2:170, #474: Altogether Evil

This is what Gandalf calls the Ring of Power when he's in the group session at Rivendell trying to decide just what's to be done with the ring. Well, being the good Calvinist I am, I'm ready to look into Leaf #1 of the old T.U.L.I.P. this morning...Total Depravity.

The bottom line is that WE are ALTOGETHER EVIL from birth according to Ephesians 2:1. In fact, being "dead in your trespasses and sins" might explain the need for deodorants, given that after three days we'd start decomposing and, as Loudon Wainwright's song, "Dead Skunk In the Middle of the Road" suggests, we'd be "stinkin' to high, high heaven." What I can't figure out is why anyone would operate from the position that people are basically good.

Think about a crying baby...its first cry is from some complete stranger slapping it after it's been forcibly ejected from the almost perfect environment. The second is either to manipulate Mom to host out the old feeding device OR to clean up the mess at the other end from having supped to the full earlier on.

THEN there's the Terrible Twos!! Just which person has had to sit their toddler down and actually teach him/her to be bad?!! NADA UNO, I'd say.

And for those of you who "train up a child in the way he should go so that in his old age he does not depart from it," do you notice how the teenage years are not necessarily covered in that promise? One Christian comedian says teens are God's way of letting parents understand creating someone in their image who then completely denies their existence. I think he might have a point.

And it just happens that "evil" in English is "live" spelled backwards, so "live evil" is the basic description of what we do as natural men and women. It's a good thing God decided to elect some of us and put His Spirit within us or we'd be entirely hopeless. Oh, and speaking of that, I've a theory that God saves a lot of covenant kids early on specifically because He knows how bad they'd be if He didn't!!

Well, odds and ends call...the good news in Christ is that we are a NEW creation...
Got ALTOGETHER HOLY??!!