There Is None That Doeth Good

Let us consider our first parents, Adam and Eve, after they had eaten the forbidden fruit, standing before God in the Garden of Eden. Notice how they behaved: they had already become spiritually dead.

They did not seek God’s forgiveness. They did not pray, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” They had no hunger or thirst for righteousness. They did not seek God (compare Luke 18:13; Matthew 5:6; Romans 3:11.) No, but they went and hid from God among the trees of the Garden. They were not willing to do any of these things; and that is why they did not do them.

Consider this spiritually dead man and woman appearing before God the Righteous Judge. Even there, in God’s very presence, they still rejected him. Rather than accepting responsibility for their sins and begging God for forgiveness, they sought to pass the blame—and Adam would even implicate God himself! “And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (Genesis 3:12). They implicitly denied that they were personally worthy of all condemnation.

You, reader, must face this fact: this too is your own fallen, sinful, spiritually dead nature—or it was, if you have become a Christian. The Bible is a faithful mirror: this is how so many people are today, and this is how you too will be on the Day of Judgment—if you have not been saved by the Saviour.

Desperately Wicked

Where people think too highly of themselves and deny this terrible fact, it is because there is no work of God’s saving grace within them and they do not understand their own fallen heart. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

Please take careful note of how the Bible describes the spiritually dead soul: “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).

Although sometimes this Psalm is applied to outright atheists (deniers of the existence of God and all spiritual things), it really refers to all people who reject the one true God, as revealed in the Bible. They are saying NO to this God.

This is how we all are, unless we have been converted: “Among whom also we [Christians] all had our conversation¹ in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath [i.e. deserving of God’s wrath], even as others” (Ephesians 2:3).

If “there is none that doeth good, no, not one,” among fallen sinners of mankind, then nothing that they do is good in God’s sight. If nothing that they do is good, then all that they do is not good; in other words, all that fallen sinners do is sin.

But this is impossible for fallen human pride to accept.

Total Depravity

Many Bible-rejecting systems resent the force of the total depravity² verses in the Bible. “No,” some say, “human beings are basically good at heart.” Others say, “There is a spark of goodness (even a spark of divinity) in all of us—or, in most of us.” They all say, “I refuse to accept that I myself am so bad! I have not committed murder. I am certainly not as bad as…”

The Bible says: Yes, you are that bad.

Unconverted human beings resent and protest at the Bible’s teaching that there is no man, woman or child that does anything good. “But—some people are altruistic. Some people do courageously give up their lives to rescue, help, protect, or care for others. I know I can be good, sometimes!”

The Bible says: No, you can’t be good.

Whatever ‘good’ God-rejecting people may think they do, they should not imagine that God is pleased to accept it as good in his eyes. Sinners deserve God’s wrath—deserve death, in the Bible’s fullest sense of the word. And that condemnation to everlasting death has already been passed upon the human race in Adam, for breaking the covenant of life.

The Lord Jesus Christ reasoned against the wrong-thinking of somebody who came to him by referring to the 14th Psalm: “Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God”³ (Matthew 19:17). So, fallen human beings are not good and they do no good, in God’s eyes.

Fallen man’s heart is as Jesus described it: “That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man” (Mark 7:20-23).

Appendix

The Canons of Dort, Heads 3 & 4 Article 4.

There is, to be sure, a certain light of nature remaining in man after the fall by virtue of which he retains some notions about God, natural things, and the difference between what is moral and immoral, and demonstrates a certain eagerness for virtue and for good outward behaviour. But this light of nature is far from enabling man to come to a saving knowledge of God and conversion to him—so far, in fact, that man does not use it rightly even in matters of nature and society. Instead, in various ways he completely distorts this light, whatever its precise character, and suppresses it in unrighteousness. In doing so he renders himself without excuse before God.

Thomas Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, Part 2 Chapter 1.

There is a natural contrariety, direct opposition, and enmity, in the will of man, to God Himself, and His holy will (Romans 8:7), “The carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” The will was once God’s deputy in the soul, set to command there for Him; but now it is set up against Him. If you would have the picture of it in its natural state, the very reverse of the will of God represents it. If the fruit hanging before one’s eye be but forbidden, that is sufficient to draw the heart after it.

Matthew Poole, Commentary on the Whole Bible, at Jeremiah 17:9.

The words translated deceitful, and desperately wicked, are very variously translated, fraudulent, perverse, supplanting…It is a proposition true concerning the hearts of all the sons and daughters of men; there is nothing so false and deceitful as the heart of man; deceitful in its apprehensions of things, in the hopes and promises which it nourisheth, in the assurances that it gives us, etc.; unsearchable by others, deceitful with reference to ourselves, and abominably wicked, so that neither can a man know his own heart, neither can any other know our hearts.