Dead Men Walking: They Lost Their Juice

The fool has said in his heart there is no God." Psalm 14:1

Charnock: " 'The fool' a term in scripture signifying a wicked man, used also by the heathen philosophers to signify a vicious person...[the word used here] signifies the extinction of life in men, animals, and plants; so the word...is taken, a plant that hath lost all that juice that made it lovely and useful. So a fool is one that hath lost his wisdom, and right notion of God and divine things which were communicated to man by creation; one dead in sin, yet one not so much void of rational faculties as of grace in those faculties, not one that wants [lacks] reason, but abuses reason. In Scripture the word signifies foolish."

Clay: We are alive in a physical sense, but dead in a spiritual sense in and of ourselves. Because of sin, we are spiritually stillborn. We have a form of living, but not the living we were created for. We may think we are lovely to God, but the truth is we are not. He does not save us because we are lovely or lovable...He saves us because of mercy and grace. Mercy means we do not get the punishment we deserve for being sinners. Grace is getting more good than we deserve. Grace by definition explains that God saves on something other than some worthiness in ourselves. We are born with abilities, but all of those abilities are tainted by the corruption of our sinful nature. Even the good we do is tainted. This too is bad news. But it is all to set up the good news of God's mercy and grace. Every sin will be punished, but for believers in Christ, those sins were already punished in Christ. He took the wrath of God for the believers. And God in His grace also credits Christ's perfect life to the believers' account and treats the believer as if they had lived the sinless, perfectly righteous life of Christ. Salvation is by grace alone. More later...