What Does Your Proof Text Prove? (35)

I was reading a Puritan Board discussion the other day about the morality of human desire that got me thinking.

Believers on both sides of the ongoing divine determinism argument can probably agree scripture teaches that neither Christians nor unbelievers are able to perform any eternally valuable works without the help of God in some sense. Commenters cite a long list of verses including John 15:5 and Psalm 127:1 to make the case.

Fair enough, I can buy that.

Apart from Me

I do think, though, that when Jesus said to his disciples, “Apart from me you can do nothing”, he was talking in the context of a deeply intimate and personal relationship of master and servant, vine and branches. He was not simply acknowledging that in God we “live and move and have our being”.

Indeed, if what we mean by “the help of God” is nothing more than that he keeps us breathing, we are not saying much at all, let alone addressing the question of where good works originate. That sort of remote, undergirding, providential “help” is equally effective in accomplishing evil as accomplishing good. When we say God “helps” in only that sense, we are conveying true information, but it’s not particularly useful in discussions about whether an unbeliever can in any sense independently desire salvation, which is always where the question ends up in these online discussions.

That’s the more divisive point: at the level of desire. Some argue even the desire to do good comes from God and cannot ever exist without God.

Dead Means Dead

They make their point in various ways, the most common being the “dead means dead” argument. The unsaved, they say, cannot desire anything good because prior to regeneration they are incapable of even aspiring to anything better. They are in effect spiritual zombies.

That’s a difficult argument to sustain practically when unbelievers do kind things for us, and it requires us to impute less than stellar motives to them. Sometimes that may indeed be the case. Guilt, attention seeking, pride and other questionable motives can creep in. In many situations, however, I have had unbelievers treat me with such overwhelming generosity and decency that it made it difficult to view their desire to do good as merely self-serving.

Of course, that’s an anecdotal argument, but it’s also true that in scripture the word “dead” is used as a metaphor for all kinds of conditions, as described here, both good and bad. “Dead while she lives” is a very bad thing. “Dead to sin” is wonderful. An honest exploration of what the Bible says about non-literal death does not support the “dead means dead” argument. It does not settle the case for divine determinism in human desire.

To Will and to Work

Another verse I’ve seen cited in the context of this argument is Philippians 2:13, “It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” That implies that in at least some cases, not just deeds but desires originate in God. That’s how some advocates of divine determinism use it.

That case fails the moment we look at context. Paul is demonstrably writing to believers. He calls them “beloved” and refers to their “salvation”. In the first few verses of his letter, he addresses them as “saints”. That makes applying the phrase “to will and to work” to the desires of non-Christians highly questionable, including the desire to be saved in the first place. That is simply not Paul’s subject. He is talking about a post-salvation experience in which the indwelling Holy Spirit is working away to accomplish the goal of Christ-likeness. No doubt unbelievers have to deal with the work of the Holy Spirit too, but convicting men of sin, righteousness and judgment may or may not lead them to conclusions they will eventually embrace. However important that is, it is distinct in scripture from the ongoing work of indwelling and conforming in those who belong to Christ for eternity. King Saul had dealings with the Spirit too. Mostly, they were embarrassing. They certainly didn’t save his soul.

Moreover, Paul is not talking about desire but about will. They are not the same thing, though the same Greek word may indicate either.

Desire and Will

The Greek word thelō may indeed mean “desire”. One familiar example: “Whatever you wish [thelō] that others would do to you, do also to them.” Such desire need not be a mere whim, but it may be for some. In other instances, thelō refers to a fixed and unchanging purpose, something we use the word “will” to describe. In 1 Corinthians, Paul speaks of God determining and acting: “But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.” That’s a desire both felt and acted upon with finality, a fixed creative purpose.

So then, even if we could apply Philippians 2:13 to the case of salvation, Paul’s use of the word thelō tells us nothing determinative about the quality of that desire, whether it be mere passing whim or determined course of action. I suspect the Lord is speaking of the latter.

Romans 7 Weighs In

The reason is Romans 7, another passage hotly debated. I cannot see how the person whose spiritual struggle Paul describes there can be anything but a believer. This is a person who wants to do good (v15), who hates when he does not do good (v15), who agrees that the law is both good (v16) and spiritual (v14), who acknowledges that nothing good dwells in him (v18), who has the desire to do what is right (v18), who delights in the law of God (v22), whose inability to consistently please God makes him miserable (v24), who serves the law of God with his mind (v25) and who calls Jesus Christ his Lord (v25). This sounds like a man with two conflicting natures, not one. He’s got a new nature that is at war with his old nature. He has the desire to do good but not the will. He cannot translate a wish into an action consistently. It is only through Christ that he can conquer the flesh and do anything pleasing to God.

This seems a very similar condition to the one described in Philippians, in which God provides through his Holy Spirit the strength of character to complete the actions one desires and to avoid the errors one wishes to avoid. The indwelling Spirit of God makes all the difference once we are aware of his presence in us. It’s not that we cannot sin now if we insist on it, but that we are never obligated to.

In any case, the passage makes the distinction for us between mere desire and will, I believe. The Spirit of God can turn the former to the latter.

Publicans and Sinners

But of course that does not help us in asking if unbelievers can ever desire salvation apart from first being regenerated. Remember, what we’re after here is not evidence that the average sinner has worse motives than the average believer, or that he has less power to act on “good” desires than a Christian. That’s the case, certainly. Both scripture and observation confirm it.

No, what we’re after is solid biblical evidence that no unbeliever ever aspires to anything better, whether or not he is able to accomplish it. If we are going to be fair-minded about it, the evidence for that simply isn’t in these two passages commonly cited as evidence of “total depravity” in the sense the determinists define that term. I’m reminded of the publicans and sinners with whom the Lord was so often accused of fraternizing. What drew these to Jesus if not the desire for a cure to their spiritual ills?

We can theorize about it, but I don’t believe either the “dead” argument from Ephesians and Colossians or the “will and to work” argument from Philippians 2:13 unequivocally demonstrates that all unbelievers are utterly unable to despise their fallen spiritual situation and desire to change it.