One consequence of the Fall is that people do things when nobody is looking that display a profound degree of lawlessness. We’ve seen a number of random killings in schools recently (girls are still dying in the recent Amish shooting). Of course, this is a picture of human depravity. It seems molestation was an aim.
But I was struck by a perhaps more graphic manifestation of man’s depravity in watching a portion of 60 Minutes this past Sunday. There is supposedly a national trend of high school boys going out and violently beating homeless men. One gentleman in the story makes the observation that one possible motive is that these high school boys are less powerful than almost everyone else in the culture, yet they are more powerful than homeless men. So they exert that power in a most horrific fashion. Disgustingly, these beatings seem inspired by a commercially available DVD called “BumFights” (which has sold over 300,000 copies) in which a rookie producer induced homeless men to do dangerous and foolish things in exchange for money and alcohol. The producer is now being sued.
Sin is deceptive and irrational, and sin begets increasingly severe sins. Thank God for saving grace that gave us a new heart and caused us to fly to Christ for salvation, having realized that all our wicked thoughts and deeds are laid bare before Him to whom we must give account.
“That phrase [total depravity] is a bit misleading, because it suggests that everybody is as bad as he could be. That’s not true. As we have seen, some sins are worse than others, and not everybody chooses the worst sins. God keeps people from doing that. But it is important to recognize that depravity, sinfulness, extends to all areas of our lives. It includes our best deeds, even those that seem to conform to the law. It extends to our thinking, our understanding, so that we don’t even understand the things of God correctly.” – John Frame on total depravity in Salvation Belongs to the Lord: An Introduction to Systematic Theology