There is no power within him by which he can change the essential character and determined trend of his life. Men do not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles. All the effort that the most devoted and laborious of men might give to the culture of a hedgerow of thorns would not succeed in producing one grape. Though men spent life and fortune in cultivating a field of thistles, they would not gather a single fig. No sooner (says the Bible) can the natural man bring forth the fruit of righteousness unto God. The Ethiopian may change his skin, the leopard his spots, before a natural man can change himself into a spiritual man. “The carnal mind is enmity with God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” “The natural man (the word ‘natural’ is ψυχικὸς, soulical) receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually (πνευμτικῶς, pneumatically) discerned.” “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” meaning thereby that God alone can sound the depths of its measureless capacity for sin and iniquity; therefore, he says: “I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins.”
The end of man is to die.
Such an end is not natural.
It is unnatural.
It is violent.
It is penal.
It is an appointed punishment: as it is written: “It is appointed unto men once to die.” “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed (literally, passed through, pierced man;” the seeds of death entered him for himself and all his posterity). When he dies, therefore, be he never so moral and upright, his death is judicial, his taking off is the execution of a criminal.
He is to be raised from the dead as to his body (in the meantime, his soul is “dragged” downward to the prison of the underworld, where in conscious suffering he awaits the second resurrection and the judgment hour), he will be raised, judged, found guilty and cast forth into the lake of fire (which is the second death), from whence there will be no resurrection of the body (the body will perish in the fire—for an immortal body belongs only to the sons of God—the participants in the First Resurrection); then, as a disembodied spirit—a ghost—he will go forth with an inward, deathless worm, and an inward, quenchless fire, to be like “a wandering star unto whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever,” an exile from God, outside the orbit of divine grace, love and life—a hopeless, an eternally hopeless—human derelict, upon the measureless sea of night and space.
That is the Bible picture of the natural man.
Is that the picture the natural man paints of himself?