Total Depravity: Can the Leopard Change His Spots?

I expect unbelievers to deny that they are sinners. That is the nature of unbelief. If they understood sin, then they would understand the holiness of God and their need for a Savior. However, I am always bewildered by Christians, claiming to believe in the Bible, who deny the wickedness of men. Not that they phrase it that way, of course, but rather that they deny the logical consequences of that wickedness.

Paul tells us that the unregenerate are "dead in trespasses and sins" (Ephesians 2:1). Yet, such Christians unconsciously change that to "sick in trespasses and sins." And, as a sick person can act to make himself well, they believe that the natural man has the ability to treat his own spiritual condition.

Nicodemus

However, Scripture deals with that belief in other places, too. For example, we read, "Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil" (Jeremiah 13:23). The Prophet asks a rhetorical question, Can a man change his skin color? Or can a leopard wish away his spots? And the implied answer to both questions is "no." In the same way, he says, the wicked cannot choose to change to good. Jesus makes the same point: "What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person" (Matthew 15:18-20).

How, then, can anyone be changed? Are we doomed to the natural condition in which we were born? The Bible answers those questions, too: "I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes and be careful to obey My rules" (Ezekiel 35:26-27).

The answer is not to gloss over the sin of man. Rather, we depend on the divine Cardiologist to perform radical surgery, removing our dead spiritual hearts, to replace them with new living hearts, rendered thereby able to love God and to obey Him. This is what Jesus calls being born again (John 3:3-8). It is the new birth which changes dead sinners to living saints.