| What Did Christ Think About Men?, Part 2 |
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| Written by David Lawrence |
| Monday, June 20 2005 00:00 |
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Jesus considered people to be inherently evil and thus in need of rebirth and salvation. All Jewish people were taught from the Scriptures and understood the truth about man's depravity and radical fallenness. Note the response of the Jewish council to the former blind man, "You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?" (John 9:34). David wrote, "Behold I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me" (Psalm 51:5). Jeremiah taught: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jer. 17:9). The Psalmist wrote that "God looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all fallen away; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one" (Psalm 53:2-3, Psalm 14:2-3). So much for the idea that God looks down from heaven and finds those who are good enough to believe in Christ! Before the flood "The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Gen. 6:5). After the flood the situation did not change, for we read in Gen. 8:21, "…I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth." Jesus never contradicted the Scriptures, and the message of Jesus was in every way consistent with it. He claimed that Scripture could not be broken and that he came to fulfill Scripture. He chided the Sadducees because they were ignorant of Scripture. The point is that Jesus continued the consistent witness of the Bible that insists that man is inherently evil. He has a sin problem, and the problem can only be corrected by radical heart "surgery." As Ezekiel prophesied, God must take away his heart of stone and give him a heart of flesh (Ezek. 11:19, 36:26). |
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