Promise From Above

There is a saying that we are all human and we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves. The tragedy is that our sin is our problem and we fail to realize how pervasive it is. It has perverted our sense of reality to the extent that we think we can do something about it.

Paul deals with this error in human thinking. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Romans 1:21-23

We cannot eradicate sin. In Martin Luther’s The Bondage of the Will, he argued against Erasmus’ idea that we are a tabula rasa, a notion that that we can be taught to change. This stands against the Word of God which says that as descendants of Adam we have inherited the sin of disbelief in God.

Paul says that we are locked up in a universal prison of evil. Release from this prison can only be found beyond ourselves. But Scripture has locked up everything under the control of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe. Galatians 3:22

“Locked up” means shut out completely.  This includes the universe of things, the whole world, man and all that has to do with sin. What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. Roman 3:9

That some of us are better than others is the very reason we are in bondage to sin. One writer uses the analogy of the “one-eyed-man” who thinks himself better off because he has one eye from which to see reality, verses those who are totally blind.

The solution to the evil that is in all of us can only be found beyond ourselves. But Scripture has locked up everything under the control of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe. Galatians 3:22

Paul says that we are locked up in a universal prison. It is the Word of God that has driven us into this bondage of the will. What the Word of God does for us that nothing else can do is to declare the fact of our human sinfulness with a voice no other voice has ever done.  

All the individuals of human nature, Jews and Gentiles, and all that is in them, and done by them, are under the power and dominion of sin, defiled by it, and involved in the guilt of it; for it is not “all persons”, but “all things”, belonging to all persons; all the members of their bodies, and faculties of their souls; all their thoughts, inclinations, and intentions; all their works and services, even their best righteousness, which is as filthy rags; all are declared to be sinful and polluted, and men on account of them to be guilty before God, and liable to punishment; from whence there can be no escape by the law of works; for they are like men concluded, or shut up in a prison, from which there is no apparent likelihood of deliverance: now the Spirit of God, discovering to men this their wretched and desperate condition, under the law and sin, reveals Christ and his righteousness to them, and enables and encourages them to believe in him, by whom only they can be justified from all things, they cannot by the law of Moses, in which they see themselves shut up, as in a prison:

It is the Scriptures that have done this so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe. This means that man’s solution to evil is found outside and beyond man and to be found in the promise—“that God would make us into his sons and daughters by uniting us to his unique son, Jesus Christ, reconciling us to himself–lies at the heart of the exceeding abundance of his grace towards us. The Bible is the Book of books because it tells the truth of that grace from Genesis to Revelation as it reveals our need for God, and how he meets that need in all times and places, to the praise of his glorious grace, to the glory of God alone.”