The Lord Himself is Our Salvation

The Lord Himself is Our Salvation

Apr 22, 2023 | Theology

I’ve concluded over these four plus decades as a Christian talking and listening to many Christians, that no matter what tradition they come from or their theological convictions, they are all Calvinists. What I mean by that is they all realize, every single one of them, they can’t save themselves from their sins; it is God alone who has saved them and is saving them. It’s just too obvious to any honest person who has a real relationship with Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, that they are sinners, hopeless, pathetic sinners in need of a Savior who actually saves, not a Savior who just makes salvation possible or theoretical. That is Calvinism. There is no need to try to figure out God’s sovereignty and free will. They’re both true and well beyond our ability to comprehend. Every Christian knows, every one of us, that “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost,” (Luke 19:10), and that he was given the name Jesus “because he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). He will not try, he will.

This has become even more clear to me reading through the Old Testament again, now into Jeremiah. The message God is communicating loud and clear is the inability of God’s people to save themselves, the premise of the entire Calvinist theological system. Over and over God commands, and his people do the opposite. They are pathetic. As I wrote recently, the stories of the people of Israel have to be of God and true because no ancient people make themselves look so horribly bad unless it was true. And before we get all judgmental and feeling superior, those stories are about us! And deep down every true Christian knows it. The reason is because at Pentecost Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to “convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:8). His job is to reveal to us the guilt of our sin and that we can’t save ourselves, that we need a Savior. I’ve never met a true Christian in my life who thinks they are their own Savior. I’m not too concerned about how they think that all works, unless they’re interested in my opinion. I just know if Jesus is their Savior, if they realize they can’t save themselves from their own sin, we’re on the same team.

From the very beginning when God promised the seed or offspring of the woman would crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3), the plan was for God to save his people from their sins, not make salvation possible for all people. Since He saved me, raised me from the dead when I was at the bottom of the spiritual ocean, I trust His salvation. I couldn’t choose Him, He chose me. Therefore, my confidence is wholly in Him. No matter how wretched I am, I know He has saved me from my sins, all of them, past, present, and future. I am Israel! I like them get to the end of the story in Malachi, and then silence. Until the messenger comes and points to the One, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Isaiah points forward to Jesus as God our Savior in Isaiah 7. The Lord is telling King Ahaz to trust him to save them from their geopolitical enemy, and to ask Him for a sign. Ahaz refuses to “put the Lord to the test,” and the Lord rebukes him saying, alright then, I’ll give you a sign whether you ask for it or not!

14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

When you read these few verses about this son they seem completely out of place, but God is always interspersing prophetic utterances about a spiritual salvation to come with geopolitical Israel. The name given to this son the virgin conceives means “God with us,” and we now know this was the Messiah Jesus who was God himself in human flesh. Jews would never, ever have interpreted the name that way. The Messiah had God with him, along side him in battle like any king—he would never be God himself. That’s why Jews don’t make up Jesus of Nazareth, the word made flesh.

Then in a brutal passage in Isaiah 63, verses 1-6, the Lord is proclaiming himself coming in judgment “mighty to save.” A salvation of wrath drenched in blood is a very strange salvation, as He says, “the day of vengeance.” That doesn’t make any sense until you realize in Christian hindsight that the spiritual salvation to come includes both judgment, wrath, and righteousness. Here the Lord tells us only He can pull that one off:

5 I looked, but there was no one to help,
I was appalled that no one gave support;
so my own arm achieved salvation for me,
and my own wrath sustained me.

Notice the past tense. In the eternal sovereign council of the Triune God this salvation has already been accomplished. His prophetic words through His prophets are as good as already done.

Then in Jeremiah 23 we get a glimpse into the full picture of the nature of this salvation when we read of a Righteous Branch. The Lord condemns “the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of” his pasture, and says He in effect will become their shepherd, of course pointing forward to Jesus, the good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. Then we read:

5 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch,
a King who will reign wisely
and do what is just and right in the land.
6 In his days Judah will be saved
and Israel will live in safety.
This is the name by which he will be called:
The Lord Our Righteousness.

No Jew could conceive that Yahweh himself would be the atonement, or propitiation, for our sins, even though Isaiah 53 gives a very strong hint of just that. And it isn’t only that he will pay the penalty for our sins, i.e., death, and take God’s wrath for us, but that he will be “our righteousness.” What does that mean?

I heard Tim Killer say many times, Jesus died the death we should have died, and He lived the life we should have lived. Jesus not only died for us, but He also lived for us. Just as our sin was imputed to Christ on the cross, his perfect sinless life was imputed to us as well. This is why the Apostle Paul says in I Corinthians 1:

30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

This became the most important verse in my life after more than three decades as a Christian when I finally realized I am Israel! No matter how hard I try, no matter what I do, I can’t pull it off. I fail over and over and over again. I am, I know it’s shocking, a sinner! And being a sinner I sin, also shocking. Sinning is what sinners do. But we are born that way, all of us. Isn’t it obvious? This is what makes “The Lord Our Righteousness” so powerful.

Here is the realization I came to: I can never be more acceptable to God than I am in Christ my righteousness no matter what I do or don’t do. I used to think, sort of, that God would like me a little bit more if I did this or didn’t do that. Nope! And I found that the gratitude that flows out of this grace, this unmerited favor, makes me want to be more righteous! I’m just not very good at it, but I keep trying. So I repent daily, and thank God that I don’t have to save myself.

 

Nobody Wants to Die, But Nobody Wants to Get Old

Nobody Wants to Die, But Nobody Wants to Get Old

Apr 20, 2023 | Culture

We recently visited relatives and spent some time with my wife’s mother and father who both live in elderly facilities, and also visited my mother who does as well. I don’t know how other people respond to being around a lot of older people, but it depresses me. Seeing people aging and their bodies having to endure the ravages of time is not something I can just blow off, like it has no implications for me and everyone around me. I know, they know, you know, we all know, they will be dead soon, but it’s not a pleasant topic to contemplate, so people, old and young alike ignore it. It’s even less acceptable to discuss openly, and if you do, people will think you morbid or negative.

For me, though, the topic is never far from my mind, and I have a story that is so indicative of that. When our granddaughter was about to be born (Jan. 22, 2022), I told my wife, “Just think, in 2100 she’ll be 78 years old!” And she replied, perfectly, “Can you just let her be born first!” It was hilarious. But as I told my daughter, who knows me very well, as soon as Eleanor was conceived, she was condemned to death. And given she isn’t shocked by my Woody Allen like obsession with death, she shook her head in lamentable agreement. But unlike the atheist Mr. Allen, for those of us who trust in the resurrection of Christ, death for isn’t the end, but only the end of the beginning of blissful life eternal with our Savior and all those who have preceded us in Christ. How do we know this? That’s a big question, but before I get to that, we need to establish that our mortality is something we need to think about all the time. I know, it’s a tough sell, but bear with me.

When I’m around much older people (I’m no spring chicken!), like in a retirement community, I don’t think about people much differently than if I’m in a restaurant in a chic part of Miami Beach, for example, where I’m surrounded by young, good looking “kids” in their 20s or 30s who are in great shape. It’s less depressing and easier to get sucked into the illusion that life isn’t a death sentence in such an environment, but it’s a lie, a bold-faced horrific lie that the devil uses to lead people to hell. I can hear Satan whisper in their ears, “Hey beautiful, hey, handsome, isn’t life great now? No need to worry about what happens after this life, get all you can, eat, drink, and be merry because, well, it’s fun!” I’m convinced most young people, I’d say prior to entering their 40s, are under the illusion that death happens to other people, not them. As Fraud argued, human beings cannot imagine their own deaths. It is, literally, inconceivable to us, unless that is, we are reminded of that fact, over and over and over again.

This widespread illusion in the modern world, or should I say delusion, is a “gift” of the secularism we’ve inherited since the seventeenth century Enlightenment. There have been many deleterious consequences of this movement in Western intellectual thought, but the most pernicious is related to epistemology, or how and what we can know. In our secular culture, thinking about or focusing on anything beyond this life is waste of time because, well, we really can’t know anything about it; we are bound, most people assume, to the physical world. This kind of thinking began to seep into the stream of Western thought with the work of Immanuel Kant (1774-1804). Simply put, Kant stipulated that there are two realms, one called the “noumenal realm,” and the other the “phenomenal realm.” The latter is material reality, the one we can know, while the former is the meta-physical realm (above, outside of the material), and beyond our ability to know. (Here is a great short video of R.C. Sproul describing how Kant paved the way for agnosticism, that we can’t really know, which is the faith choice of our age).

Given we are all drenched in a secularism that programs agnosticism into us from birth, most people figure why bother with that after life stuff; we can’t know it anyway, and it’s all guesses and “faith.” Which is why we need to remind ourselves, all the time, that death can find us at any moment. For example, no matter how well we take care of ourselves, what great shape we’re in, how perfect our bloodwork is, an airplane can fall on our house tomorrow, that’s it, we’re gone. Echoing Isaiah, the Apostle Paul says, “God gives all life and breath and everything else,” and he can take that breath anytime he pleases. So it’s best we approach life in humility and treat it as the precious gift it is, one for Christians that will continue forever, a life without pain, sorrow, sin, sadness or death. Yes, that is as inconceivable to us as our own deaths, but that is why faith (i.e., trust) is required, and there are an infinite number of reasons why this faith is justified.

In a recent post where I laid out some of the reasons that compel me to accept the trustworthiness of Christianity, I assert that “everyone lives by faith, which I define as  trust based on adequate evidence. I trust based on more than adequate evidence to me that Christianity is true.” The question is who and what will we trust. I trust the man who rose from the dead, who claimed he was “the resurrection and the life,” and that whoever believes in him will live even though he die, and whoever lives and believes in him “will never die.” Do you believe this? I do. And Isaiah 25 gives us a glimpse into what this promise will look like when it is fulfilled:

6 On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
7 On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
8     he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken.

9 In that day they will say,

“Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the Lord, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

This is a program even Woody Allen should sign up for: no more death.

 

Point of View Radio Interview

Point of View Radio Interview

Apr 17, 2023 | Uninvented

This was my first Uninvented radio interview, and it was a lot of fun. The poor interviewer, the host of the show, Kirby Anderson, butchered my name several times, but each time he said it after a break he got closer and closer, and the final time nailed it! It’s an occupational hazard having a name like D’Virgilio creates, and one I’ve enjoyed dealing with all my life. Like the Amazon review I just posted, having someone I don’t know rave about the book like Kirby does is thrilling, and humbling. I mean, I think it’s pretty good, but having that confirmed by others is a blessing of God. As the Holy Spirit says through King David, wealth and honor come from the Lord.

You can listen here, and I am on in the second hour that starts around minute 45, but there is a lot of good stuff prior to that.