Taking the teaching of Jesus and John the Baptist at face value will appear facile to many who believe the Saviour’s teaching was primarily to show His listeners the impossibility of meeting God’s requirements for righteousness. In the Reformers’ case it resulted from a misunderstanding of Pauline polemics to be outlined shortly. The ingenuity of such heresy and the reason it has so long persisted is that any attempt to challenge it appears to be an act of human pride: the elevation of man and the diminishment of God’s grace. But that is a misconception, for anything that is good about man is thanks to His Creator’s benevolence, whether it be through a response to the Gospel or via natural precepts and the fact that man’s spirit is created in God’s image before being planted into a morally disordered procreated intellectual vessel at the commencement of life. Whilst that earthen vessel’s control centre or brain is procreated, the faculties pertaining to man’s spiritual component being the part of us that survives physical death are from God, resulting in opposing laws governing flesh and spirit within the human psyche (cf. Rom7:23; Eccles12:7).
Rejecting such a hypothesis implies either that the human testicles/ovaries are capable of producing what is spiritual and eternal or that God through Christ directly creates and plants within man a spiritual entity polluted by sin, hateful towards its Creator and deserving of eternal torment from its conception. Paul’s “body of this death” resolves the matter, indicating man’s moral and spiritual predicament to be temporal147, as more explicitly does Peter148. A sinful nature cannot and does not derive from what God has directly provided to man but from the intellectual vessel procreated from our first parents that the God-given soul/spirit currently inhabits. As for natural law, whilst the devil’s desire is to darken man’s mind, the Creator’s wish has always been to enlighten man - for the benefit of human society, the creative order set under man and the wellbeing of his own soul, and such He does through the Christ-enlightened human spirit that is referenced by the conscience149.
Building on the theological distinctives of Augustine, the Reformers believed that Adam’s disobedience resulted in such a triumph for Satan at Eden that what was intended to be the pinnacle of God’s creation instantly mutated to the point of becoming innately incapable of escaping eternal punishment at its Creator’s hands. On the contrary, the Godhead shall ultimately be worshipped and adored even by the vast majority who are not 144 Lk3:10-14
145 Mt11:11
146 Lk19:8-10
147 I.e. “the body of this death” unlike the soul pertains to a temporary feature of a person’s journey through eternity although its corrosive impact upon the soul can have more enduring consequences (chapter 3)
148 1Pet4:6
149 Jn1:9 (King James Version)
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the saints of God when the One who obtained their pardon comes to be glorified in those who are150. That will demonstrate the multifarious yet equitable way the God of grace exercises His favour and shows kindness to all who are willing to receive it.