Sunday, September 15, 2013

To the Antilapsarian: those who Deny the Fall of Mankind



G. K. Chesterton, in his book Orthodoxy, said that some people he knew had a “too fastidious spirituality,” believing in “divine sinlessness,” something he claims they could not see even in their dreams.  He further elaborated that “they essentially [denied] human sin, which they [saw] in the street.”  The antilapsarian doctrine is especially pervasive today.  Perhaps all the self-esteem indoctrination we have experienced since the 70s has warped us.  It is of no small matter that the essence of the antichrist is about the evolved self without Christ.  In other words, someone completely steeped in self-esteem without Christ.  It is Adam fully flourished.

The second Adam, Jesus Christ, and the born-again experience born out of this fact, is the only premise from which man can lawfully express himself.  Whenever man develops and expresses his person without the requisite foundation, he is a monster, a monstrosity.  He is an animated dead flesh expression; he is the Frankenstein monster; he is an antichrist.  When God sent the angel to guard the way to the tree of life, after Adam and Eve had fallen, He did so to preserve them and all of humankind.  Whether or not it was a literal tree or not I will not debate here; suffice it is for this line of reasoning to say that it represented the idea that God did not want them to eat from the tree of life while yet in their fallen state of being. 
 
To eat from the tree of life without first being corrected or fixed is to nourish a perverted form.  The fall of mankind was an implosion of being activated by God’s response to Adam’s sin.  God disconnected from humankind, and humankind fell down in a hierarchal sequence from top to bottom down into their base, or flesh.  The spirit on top of their soul on top of their flesh was now laid at their feet (metaphysically speaking).  God begins to call humankind “flesh,” because that was now their dominating aspect.  God said they would die if they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; they did, immediately, and throughout their now abbreviated lives.

This insidious doctrine of antilapsarianism undermines any hope of believing in God’s only solution to the biggest problem of their lives: the fact that they are dead and dying and have no hope for the future.  By denying they need help they remove the ground upon which redemption is built.  With God nothing is impossible, sure, but someone in this state is irrepressibly stubborn and practically apostate.  Their conscience must be completely seared because they deny all conviction based on the inner voice of God inside them, which is inherently what conscience is.

What is especially troubling is the fact that they have eliminated all grounds for argument based on the reasoning component of those things God might say to them concerning redemption.  It is utterly reasonable to believe in God and His redemption plan, but they are stubborn without reasonable justification.  In conclusion, I again quote Chesterton who said:

In this remarkable situation it is plainly not now possible (with any hope of universal appeal) to start, as our fathers did, with the fact of sin.  This very fact which was to them (and is to me) as plain as a pikestaff, is the very fact that has been specially diluted or denied.

When someone denies the obvious and fundamental things of life they are beyond the reach of human hands; as we know, only God can save people (but not through our direct influence in this case).  Indeed, “the night cometh, when no man can work”; I would suggest, that that night has come (John 9: 4, KJV).  God help us all!                    

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