Covenant Presbyterian Church

It was a pitiable sight: the anguished look upon the young man’s face, the hardly audible cries escaping from his trembling lips, the despair in his half-crazed eyes. Barely sensible of his actions, he reached for the Bible on the nightstand. His last hope. Some word of encouragement. This was a dark hour in his young life, a trial to determine which principle within him would win out. His guilt was overwhelming, his misery palpable. He lay prostrate on the floor, trying to understand why he was here yet again, why the past resolutions of reform and prayers for mercy had proven ineffectual to produce any lasting change in his life. What was this force within him that he could not conquer, his irresistible craving for sin, from which God seemed unwilling to release him? Not any one sin, all of them: lust, pride, jealousy, laziness, and beneath them his fierce selfishness. Why the endless cycles of guilt-induced resolve and temporary improvement, only to be followed by even lower descents into the morass of depravity? The thought that his current struggle would seem pointless, even laughable, to his friends did not comfort him. That they would tell him he was very good in comparison to most and had not done anything illegal appeared to him incontrovertible proof that they were held tightly in the grip of the same force that poised to wring the last hope from his breast, to extinguish the last spark of light in his troubled soul.

The young man opened the Bible to Psalm 51. He read, "I was born in sin, and in sin did my mother conceive me." He paused over the verse for some time. It occurred to him that all his previous prayers and reform efforts had focused upon specific sins he had committed. A scab would develop; he would apply a little ointment and bandage the wound. He would feel better for a while. He was doing something, making some progress. The wound would go away in time, only to be followed by another and another, then another in the same spot. He realized that no external promptings were necessary for sin to raise its hideous specter. Considering his environment of regular church attendance, more careful than usual parental shepherding, and at least occasional use of the means of grace, his life setting was relatively pristine. It is not my environment, he concluded, no specific fault in my parents, not even the influence of my peer group. It is me. He read the verse again. I have a contagion with which I am born, a tenacious, choking root of depravity that no halfway measures can dislodge. A recent sermon came flooding into his mind: something about an Ethiopian’s skin and a leopard’s spots. Hope entered his troubled soul.

Very few reach this level of soul-searching today. Troublingly few. We have practically institutionalized shallow thinking and low experience of grace. The preferred gospel is one of environmental blame-shifting, easy believism, low-demand, sin-excusing sonship, and a sentimental, indulgent deity. There is little preaching about sin or holiness: next to nothing about our systemic contagion. We do not hear the thundering of the law. Thus we do not hold deeply to the gospel of sovereign grace. We hear little of our spiritual death, so we lightly esteem the resurrection and the life. It is not surprising that conversion experiences are trite, true piety hardly known, and humble gratitude rarer than snow in Atlanta. We gather in droves to hear the latest spiritual success story, the rags to riches saga, the celebrity turned celebrity Christian. Principles, keys, and programs are the rage. Give it to me simply, conveniently, without much to challenge my pet ideas and comfortable lifestyle, and with a money-back guarantee. We have lost the old gospel because we are not told of our older contagion. The few that are driven by God’s Spirit to face this horrible abyss receive little encouragement from church leadership: just easy remedies, a few blithe platitudes for their struggles, and some church work out of the spotlight lest they encourage others to reflect more deeply than the sight and sound of the Sunday morning carnival. They do not fit the mass mold and make very poor consumers in the den of robbers led by shepherds fleecing the flock, economically and spiritually.

Because we no longer believe, preach, and face our contagion, we have also relinquished our ability to impact meaningfully the surrounding culture or fulfill our calling to be the salt and light of the world. This is a tragedy of immeasurable proportions, for though many professing Christians have joined the ranks of the culturally concerned and politically active, most solutions offered by Christian conservatives are an extension of the shallowness within the church. More: our unbiblical theology and pseudo-gospel makes us unable to see and proclaim the true problem: contagion -the death, darkness, and depravity of the human heart. It is this contagion that stalks the land and lies at the root of every injustice, lie, and theft. Hence, we end up looking like fools. We are fools - not for Christ but for our attempt to play Satan’s game. Our contagion can neither be confronted nor remedied by advocating smaller government, a free market, homeschooling, the renewal of the family, or a return to farm life. Conservatism and liberalism - every ism just another crack into which our contagion more deeply imbeds itself. Sin is not a product of our environment, an inherent defect of our nature or social structures. It cannot be remedied politically, educationally, or economically. As long as we continue to think and act in these terms, we are contributors to the demise of what little is left of the west. Worse, we dishonor God by rejecting his word at the most fundamental level of its analysis of man’s fallen condition: contagion.

The Bible does not suffer from backwardness in honestly presenting our contagion or pointing out its only remedy. We can begin with the aforementioned Psalm 51. Coupled with passages like Ezekiel 37, Romans 5:12-19, Ephesians 2:1, the Bible teaches that we are born dead in our trespasses and sins - not neutral, perfectible through education, political action, middle class neighborhoods, or self-realization. We are a sin cursed race, not simply in that we are subject to the curse and guilt of Adam’s first sin and the loss of the original righteousness with which we were created by God, though these are sufficient in themselves to justify describing man as dead in his sin. The principle of contagion is active from our conception, develops and hardens with self-awareness, time, and every new sin, and spews forth all manner of corruption. It does not always take the same forms or extremes. The Bible does not teach absolute depravity, that every man is as bad as he could be, and it does teach that God restrains the sinful propensities of fallen man lest the race be annihilated (common grace). But the contagion is there. Its development does not require parent abuse, molestation, poverty, or early exposure to pornography. It feeds off these, using them as excuses to cover up or facilitate the depravity in our hearts.

There is no remedy for our contagion through the usual channels. None. You cannot counsel, persuade, or educate it out of the heart. You can sophisticate it, deny it, and glamorize it. You can convince yourself that you are normal, or that you are afflicted by culturally created psychoses, or that other people are much worse than you. The contagion remains. It grows. Perhaps the most fearsome aspect of our contagion is that the more we deny it and treat it with false remedies, the more it grows and chokes the life of the soul.

There is good news at this point, praise God! He has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He alone can. The whole gospel of Jesus Christ, of biblical religion, is this: God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the world to himself, not imputing their sins to them. The only cure for man’s contagion is the gospel of sovereign grace. God sent his Son - not as a testimony to his moral government of the world, not out of romantic or sentimental love, not to teach us how to lead morally improved lives. He sent his Son to become the curse for us, to bear the penalty of our contagion by suffering the penalty we deserve for it on the cross. At the cross, a transaction took place - a personal, legal, covenant transaction. The Son of God and Savior of the world became our propitiation, our satisfaction. That these words rarely make into sermons today is evidence that we do not understand the gospel. When the Bible speaks of propitiation, it is giving us an important insight into the character of God. He is just and holy. He cannot leave the guilty unpunished. Though he loves his people, that love is not sentimental mush that ignores the claims of divine justice. It is a love that moved him to provide a substitute for us that the just claims of his holiness that are announced in the law might be satisfied. Upon Jesus Christ the holy, triune God poured out his just wrath against sin and sinners, satisfying the claims of his justice, and thus opening the door for his love to be poured out upon us. Jesus bore our curse. He took our contagion upon his back.

But even this is insufficient unless we understand who Jesus was. He was not a good man that tragically suffered at the hands of the Jews. He was not merely a supreme example of patient suffering for righteousness. He was God and man, two natures in one person. He had to be, or, and here we must be very honest, there is absolutely no hope for our contagion. He had to be God in order to bear and satisfy the full measure of divine justice, swallow up death by his life, and give worth and efficacy to his sufferings. He had to be man in order to suffer in our place, to die, to sympathize with us in power, and to represent our interests to God. Liberalism, by denying the God-man, had no gospel. Post-liberalism, by sentimentalizing Jesus, has no gospel. Contagion cannot be cured with sentiment, German higher-criticism, success stories, or existential spirituality. It can only be cured by killing it. And only the God-man could do this, and even he could do this only by dying as our curse, suffering our penalty, and bearing the wrath of God.

The Holy Spirit takes his propitiatory work and applies it to those who believe the gospel. In present history he takes the victory of past history and makes it efficaciously operative. He is the bond of power and peace between the soul of the sinner and the life of Jesus Christ. He definitively breaks the dominion of our contagion, gives us a new nature, and writes God’s law upon our hearts so that we delight in it. Throughout our subsequent battles with the remnants of the sin nature, he enables us to keep turning to God, to seek the grace of God in Jesus Christ, to die unto sin that we might live unto Christ. He performs this work in every child of God. He reveals to us the abyss of our contagion that we might revel and rest in the greater abyss of God’s mercy to us through Jesus Christ. There is struggle. Sin and guilt endeavor to raise their ugly head with deceptiveness and tenacity, but there is the Spirit of the thrice holy God, revealing the all-sufficiency of Jesus Christ, that there is no longer any condemnation to those who are in him, that there is power to walk in newness of life. It is not realized all at once. There can be and usually is tremendous struggle, a process the Bible calls sanctification, spiritual warfare, and the hope of redemption. But the Spirit is the seal our inheritance, the bond of our union with Christ, the light in the dark, the conqueror of our contagion.

Our young man rose from the floor, shaken by the fresh revelation of the depths of his sinfulness, which he came to understand that God does not reveal in one day or it would completely overwhelm us. He was also shaken by the unsearchable riches of Jesus Christ. He called afresh upon the name of the Lord, confessed his Son, pled the blood and merits of the Savior, and sought renewed supplies of grace. The battle would not end until heaven, he realized, but he had taken an important step toward victory. He has honestly faced his contagion. He remembered again the God-man. He clung to him as his only hope in life and death.

And the lesson he learned that day must be learned again by the church at large. The gospel of the God-man is very political and social, but it aims indirectly at these ends, transforming these only after the deepest enemy is countered and defeated by the gospel of the grace of God. Yes, there is much injustice in the world, racial prejudice, economic oppression, lies, and environmental abuse. These cannot be cured by political means because they are ultimately the fruits of our contagion. Hence, if we would see these confronted and changed, it can only be by a renewed commitment to the gospel of the God-man, the whole gospel, the biblical gospel, without adulteration, compromise, or apology. There are so many problems in the world today because there are so many men unreached by the gospel, still held in the unbreakable grip of contagion. The old gospel of the always new Savior is the only remedy. When men are changed by his power, when the hold of sin is replaced by the reign of grace, then, and only then, will men’s lives and societies be changed and justice rule from sea to shining sea. And you, believer, have this gospel. It is your pearl. It is the hope of the world. It is the sword of the Spirit. It is the light and power before which contagion must give way to peace and righteousness. Proclaim it. Proclaim it.