Regeneration: No Zombies Allowed!

I have been confronting a lot of professed Christians recently who deny the doctrine of total depravity. That is, they deny that the human spirit has been so marred by the Fall that it has become unable to do any spiritual good from itself, but is, instead, dead (Ephesians 2:1), and fated to remain that way, apart from the regenerating intervention of the Holy Spirit. The alternative is that the spirit is merely sick, able to choose, out of its free will, to throw off its sickness and grope its way to God, maybe with a little assistance from grace. That is called semi-Pelagianism, a heresy, and shows how far even professing Evangelicals have fallen from the biblical Protestant faith.

Frankly, I am stunned by that, considering what the Scriptures say about the heart of the natural man: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick" (Jeremiah 17:9).

But let's look at another verse, one that rarely comes up in these discussions: "The hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead" (Ecclesiastes 9:3). How anyone, who claims to believe in the authority of the Bible, can read that and believe that man is basically good, capable of coming to salvation, I cannot conceive!

I understand that such people usually do not use the terminology of "basically good." They proclaim a belief that all men are sinners. But then there is a disconnect between that profession and the rest of their spiritual lives, especially in evangelism. They treat the sinful state that they profess like a difficulty that one must (and can) overcome, not a fatal condition.

But the Bible tells us that only God can change a man from a dead sinner to a living believer through regeneration: "Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord" (Ezekiel 37:5-6). While it is impossible for a dead man to rescue himself, it is a simple effort for the God of the universe to make him alive! That alone is the hope of the sinner.