Joel Beeke

The Bible tells us that although fallen man is capable of doing some externally good acts, he cannot do anything truly good or pleasing in God’s sight (Rom 8:8) unless he is regenerated by the Holy Spirit (Joh 3:1-8). From God’s standpoint, which is the only true standpoint, natural man is incapable of goodness in thought, word, or deed, and thus cannot contribute anything to his salvation. He is in total rebellion against God.

When [we] speak of total depravity, [we] are confessing our helldeserving demerit and corruption before God because of our original and actual sins. We can neither erase our demerit nor do anything to merit the saving favor of God. To grasp the full implications of this truth, we must understand five things that lie at the heart of what Scripture presents total depravity to mean.

First, total depravity is inseparable from iniquity. Total depravity is the inevitable result of our sin, and sin is the inevitable result of our total depravity. You can’t understand what total depravity is if you don’t understand what sin is. The Bible tells us, “Sin is the transgression of the law” of God (1Jo 3:4). Thus, sin is any failure to conform to the moral law of God in our actions, attitudes, or nature—either by doing or being what we should not do or be (sins of commission) or by not doing or not being what we should do or be (sins of omission). Sin is unrighteousness, and all unrighteousness is anti-God. In essence, sin is all that is in opposition to God. Sin defies God; it violates His character, His Law, and His covenant. It fails, as Martin Luther¹ put it, to “let God be God.” Sin aims to dethrone God and strives to place someone or something else upon His rightful throne.

The Bible uses a variety of words for sin. Taken individually, they mean (1) to miss the mark God has established as our aim—that is, not to live to His glory; (2) to be irreligious and irreverent, which is to show the absence of righteousness; (3) to transgress the boundaries of God’s Law—that is, to violate His established limits; (4) to engage in iniquity—that is, to deviate from a right course, to show a lack of integrity, or to fail to do what He has commanded; (5) to disobey and rebel against God through a breach of trust or a conscious act of treachery; (6) to commit perversion by twisting one’s mind against God; and (7) to commit abomination against God by performing acts particularly reprehensible² to God. Every life—including yours and mine—has missed its target and is irreverent by nature.

Every life has transgressed the lines of God’s prohibitions and engages in iniquity. Every life has disobeyed the voice of God, has rebelled against Him, and is prone to commit perversion and abomination. Isaiah 53:6a says “all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way,” and Romans 3:23 says that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”

Thus, total depravity means that we are lawbreakers at every turn. By nature, we never love God above all or our neighbors as ourselves. We are at “enmity against God” (Rom 8:7), living in active, frenetic³ hostility toward Him, and we are “hateful, and hating one another” (Ti 3:3). We are always sinning, for our motives are never altogether pure.

Second, total depravity is primarily inward—an inwardness that stems from our profound and tragic fall in Adam. When we think of sin, we are prone to limit ourselves to outward actions such as murder, theft, assassination, cruelty, and anything else that is external and observable in human behavior. But the Bible is much more rigorous and far more radical. It looks not simply at what is outward, touched, and heard; it goes into the depths of human life and says that sin and depravity exist there, too—in our thoughts, our ambitions, our decisions, our motives, and our aspirations.

Jesus said that it is not what a man eats or touches that defiles him, but that which comes out from him that defiles him and affects all he thinks and does (Mat 15:17-20). It is not so much that human actions or speech have missed the target; it is that the heart of man has missed the target. The very heart of man is unbelieving, selfish, covetous, sensuous, and always desiring to displace God Himself. Hence, the very desire to sin is sin. John Calvin put it this way: “According to the constitution of our nature, oil might be extracted from a stone sooner than we could perform a good work.”⁴

Why is this? Why are we all so inwardly depraved? Why is it impossible for the natural man to produce any righteousness? To answer these questions, we must return to Paradise. There we were affected by Adam’s sin in two ways. First, the guilt of his sin was imputed to us, so we are guilty sinners before God, as Paul tells us graphically in Romans 5:18a: “By the offence of one [man,] judgment came upon all men to condemnation.” Second, we inherited the pollution of his sin, so we are corrupt sinners before God, conceived and born in iniquity, as David tells us graphically in Psalm 51:5: “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Thus, we are depraved in our inner beings through our fall in Adam, both in our state of guilt and in our condition of pollution. Isaiah said that the best of our righteousness—that is, the best of our best—is as “filthy rags” before the holy God (Isa 64:6). We are worse than we can imagine. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Calvin declares that no one knows even 1 percent of his sin. And a common ancient proverb says, “If the best man’s faults were written in his forehead, it would make him pull his hat over his eyes.”⁵

We have two problems in God’s sight: we have a bad record and we have a bad heart—and the second problem is by far the greater of the two. When we understand our inner depravity in scriptural terms (read Rom 3:9-20), we see that this condition—known by the theological term original sin—is a far greater burden than our actual sins, for all our actual sins flow from the fountainhead of our original sin and our bad heart. We sin because we are internally depraved, not because we are externally deprived. That’s why Calvin writes, “Every sin should convince us of the general truth of the corruption of our nature.”⁶

When Paul got a glimpse of the depths of his depravity, he confessed that he was the “chief” sinner among mankind (1Ti 1:15). When John Bunyan saw just a bit of his inner depravity, he said that he would trade his heart with anyone in all of England.⁷ Luther summarizes our problem well: “Original sin is in us like our beard. We are shaved today and look clean; tomorrow our beard has grown again, nor does it cease growing while we remain on earth. In like manner original sin cannot be extirpated⁸ from us; it springs up in us as long as we live.”⁹

Third, total depravity means that sin is tragically inclusive, i.e., it dreadfully impacts every part of us. There is something terribly wrong not only with who we are inwardly, but with every aspect of our being. No element of our personality is less affected by sin than any other. Our intellects, our consciences, our emotions, our ambitions, and our wills, which are the citadels of our souls, are all enslaved to sin by nature. That’s why Jesus complained, “I would have gathered thy children…and ye would not” (Mat 23:37). Total depravity is not absolute depravity…[it] does not mean men are animals or devils, or that they are as depraved as they could be or will be. This world is not hell.

Total depravity does not mean that an unbeliever is wholly evil in everything he does, but rather that nothing he does is ever wholly good. Man is not so far fallen that he has lost all awareness of God or conscience; by God’s common goodness, he is still capable of showing domestic affection, doing civic good, and performing his duties as a citizen. He is capable of great heroism, of great physical courage, and of great acts of self-denial. Yet he is a corrupt sinner in every aspect of his nature, and as such, he is utterly incapable of performing any spiritual good in the eyes of God. Total depravity means that when God scrutinizes the human heart, affections, conscience, will, or any part of the body, He finds every part damaged and polluted by sin. Apart from saving grace, every part is alienated from God and actively pursuing sin. If the Spirit teaches us this experientially, we will understand Jonathan Edwards’ confession: “When I look into my heart, and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss, infinitely deeper than hell.”¹⁰ As D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes, “When a man truly sees himself, he knows that nobody can say anything about him that is too bad.”¹¹

Fourth, total depravity spells inability. It means we are active “sinaholics” by nature. There is no thought, no word, no act, and no area of human life that is not affected by sin. Romans 6:16 says that we are by nature slaves of sin: “Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants [or slaves] ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?” Consider this literally for a moment. A slave was his master’s property. A slave had no time, property, or wealth of his own. He had no single moment of which he could say, “This moment is mine; my master has no rights over this moment.” He was always his master’s property; his every movement, his every talent, his every possession was entirely his master’s. So, Paul says, you were by nature the slaves of sin (Rom 6:16). Sin was your master. Sin lorded itself over you. Sin was in control. And yet, sin gave the impression all the while that you were free and in charge of your own destiny.

Total depravity thus entails moral inability. In ourselves, we are unable to do anything about our condition. We are spiritually impotent by nature, unable and unwilling to save ourselves. We cannot appreciate the Christian faith and we are powerless to work toward our conversion. “We can do nothing but sin,” Calvin says, “until He [the Holy Spirit] forms a new will within us.”¹² No matter how much the natural man is urged by the law or the gospel to believe in Christ and turn from sin, he is “not able, by his own strength to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto” (Westminster Confession, 9.3). Charles Hodge puts it poignantly: “The rejection of the gospel is as clear a proof of moral depravity, as inability to see the light of the sun at noon is a proof of blindness.”¹³ The natural man may want to be free of some sin and of the consequences of sin; he may even expend some effort in that direction. But he is too much a slave to it. He is not simply “going lost” or “dying,” he is lost and is dead in trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1).

Every person in the world is by nature a slave of sin. The world, by nature, is held in sin’s grip. What a shock to our complacency—that everything of us by nature belongs to sin. Our silences belong to sin, our omissions belong to sin, our talents belong to sin, our actions belong to sin. Every facet of our personalities belongs to sin; it owns us and dominates us. We are its servants.

Total depravity is active in us. It is not simply the absence of righteousness, but the presence of corruption. Our depravity is enormously creative and inventive, ever devising new ways of violating God’s will. It is a growing cancer within us—a rampant, productive, energetic, and self-propagating¹⁴ entity. It is fire out of control—a living, fierce, powerful force. In the horrors of the Holocaust, the monstrosity of modern-day terrorism, and the dreadful headlines of our daily newspapers, we are shown what our corrupt, active human nature is capable of, given the requisite conditions, if God leaves us to ourselves.

My dear unsaved friend, you are a “sin-aholic.” You are a slave this very hour, a slave in your bed tonight—even when you pray. And you will be a slave until God’s almighty power raises you from spiritual death, opens your blind eyes, unstops your deaf ears, and breaks the chains of depravity that enwrap you. And even then, until your last breath, you will battle against your addiction to sin, for we remain recovering sin-aholics to the end (Rom 7:24).

Finally, total depravity is a stark reminder of the final issue of sin: the wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23). If you serve sin, you will receive the wages of sin. This is a moral universe. We live and move and have our being in God. Every breath of our lives is in His hands. Sow a seed of sin and you will reap the harvest of judgment. Sow the wind of unbelief and you will reap the whirlwind of destruction. “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Heb 9:27). Judgment is always imminent.¹⁵ There is a moment when God sends in the bill, and we must render account.

The fact of physical death is utterly unavoidable. You and I have a unilateral¹⁶ appointment with death in God’s eternal record book. The one absolute certainty about every one of us is the rending apart of our bodies and our souls. But beyond that is spiritual death—the rending apart of our soul from God, so that we lose the image of God and communion with Him and abide under His curse. Above all, there is eternal death—the rending of soul and body from God forever without any alleviation¹⁷ from common grace. Eternal death is hell—the solemn, awesome reality that the book of Revelation calls “the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone…the second death” (21:8). Hell is the cesspool of the universe. It is that appalling cosmic incinerator into which one day God Almighty will gather the refuse of the world, that place that is ever under His undiluted wrath, where the worm of memory dies not, where the false prophet is, where the Dragon and the Beast are (see Rev 12-13), and where everyone will be unless they deal with their sin. Hell is the logic behind sin. It is the divine response to persistent impenitence and final disobedience. Pollution is the forerunner of perdition. And hell is what God ultimately thinks of impenitent sin and total depravity.

[Scripture] teaches the sinfulness of sin and depravity. But it declares that sin and depravity are anomalies¹⁸ In the final analysis, they are beyond all reason. They cannot be depicted as too heinous and dastardly. They represent the height of spiritual stupidity and insanity. The magnitude of our sin and depravity exhibits the magnitude of our need for God’s gospel way of salvation.

From Living for God’s Glory

Joel R. Beeke: American author, theologian, and pastor; President of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, where he is Professor of Systematic Theology and Homiletics.

Courtesy of Chapel Library

1 Martin Luther (1483-1546) – German leader during the Protestant Reformation.
2 reprehensible – deserving rebuke or condemnation.
3 frenetic – wildly excited.
4 John Calvin, trans. John Allen, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 2 (New-Haven; Philadelphia: Hezekiah Howe; Philip H. Nicklin, 1816), 253; Calvin (1509-1664) was a French-born Swiss Protestant pastor, theologian, and reformer.
5 Select Proverbs, Italian, Spanish, French, English, British, etc., Chiefly Moral (London, 1707), 111.
6 John Calvin and James Anderson, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, Vol. 2 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 290.
7 Cf. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Choteau, MT: Old Paths Gospel Press, n.d.), 88-95.
8 extirpated – completely destroyed, as if down to the roots.
9 Quoted in John Blanchard, The Complete Gathered Gold (Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 2006), 144.
10 Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 1 (Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), xc.
11 D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 58.
12 John Calvin, Hebrews and the Epistles of Peter, trans. W. B. Johnston, eds. David W. and Thomas F. Torrance (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1963), 223-224.
13 Charles Hodge, An Exposition of Second Corinthians (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1862), 84.
14 self-propagating – able to reproduce itself.
15 imminent – approaching.
16 unilateral – performed by only one side.
17 alleviation – reducing something unpleasant.