S. THE ENMITY AGAINST GOD
THE ENMITY AGAINST GOD Dr. W. A. Criswell
10-10-54
Rom 8:5-8 In our preaching through the Book, we are in Rom 8:1-39. Tonight, I hope you brought your Bible. And in Rom 8:1-39, tonight speaking of: The Enmity Against God. That text is in Rom 8:7.
Now, I’m going to read from Rom 3:8, beginning at Rom 3:8 : For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh; That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
Now if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.
Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: But if ye through the flesh do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.
Now, Rom 8:7 -and I’ll read Rom 8:6 with it: “For to be carnally minded is death, because”-my text, Rom 8:7 :
Because the carnal mind is enmity again God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. The Enmity Against God. Where do you suppose you would find it: the enmity against God? Well, in searching for the enmity, we see the violence and the rebellion against God. In searching for the enmity against God, we would find it in the pit of hell. That’s where you’ll find it. If you were looking for the enmity against God, you’d go to the pit of hell and there you’d find it.
Well, that might be right. If you were looking for the seed of the enmity against God, where would you look for it? You would like for it in the counsel of the inferno. That’s where you would find it. Well, that might be right. You’d look for it in the counsels of Hades. The enmity against God, the seed of rebellion and wickedness against God, where would you find it? Well, you would find it in the heart of Satan. That’s where you would find it. The arch-enemy and arch-adversary of all that God stands for. That’s where you would find it: in the heart of Satan. That’s right.
Well, all of those things, I suppose, are correct. If you seek for the enmity against God in the pit of hell, I guess that’s right. The Bible doesn’t say that, but I guess that’s right.
If you find it in the counsels of the damned, in the fallen angels, I guess that’s right. The Bible does not say it. But, I suppose, that’s right.
If you are looking for the enmity against God, you’d find it in the heart of Satan. I guess that’s right. I suppose that’s right.
But, what the Bible says is this: The enmity against God is found in the human heart and in the human soul. And isn’t that a terrible thing to discover? And what a colossal thing to have developed on the scene of human history and in the story of human life: the enmity against God is in the human soul and it’s in the human heart and it’s in the human life. When you think of how God made the first man, perfect in all of his ways-devout and holy and reverent in all of his attitudes, God’s perfect workmanship, and look at this text-he is now the enemy of God.
Oh, the colossal thing that has overwhelmed him and overtaken him. It is the same thing as if an ancient Carthaginian that walked through the streets of his beloved city now made heaps of ruins by the Romans, looking upon the heaps of ruins, burst into tears.
It is the same thing as the Jew who would walk through the street of his beloved Jerusalem today and look upon the Jewish quarter of it, looking at the most endless indescribable debris. One, anything that you could find in Germany-all destroyed. For the beauty of the beloved city, the joy of the world marred-same thing.
Some years ago, a star appeared in the sky above the brilliance of any other star that had ever been seen. It has been confirmed since then that star was a world burning up. It was a world on fire.
That’s what happened to us. Our world was destroyed, our house burned down. Our humanity was wrecked. The enmity against God is in us. It is in the human heart. Do you know that this is a noun here? It is not an adjective-the carnal mind, the mind of the natural man. Is that enmity against God? No, sir. The Bible says the carnal mind is enmity itself against God-the carnal mind. The mind of the natural man is not black. It is darkness itself. It is not rebellious. It is rebellion itself. It is not wicked. It is wickedness itself. It is not envious. It is envy itself. The essence of sin, what sin is, is found in the human heart. The human heart is enmity against God. The whole spectrum of the man God made has fallen. He has fallen in his mind. His mind is wrath. He is fallen in his soul. His soul is destroyed. He has fallen in his life. He life it filled with transgression.
He has fallen in his desire. The man that God made has fallen. And the sentence upon that man is the sentence of death. “For to be carnally minded is death,” Rom 8:6. Turn over one page back: “For the wages of sin is death.”
Turn the pages backward, and in the book of Ezekiel, the prophet said: “The soul that sins shall die.” And turn the page back to the beginning: “In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” The carnal mind is enmity, enmity itself-It is enmity itself. It is blackness itself. It is wickedness itself. The natural man is the enemy of God. And the sentence of God upon that enmity is death: universal, everlasting, eternal death. That is the fate of the natural, unregenerate man.
Well, knowing a theology like that is ever presented and people not think about it and talk about it and look askance upon it and sometimes seek to repute it? They certainly do. If you’ll sit down in any theological library and turn to those books, you’ll find all kinds of things said about the Pauline Anthropology, the Pauline presentation of the natural man. For one thing-for one thing-now you look, for one thing, there are wonderful theologians and there are great preachers and there are mighty philosophers who are gifted in the language of the books and who know the Christian faith. There are men of great homiletical erudition or men of great learning and power. There are men who said that this presentation of the natural man-of humanity by the Apostle Paul is not right. It is not correct. It is not so. For say they-now, listen to what they say-for say they, a man is born good. The soul is born pure. The life is conceived wholly. And a man is a sinner only because he imitates a sinner. A child will be good if you will teach that child goodness. He learns to be a sinner by being taught to be sinful. But, by nature, we are pure and holy and uncorrupt. And we only become sinners by imitation, by being taught and trained.
Now, the Pauline Theology says that we are born fallen and corrupt and in sin, that the carnal mind-that is, the natural mind, the mind that we are brought into this world with, that is the enemy of God. And there are those two things. And they’re opposite.
Now, to look at that for a moment with you: Paul says, into this world we come with a disposition, with a soul, with a mind, with a body that is already corrupt, already undone, already sinful.
They tell me-I’m not an expert on crocodiles, but they tell me that, when a crocodile is broken out of its shell, that the minute the little crocodile breaks out of its shell, that it takes the posture of attack and opens its mouth as though it was taught and trained. It is born that way-a crocodile: to attack and to bite.
I see in the paper, often, pictures of little kittens, pretty little kittens. They are tiger kittens. And while they’re little bitty tiger kittens, I’ll see in the paper, somebody played with those little kittens. And they are so fluffy and they are so soft and they are so nice and they are so amusing.
But, on the inside of that little kitty, kitty, kitty, there’s a tiger heart. And the day will come when there’s nobody in anybody’s house that would want to play with the pretty little kitty, born that way, with a tiger in its breast. A wolf may be asleep, but it is still a wolf. A serpent may slumber among the pretty flowers, but it is still a serpent. And Paul says: “However in a man’s mind and in a man’s noble life he may rebuff and become a poet or a philosopher-he become a scientist, he become a scholar-however a man’s mind may reach up and out, grasp the part of the sky, take into and encompass the infinitude and the magnitude of God and of space,” Paul would say, “However a man may learn and however he may give himself to the great evolution of God’s universe,” Paul says that “he is still depraved and lost and undone.” The stars are not heaven and the sea was not God. Nor does a man achieve his regeneration through solid erudition and philosophical learning. They are lost. They are undone. Could I see that in our present moment in which we live? You tell me of whom are you the most afraid? Are you the most afraid of one of those typical criminals? Could I describe him? He has a low brow. And his eyes are vicious. And he has a frame like an ape. He has heavy arms and hands. And in one pocket he has blackjack and in the other pocket has a ferret. And on one such leg, he has strapped a pistol. And there, on the nother, he has a blueprint of the robbing of the bank, with the overwhelming of an innocent somebody. Do you ever tremble before people like that? I never give them a thought. It never enters my mind, the typical criminal.
But, there’s not a single soul in the civilized world today that doesn’t tremble for himself and his city and his country and his nation and his world. There is not a single one of us today that doesn’t tremble before that awful and terrible scientist who has discovered the secret of God’s universe.
You can check it out with his credit wide open. He can say to the uranium atom, and use it to bombard the hydrogen atom, and can use it to explode God’s world. And you tremble in your soul, because he’s smart, because he’s learned, because he is a scientist, because he knows.
But, the man who is a scholar is as depraved and wanton as there is-as it is in the brow and the thick skull of a man, heavy-handed with a club or a black jack or a pistol in his hand. That is the Pauline theology. We are lost, lost-depraved.
“The carnal mind is enmity against God.” That’s the mind of the scholar. It is the mind of the philosopher. It is the mind of the businessman. It is the mind of every man. Whether degenerate natural-“the carnal mind is enmity against God.” That is the Pauline theology.
Now, I want to take one other. We could take dozens here tonight. These things are things of the world and of God and they are mighty things.
What about that Pauline Anthropology, his doctrine of the carnality of the human mind? You: unregenerate man. He is a fallen man-a fallen man.
All right. Here’s what some of our greatest theologians and scholars and philosophers and teachers say about the Pauline Anthropology.
All right. A second thing they say-they say that unregenerate and ordinary man, the carnal man, the human race or the human family-they say that those things that happen to us now are-and I’m thinking of one tremendous philosopher now, as he describes it. He says these things that are happening to us now are caused in a great tide, and he says we go down, maybe in the World War I, and he says, then, we come up higher. And then he says, we had another fall in the World War II, and then, we come up higher. And he says to all of the generations and through all of time and through the passing of the centuries, mankind is going up and will fall like the wave of the tide. It will be down, but it comes up. And it never goes down as low as it was. It goes up and up and up and up and up. And of course, the consummation is that, some of these days, mankind, in its evolution, will come up and up and up and up until, finally, we’ll not only become angels-as one of the men I read said: “We shall become archangels in the presence of God and we shall do it through the processes of evolving.” We are going up and up and up. And these things that we fall into now are mistakes. They are stumbling. But, they are stumbling-the humanity that is groping and seeking and, as a corollary, we are finding and achieving. And some of these days, we shall achieve final and infinite success.
Now, that’s what the philosopher says. The Pauline theology says that, however a man may go and whichever way he may turn-that he produces, he reproduces, himself. And that himself is carnality; that himself is wickedness; that himself is enmity; that, left to himself, man is a fallen creature and reproduces his kind; that the sin in our day and generation shall also be the sin of our children and of generations. And it echoes from soul to soul, and generation to generation, all through the centuries. To be carnal-minded is death. “The carnal mind is enmity against God.” “It is not subject to the law of God neither can be.” Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life everlasting. The carnal mind is full of corruption. The carnal mind reproduces itself. The carnal mind condones carnality. And the carnal mind reaps carnality. The natural man sows the natural man. And the natural man reaps the natural man.
There is no such thing, Paul would say, as a carnal man sowing and reaping a spiritual man. There is no such thing as a sinful generation sowing and giving birth or reaping fruit in a holy generation.
That’s the echo and the repercussion of the transgression and wickedness and sin as in our day. It was in our father’s day. It will be in our children’s day. And there is no breaking of that vicious circle according to the law of God. Kind reproduces kind and carnality is sown. The human mind, the human life, the human flesh-carnality, counsel-the unregenerate man reaps its kind, its like, reaps carnality, reaps unregeneration, reaps wickedness, reaps enmity against God.
Now, I say that is a law of God in every realm of God’s created universe. It is a law of God in the realm of the vegetable world. If a man were to come to me and say, “Preacher, guess what? I sowed ten acres of wheat and one of them came up.” And another man would have come to me and said, “Preacher, guess what? I planted-I planted onions and I reaped turnips.”
I’d say that you are slap, dab crazy. That’s what I’d tell him. And I’d be right. It would be a lunatic that would say a thing like that. That’s the according to the law of God in the vegetable world: kind reproduces kind. The same thing in the animal world-that’s the law of God. Dogs don’t have cats. And cows don’t have horses.
According to the fixed law of God, cats have cats. And dogs have puppies. And cows have calves. And horses have colts. And that’s the law of God. That’s the law of God. God made it that way.
Now, that law is the same law in the realm and in world of our manual skills. If a man has been taught la-like you, if a man has been taught law, like you, I would not call you if I had to have my innards taken out. I would not call you. No, sir. No, sir.
I’d call-I’d call for a doctor, wouldn’t I, Dr. Bagwell? That’s right.
That’s according to the law of God. The man in his labor, the man in his work, he does according to his kind. His hands are taught how to carpenter-or a man to be a watchmaker. If he’s taught law, we don’t look to him to practice medicine. He’s taught and trained in these things, and that’s his kind.
That’s the truth of God in the spiritual world. And that is a terrible and an awful law. It is true in the spiritual world: what we are, we reap; what we sow is our fruits; carnality breeds carnality-enmity, enmity; transgression, transgression.
There is no breaking of that terrible law. Jacob deceived his father. He took the coat of a kid-took the skin of a kid, and put it on himself. And when his blind father, Isaac, felt of him, he was hairy like Esau-weathery, outdoor Esau. He was a hairy man like Esau.
So, when the blind father felt of Jacob, he was hairy like Esau. And he said he was Esau. And he stole his brother’s blessing. The years passed, and upon a day, the sons of Jacob came to their father and they did what? We found this coat and held it up before Jacob their father.
It was Joseph’s coat of many colors. And this-what? Blood dyed it red. It was the blood of a kid. And when Jacob saw it, he said: “A wild beast has slain my son, Joseph.” That’s a terrible law.
David slew a man to hide his transgression. And the prophet said: “And the sword shall never leave thy house.”
Maximus, built a bridge, a thick one, to drown Constantine. And he drowned himself crossing his group.
Haman built a gallows for Mordechiah. The hangman was hanged on Mordechiah’s gallows. The emperor Stalin took a band of devout Christian people, put them in a ship, sent them off to sea and burned the ship up. Upon a day, the Galls invaded his kingdom, he fled to a cottage, and they burned the cottage down.
Henry III was stabbed to death in the very same room where he plotted the infamous massacre of the first Protestants.
Alexander VI was poisoned by a wine he made for another.
Marie Antoinette, on that gorgeous bridal procession through the streets of Paris to Notre Dame, when she was married to the Dauphine, later Louis XVI of France-she gave orders to her soldiers to go up and down the procession and go outside and send away all of the ragged and the poor and the crippled. “I can’t bear them in my sight.” And a few years later, down those same streets was she carried, bound, to an executioner court, as she walked between lines of granite and stony hearts.
I remember Herman Goering saying-as they bombed the British and destroyed Coventry and ruined London, I remember Herman Goering saying: “I assure my German people no bomb shall ever fall over the Rhine.
I don’t know why but God wills that chain together. Like produces like. The carnal mind reaps carnality. What you sow, you reap.
Let’s be a little different for the moment. A farmer wrote a letter to a newspaper. And he said: I dare you to print this letter. This was the letter that he wrote:
“Dear Editor:
I plowed my field on Sunday. I planted my crop on Sunday. I cultivated my crop on Sunday. I harvested my crop on Sunday. I sold my crop on Sunday. And the harvest that I reaped and the yield I received and the price that I got was better than anybody else’s, and I did it all on Sunday. I dare you to print this letter.” The next issue of the newspaper came out and his letter was printed, just like he had written it. And underneath, edited, post-scripted: “God does not always collect his debts the first week in October.”
It is an inviolable link-it is a chain, this thing of Almighty God. Who breaks it? Who breaks it? “I’ll study and I’ll break that chain.” You’ll study and study and study, but it’s still there, molded, hard and unbroken.
“But, I’ll be good. I’ll be good. I’ll break that chain. I’ll reform and do better. I’ll quit that and I’ll break that chain.”
No, you won’t. It’s put together by Almighty God and it is still there. It is still there.
“Oh, I know what I’ll do. I’ll join the church. I’ll go out here and I’ll sit at such and such, you put my name on the roll. I want to join the church and I’ll be a member of the church.”
But, that awful thing is still there, willed by Almighty God. What breaks it? What breaks it: that terrible and awful thing, sin and death-sin and death?
“To be carnal minded is death.” “If you live after the flesh, ye shall die.” The unregenerate man is doomed.
What will I do? And where shall I turn? Who breaks that awful chain? Who? That is Rom 8:1-39 :
There is no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus… For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free-has broken the chain of-the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh… condemned sin in the flesh-broke that terrible chain; That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us… For they that after the flesh mind the things of the flesh; they that are after the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.
If you be in Christ, you’re dead to sin, for the Spirit of life is the Spirit of righteousness. And the spirit of life in a man forever breaks that awful and terrible and welded chain, for the law of the spirit of life has made me free from the law of sin and death.
If I’m going to live-if I’m going to be saved, I can’t do it myself. I cannot. I can never study enough to learn how. And I can never be smart enough to achieve. I can never run fast enough to overtake it. I can never be good enough to possess it. The holiest of men are the first to admit they are derelicts. The man with the finest garments is always the first to see the spot on his robe. The man who has the greatest diadem is the first to notice the jewels that are lost from his crown.
We can’t do it. It comes as a gift of God. It comes from the gracious hand of Jesus. In my hands No price I bring, Simply to thy cross
I cling.
I can’t save myself, can’t redeem myself, can’t be good enough to climb those rungs of the ladder that reaches to God in heaven. I can’t, Lord. I can’t. In my weakness, in my carnality, in my flesh, in my soul-lost and fallen, Lord, I come to Thee. Master, in my hands place the gift otherwise we will never win. Lord, give me Thy Spirit, Thy grace, Thy abundant salvation. Do it, Lord, do it. And that’s all that it takes. But, it takes that. I don’t try, Lord. I turn it over to you, God. You save and you keep. My hand is open. Place in it the gift. My heart, Lord, is wide open. Come in, Holy Spirit of Jesus. And that’s it. That’s it. That’s liberty. That’s freedom. That’s triumph. That’s the salvation. That’s the gospel. And that’s what we offer in the name of God and the Lord Jesus tonight. Will you take it? Would you?
“I can’t do it myself. But, I’ll let Jesus do it for me. And I’ll hide my soul in him. And here I am, and here I come.”
Somebody, to put his life in the church, however God shall say the word and open the door. While we make appeal, would you come? Would you make it now? Would you? On the first note of the first stanza, step into the aisle and down here by my side: “Here I am, Pastor, and here I come.” Would you do it now? Make it now, while we stand and while we sing