Once you’ve taken the first two steps on the road of the reprobate, the step of sinfully suppressing the truth of God’s Word and obstinately refusing to acknowledge the existence of an intelligent Creator behind an intricately designed creation, you are well on your way to becoming reprobate.

Those who have taken these precarious steps will be easily detected by their ingratitude and irreverence toward God. They will also be identifiable by their efforts to ingratiate themselves to this fallen world and to glorify themselves within it. Once one has traveled this far down the road of the reprobate, it takes only one more small step to be divinely abandoned to total depravity.

According to Apostle Paul, the final step on the road of the reprobate is the beastly sin of worshipping and deifying ourselves. In Romans 1:23-32, Paul writes the following with his divinely inspired pen: “And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,Without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”

According to the Apostle Paul, the sure sign of spiritual reprobation, that one has committed the beastly sin of eating from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” is when one begins to legitimize depravity. For instance, homosexuality can only be legitimized by people who have made the spiritually deadly decision of deifying themselves in order to determine for themselves, in total disregard of God’s Word, what is “good and evil.” Far more than disobeying God, these self-made “gods” actually delight in clenching their fists in the face of God. Not only do they delight in their own disobedience, but also in persuading others to be disobedient to God as well. Once one finds himself or herself here, he or she has passed a point of no return with God. They are beyond redemption; they are reprobate.

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