In the beginning, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God created he him: male and female created He them”: (Genesis, chapt 1, v. 27); and it was in the soul that man especially bore the image of his Creator, in knowledge, righteousness and true holiness, living in perfect union, and communion and fellowship with his God. But the Fall and man’s awful sin therein brought all mankind into a state of sin and misery involving the complete and utter loss of the image of God from the soul. So that the heart of man became deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; and as Christ Jesus declared to the scribes and Pharisees, (and to us now): “Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornication, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: these are the things which defile a man.” (Matt. chap. 15, v. 19, 20), so this divine testimony asserts the wholly ungodly condition and state of man’s nature and heart. And this is a universal state of matters from one generation to another regarding every child of Adam born into this World, “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God,” (Rom. chap. 3, v. 23) and “There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God,” (Rom. chap. 3, v. 10, 11). Every precept in the divine Law has been, and is, violated by men in spirit and practice, albeit many are restrained and kept from open transgression in certain ungodly activities by the hand of God according to His pleasure.
We are certainly the “offspring of God” as to creation, but it is a great delusion and lie in the light of inspired revelation for men to plead and propagate in their theological teaching that all men are the children of God in a spiritual sense, and that in this context God is the Father of us all. “Ye are of your father the devil” declared Jesus to His enemies and haters. They had within their breasts the very spirit of the Satanic liar and murderer, and the exact same spirit has actuated men in all ages and nations, and as conspicuously today as in any age, even in the midst of all the powerful influences and advantages of modern civilization, education, and apparent refinements.
Social reformers today are at a loss to know what new methods to adopt and apply to stem the constantly rising tide of crime and immorality, in other words the flagrant ungodliness of young and old. Such of course have regard to only certain aspects of wicked conduct. But the Christian Church views with grief and concern the almost generally accepted attitude to the law of the Lord’s Day, the neglect of the public Worship of God and the Gospel, in addition to immorality and crimes of all kinds. Truly man today also is proving beyond all shadow of doubt, in the light of the Bible, that he fits exactly the description given of him in the Old and New Testaments, that is, that he is ungodly, in heart, fundamentally, and in practice. As we read in psalm I, v. 5: “Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment” and again in the Epistle of Jude, v. 4, “… who were ordained of old to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness…” and so men were known to be ungodly in all ages by those who in the mercy of God were themselves saved and delivered from their own ungodliness by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit through the Holy Word of God.
Now ungodly men are frequently identified as such by their irreligion and bold and notorious wickedness, as in the case of king Ahab and Jezebel his ungodly wife, who contrived the death of Naboth, that Ahab might satisfy his covetous heart in taking possession of Naboth’s vineyard. Then there is the conduct of those Athenians who mocked when Paul spoke of the resurrection of the dead. And in the old World in the days of Noah, the earth was filled with violence, and “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth”; and later the people of Sodom and Gomorrah polluted themselves with great ungodliness, of which the Lord said to Abraham: “Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous; I will go down now, and see whither they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me…” And further there is the case of Elymas, the sorcerer, who sought to turn away Sergius Paulus from the faith when being instructed by the Apostle Paul. Paul, by the Holy Ghost, reproved him in the following solemn terms: “O full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord”: Acts, (chap. 13, verses 9, 10). Here is now another of the children of men, exposed as a child of the devil and as an ungodly man.
But among those who affect to be religious and profess regard for God, we find ungodly men, as many evil men in all ages have taken up with religion connected with the visible Church of God for one carnal reason or another. There was Cain right at the beginning of human history, who concerned himself with religion and the worship of God, but after a carnal manner. He slew his believing and righteous brother Abel, because it was discovered to him that his own
works were evil and his brother’s righteous. Again in Moses’ day, in the wilderness, Korah and others rose up in rebellion against Moses and Aaron, charging them with exercising an undue authority over the congregation of Israel, and saying, “Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy . . .” (Numbers, chap. 11, v. 1-3 etc.). Later Moses called upon the congregation saying, “Depart, I pray you, from the tents of these wicked men, and touch nothing of their’s, lest ye be consumed in all their sins.” (v. 26.) Then there is the outstanding record in the four Gospels of the greatest conceivable wickedness and ungodliness of the Chief Priests, scribes and Pharisees in their enmity to and treatment of the Lord Jesus Christ, culminating in these religious men crying out, “away with Him, crucify Him.” They killed the Prince of life. They were ungodly men who professed to be pious, but were a generation of hypocrites. Another illustration of religion and ungodliness going hand in hand is the case of Simon who was a socerer. When Philip preached Christ to the people in the city of Samaria many were brought to believe on Jesus as their Saviour. He professed to believe and was also baptised. But later revealed his ungodliness by offering Peter money to give him the power that on whomsoever he might lay hands they may receive the Holy Ghost: (Acts, chap. 8, ver. 5 etc.). Peter gave him a severe rebuke and among other things told him: “. . . thy heart is not right in the sight of God:” (ver. 21).
So these several cases from the Word of God may well suffice to prove and establish what the Word itself avers in its doctrine as to the fact that man by nature is ungodly, whether he be entirely irreligious or professing the religion associated with God and also with the gospel of Christ and the Christian Church. And what blindness or wilful rejection of the teaching of God’s Word plagues many today, when as teachers in the professing Christian Church or as members and adherents thereof, they disregard the fact and doctrine of the Fall of man and his natural and inherent ungodliness in their beliefs, teaching and profession related to the Christian faith.
Anything short of belief in and acceptance of the aforesaid doctrine, (and of course all other doctrines of the Bible) must of necessity permeate as an evil and dangerous leaven the whole range of the religious doctrine and practice of all those involved.
Now if men hold that they are not so sinful, wicked and ungodly as the Scriptures state, then the great and glorious work of redemption by the Son of God in His obedience, sufferings and death cannot possibly be preached or received in its fullness and preciousness among such persons. “Christ died for the ungodly,” the wholly ungodly, the corrupt from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot. Then again views of man which limit the extent of his depravity and ungodliness, come into conflict with divine revelation as to man’s need of being “born again” and made “a new creature” by the regenerating work and power of the Holy Spirit through the
Word of God, in order that he may enter into the kingdom of God. The fact is that a great multitude of professing Christians today throughout our Nation, are completely ignorant of the work of the Spirit and their personal need of being born of the Spirit. How is this? They agree to the erroneous view that man is not so ruined morally and spiritually as the Scriptures assert, and they are not taught the Biblical doctrine on the matter by their religious leaders. And so “the blind lead the blind.”
And when men and Churches “water down” or abandon entirely the fact of man’s ruin by the Fall, then the outlook and beliefs of such upon eternal realities become seriously affected also. On the one hand, everyone more or less is considered as on the way to heaven; and on the other, everlasting punishment as a terrible truth, is denied out and out, or eliminated to the background. Let us suspect a Church, preachers and professors of religion, who have little or no place for the doctrine of the everlasting punishment of the wicked in hell, by God as an infinitely just and righteous God. Such at the back of their minds are not agreed that they and others are as wicked and ungodly as to deserve God’s wrath and curse both in this life and in that which is to come. Let us hear Enoch, the seventh from Adam prophesy concerning the ungodly, “Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed . . .” (Jude, verse 15).
The gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is for ungodly men, and not for respectable or reformed or orderly men and women, viewing themselves and being viewed as such by others. Christ came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance, and so He told the hypocritical Pharisees. And “this is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners”: (1st Timothy, chap. 1, ver. 15). Therefore it is one of the needs of today, that all classes of men require to be told Scripturally, plainly and faithfully, that by nature they are utterly ungodly, and nothing but the salvation of a Three One God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, will deliver them from going down to a lost eternity, and fit them for and bring them to the glory of heaven.
God’s Sovereignty in the Lives of Twin Brothers.
(Continued from page 110.)