By Vance Havner
"And he said unto them, You are from beneath; I am from above: you are of this world; I am not of this world." - JOHN 8:23.
From beginning to end, the Bible teaches that God works down from above, not up from below. This, of course, is contrary to human reasoning. Man teaches that we are on our way from the bottom to the top, that we started as sentient jelly on the shoreland of some prehistoric age and that through millions of years of evolution we have been working our way up from below. But God says that in His dealings with us from start to finish He works down from above.
To begin with, God says that man was made in God's image but he fell. And when he fell, he did not fall upward. Adam started better than he finished. He was not a cave-man swinging a club but a Godlike being who fell. "In Adam all die." "By one man sin entered into the world and death by sin." "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God."
For quite a while we have been taught that man started with no knowledge of God but that he has worked his way up through animism, fetishism, totemism, polytheism; that in the Jewish nation he reached monotheism and in Jesus Christ he carried that idea to its highest ideals. But the truth is, man started with a knowledge of God, but when he knew God he glorified Him not as God neither was thankful, but became vain in his imagination, so that his foolish heart was darkened and professing himself to be wise he became a fool. The first chapter of Romans presents us with a picture of degradation and depravity that forever debunks the idea that man has been continually seeking God's fellowship through the ages. Even the Israelites, when they did know God, were continually turning from God to idols. Such has been the course of church history. Such has been individual experience. The human heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, and its natural bent is away from God. "The carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be." "The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness to him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." Men hate God. They do not want God, they resent Him, they are rebels against Him, they make gods of their own.
Whoever assumes that man is kindly disposed toward God, and that if God's love be presented and the winsomeness of Christ be preached, men will fall over each other rushing down church aisles to be saved, is in for a big surprise. The facts simply do not bear that out. God's Word does not teach it. It is not true to history or experience. Jesus Christ lived among us in all His winsomeness and we spat upon Him, crowned Him with thorns, crucified Him on a tree. And we would do it again. He said the world hated Him and that it would hate us. And the reason it does not hate us Christians more is not because the world today is more like Christ but because we Christians are so unlike Him.
Man is not on his way up but on his way down. It is ridiculous to ask man to follow Christ so long as he is unsaved. He is a guilty sinner and must be made to face the fact; he must see himself as God sees him. Then will he pray like David, "Against thee only, have I sinned." We must stop dusting off sin with a powder puff and spreading cold cream over the cancers of iniquity. Sin is not mere imperfection, the left-overs of a brute ancestry. Man is not evolving Godward. Left to himself, he is foul, reprobate, degenerate, disgusting, not on his way up to heaven but on his way down to hell.
Certainly the Word of God paints no rosy picture of man in his natural state. Instead, we are told, "The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it: but wounds and bruises and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment." If it be objected that this is an Old Testament picture of a corrupt nation we turn to the New Testament and find the human race given over by God to "a reprobate mind, to do what ought not to be done.
They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. Again, if it be objected that we have made progress since Paul wrote Romans we turn to his description of men in the last days and find that men are no better, that these same characteristics persist and some more are thrown in for good measure. Lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, truce-breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God - these, mind you, are marks of the human race at the end of its course. Man still is no better. For it is not a progressive race "evoluting" upward but a perishing race "deviluting" downward. Of course, that is not what we are reading in popular magazines; it is not what starry-eyed idealists are telling us - but it is what God says.
