10 None is righteous, no, not one; 11 no one understands; no one seeks for God. 12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.
Ephesians 2:1–3
1 You were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience - 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
What do we mean by the term “total depravity of man?” By total depravity we mean the very nature of man has been so thoroughly affected by original sin that every part of our being is under the control of sin. Evil totally affects, infects, and defects man. The Calvinist view of total depravity understands that sin has profoundly and thoroughly corrupted every aspect of human nature, meaning we are completely unable to come to God without His divine intervention. This doctrine highlights the need for God’s sovereign grace in salvation, underlining our dependence on God’s mercy. It is only when we recognise the extent of human sinfulness that we begin to see the glory of God’s saving work through Jesus Christ.
The point of the doctrine of total depravity is not merely that human beings commit sins, or that because we sin, we are sinners. That’s the easy part to understand. Just watching the news or reading a newspaper confirms these truths.
Total depravity deals with the nature and extent of sin. We are all radically sinful, so much so that we cannot take even the smallest of steps toward God unless He first intervenes.
This is the first of the five points of Calvinism. This doctrine is a profound and humbling aspect of the Calvinist understanding of our faith. It teaches that sin has so affected humanity that we are completely unable to come to God on our own. It’s a topic that challenges our understanding of human nature and of God’s grace.
So we need to begin by defining total depravity, and what it means and what it does not mean. Some commentators say that the term total depravity is a bit misleading, as to most people the word total means utterly or complete. Utter or complete depravity would mean that people are as bad as they can possibly be. That’s not true, of course, because there is no doubt that we could be much worse than we are.
Total depravity teaches that sin has affected the whole person down to the very core or root of our being. This is why some prefer to call it “radical depravity” or “radical corruption” instead.
So it’s important to note that when we speak about total depravity, which teaches that men are dead in sin, this does not mean that all men are equally bad, or that any man is as bad as he could be. What it does mean is that since the fall, man is under the curse of sin, meaning that in our natural state, we are incapable of loving God, and we cannot do anything to achieve our salvation.
Total depravity teaches that every aspect of our being is tainted by sin. Our minds, wills, emotions, and bodies are all affected, leaving us entirely dependent on God’s grace for salvation. Our sinful nature continually leads us away from God.
As with the rest of the 5 points of Calvinism, these doctrines all have their critics, so the best place to start is in Scripture. There are several key passages that illustrate humanity’s fallen state.
Genesis 6:5 says, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” This verse describes the total corruption of humanity before the great flood, teaching that every intention of the human heart was evil, and as we know, sin survived the flood.
Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” What this means is that our hearts are inherently deceitful and corrupted by sin, and incapable of understanding their own condition without divine intervention.
And then we turn to the two passages of Scripture we read earlier. Romans 3:10–12, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” Paul quotes from the Psalms here, teaching that because of the depth of depravity of our hearts, not only are we unable to seek God, but we don’t want to. The logical conclusion is that a person whose heart is only inclined toward evil does not and cannot seek God.
And Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:1–3, “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience - among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” We’ll come back to this text in a moment.
The Bible’s teaching about sin begins with the story of the fall of humanity recorded in Genesis 3. The consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin is described as death. God warned Adam in Genesis 2:16-17, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
God’s warning was not merely about physical death, but spiritual death as because of the sin nature we have all inherited, we are all spiritually dead. This is a concept that most people, including many Christians, cannot accept.
Yes, we’re prepared to admit that we are sinners, but we would like to think that we’re not that bad, and are able to help ourselves, but that is not the Bible’s teaching on sin. The truth is that to be a sinner doesn’t mean that we are just morally imperfect or unable to achieve our full potential without God. Because of sin, human beings are in an utterly ruined state, a state from which we are unable to save ourselves and were it not for God intervening to save us, we would be doomed.
Getting back to Ephesians 2:1-3, here Paul teaches 3 things which describe the true condition of the unsaved.
Firstly, the sinner is dead in trespasses and sins.
This is what we are taught in Genesis 3. Contrary to the popular opinion that the world is getting better, and apart from a few obvious exceptions, there is really not that much wrong with humanity, the Bible teaches that as far as our relationship with God goes, man is dead.
The Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper wrote that prior to regeneration, a sinner “has all the passive properties belonging to a corpse. Therefore every effort to claim for the sinner the minutest co-operation in grace destroys the Gospel, severs the artery of the Christian confession and is anti-scriptural in the highest degree.”
Like a spiritual corpse, the sinner is unable to make a single move toward God, think a right thought about God, or even respond to God, unless God first brings this spiritually dead corpse to life. And this is exactly what God does.
Secondly, Paul writes in verses 2 and 3 that the sinner actively practices evil. He says that we were “following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience - among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind.”
Though the sinner is dead to God, he nevertheless is very much alive to wickedness. Another way to describe our sinful state is to say that we are enslaved to sin, so that without the grace of God, there is no escape from sin. 2 Peter 2:19 says, “They themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved.”
We are enslaved to the world because we follow “the course of this world” as Paul writes in verse 2. Jesus said in John 8:34, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.” And because prior to salvation, we are slaves to sin, we actively practice sin.
And thirdly, Paul says that because we are dead in our sins and we practice sin, we are by nature objects of God’s wrath. Most people don’t take the wrath of God seriously because they don’t take sin seriously. But if sin is as bad as the Bible clearly teaches, then it is only natural that the consequences of sin are the wrath of a holy God.
Paul writes in Romans 1:18, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth,” and in 2:5, “Because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.”
John Calvin and other Reformers built upon these Biblical foundations to develop the doctrine of total depravity. Calvin, in particular, saw human sinfulness as necessitating the sovereign grace of God in salvation. He wrote in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “Since we are all naturally blind, proud, and prone to hypocrisy, God must not only give us grace but give us grace to receive grace.”
And Martin Luther, in his book The Bondage of the Will, wrote that human will is bound by sin and cannot turn to God without divine assistance. Luther’s view, just like Calvin’s was that because our will is enslaved to sin, only God's grace can liberate us.
One of the most challenging aspects of total depravity is how we understand it in the light of what is known as human free will. If we are totally depraved, what does this mean for our ability to choose or reject God?
The Calvinist view is that we do have free will in a limited sense. In other words, we are able to choose our careers, our marriage partners and even the colour socks we want to wear each day, but when it comes to spiritual matters, we have no free will because we are spiritually dead. Our will is so affected by sin that we would never choose God on our own.
This view is taught in the Westminster Confession of Faith. “Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation; so as a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.” (Chapter 9, Section 3).
Also, our will is not free in the sense of being neutral. Rather, it is biased towards sin. This is why Jesus said in John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” The drawing of the Father is necessary because our sinful nature renders us incapable of coming to Christ without divine intervention.
Understanding total depravity has profound implications for evangelism and ministry too. If humans are totally depraved, then our efforts to share the Gospel must rely on the work of the Holy Spirit to be effective. We cannot persuade someone to faith by human means alone. It requires a work of God. He is the one who draws the lost to Himself.
As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 3:6-7, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”
One of the dangers in recognising the reality of our total depravity, is that it can lead us to a point of despair and hopelessness. Instead, it should firstly humble us, but also fill us with gratitude. John Newton put it so well in his most well-known hymn: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.”
Recognising that our salvation is entirely a result of God’s grace and not our merit should lead us to humility, knowing that we are no better than others, and to gratitude, because God has rescued us from our helpless state.
Moving on, we can’t avoid addressing some of the objections to the doctrine of total depravity, for the simple reason that there are many who disagree with not only this doctrine, but all 5 points of Calvinism.
Some object to the doctrine of total depravity, and probably the most common objection is the idea of human goodness. We see people doing good deeds and being kind all the time, which is just as well. A world where there is no kindness would be dreadful.
So the argument goes something like this: People can do good deeds, therefore they cannot be totally depraved. However, in Calvinism there is a distinction between civil righteousness and spiritual righteousness. While people can and do perform good deeds in a societal sense, these deeds do not meet God’s standard of perfect holiness. We might not like the words of Isaiah 64:6, but we can’t avoid or ignore them. “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” The NIV translation calls our righteous acts “filthy rags.”
Isaiah 64:6 in particular, highlights our total depravity and the insufficiency of self-righteousness. The Reformed view is that this verse teaches the depth of sin and the futility of human efforts to achieve righteousness apart from God. It serves as a powerful reminder that salvation and true righteousness come solely through faith in Jesus Christ, whose perfect obedience and atoning sacrifice fulfill the demands of God’s holiness.
So human works, as wonderful and as kind as they may seem to us, remain tainted by sin, so they cannot merit God’s favour. It is only through Christ that we are made truly righteous.
A second common objection to the doctrine of total depravity is that it denies human free will. As mentioned earlier, the Calvinist response is that humans do have free will in a limited sense, but that will is in bondage to sin. Without God's grace, our free will leads us away from God rather than to Him, as Paul explains in Romans 8:7-8. “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”
The third objection to total depravity that we will consider is that some question the justice of God in Him condemning totally depraved individuals. Eternal punishment seems a bit unreasonable and even unfair is the usual argument. This ignores the eternal and infinite holiness of God. God is just in His judgment because our sin violates His nature and His perfect, holy Law. Our sinful nature does not excuse our sin but rather, it compounds our guilt. God’s judgment of depraved sinners is just and righteous, because it is rooted in His holiness and justice. As a result of the Fall, we are inherently sinful, meaning we are incapable of meeting God’s perfect standards as defined in His Law.
God’s judgment of sin is deserved because sin is a direct rebellion against His righteous nature. However, there is good news. God’s justice is tempered with mercy through the atonement of Jesus Christ, who bears the punishment for the elect, which satisfies the divine justice of God, meaning we now receive grace we do not deserve.
This leads us to the necessity of God’s grace toward us. If we are totally depraved, then salvation must be exclusively the work of God. This is where the doctrines of unconditional election and irresistible grace come into play within Calvinism, which we will look at in more detail in the coming weeks, but for now it would be good to be reminded of the wonderful promises we see in Ephesians 1:3-5. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will.”
The doctrine of total depravity reminds us of our great need and the greatness of God’s grace. We are saved not because of anything in us, but only because of His mercy.
Another important point on the doctrine of total depravity that we need to consider is that since the Bible teaches that we are dead in our trespasses and sins, and no-one can come to the Father unless He draws the sinner to Himself, what are we to make of the many invitations the Bible contains, calling for sinners to repent of their sins and to come to Christ?
Just a few examples are Isaiah 55:1, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”
Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:28-29, “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
In the final chapter of the Bible we read, “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.” (Revelation 22:17)
These verses (and there are others) seem to imply that every person has a will, and is able to either choose or reject Jesus Christ whenever the Gospel is presented. So what are we to make of the clear commandment we have in the Bible, that as Christians, we are to proclaim the Gospel to the lost?
How does the doctrine of total depravity fit into the Reformed understanding of evangelism?
These are important questions, because at first glance, there seems to be some conflict here, or confusion at least. The very person who gave us the Great Commission at the end of Matthew’s Gospel also said in John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”
If we believe and teach that men and women cannot choose God, are we not undermining evangelism and the power of the Gospel?
The best way to try and understand this question is that instead of the doctrine of total depravity being a hindrance to evangelism, it is actually the greatest possible motivation for it. If it is true that sinners, left to themselves, will never naturally seek out God, then how are they ever going to find God unless redeemed, born again Christians, sent by God, take the Gospel message to the lost?
Paul explains this in Romans 10:9-15. “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, ‘Everyone who believes in Him will not be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing His riches on all who call on Him. For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!’”
It is by the preaching of the Gospel that God calls people to faith, and those who obey God by taking the Gospel to the lost can know that God will work through their obedience to His Word.
Some might say that surely we shouldn’t tell sinners that they cannot respond unless God first does a work of regeneration in them, because they might throw their hands up in despair and ask what’s the point, but this is exactly what they need to hear.
It is only when sinful human beings understand how desperate their situation is, that they will realise how absolutely essential God’s grace is.
When sinners hold onto some confidence of their own spiritual ability, or the good works they have done, they will never seriously worry about their true spiritual condition outside of Christ.
There is precious little understanding of God’s holiness and His righteous wrath at our sin. Even in some Christian circles God is referred to as the man upstairs or the big guy in the sky. If the church has such a shameful understanding of who God is, how will non-believers ever grasp His true nature and the wrath which awaits all those who don’t turn to Christ?
We see it all the time. There is little or no sense of urgency, because life is long, and there will be plenty time to believe later on. The thief on the cross was saved with virtually his dying breath, so why not do the same?
These are the people who need to hear the truth of their situation and the hope of the grace of God through Jesus Christ, and God has called and commanded us - His church - to share the Gospel.
Some object by saying, “but if God has already chosen His own in eternity past, and He will sovereignly draw the elect to Himself, there is no need to share the Gospel.”
That’s just a cop-out. Firstly, we don’t know who the elect are. We are commanded to share the Gospel with all, and secondly, Jesus’ answer to that objection is His Great Commission to the church. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:18-20)
Finally, how do we, those who have had our eyes opened to our need for grace and have been saved by the amazing grace of God, live our lives in the light of the reality of the doctrine of total depravity?
When we understand and accept this crucial doctrine, it should deeply affect how we live our lives.
The first practical application is that we should live in humility, because we have seen our total dependence on God’s grace. There is no place for spiritual pride or boasting, because our salvation is only through the saving work of Jesus Christ and the grace of God. We are no better than non-Christians.
Secondly, knowing that we have been saved from a state of total depravity should fill us with gratitude. Every day is an opportunity to thank God for His incredible grace and mercy.
Thirdly, the total depravity that God has saved us from teaches us to trust in and depend on God in every aspect of our lives. Paul reminds us in Philippians 2:13, “It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”
And again, we should be earnest in our efforts to share the Gospel, knowing that God uses our witness as a means to draw people to Himself, remembering always that it is God who saves, not us. Pray for those that you witness to.
While the doctrine of total depravity paints a bleak picture of human nature, it also magnifies the glory of God’s grace. We are able to look back and see the depths from which we have been rescued and the greatness of the God who saved us.
So we rejoice in His mercy, live in dependence on His grace, and proclaim His Gospel to a world in need. Far from keeping us away from Christ, the true knowledge of total depravity actually helps us abandon ourselves to His grace.
It is a doctrine that humbles us, highlights the necessity of Christ’s redemptive work, and assures us of God’s sovereign grace in salvation. Embracing this truth with humility, gratitude, and a renewed commitment to live for the glory of God is essential for every Christian.
Homegroup Study Notes
Read Romans 3:10-12 and Ephesians 2:1-3
What do you understand by the term “Total Depravity” of man?
Apart from the two passages you have just read, which other Scriptures can you think of that teach this doctrine?
The Bible makes it clear that sin has completely corrupted the human mind and heart, yet there are many objections to this doctrine.
The most common is that since we see so many kind and good deeds being done in our fallen world, we cannot possibly be totally depraved.
How would you respond to this?
Read Isaiah 55:1, Matthew 11:28-29 and Revelation 22:17
How are we to understand our call to share the Gospel, when the Bible teaches that sinful man cannot and will not turn to God?
How should our understanding of the doctrine of total depravity affect the daily lives of Christians?
Today’s Hymns:
O Worship The King
Search Me, O God
Not I, But Through Christ In Me
The Love Of God Is Greater Far