I would offer three answers to this important question. For the doctrine of total depravity is not just something we learn so as to score high marks on some theology exam. Instead, total depravity is a doctrine to live by.

“I’m not totally depraved, am I?”

The answer from the Bible, and the testimony of universal human experience, is, “Yes, you really are.” But even if we have to accept that this is, in fact, the Bible’s teaching, it’s not obvious why we should like it. This is why some find it odd that Calvinists seem to love total depravity (the doctrine, not the condition) so much. Their question is, “What’s so great about the doctrine of total depravity?

I would offer three answers to this important question. For the doctrine of total depravity is not just something we learn so as to score high marks on some theology exam. Instead, total depravity is a doctrine to live by.

The first answer is that through the lens of a biblical understanding of ourselves, we come to appreciate the gospel truly. The only way to see the greatness of the gospel is to see how bad is our plight. Or to put it differently, unless we know what we are being saved from, we really don’t grasp the glory of our salvation.

People say the doctrines of grace are boring and irrelevant, and that we need to preach something else to keep their attention in church. But this could be said only by someone who does not sense the depth of his problem before God. Indeed, it is when we best see our lost condition that we most treasure the gospel. This is what the doctrine of total depravity tells us–that the only way someone like this, someone like you and me, is going to be made right with God is by radical grace. And when we combine an accurate appraisal of man’s total depravity with a biblical vision of the absolute holiness of God, we see the gospel in all its glory.

It is when we set God’s high and right demands next to our low and base performance, and when we compare His glorious being with our utter corruption, that we see the true problem of life. This is the great gulf between us and God, indeed an infinite one, as high as the heavens are above the earth. It is a problem that could be solved, a chasm that could be spanned, only on a hill far away, on an old rugged cross, “where the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain.

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