Step 6 - The Pot and the Kettle

Doubting Doubt

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The Process

Step 6 

The Pot and the Kettle

  Is there a chance that we could apply two standards when we read our Bibles?  What could possibly cause us to do such a thing?  Well fortunately we are not left to fend for ourselves to answer that question.  The Bible has already told us.

  I know you are well familiar with the Doctrine of Total Depravity.  I am confident that you understand that it does not mean that man is a completely hideous degenerate.  That is not what the Doctrine of Total Depravity is.  Rather, that would be more correctly defined as “utter depravity.”

  The Doctrine of Total Depravity refers to the fact that there is no part of God’s creation that has not suffered some degree or another of corruption by sin and that in man it includes every aspect of his being including his reasoning.  I am wondering if that is what is going on here and that we do not realize that we are employing a double-standard because we just can’t see it.  Try to imagine a better target for Satan to twist out of whack than a man’s pride in his own intellectual comprehension.

  It’s as if we are saying, “Yes I know about the Doctrine of Total Depravity and I know that sin has even contaminated to a greater or lesser degree man’s reason.  But it hasn’t happened to me.  There is not a single millimeter, a single grain, a single dot within my reasoning ability that has been affected.  I am immune.  I see every part of God’s revealed Word, even “the deep things of God” (1 Cor. 2:10) with complete clarity.”

  “Well, Monty,” someone will say, “what is this, the pot calling the kettle black?  Do you think you have risen beyond any such thing yourself and can point at the church and tell us you are right and we are wrong?  Don’t you think the Doctrine of Total Depravity applies to you?  Aren’t you just as vulnerable to its effects as anyone else?”

  Yes!  Now we’re getting somewhere!

  It was precisely when I realized that that something far more important became apparent.  There is a far greater Truth here.

  My Preface at the beginning of this essay is a letter to a friend in which I told him that there was something I was excited about.  Something about it seems to nearly defy words to express it, but I will try to make that attempt now.