Michael tackles a listener question: “Why doesn’t God just make it so believers cannot sin after conversion?” The answer to this question balloons rather quickly to touch on many other things, including, in keeping with the trend of this podcast, the nature of reality. Enjoy! LINKS: Michael’s Patreon Human Nature in Its Fourfold State Impeccability NH Ep. 17: The Origin of the Soul (where you’ll find a discussion of the human nature and flesh identity of Jesus beginning at ~50:18) NH Ep. 18: Physical and Spiritual, Heaven and Earth (for a discussion of visible/invisible) Monergism Atlanta Storytellers (The Event at Eddie’s Attic was “The Songs that Shape Us”) TRANSCRIPT (the content, for the most part): This is Episode 23 of the Nothing Human Podcast: Why Doesn’t God Just Make Us Perfect Already? Welcome to the Nothing Human Podcast. I’m Michael Minkoff, and I want to explore the big human questions in a way that makes complex ideas more accessible and practical for any and everyone. All I need from you is curiosity and attention. Join me on this journey of discovery, and I promise you’ll see that’s there’s really nothing about the big-T Truth we can’t understand better together. All of the episodes for Nothing Human and my bonus podcast Being Something Extra are available on my website, Nothing Human Podcast .com. If you have any questions or comments, please comment on the relevant episode on my website, and I will make sure to respond either there or in a podcast. If you want to support me in my work, please rate and review this podcast wherever you are listening to it. If you want to support me further, you can become my patron for as little as five dollars a month on Patreon. There’s a link in the show notes on my website. Thank you all for your support. It’s been a bit. If you support me on Patreon, you already know I took a break from the podcast to go on a road trip out west with my family. I needed the break and the vacation, and I hardly knew how much until I was nearly finished with it. All said, I feel refreshed and ready to get back into a productive rhythm. But … I’m not ready to release the next video of my conversation with Christa. That one still needs a good bit of work in post. At the same time, I don’t want to leave you hanging much longer for the content I know you all crave. So I’m going to take a stab at answering a listener question today. The question is from my friend Joe, and in this case, I actually have his recording of the question, and I’ve gotten permission to share that recording. So here goes: JOE: Hey, Michael. I wanted to say thank you so much for the podcast. I’ve been listening to many of the episodes multiple times, and digesting them and then circling back around to them with a fresh perspective after a couple of weeks. I still have more I want to comment on from the various parts of the series, and I’m still re-listening to various parts. I do have a question though that doesn’t really fit into any one episode as of yet. So I want to leave you a message about my question and you can do with it whatever you will. So the question is why is it that God thinks it necessary or chooses to have a world—you know, the real world we live in—where after salvation and being filled with the Holy Spirit, He leaves us in the state of being where we have the Holy Spirit, salvation, but we still bear a sinful nature that wants to take control, lead us to sin, and ultimately just be at odds with our new creation state of being? I’m thinking like God can do whatever he wants with the universe. He can decide however he wants things to unfold. We know from Scripture that, in eternity in the future, we’re going to have a state of being where we are sinless, we do not sin, we have no desire to sin, we do not choose to sin, and you could argue it’s not even possible for us to sin. But why do we have this state of being where He didn’t choose to just rewire us spiritually and bodily in such a way that we just do not desire to sin after salvation? I would prefer it that way. I think there are many layers down we can go into the ramifications of what it would look like. And I’ve been very unsatisfied with the answers from other Christians. So, let me give you some of the examples of what they’ve said. Some responses I have had from others included things like, “You know you have the old man and the new man. You still have a sin nature. And, you know, you're supposed to experience sanctification during the church age. So you’re supposed to be less and less sinful and more and more bodily and spiritually reflecting Jesus Christ.” And the reason I’m not satisfied with that being the answer is that tells me what God is doing in this present age and how things are unfolding, but it’s not answering the why. Why is it that God wants it this way? He could have had it any way He wanted. And wouldn’t the all-powerful creator who ultimately hates sin want to eliminate the ability of his own kind, his own people, his own sons and daughters, to practice sinfulness when the Holy Spirit resides in us? We are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Why on earth would we have the capacity to sin if God who is all powerful has taken residence and can mold us and shape us however he sees fit? And before I sign off, I’ll just say that I would also not be satisfied with an answer like, ”Well, God is not going to treat us like robots. He’s not going to force us to change.” Because that's ridiculous. Because something is going to happen in the future in our new state of being where we will simply have no cause or desire to sin. And that is all brought about by force of changes that God brings about. So ultimately God will be responsible for changing our state of being so that we do not have the desire to sin anymore. And it will be God getting the credit. It will not be something like, “Well, you know, we can't do it this way now because we would take pride in our sinlessness and then that's a sin. So if we were sinless now as Christians in the church age we would ultimately commit the sin of pride.” No no no. We’re not going to be proud either when we ultimately don’t sin anymore. So I just don’t see why in the church age in the present conditions, God just didn’t skip to the part where we’re no longer sinning. And the reason I bring it up is because I think it would just be a whole lot better for all of us and the unfolding of history on so many levels if it was just a done deal at the time of salvation forward. So I think the question Joe is asking, put in shorthand theological terms, is why is sanctification necessary in God’s plan? Why would God put Christians through this process of struggling with the sin nature inside of us for our whole Christian lives? And, why would God put even unbelievers through the temptation of unbelief which occurs because of so many inconsistent and struggling sometimes even hypocritical Christians? Wouldn’t it be better all around if He just skipped the struggle and made us sinless at the moment of our regeneration? Why would He have us struggle with sin, and even fall to its temptation, if He could just make us righteous instantaneously? Since God hates sin, why would He allow it to coexist in us His children with His Spirit after conversion, even for a minute? And in case you think this question lacks practical value, I think wrestling with this and similar questions is almost impossible to avoid while you’re exploring the Christian life. Maybe you have witnessed the enormous destructive consequences of a well-known Christian pulling a King David …. or the fatigue or discouragement you can feel from having to be vigilant about fighting temptation …. or the uncertainty concerning your salvation that can occur when you go through periods of faltering. It’s natural to ask, occasionally, why won’t God just make us perfect already? So, like the problem of evil or questions of why or whether God planned the fall of humankind, these are questions we ask for real practical reasons. They matter to us. We love God and have a relationship with Him, and sometimes we get confused or even hurt by the choices He makes concerning us and the world. So I appreciate the question, Joe, and I’ll do my best to think through it with you productively. Let’s start with the question itself. We need to know more about what we’re actually asking. There are a few ways to frame the crux of this question, and I think it’s helpful to walk around in it a bit. I have mentioned before how Augustine talks about the four possible states of humankind—sometimes called the state of innocence, the state of nature, the state of grace, and the state of eternity. In the state of innocence before the fall, humans had the ability to sin. In the state of nature after sin, after the fall but pre-conversion, humans don’t have the ability not to sin. we do it by corrupted nature and always operate according to that nature. In the state of grace, after conversion but before death, we have the ability to sin still because of indwelling sin, but we also have the ability again through regeneration of not sinning. In the state of eternity, believers can’t sin. According to Augustine, the unconverted are born into and never progress beyond the state of nature. Really quickly as an aside, I will mention that the inability to sin is not usually called sinlessness. The term sinlessness refers to having never sinned or being cleared from all sin, but does not necessarily say whether you could have sinned or can sin. Theologians use the term impeccability to refer to the inability to sin. And they use sinlessness to refer to having never sinned. In this sense, as we mentioned in our discussion of the human nature of Jesus, w
