No, Not One

According to the Bible, this is the nature of the fallen human being:

The spiritually dead soul always rejects the true God as he reveals himself to be in the Bible.

He may worship a so-called “god” or other spiritual entity; or he may be an atheist (on the surface at least); or he may be a member of a cult that pretends to be Christianity but is not at all; or he may be someone who thinks he is a Christian, but is really not.

Every fallen human being is in a state of opposition against God, rejecting his right to intervene in this world, or even denying his existence. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good. The LORD looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one” (Psalm 14.1-3; see also Romans 3.10-11).

The spiritually dead soul always rejects the truth that God’s moral law is the standard by which he ought to live.

He may sometimes outwardly pretend to live by God’s commandments, if the society in which he finds himself has been strongly influenced by the Bible. But he will have many ways of rejecting them in his heart, and in practice.

Or, he may be totally pleased to live in a nation that is set against God—a nation working hard to overturn God’s commandments—a nation surging ahead in its post-Christian (actually anti-Christian) “progress.” And he himself may be rushing headlong in his sins without any concern about where he will end up—in this life or the afterlife.

God’s moral law is what makes man most angry. His discomfort and resentment is especially targeted against the deeply-probing exposition of the moral law which Christ made so clear in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).

The spiritually dead soul is always interested in sin.

Sin occupies all his waking and sleeping thoughts—indeed, he despises the whole idea of living a godly life, exclaiming that it is boring and annoying, only for “losers,” “hypocrites,” “killjoys,” and “bigots”!

By no means will he seek to do anything for the glory of God. “The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts” (Psalm 10.4). It is not that God is in some of his thoughts, but that in all his thoughts he rejects and denies the one true God.

The spiritually dead soul always rejects the gospel of Christ.

It is as the Lord Jesus Christ said: “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3.19).

As Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden, so fallen human beings still flee from God—and they flee from “God manifest in the flesh” (1 Timothy 3.16; see also John 1.1-3,14). They do not turn to the true God or to the true Christ. “No man can come to me,” declared the Lord Jesus, “except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (John 6.44).

The spiritually dead soul never delights in Christ—not as he is revealed to be in the Bible.

Where a person claims to seek God without turning to Christ, that person is not really seeking the true God at all. He refuses to seek God on God’s terms: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him” (Matthew 17.5).

The sinner is never pleased with this Jesus in whom God is well pleased (Matthew 3.17). He would much rather follow a false Christ than the true Christ. He will prefer a “Jesus” who is (or, was):

• Merely a good man
• A legendary hero
• A non-violent freedom-fighter
• A guru
• Merely a prophet (whose actual teachings, they say, have been corrupted or lost, and are certainly not in the Bible’s New Testament)
• A man showing his “feminine side”
• A master of occult mysteries
• An “ascended master” who enables us to evolve ourselves to the next level by “channelling spiritual energies”
• A superman or god-like man who exemplifies what we too can become by our own “personal development” or “untapped potential” or (what they wrongly call) “faith”

The spiritually dead soul will prefer any of these lies, or any other invented philosophy, religion or ideology of man, to the true Lord Jesus Christ of the Bible.