One consequence of the apostasy was the loss of important and eternal truths about God and our relationship with Him. Human attempts to cram the simple, straightforward Gospel of Jesus Christ as presented in the Bible into the traditions of Greek and Roman philosophy warped and even reversed many truths.
“Our Father which art in heaven…” Jesus taught His followers to pray. The implications of taking this statement literally are staggering. But when Christian doctrine was filtered through Hellenistic philosophical preconceptions, what the world at large was left with was the teaching of abject human depravity—the idea that people are naturally, automatically, and essentially depraved. In this worldview we cannot choose to do anything good, no matter how hard we try.
This may placate Greek philosophy, but it is discordant with reality. Mothers loving their children, fathers loving their children, spouses loving each other, children loving their parents, siblings loving each other, altruism towards strangers—all these things are natural and good human tendencies. They are harmonious with what God expects of us. Philanthropy, compassion, and mercy can emerge at any moment in anyone. That is part of human behavior.
True, humanity also exhibits bad and even depraved behavior on occasion, but people in general, and individuals, exhibit a mix of good and bad behavior. Good behaviors that occur daily are not as visible or memorable—we take them for granted. Obedience to traffic laws, honesty of store patrons, and general moral behavior—we just assume that is how others are going to act most of the time, and they do. Conversely, atrocities get plenty of magnification, and excess airtime.
“...good and evil have come before all men...” (Alma 29:5). And it is true; we are faced with choices all day, each day, and we can choose from a multitude of good or bad options.
Joseph Smith opposed centuries of negative depictions of humanity as essentially depraved. He taught of mortals as preexistent spirits who came, innocent, from the presence of God into a fallen world (see D&C 93). Yes, tendencies to sin are present in us now, but we are also, as Jesus taught, children of God. We can choose good or evil, partly because there is native goodness, the light of Christ, at the core of each person. “The spirit is indeed willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matt. 26:41). We are dual beings, with good and bad mingled in us, not totally monstrous or saintly.
King Benjamin Quotes an Angel
There are scriptures, even restoration scriptures, which seem to support the negative view of mortals. In King Benjamin’s sermon in the Book of Mormon, he tells his people an angel awakened him in the night with a message, and the following is an brief part:
“For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever…” (Mosiah 3:19). This sounds dire, but there is hope:
“…unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord…” Jesus Christ can change our natures from sinful to saintly.
“For I am able to make you holy…” (D&C 60:7), the Lord reassures us.
But King Benjamin’s statement still gives us the impression that, without saving grace, humanity is depraved. As explained before, not every inclination we have naturally is depraved; we also have good insticts. How, or in what sense, are we enemies to God?
Natural is Bad?
Natural has positive connotations in almost every context. At the grocery store, natural generally is better than artificial. Natural means the way it was at birth, born that way. Noel, nativity, native, navel, are all cognate with natural. Why, then, is it portrayed as bad in King Benjamin’s sermon?
Parents and Children
Instead of looking for the natural man solely in depravity (which we rarely commit), or even in little pet sins we justify to ourselves, we can find him cloaked in a far more innocuous guise.
How are we enemies to God?
Imagine the struggle between a girl and her mother. Mom wants the daughter to eat vegetables, go to bed early, wake up early, clean her room, do homework, do well in school, practice musical instruments, and otherwise spend time exerting herself.
Meanwhile, her young daughter wants to eat sugary, processed foods, stay up late, sleep in, watch movies, neglect homework, ignore lessons at school, play outside, and generally engage in amusements rather than focus, exert herself, or develop her talents.
Is the tension between Mom and daughter here indicative of evil in the girl?
The difference between this mom and her daughter is their individual perspectives. Mom looks to the future, and sees her daughter as a woman, two and three decades from now. The hard work and practice and discipline invested now will yield dividends of competency, peace, and power in that inevitable future.
Meanwhile, the daughter can only see what is immediately at hand, and has little concern for long-term outcomes. Her main reason for resisting is merely that she is short-sighted. She is not evil per se.
Not Depraved; Physically Oriented
We resist God because we have a limited perspective. Our physical natures predispose us to give priority to physical things, and neglect spiritual things when the two conflict. God sees everything, and gives highest priority to spiritual concerns for us.
Our default condition upon entering this life is to be saddled with a body full of irrational appetites. Yes, God gave us brains, and He expects us to use them, but what is their main purpose? To keep our bodies alive and comfortable. Our natures, our condition of being born with a physical body full of raw instincts, means we are predisposed to give more credence to what we can see and comprehend than to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.
Naturally Pragmatic
The innocuous face of the natural man is common sense, pragmatism, practicality, being safe, cautious, and reasonable. There is nothing virtuous about being unreasonable—unless the Lord tells us to do what seems unreasonable to us.
Laman and Lemuel are vilified regularly in Sunday school classes. Be like Nephi; don’t be like Laman and Lemuel. But they had the same family as Nephi, and traveled the same terrain and oceans. Why was their perception and behavior so different from Nephi’s?
Nephi explains:
“…I did cry unto the Lord; and behold he did visit me, and did soften my heart that I did believe all the words which had been spoken by my father; wherefore, I did not rebel against him like unto my brothers” (1Ne. 2:16).
In other words, Nephi had a private spiritual experience in which the Lord visited him and changed his nature, and therefore his changed heart responded differently than Laman and Lemuel’s to the same circumstances.
There are videos of rollercoaster passengers sitting side by side, riding the same curves and loops, yet having completely different subjective, internal experiences. One passenger is elated; the other is terrified. Similarly, Nephi is able to rejoice in his circumstances because God softened and changed his heart; his views are “glorious” because God has given him ability to see spiritually instead of just physically. Laman and Lemuel complain because they are natural men, perceiving only what is obvious to their five senses, appetites, and human logic.
Because of Nephi’s divinely softened heart and corresponding increase of faith, he perceived the journey the Lord commanded his family to go on as a good thing, and rejoiced at times rather than complaining. Without that essential faith and trust in the Lord caused by spiritual rebirth (and subsequently receiving a new nature), Laman and Lemuel murmured about the exact same ride Nephi gloried in.
Nephi received revelations and spiritual promptings, and trusted these invisible, intangible influences. As a result, he faced his challenges with more courage. He perceived things with an eye of faith. Though Laman and Lemuel saw an angel with their physical eyes, heard the voice of the Lord, and saw other miracles, they lacked the ability to prefer these sources of information to their appetites, physical senses, and mortal thinking. They saw through the brain of the natural man, which is meant to keep us alive for the next fifteen seconds, not trusting prophecies looking eight years, or six centuries, into the future.
They could not see the Babylonian army marching over the horizon to sack Jerusalem in eight years; they could only see the carnal security of their wealth there. The Arabian Peninsula is foreboding (the only country in the world today without a river). To their natural senses, even with angelic assurances and witnessing miracles, they struggled to trust that this road into the wilderness was a wiser course than staying home.
Why did they threaten to kill Nephi? How do they going from being just practical, to atrocities like murder? At least, in part, because God was telling them to do things that scared these practical, down-to-earth, common sense natural men. Like the girl whose mother’s demands seemed unreasonable to her because she could not see into the future, so Laman and Lemuel’s short-sightedness due to a lack of spiritual rebirth predisposed them to rely on their five senses, their appetites, and their human reasoning.
If Laman and Lemuel had stayed at Jerusalem, they probably would not have tried to kill Nephi. They would have taken out the garbage, run errands, and lived as good, reasonable citizens in Jerusalem (until the Babylonians destroyed it and killed or enslaved the populace). They were only depraved when God demanded they do risky things, which frightened their low-faith, high-practicality selves. Then they became dangerous towards Nephi and their other family members.
Nephi was good because he set out on his journey with some degree of initial spiritual rebirth that empowered him to trust the Lord, while his brothers balked and rebelled because of (what seemed to them to be) natural, reasonable fear.
Modern Application
Elder Ballard tells a less extreme story from his own life that typifies what the natural man looks like—not necessarily depraved, murdering and adulterous, but convinced of what he can see with his eyes immediately before him. The typical natural man hesitates to follow the invisible, still, small voice of revelation, or to see with an eye of faith.
“Years ago when I was in business, I learned a very expensive lesson because I did not...heed the promptings of the Spirit giving me guidance from my Heavenly Father. ...I [was] in the automobile business, and the Ford Motor Company was looking for dealers to sell their new line of cars. Ford executives invited...me to a preview showing of what they thought would be a spectacularly successful product. ...the Ford sales personnel were very persuasive, and I chose to become Salt Lake City’s first—and actually last—Edsel dealer. And if you don’t know what an Edsel is, ask your grandpa. He will tell you that the Edsel was a spectacular failure” (Learning the Lessons of the Past, April 2009 General Conference).
Anyone can find himself or herself trusting in human reasoning above and beyond the whiserpings of the Spirit. To the degree that we are spiritually reborn, we exhibit greater trust in spiritual promptings than in human reasoning, physical senses or appetites.
Our hesitations and weak faith result in a struggle with the Spirit, and THAT is the greater part of the natural man’s enmity toward God.
We can watch over time as our trust in the Lord and willingness to follow His promptings (as well as our ability to hear them) increase. Rebirth happens less dramatically and by degrees most of the time, so we will alternate between success and failure at first.
Progress means trusting the Spirit over what we see and touch and surmise through human reason; this indicates the process of spiritual rebirth is taking hold in us.
Less Extreme, More Effective
We might deny any trace of the natural man in us, or beat ourselves up if we perceive it in ourselves. Both tendencies are extreme, and interfere with repentance. Instead, we can think of “natural man” as our common starting point, and spiritual rebirth our destination in this life. When we are reborn, and to the extent we are reborn, we have “[put] off the natural man, and [become] a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord.”
We are not meant to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, to rely on the arm of the flesh, the natural man, to overcome or replace the natural man. It is by pairing with the Savior that this part of us is overcome or replaced with a new nature.
Natural birth, natural man; spiritual rebirth, new spiritual nature.
We can be born again, and inherit a part of Jesus Christ’s nature. That is the real solution to the problems of being a natural man.
