(Excerpted from The World-Tilting Gospel, 77-79)
Our eyes open on an operating room.
One full complement of antiseptically garbed professionals rushes about, working intently on a patient in the center of the surgical theater. Instruments flash, experts lean in, all attention is riveted on this figure and the controlling machinery surrounding him. Off to their right stands another complete team, uniformed and equipped, waiting for their cue to dive in and begin their specialized assignment. On the other side, to the left, another squad reclines on cots, resting.
A clock on the wall reads Time elapsed, and gives a figure of eighteen hours, forty-seven minutes, nineteen seconds . . . twenty . . . twenty-one . . .
And we gasp, Good heavens, what a desperate ruin this poor soul must be, that such a massive-scale operation was necessary!
Blink. Our eyes open again on a garden.
Listen. What does He ask?
“Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36).
The Father has never through all eternity denied a request of the Son. Surely He will grant this! Yet Christ pleads it once . . . twice . . . three times. There is no answer. The Father says nothing.
Another first—and an alarming one.
An angel appears. We hear no words. But the Son rises. He squares His shoulders. He goes forth, meets a jittery and heavily armed crowd. He allows Himself to be arrested.
Too horrified to look away, we watch from afar as He is led off, as He is subjected to atrocious and repellent mockeries of justice; as He is beaten, whipped to a ragged walking corpse; as He is mocked,
condemned, and sent off carrying a cross.
To that cross He is nailed. On that cross He bleeds. He groans under glowering, angry, darkened skies. Our gut clenches and we gasp to hear Him cry out in prayer once again, this time to the silent heavens, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” He lets out a loud cry . . .
And He—the resurrection and the life; the way, the truth, the life; the bread of life—dies.
Nauseated with horror, through numb lips we murmur, “Dear God, why? What a desperate ruin must we be, that such a massive-scale operation was necessary!”
For, you see, the Bible is clear that the miserable, lonely death of the Son of God was absolutely necessary for the recovery and redemption of men and women. If such extreme measures were an absolute necessity—and they were—then the ruin from which we needed to be rescued must have been far worse, and far more comprehensive, than many imagine. As we are about to see, the cross of Christ underscores the truth of what we just learned about man, and our need for what we are about to learn...
ere's a bit of e-mail correspondence from someone who is adamantly opposed to the biblical (and Calvinistic) doctrine of total depravity. He insists that if sinners are spiritually unable to summon faith from their own hearts by their own free will, then they cannot be held responsible for their unbelief. Since we know they are responsible if they remain unrepentant, he says, we cannot say their depravity renders them unable to come to Christ in faith. Would God hold them responsible for something they are totally unable to do?
In other words, the problem with fallen humanity is not a physical incapacity or a lack of some intellectual, emotional, or rational faculty; it is that our wills are in bondage to sin. Fallen people sin willfully, not under compulsion or duress. They know full well what God's righteousness demands of them, and they refuse that duty, not because of factors beyond their control, but because they love sin and hate God. And it is that hatred of God that renders them unable to repent and trust Him.
You missed the whole point, or else you deliberately ignored it. I know you don't really think the drunk's inability exculpates him. Even your vaunted "common sense" tells you the drunk's inability is different from the inability of the infant—because the drunk's inability is the fruit of his own wrongdoing. Claiming his inability renders him blameless is like the gang-banger who kills his own parents to get drug money and then pleads with the court to show him mercy on the ground that he is an orphan.
Again: I was not making an analogy. I was merely trying to disabuse you of the notion that "inability is inability" and no legitimate distinction can ever be made between moral inability (as in the case of the drunkard) and natural inability (the reason we don't look askance when the baby soaks diaper after diaper).
The best way to ensure, by the providence of God, that I will have a full week at work is to promise to post something controversial which will require significant moderation and a lot of time disambiguating people regarding their own bum preconceptions.
That's a thought to ponder if you want to fire up your vitriol in the comments -- in fact I insist: why do all the nut-jobs hate Calvinism most of all rather than, for example, the idea that God is the Eucharist, or that your soul will suffer in purgatory for your sin before you get to spend eternity with God and the Virgin Mary? Why is Calvinism the one they know they have to overcome?
Wow! Like DOUBLE the number of sites! Seriously -- if the problem is that there's quite a lot of venom going around, check the internet, because clearly someone out there is wrong.
t is a well-known fact, and one which can be proved by the observation of every day, that the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God. Mark, we lay this down as a rule.
So in their response here, they blame everyone — everyone, that is, except themselves. It's 
outmatched."
od only knows the vileness of the human heart. There is a depth beneath, a hidden spring, into which we cannot pry. In that lower depth, there is a still deeper abyss of positive corruption which we need not wish to fathom.
et's go back to the passage 
This is our first question. They need him, all of them. There is no difference in this respect. Whether Jews or Gentiles, they are all sold under sin. God has concluded the whole race of man in unbelief. He has shut them all up in condemnation. There is no escape from the universal doom except by the way of the cross. Jesus Christ comes to save; comes with pardon in his hands, with messages of love, with tokens of favour; yet most men bar the doors of their hearts against him. There is no cry heard in their souls, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates! and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, that the King of Glory may come in!" Instead thereof, there is a sullen cry, "Come prejudice; come unbelief; come hardness of heart; come love of sin; bar ye the doors and barricade the gates lest, perhaps, the King of Glory should force an entrance!" Men treat the Saviour as they would treat an invader who attacked their country. They seek to drive him away; they would fain be rid of him. They cannot endure his presence. Nay, they can scarce endure, some of them, to hear about him in the street. Why is this? The chief reason lies in the depravity of man's nature. You never know how bad man is till he comes in contact with the Cross.
ow did we get in this state? Scripture lays the blame at Adam's feet. Roman's 5:12 says, "Through one man [Adam] sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned." Sin entered the world through Adam, then passed to all men. Adam's sin brought spiritual death—total depravity—upon the entire race. First Corinthians 15:22 says, "In Adam all die."
In this series, however, it's not really necessary to go into great detail on the question of how sin was transmitted to us from Adam. It's enough to affirm the fact that Adam's sin condemned us. Without delving deeply into all the mysteries that surround this question, let's simply declare what God's Word has to say on the matter: "By the transgression of the one the many died" (Rom. 5:15). "The judgment arose from one transgression resulting in condemnation" (v. 16). "By the transgression of the one, death reigned" (v. 17). "Through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men" (v. 18). "Through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners" (v. 19).
by Frank Turk
Here's what that has to do with you: you should be more worried about whether you have a savior than whether you are doing any good. See: you can admit that you really just aren't any good. Even the good you seem to do is really just the white space around the big black blobs of sin nature that come out of you, guiding the eye to the violations rather than somehow making you seem mostly clean – like 
