The Natural Man's War on God

Sin is natural. It is a part of man’s nature. Man does not just commit sins; he is a sinner by nature.

Man was once righteous in Eden. But his choice to sin corrupted him and brought God’s curse upon the human race. Concurrent with God’s curse on man was His promise of one who would crush Satan’s head (Gen. 3:15). That one was Jesus Christ, whose supernatural incarnation, atonement, and resurrection represents His restoration of man to fellowship with God. Natural man is a reprobate sinner before God. It is only by the power of the supernatural man, Jesus Christ, that man is himself made a new creature and given a new nature. This means a struggle between natural man in Adam and supernatural man in Jesus Christ.

Sin is rebellion against God. It is a panicked flight from God: sinners flee in every direction and take refuge in any place that seems safe from Him and His divine law. The only unity in this rebellion is in its consistent hostility to any acknowledgement of God and of man’s accountability to Him. The natural man is quick to destroy; quick to assault, but incapable of productivity.

This is why homosexuals today are attacking marriage. To vindicate their own moral anarchy, they seek to destroy the legal distinctiveness of marriage. They want to cast down the supernatural view of marriage as a divine institution and force society to justify their suicidal course.

The Enlightenment
The ascendancy of the natural man has a long history. In modern times it became prominent in the 18 th century Enlightenment, a conscious return to the humanism of the ancient world and the Renaissance. The Enlightenment was more than just anti-Christian; it was a self-conscious design to replace Christianity and God’s Law with Nature and Natural Law.

Such naturalism inevitably excludes supernaturalism, especially Christianity. If the natural is “real,” the supernatural is not. It is an illegitimate intrusion on the “real” world and its social order. A worldview that sees nature as normative sees the supernatural as an insult to man’s freedom.

When the Enlightenment enthroned nature, it enthroned natural man. Later, the French Revolution elevated man’s reason. Natural man opposed supernatural man, Jesus Christ and His new creation. As Christianity was rejected, naturalism became the new religious faith. What was natural was said to be normal and good; the supernaturalism of Christianity and its divine revelation became the new evil, a thing hostile to man’s being.

Darwinism
Charles Darwin is an example of how rebellion against God is not necessarily unified or even consistent. His legacy also illustrates that man’s rebellion is destructive, not constructive.

Darwin wanted to explain the world naturalistically, without God. He wanted to construct a theory of origins that did not depend on the supernatural. Darwin did just that, but in doing so altered modern thought dramatically.

In Darwinism nature as a source of law is impossible because it is a random world of chance. After Darwin, nature could no longer be viewed as a source of law, as it was a realm of violence and chaos. Darwin gave modern man what he sought — a world without God — but he also reduced man to an animal governed by primordial urges. Darwin not only destroyed nature as a source of law, he destroyed any possibility of law as absolute. Law and all else after Darwin were products of man’s evolution. Man came from chaos and yet was the highest form of intellect. Whatever man was or did was natural, and by definition normative.

Darwin’s thinking was a watershed in modern thought. He could not put the genie back in the bottle; he could not limit the realm of chaos and randomness to science. Darwin gave man a rationale for a world without God, and, at the same time, a rationale for a world devoid of meaning. Modern man is “living down” to Darwin’s theory, explaining all things in terms of randomness and the impossibility of ultimate truth.

As Darwin entrenched naturalism in modern thought, he destroyed it as a source of law. He made nature normative in all its violence and primordial urges. Evolutionary thought justifies every natural act, and considers every act natural. Such was the rationale of Alfred C. Kinsey’s fraudulently derived conclusions in his 1948 and 1953 Male and Female Reports, the Playboy Philosophy, the demand for legalization of prostitution and incest, and the current quest of the homosexual lobby for the redefinition of marriage. It accounts for the freefall of morals and civility since Darwin.

The Warfare
The only answer to Darwin’s natural man is supernatural man, the incarnate Christ and His new humanity reborn into righteousness. The alternative to natural man is the supernatural God.

The homosexual movement is one aspect of natural man’s defiance of God. Homosexuals demand acceptance because they seek a moral justification from society they cannot get from God. The battle is in the judicial and political arenas, but it is a religious warfare. The hostility is not between lifestyles but between faiths. Few care about the lifestyle or personal proclivities of others.

The science of natural man will defend homosexuality. It defends what exists. It is pliable enough to defend every degradation of man, but cannot defend anything supernatural. It is consistent in its moral rebellion and is thus hateful of God and His Word.

The Christian believes man was created in the image of God. Modern man believes he has re-created himself in a new image. The shrill cries of the homosexuals and others are altar calls in our statehouses and courtrooms for society to recognize that image. Because he is self-righteous, the homosexual demands the sanctity of holy matrimony.

Even in his rebellion, however, man is still God’s creature operating in terms of his calling. He still does what God made him to do, only now in a perverse and evil manner. Natural man still seeks dominion, but in terms of Adam’s sin, not God’s law. He tries to exercise dominion as his own god, his own determiner of good and evil (Gen. 3:5). Romans 1 makes clear that the end result of man’s rebellion is a developed, cultivated perversity, and that this culminates in homosexuality. Part of God’s judgment on such men is that he gives them over to their own passions. God said in Proverbs 8:6, “But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death.”

Homosexuality is the lifestyle of the suicidal lovers of death. It is a natural part of, and progression in, man’s sinful nature. There is nothing more natural than sin and its end, death.

God calls us to choose righteousness and life in Him, and to call others to do likewise.