Straying Sheep Saved

Isaiah 53:6

Here are three gospel truths experienced, believed and confessed by all who are born again by God's almighty grace. Regarding these three points of doctrine all true believers are agreed.

ORIGINAL SIN - "All we like sheep have gone astray." We all went astray from God in the sin and fall of our father Adam (Psa. 14:3; Rom. 5:12). We call this the doctrine of "Original Sin," because it was the first sin of our race and the source and cause of all other sin. By God's appointment and decree, Adam was the federal head and representative of all men. His sin was imputed to all men, so that all men became sinners by his disobedience (Rom. 5:18-19). And Adam's fallen, depraved nature is imparted to all men by natural generation (Psa. 51:5; Matt. 15:19).

PERSONAL DEPRAVITY - We are all sinners by imputation, birth and nature. But we are all sinners by personal choice too. "We have turned everyone to his own way" (Psa. 58:3; Jer. 17:9; Gen. 6:5). God's elect are like all other men by nature, ever going astray from God. Each one turns to "his own way" but never to Christ "the Way", until he is turned by almighty grace. Some turn to the way of profligacy, some to the way of morality, and some to the way of religion. It is always "a way that seemeth right unto man, but the end thereof are the ways of death." Man by nature is so thoroughly depraved that he has neither the will nor the ability to do anything but go astray from God. Yet, there is hope.

The text also proclaims SUBSTITUTIONARY REDEMPTION. "And the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." God the Father against whom we have sinned, from whom we have strayed, whose law we have broken, whose justice must be satisfied, has laid upon Christ, his dear Son, all the sins of all his elect. The Son of God was made to be sin for us, so that he might be justly punished for sin in our stead, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (II Cor. 5:21). Our sins were laid upon Christ, by whose death justice is satisfied and our sins completely put away.

Don Fortner