Ruined by the Fall

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. ROMANS 3:23

Moody’s preaching is often summed up in three phrases that his friends and followers used as a kind of motto: ruined by the fall, redeemed by the blood, regenerated by the Spirit. The next three chapters take them in turn. The first is the one nobody likes to hear, and Moody did not enjoy saying it. But he was sure that no one would value the remedy until he had understood the disease.

Two kinds of enquirers

In The Way to God Moody divides all the people he met in the enquiry room into two classes. They had either the spirit of the Pharisee or the spirit of the publican. The publican already knew he was a sinner; he needed to be pointed straight to Christ. The Pharisee did not, and until he did, no amount of talk about the love of God would reach him.

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. LUKE 18:10

For the Pharisee, Moody had one passage he used more than any other: the third chapter of Romans, where Paul gathers the Old Testament’s verdict on the human race.

As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. ROMANS 3:10–11

He tells of a man in a New England city, brought night after night to the meetings by a praying wife, who was so wrapped in his own righteousness that, Moody said, you could not get the point of a needle into him anywhere. Near the end of the campaign the man came to him trembling and asked him to step into a side room. He said he was the worst man in the state. Moody, alarmed, asked whether some particular crime was troubling him. No, said the man; his whole life had been a sin, because he had been a self-righteous Pharisee. Moody’s comment is the heart of this chapter: no man could have produced that conviction. The Spirit had.

Not a matter of degree

Moody’s point about the fall is not that everyone is as wicked as possible. He knew perfectly well that some people are kinder, more honest and more useful than others. His point is that all have fallen short of the same standard, and that the difference between the respectable and the disreputable is a difference of degree, not of kind.

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 1 JOHN 1:8

That is why he was glad that Christ spoke about the new birth to Nicodemus rather than to a thief or a harlot. If He had said, You must be born again, only to the notorious, respectable people would have assumed the words were not for them. Instead He said them to one of the best men in Jerusalem, a ruler and a teacher, with nothing on record against him.

The same conviction shapes Moody’s teaching on the law. In Weighed and Wanting, his addresses on the Ten Commandments, he holds the commandments up one by one so that his hearers might see themselves in them. His point, in effect, is that the law is like a mirror. It shows a man the dirt on his face, but no one ever washed his face with a mirror. The law was given to stop every mouth, not to save anyone.

Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. ROMANS 3:19

The heart that cannot be trusted

Moody had a plain view of the human heart. He had seen too much of it in the slums of Chicago and the camps of the Civil War to be sentimental. When people told him they could not believe, he would answer that he could believe God better than he could believe his own heart, and quote Jeremiah.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? JEREMIAH 17:9

This is not gloom for its own sake. It is the ground of his whole gospel. If the heart were basically sound, people would need advice and encouragement. Because it is not, they need a new heart. That is why Moody had so little patience with religion that tried to patch up the old nature. You might as well, he said, try to make a leopard change its spots.

Adam’s sin and ours

People sometimes objected to Moody that it was unjust for them to suffer for something Adam did thousands of years before. His answer was characteristically practical rather than philosophical. He did not argue the doctrine of original sin at length. He told a story.

Suppose, he says in The Way to God, that he was dying of consumption he had inherited from his parents. It was not his fault that he had it. But suppose a friend came with a remedy that had cured him, and then brought another and another who had been cured by it, and Moody dashed the medicine to the ground and died. Whose fault would his death be then? “If you are lost, it will not be on account of Adam’s sin.” We inherit the disease. We are condemned for refusing the cure.

How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation. HEBREWS 2:3

It is a good sermon illustration, and it lands where Moody always wanted to land, on the hearer’s own responsibility. The reader should notice that it does not settle every question the Bible raises about Adam. Paul teaches in Romans 5 that in Adam all died, and that the one man’s disobedience affected the many in a way that is deeper than inheritance. Moody would not have denied it; he simply did not dwell on it. His concern was not to explain the fall but to get people out of it.

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. ROMANS 5:12

Good news in bad news

It is important to see why Moody preached the fall at all. He did not do it to crush people. He did it because, as he said of the Pharisee, the needle of conviction has to go in before the thread of the gospel can follow. The bad news is the necessary shadow of the good. A person who does not know he is lost has no use for a Saviour who came to seek and to save the lost.

For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost. LUKE 19:10

A word of qualification is fair. Moody’s preaching could make the line between the two classes very sharp, and the crowded enquiry room could hurry people across it. Conviction of sin is not always a crisis in a side room at two in the morning. For some it is a slow dawning over years. Moody himself admitted elsewhere that some are converted so gradually that one cannot say when the light began. But he was right on the main point. Nobody comes to Christ as a good person needing a little help. Everyone comes as a sinner needing to be saved, and the sooner that is admitted the sooner the good news begins.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Are you, by temperament, more like the Pharisee or the publican? Where does the Pharisee in you show itself?

2. Read Romans 3:9–26 aloud, slowly. Which sentence do you find hardest to accept about yourself?

3. Moody said he could believe God better than his own heart. Where have you been trusting your feelings rather than God’s word?

4. Take one of the Ten Commandments this week and let it be a mirror. Do not excuse what you see; bring it to Christ.

5. Pray for someone you know who thinks himself too respectable to need saving, that the Spirit would do what argument cannot.

A PRAYER

Holy God, I have so often compared myself with others and felt safe. Show me myself as You see me.

I confess that my heart is deceitful, and that I have fallen short of Your glory, not in one place only, but in all.

I do not blame Adam, or my parents, or my circumstances. I have sinned, and I need a Saviour.

Thank You that the bad news is not the last word. Lead me from the mirror to the fountain, and wash me in the blood of Your Son. Amen.