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- To answer the question that is raised
whether people are ultimately good or bad,
from a Christian view you have to,
define your terms very very carefully.
First, when we talk about good and bad,
we are doing so in relation to God,
in relation to Him as our Creator and Lord.
His character, whether we love Him and serve Him, so
to be good is to honor Him, to want
to know Him, to obey Him in every area of life.
To be bad ultimately is stand in opposition to Him.
And then when the think about whether people
are good or bad, we have to think
in terms of the Bible storyline.
If we walk through the Bible at this point,
humans in Adam were created good.
They were created to know God,
to rule over the earth, to love Him, to serve Him.
They were created with value and dignity,
image bearers, and the Bible describes
that original situation as very good.
But when we then talk about humans
as good and bad we're really probably thinking
about what happened after that,
so that in our present world after Adam,
after what the Bible describes in Genesis 3.
Adam sins, he functions as the head
of the human race, so that in him the human race
now is what we call fallen or, in the words
of good and bad, bad.
Bad meaning that, in Adam's sin
which is then passed on to each one of us,
we are dead unto God.
We do not love Him, we run from Him,
we may think that we are seeking after Him,
but the true and living God, really
we wanted our own way.
And as you walk from Adam through the Bible
you can see this very, very clearly.
Adam and Eve sin, they're removed from the garden,
their children, if you wonder whether their children
receive sin passed on, they do.
There's murder in the very first family.
A couple chapters later you have a genealogy
that describes the entire human race,
and other than Enoch, who by God's grace
takes him out of this world, every single person
ends up in death and death would certainly describe
both a spiritual and a physical death.
We are those that Scripture will say
in the words of Romans 3:23, that all,
and that is not leaving anyone out,
all people, "all have sinned and fall short
"of the glory of God."
"The wages of sin is death,"
and all people experience death,
so that as we look at ourselves in Adam, we are bad.
Ephesians 2 describes it as "dead, spiritually dead
"in transgressions and sins" and gratifying
our desires that stand against God,
which is the opposite of what is good.
The good news, obviously, is that God
has not left us in this state, so that
in the plan of redemption in Christ He as taken
on our human nature.
He has paid for our sins by faith in Him
we no longer remain in Adam, but we are now
in Him, and by the Spirit of God
we are given spiritual life.
So that in Ephesians 2, "where we were dead
"in our transgressions and sins,
"in Christ, we are made alive."
So we have spiritual life.
We are now made good, so that we want
to love God and serve Him.
We still await the final,
when Jesus comes again where He will make everything new,
there we'll be perfectly glorified.
So we still struggle with sin as Christians
until Jesus comes, but we are no longer bad
in the sense of what we were in Adam.
We are now good in Christ because of His righteousness,
His work, the work of the Spirit that joins us
to him and makes us alive so that when we think
of anyone now outside of Christ,
they still are in their sins.
They would be considered bad and the effects
of sin are pervasive upon all of us.
Does that mean then that we are as bad
as we could be or that the effects of our sin on us
are such that we don't care for our neighbor
and do good things, this would be a misunderstanding
of what bad or the doctrine of sin is
in humans outside of Christ.
What it means is that we are dead unto God,
but we can still act in ways that, in our world,
are favorable to one another.
We still are image bearers.
Yet in our very heart, we don't pursue the things
of God and even when push comes to shove
we put ourselves at the center.
We may do noble things for people.
Yet in the end it's not done to God's glory.
That's not the standard by which we are making
our decisions, and Scripture will say
that even those relatively good things,
which are good in a world's way
and we want to be kind to one another,
is not reflective of ultimately--
What God wants from us is obedience,
wholehearted devotion, first to Him,
and then to our neighbor.
You think of the Great Commandment,
we are "to love the Lord our God with
"all our heart, soul, mind and strength"
and our neighbor as ourself.
To be good is to be that person who does
that perfectly and obediently, and completely.
Out in our fallen state we do not do that.
And what is needed is to be transferred
from sin and death under Adam
to be brought into saving relationship with Christ.
So are human beings ultimately good or bad?
Well, we define good and bad in terms
of our relation to God and its implication with one another.
In Adam, we were made good.
In Adam's sin, we are bad, we are fallen.
In Christ we are made alive,
and we will be transformed in the end
when He comes again, but outside of Him
we are still in our sins, we are still bad,
we need the work of the Spirit to make us alive.
We need the Lord Jesus to become our Lord and Savior
so that we are given new life in Him.
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