Still Time to Care by Greg Johnson

Author:Greg Johnson [Johnson, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2021-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Though commentators don’t always agree, there’s good reason to believe Paul is giving voice to his present experience as a believer. In this passage, he speaks of how he delights in God’s law in his inmost being. That seems to suggest a spiritually regenerated Christian—alive to God. Yet even as an apostle, having penned biblical books under divine inspiration, having walked with Jesus for decades, Paul still has sin living in him—indwelling sin. Evil is right there with him. Temptation doesn’t always go away.

This deeply rooted sin is what theologians have variously called concupiscence, the sinful nature and its motions, indwelling sin, or internal corruption.

The Protestant reformer John Calvin explained the relative permanence of indwelling sin in his discussion of Romans 6. “So long as you live, sin must needs be in your members,” he wrote. It must be. There is no cure. He continued, “At least let it be deprived of mastery.”1 The 1647 Westminster Confession of Faith expressed this reality succinctly: “This corruption of nature, during this life, doth remain in those that are regenerated.”2 The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith quoted Westminster verbatim at this point. The Baptists saw nothing to improve upon.

There is no cure for corrupted nature in this life. We remain inescapably children of Adam. There is only a charge to fight our corrupted nature’s temptations to sin.

So distorted is our fallen human nature, and so deeply rooted our sin, that a believer can never really be rid of it in this life. The seventeenth-century Anglican bishop William Beveridge lamented, “I cannot pray but I sin. I cannot hear or preach a sermon but I sin. I cannot give an alms or receive the sacrament but I sin. Nay, I cannot so much as confess my sins, but my very confessions are still aggravations of them. My repentance needs to be repented of, my tears need washing, and the very washing of my tears needs still to be washed over again with the blood of my Redeemer.”3

Seventeenth-century scholar and divine Samuel Bolton wrote, “It was said of Carthage that Rome was more troubled with it when half destroyed than when whole. So a godly man may be more troubled with sin when it is conquered than when it reigned. Sin will still work.”4 Princeton Seminary’s legendary Charles Hodge called it a “universal and incurable corruption of our nature” which reveals redemption to be no small matter, but the work of God.5

Incurable.

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