Total Depravity

Genesis 6:1-7
Gregory Broderick | Sunday, January 09, 2022
Copyright © 2022, Gregory Broderick

The title is “Total Depravity.”  Genesis 6 contains fourteen words that should stop us in our tracks.  Describing fallen man, this verse tells us, “Every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time” (Gen. 6:5).

In this short and to-the-point statement, we are totally devastated.  We are tempted as we read this every year to slide past this verse and get on to the Flood, which is really the “coming attraction” in the next few chapters.  We are tempted to “whistle past the graveyard” of this statement.  We are tempted to contextualize it away or relegate it to hyperbole.  But we cannot do so.  We must face the reality.  Genesis 6:5 is a brutally accurate assessment of unregenerate man.  It lays bare our true condition in black and white, and diagnoses our core problem:  sin, evil, our corrupt nature:  Our total depravity.

We like to think that we are nice people.  I may sin from time to time, or struggle, or fall short, or whatever other euphemism I may use, but I am basically a good person, I am basically a moral person, I am basically a decent person.  Almost everyone thinks this, no matter what they have done.  Recall that it was Richard Nixon who said, “I am not a crook.”  But he was a crook.

A recent CNN article claimed that “we are hardwired for goodness.”  It gets worse.  “It is easier to recognize this fact when you think of children.”  That is either a person with a very unusual definition of the word “good” or who has no children.  Genesis 6:5 is not hyperbole.  It is not an overstatement.  It is the word of God.  And, as such, it is the unvarnished truth.  It accurately, if unforgivingly, states the true condition of every person ever born, except for one.  Every inclination of the thoughts of our hearts is only evil all the time.

1. Man’s Wickedness Is Great

Contrary to what the CNN article said, we are not basically good and we are not hardwired for good.  We are basically bad.  Mankind was created good; in fact, very good (Gen. 1:31).  As God’s good creations, man and woman lived in unity and harmony with one another and with God in the garden.  And if we stop and think about that, that is quite something.  It is quite something that man and woman lived together without dispute and in perfect relationship with one another for any period of time.  But in the garden two people lived together in harmony.  This is not our experience if we spend any period of time with someone else.

Perhaps more amazingly than the fact that they lived in harmony with one another, they were able to live in perfect unity and perfect fellowship with the triune God.  This is totally outside of our experience.  They were able to do so because they were without sin.  God gave them commands to govern His creation and to work the good garden and so on, and they did so with joy.  He told the woman to be the helpmeet for the man, and she did so without nagging or undermining or manipulating or striving for power.  God set parameters for them about what they must do and not do, and at least for some time they joyfully obeyed those commands.  They did not strain against them.

God walked with them in the garden.  There was no guilt.  There was no shame.  There was no need for atonement for sin.  There was no sin, no dispute, no strife, no enmity, no death, no pain, and no frustration.  We cannot even go a day without experiencing these things, and yet this was their life for some period in the garden.

But it soon came to a close.  They rebelled against God.  In distrust and disorder, and due to the devil’s deception, they disobeyed God.  They engaged in rebellion against Him.  They rose up against God and intentionally defied His decree in an attempt to overthrow God and rule in His place.  It did not work, and this is what we call the Fall.

As a consequence of the Fall, man was kicked out of the garden and separated from fellowship with God.  In fact, after they were kicked out of the garden, the next time we see man and God interacting, there is a distance.  Apparently, blood sacrifice is now required to atone for man’s guilt and sin so that he can have some relationship with God.  We are not told of it before that time.

Moreover, man’s life became hard—much harder than it was in the garden.  There was frustration for man in leading his wife, and he developed a tendency to dictate and dominate.  There was frustration for the wife in fulfilling her God-appointed role as helpmeet.  There was a tendency to undermine, oppose, and overthrow where before she did not have it.  There was frustration for both of them in their God-appointed duties to be fruitful and to multiply.  He greatly increased their pains in labor.  There was frustration in their God-appointed duty of subduing the earth and of producing food.  Instead of the previously joyous work in the garden, it says it became painful toil (Gen. 3:17).

Perhaps the greatest consequence is that man became corrupt in his nature.  We were made in the image and likeness of God:  very good and without sin.  But now everyone ever born is infected with a sin nature, and it is unavoidable.  This is not acquired like a virus.  It is not a learned behavior.  It is not environmental.  It is not social.  It is our nature.  It is part of who we are.  We are born with that nature.  Psalm 51:5 says we are sinful from birth, sinful from conception.

It is a universal condition.  It is not the problem of some other person.  It is not the problem of people in general.  It is the problem of every particular person.  Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned”—every single person.

And it is undefeatable.  In other words, we cannot overcome it with the triumph of the will.  We cannot overcome it with more effort or better techniques.  We recognize the Romans 7 man, the unregenerate man, who wants to do good but evil is right there with him.  In fact, Romans 8 tells us that unregenerate man is hostile to God in every way.  We cannot please Him.  We cannot obey Him.  And that is all because of man’s sin nature.

Let us keep it very practical.  Because of our sin nature, we sin.  Sin is the violation of, or lack of conformity to, God’s law.  We sin in our actions.  Just look at the record of mankind.  Cain murdered Abel due to jealousy, envy, and hatred.  People steal out of greed, envy, and covetousness.  People commit adultery and sexual perversion of every kind.  People lie all the time.  People disobey and disrespect and dishonor every authority established by God—parents, pastors, police, bosses—whatever it is.  People refuse to worship the true and living God on His appointed day.  People take the Lord’s name in vain, falsely swearing oaths and vows in God’s name, or actually using Jesus as a curse word.  People worship idols:  false gods of money, beauty, self, autonomy, children, and even little stones, in other parts of the world.  They put them up and say, “These are your gods.”

We violate every command of God with a continual lust for more, encouraging others to sin more and more (Eph. 4:19; Rom. 1:32).  Sinful man deadens his conscience, searing it as with a hot iron in the hope of killing the remaining vestiges of the marred image and likeness of God that remains in us (1 Tim. 4:12).  We are extremely wicked as a species.  You see, we are morally aware, which is what makes us different from animals.  We are morally aware, and yet we do immorality, and even doing it because it is immoral, out of enmity for God, out of a vain and childish attempt to oppose God; to strike at Him, to say, “You cannot tell me what to do.”

Now, it barely merits proving, but let me state the obvious:  This is still the condition of mankind today.  The coming flood, which we are going to preach about over the next several weeks, did not wipe out this problem.  This still describes mankind today:  “Every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts is only evil all the time.”

We can just look around us.  Whatever is evil, whatever is contrary to the law of God, is celebrated.  Divorce is common, easy, and socially acceptable.  It did not used to be that way, but that is the way it is now.  God hates divorce, it says in Malachi 2:16, but he made provision for it because their hearts were hard; for cases of adultery, abuse, abandonment, and so on.  But our society has elevated divorce not just from something that is tolerated, but to something that is acceptable or even viewed as a good.

Fornication—that is sexual perversion—is totally normal in our time, touted as a positive good and taught in our schools (not in our Academy, but in public schools).  Lying is perfectly normal and accepted, and even expected in certain circumstances.  Our society, our culture, has a radical love for the lie, and we have basically rejected any concept of objective truth.  We regard truth and lie as basically the same thing:  “my truth” and “your truth” is the idea.  Truth is whatever I assert it to be.

And, of course, in our society, perversion of every kind is not just accepted, not just tolerated, but celebrated.  In many quarters, there is an eager desire for our first homosexual president.  We see people pushing it.  I read a recent advice column, answering an inquiry from a man who wanted to have a homosexual orgy for his thirtieth birthday, but wondering if it was ethical to do it without telling his girlfriend first.  This is the advice that was given back:  “I would advise that you move forward in whatever way feels open and honest and in line with whatever spoken or unspoken agreements are in place in your current relationship.”  What about “Don’t do that”?  That did not enter the equation.

The Illinois statehouse recently permitted a baby-Satan display.  It was a little baby with a goat head and horns displayed for the holidays at the state capitol.  While it was being installed, people were shouting, “Hail, Satan!” at the installation.  I am not making this up.  Every inclination of the thoughts of man’s heart is only evil all the time.

Theft and greed rule.  Law is a joke.  Decent people must cower and give way to bums and perverts and criminals.  Modern man calls good evil and evil good.  It seems that Genesis 6:5 is no overstatement at all, and certainly applicable today.  Every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts is only evil all the time.

Perhaps after that, we are tempted to despair and tempted to give up hope, thinking that modern man is irredeemably wicked or has crossed some line into unsavable territory, as if things are worse now than they have ever been.  But I want to tell you that that is not true either.  Today may be no better than pre-Flood times, or Old Testament times, or the Victorian era, but it is also no worse.  It is the same man with the same sin nature and the same sin problem.  There have been variations over time, but at the core it is the same before the Flood, after the Flood, and today.

Man robs and rapes and covets and murders and worships false gods.  Man lives out the empty way of life handed down to him from his sinful ancestors.  You see, the Flood did not solve the problem.  In fact, after we read in Genesis 6, “Every inclination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil all the time,” we read that the Flood came and wiped out all people but eight.  Yet then God says in Genesis 8:21 that every inclination of the thoughts of man’s heart is only evil all the time.  The floodwaters did not wash away that problem.

Indeed, in the time right after the Flood, we see that Noah got drunk and that Ham gazed upon his father’s nakedness.  Lot abandoned the man of God, Abraham, for the worship of money and worldliness in Sodom.  We remember how the men of Sodom, the men of the town, surrounded Lot’s house and demanded that Lot produce his angelic visitors (Gen. 19:4–5).  And they give the reason:  “Men from every part of the city—both young and old—surrounded the house and called out, ‘Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.’” Every inclination of the thoughts of man’s heart is only evil all the time.

The patriarch Jacob defrauded his father, his brother, and his uncle, and fled under the threat of murder from Esau (Gen. 27).  Dinah was raped by the Shechemite, and the sons of Jacob murdered every male in the unsuspecting city of Shechem in an unfair fight (Gen. 34).  Then Jacob’s other sons plotted to murder Joseph, their younger brother, and sold him into slavery in Egypt, lying to their grieved father to cover it all up (Gen. 37).  Man was just as bad then as he is now.  And that is just the book of Genesis.

We do not have time to recount the rest in detail.  The rebellious Israelites in the desert—God rescued them, God provided for them, and what was the first thing they did?  Worship false gods and complain against God.  Consider the unfaithfulness of Achan under Joshua; the shameful treatment of Abimelech son of Gideon; the Danites of Judges 18; the Levite and the concubine of Judges 19; the wickedness of Saul, and Solomon’s idolatry; the genocidal plans of the vile Haman; the idolatry and immorality of God’s people in the days of the kings and the prophets; the hypocrisy of the priests and the Sanhedrin and the high priests who plotted to murder Jesus the Christ, whom God sent to save them.  Or we can look at Nero, Caligula, Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, Chavez, Castro.  The wickedness of mankind is an unbroken line from beginning to end.

But it is not just the big people.  It is the regular people.  Fifty million abortions are performed per year worldwide.  That means more than one million abortions have occurred worldwide so far this year, and it is January 9.  One million.  The reality is that man is no better and no worse than ever.  He is the same, give or take, for all time.  Historical variations are simply a matter of degree, simply a matter of God’s mercy coming to us at certain times to restrain the wickedness of man more than at other times.

But the fundamental problem, the root problem, remains the same.  It remains the same because man remains the same, and his nature remains the same.  He is dead in his trespasses and sins—before the Flood, after the Flood, and all the way to today.  He is anti-God.  Every inclination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil all the time.

So man is greatly wicked.  Why is that a problem?  Genesis 6:5 tells us that also.  It is a problem because God sees.  That verse begins, “God saw.”  Man’s wickedness would be of minimal import apart from God.  But there is a God, and he does see.  Genesis 6:5:  “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on earth had become.”  Genesis 6:12:  “God saw how corrupt the earth had become.”  God saw it then, and he sees it today too.

First of all, there is a God to see.  Sinful man’s first move is to say, “There is no God, so what I do does not matter.  I can decide what is right and wrong.”  But that is a lie.  Romans 1:18 and 1:21 tell us that sinful man knows.  He tries to deny God, but he knows—man knows that there is a God.  Romans 1:21:  “They knew God but they neither glorified him nor gave thanks to him.”  Romans 1:18:  “They suppress the truth by their wickedness.”  People can protest and deny it and put their fingers in their ears and shout at the top of their lungs, “There is no God” all they want; they can run away like Jonah; they can try to hide in the garden trees like Adam; or they can track down and imprison God’s people, like Saul of Tarsus.  But they know there is a God.  Despite all their best efforts to sear their consciences as with a hot iron, a small part of that image and likeness of God remains to testify that there is a God.

And this God is not blind.  He sees.  He is called, in fact, El Roi, “The God who sees me” (Gen. 16).  His eyes range throughout the earth (2 Chron. 16:9).  This same God formed the eye and the ear.  He sees and He hears.  He looks down from heaven and sees all mankind, including you (Ps. 33:13).  Job 28:24 says, “He sees everything under the heavens.”  This is beyond our capacity.  We can look over a crowd and see the general mass.  God sees the general mass, and God sees every particular person and every particular action, fully.  Psalm 139 tells us that He knows when we sit and when we rise, when we go in and when we come out.  Before we speak, before we were formed, He searches us and He knows us (Ps. 139:1).  Nothing is hidden from His divine sight (Heb. 4:13).  Good or bad, God knows.

Think about this verse.  It does not say that every action they took was only evil all the time.  It does not say that every thought of the heart was only evil all the time.  It says, “God saw . . . that every inclination of the thoughts of [man’s] heart was only evil all the time.”  God sees more than we see about ourselves.  God sees the widow who righteously and quietly gave her two little mites, all she had to live on.  He sees the bad, but He sees the good too.  He hears those who quietly gather together to honor Him and to fear His name.  He knows what sin the wicked do in the inner room, worshiping idols as in Ezekiel 8.  He sees what they do in the desolate field, murdering a brother out of jealousy, as in Genesis 4.  No man may see what happens.  No man may see the inclinations of the thoughts of our hearts.  But God sees.

More than seeing, God also cares.  He is not indifferent to the inclinations of the thoughts of our hearts.  God is no mere casual observer.  When He sees, He sees to do, to take action, to attain His perfect and glorious end.  God is a moral being.  His nature is holiness.  He is the thrice-holy God.  “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty!” (1 Sam. 2; Isa. 6; Rev. 4).  Holiness is in some way His distinguishing characteristic.

God is good (Ps. 100:5).  He is the standard for good.  How we know whether something is good or not is to compare that thing to God, to God’s nature, and to God’s word.  It is not that we make up a standard for good and measure God against that.  No, God is the standard for good, and everything is measured against that.  He sets that standard for us.  In Leviticus 11:44 He says, “Be holy, for I am holy.”  Stop to think about it:  This is an incredibly high standard that God sets.  In Matthew 5:48 Jesus said, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  That should obviously be a problem for us.  We simply can never measure up to this standard in our own strength.  Every inclination of the thoughts of our heart is only evil all the time.  How can we be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect?

More than that, God holds us to this exacting standard.  He does not grade us on a curve.  We might, but he does not.  He does not overlook sin.  He does not wink at our sin.  He does not say, “Well, they cannot help it.  Every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts is only evil all the time.”  No, God is perfectly just, we are told in Deuteronomy 2:4.  Righteousness and justice are, in fact, the foundation of His throne (Ps. 89:14).  The perfectly holy and perfectly just God is a big problem for us, for sinful man.  God sees, and yet God’s eyes are too pure to look upon evil (Hab. 1:13).  He calls us to be holy and blameless and perfect in His sight.  Yet every inclination of the thoughts of our hearts is only evil all the time.

On top of all this, God is perfectly just, meaning our evil done in His sight must be dealt with, it must be punished.  And worse yet, worse than being perfectly just, God is grieved by our evil.  He is not indifferent.  He is motivated.  He cares what we do, and it matters to Him.  Sometimes you will hear people say, “God has better things to do than to worry about what I say.”  That is a view based on our limited capacity.  God is not too busy to deal with our problems.  God never has better things to do.

Verse 6 of our text says that the Lord was grieved by all that he saw on the earth.  Ephesians 4:30 speaks of grieving the Holy Spirit by our sin and disunity.  Genesis 6:7 says God was grieved that He made the creation.  And as we read—it probably stood out to you—at the end of verse 6 it says, “His heart was filled with pain.”  This is not a disappointment or surprise, that God is disappointed with Himself because He messed up when He made man.  No.  But sin is grievous in God’s eyes.  He hates evil and He cannot tolerate it.  He will deal with it.

Proverbs 6:16–19 says that God hates the evil of particular sins, such as pride, lying, murder, and sowing discord.  It is not the general concept of evil that God has a problem with.  No.  He hates particular sins, and He deals with those particular sins and those who do them (Ps. 5:5; 11:5).

In view of God’s omniscience, in view of God’s perfect justice and perfect holiness, God executes judgment on evil—on evil itself and on evil men.  Genesis 6:7 says,  “So the Lord said, ‘I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth.’” That is the judgment that He executed on them.  It is God’s judgment against sinful man.

Soon, as I said, we are going to preach all about the Flood.  For today, we will just say that a real flood struck the earth and really wiped out all but eight people.  That is all we need to say about it now.  But I do want to say that that this is not hyperbole.  It was a historical event.

We may think that the flood is too big of a thing to have actually happened, to wipe out so many people on the earth.  But think about this:  Mankind in his feeble powers has managed to wipe out tens or hundreds of millions of people in short periods.  The Nazis killed more than twenty million people in about a decade.  Mao killed some seventy million people over twenty-five years.  The Rwandan Hutus killed one million in a hundred days.  The Mongols killed a hundred million in the thirteenth century, and they did not even have guns.  If limited man can accomplish so much with so little, then it is no problem for Sovereign God to wipe out all but eight on the earth.

What is more—this terrible flood, God’s judgment on sinful man in Genesis 6, God’s wiping them out—all that is only a foreshadowing of the judgment God is going to bring on sinful man. (GTB)  As serious as that judgment was of wiping out all but eight on the earth, it is only a small demonstration of the ultimate judgment that we deserve, and which is coming soon.  They just died, but that is not the end.  Hebrews 9:27 tells us that it is destined for man to die once and after that to face judgment.  So the dying is a judgment, but it is not the only judgment.  Death is not the end.  There is an “after that.”  Second Corinthians 5:10 tells us that we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ.

For those who refuse Him, for those who reject Him, God has one terrible punishment:  eternal hell.  Second Thessalonians 1:9 describes it as “everlasting destruction.”  That is ongoing destruction.  Revelation 21 calls it “the lake of fire” or “the second death.”   In Luke 16, the parable makes it clear that hell is a place of agony and fire with consciousness of guilt and great regret and no way out.  When we look at this language, we think of it as hyperbole that overshoots the mark, but it is really hyperbole that undershoots the mark.  We cannot describe the awfulness of hell.  Just as we cannot describe the wonderful glory of heaven, we cannot describe the awfulness of hell.  So we resort to things like “lake of fire” and “second death” because these are the terms that we have.  These are the experiences that we have to explain it.  But the judgment is far, far, far worse than falling into a lake of fire.

This is what we all deserve, and where we are all headed from birth.  Every inclination of the thoughts of our hearts is only evil all the time.  And I want to say, to anyone who thinks this is too harsh, that this is a just punishment.  God is perfectly just.  We sinned against the infinite God.  We heap up our sins to the limit (1 Thess. 2:16).  We sin in thought, in word, in deed, in the inclinations of our hearts every day, and everyone does it.  Even our so-called righteous acts as unregenerate people are as filthy rags (Isa. 64:6), tainted by our sinful hearts.  We sin and sin and sin and sin all the time.  No matter what we do in our unregenerate state, we cannot please God.  We are hostile to God.  Our numerous and innumerable sins against infinite God thus merit our infinite punishment in infinite hell.

Even one sin against infinite God would require an infinite punishment.  How much more our thousands, our millions, our billions of sins!  All of us—our individual wickedness is very great in the sight of God.  All of us must die and face that judgment.  All of us, every one of us, would deserve eternal hell judged on our own record.  For every inclination of the thoughts of our hearts is only evil all the time.  So we must pay for it forever all the time.

What tragedy for mankind who was created good!  What alarm this should cause in us!  What a miserable condition!  God’s judgment has been decreed upon us, just as it was decreed upon them in the ancient world.  And so the question we have to ask is, is there any way out?  And of course there is a way out.  There is one way out.

2. The Good News

So I gave the bad news:  that our wickedness is great, that God sees, that God is perfectly holy and perfectly just, and that God has declared his judgment upon all of us—the just punishment of eternal hell.  Now let me tell you the good news.  There is a way out.  Our perfectly holy and perfectly just God is also perfectly loving and perfectly merciful.  Although He needed nothing, and although He owed us nothing—nothing but his great judgment—He made a way for us to be justly saved from the fate that we had earned for ourselves.  He did not merely say, “Forget about it.”  No, I said that He is perfectly just.  And so He provided a just way out, the way that would satisfy both mercy and justice; a just justification.

Romans 3:26 says God is just and the one who justifies us.  How did He do it?  Substitutionary atonement.  God satisfied His perfect justice by pouring out all the wrath and punishment on another who stood in our place; on another who was free of guilt and sin and judgment; on one, the only one, whose every inclination of the thoughts of His heart was not only evil all the time, but instead, perfectly holy all the time.  He was perfectly obedient all the time in thought, in word, in deed, and in the inclinations of His heart all the time.  He poured out His wrath on one who did not share our sin nature—the only one born of a woman who did not share our sin nature, but who had a divine nature, who was fully man and yet free of our curse of original sin and our sin nature; on one who was not finite like us but infinite, and, therefore He was able to fully atone for, to fully bear, all the infinite wrath that was due to us; on one who could suffer in our place and then not keep suffering but say, “It is finished.  It is paid in full.  It is all paid.”

I am, of course, speaking about the unique God-man Jesus Christ, fully man, born of a woman and who lived, suffered, hungered, and thirsted.  He was like us in every way and yet without sin.  He was tired.  He got hungry.  He slept.  He was tempted.  He was mocked.  He was beaten.  He bled.  He died and was buried.  He had the full human experience.

What makes Him unique?  He was also fully God at the same time—uncreated, existing with God the Father from the beginning, with God from the beginning in eternity past (John 1:1).  He was God.  He was the Word.  He was with God from the beginning, but He took on flesh for us.  Because He was fully God, He was not corrupted by the sin nature that we all share.  And so He was, Hebrews 4:15 tells us, without sin—perfect in obedience to God’s word, God’s commands, and God’s will.  As He Himself said in John 14:31, “I love the Father and I do exactly what my Father has commanded Me.”  He was a worthy sacrifice, a perfect Lamb who was slain.

Because He was perfect and because He was infinite God, He was able to pay the infinite penalty that we owed.  A mere man, even a perfect man, is a finite man.  He can only save himself or maybe be swapped out for another person.  Only one who is infinite, only the Christ, could do it for everyone—only the God-man Jesus Christ, a unique being in all of history.

So there is a way out, but there is only way out.  There is no other God-man who is going to come.  There is no other God-man who already came.  This is it.  This is the only way to be saved.  There is no other way out.

How do you take the way out?  What must you do to be saved?  Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved (Acts 16:31).  You don’t need a billion dollars.  You don’t need a special ancestry.  You don’t need a particular education or particular achievement.  There is no special magic ritual you need to do.  Call upon the name of the Lord and be saved.  That is the promise (Rom. 10:13).  Confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, and you will be saved (Rom. 10:9).  Ask God to give you a new heart and a new spirit.  Ask Him to take away that old nature, that heart of stone, that heart of enmity against Him, and give you a new heart and a new spirit.  Ask Him to have mercy on you, a sinner, and He is faithful to do it.  He will save you.  He will regenerate you, and you will be born again to live a new life—a new life of holiness, a new life of joyful obedience to Him in thanksgiving for what he has done.

So, of course, this will radically and fundamentally change our lives forever.  We will repent and turn to God, where before we sinned and sinned and sinned the more.  We will live a holy life.  We will not go back to the old way.  We know the verse:  “He who stole must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his hands, that he may have something to share with those in need” (Eph. 4:28).  It is a hundred-and-eighty-degree change.  The thief used to take and do nothing; now he does something useful and he gives.

But you do not need to achieve those things first.  Those are the results of salvation, of regeneration, of God’s work in us.  They are the proof, not the cause.  No matter who you are or where you come from, no matter what you did, no matter if every inclination of the thoughts of your heart is still only evil all the time, you can be saved.  You can call upon Christ.  Call upon Him for mercy, and he will save you.  There is an element of mystery to it.  He must make you alive before you can call out to Him, “Have mercy on me, a sinner.”  We do not fully understand the mechanism.  But we know this:  He moves as His word is preached, and His word is being preached now, so he is moving now.  He may be moving around you.  Let Him move in you to save you.

Take the free offer of salvation by grace and take it today.  Do not perish in the flood to come.  These people were warned, “There is a flood coming.”  They did not believe it, or they said, “It is going to come a lot later.  We’ll have a lot of time to do something.”  I am telling you today, there is a flood that is going to come for you.  It is not going to be high waters that go over the mountaintops; it will be something else.  But a flood is coming in your life.  Do not presume that it will not come.  Do not presume that you will have more time until it will arrive.  Today, tomorrow—we do not know when it is going to come.  But we know this:  We will stand before the judgment seat of Christ.  All must do so (2 Cor. 5:10).

Why go down in the flood to come in our lives, in the judgment to come in our lives?  Instead, get into the ark.  Get into the ark of Christ, the one way to be saved.  He calls us even now:  “Come out!  Come out of the rain.  Come out of the floodwaters.  Come out of the rising waters.  Come by faith.  Come by faith in the name of Christ and be saved.”

You see, you are a sinner.  It is true.  Everyone here either is or was totally depraved, totally twisted, objects of wrath prepared for God’s judgment, corrupt from the heart.  That is the way we all started out.  But you do not have to stay that way.  He saved me, the chief of sinners, and he will save you too, if you will but bow your knee to Him and confess Him in faith.

So I counsel you today:  Escape the judgment.  Confess Christ and live for Him.  Then prepare, not for the judgment to come, but for everlasting glory and worship of God.