Two Diminished Doctrines = Many Puny Christians

Sound the alarm and bar the door! We’ve been robbed! Two doctrinal jewels are missing: human depravity and the Christian’s glorification.

But I wonder how many Christians consider them jewels? After all, who likes to talk about the depths of human sinfulness (“Yes, I know we’re all sinners, blah-blah-blah”)? And eternity sounds tedious (we’re not going to be sporting flightless wings and playing harps, by the way).

Well, as many of you know, I’ve been studying and teaching on why God allows evil for many years and long ago I realized that the absence, or at least diminishment, of these two doctrines is the primary, and I do mean primary, reason that many Christians say we can’t know why God allows evil.

But there’s more.

A weak, beggarly understanding of these two doctrines is the chief reason that many a Christian’s life is so lack-luster. So dim. So puny, so paltry, so pantywaist, that a one-legged, 97 pound weakling could kick the stuffing out of it.

But seriously, to the extent that Christians don’t understand the depth of sin or the significance of our glorious eternal inheritance, they are spiritually hobbled.

Indeed, D. Martyn Loyd-Jones, the famous expositor of Westminster Chapel, wrote, “Most of our troubles are due to the fact that we are guilty of a double failure; we fail on the one hand to realize the depth of sin, and on the other hand we fail to realize the greatness and the height and the glory of our salvation.”

Loyd-Jones is right.

So today I’m adding to the Resources section of this blog an article I presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society that was entitled “We Don’t Take Human Evil Seriously so We Don’t Understand Why We Suffer.” In it I examine the theology, examples (warning: there is some unsettling information in this section), studies, reflections of researchers and victims, and what the Scripture says about human goodness and evil. I encourage you to read it. I end it with twelve ways a deeper understanding of human sinfulness benefits the Christian.

As for the glories of Heaven, I’m also adding to the Resources page an in-progress chapter I’m writing entitled “Reigning with Christ.” By the way, when I teach on Why God Allows Evil at Biola, I end the course talking about the glories that await us in Heaven. This topic isn’t given the time it needs in most works on why God allows evil and that’s too bad. C. S. Lewis was right that “Scripture and tradition habitually put the joys of Heaven into the scale against the sufferings of earth, and no solution of the problem of pain that does not do so can be called a Christian one.”

I discuss both of these in an interview with Brian Auten of Apologetics 315.

Of course, much more needs to be said.

2 Corinthians 4:17-18:  “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

Amen.