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Peter Walking on Water – You Can Too!

Jan 8, 2025 | Theology

Well, maybe not actual water, but in Christ we can do the seemingly impossible in not giving way to fear and doubt because circumstances are greater than our Savior God. The gospel story of Peter walking on water has been significant for my life in many ways. There are several theological and practical takeaways, and I’ve never written anything extensively about it, so here are some thoughts on the gold to be mined from this amazing story.

I want to start with the most important question about this event: Did it really happen? If it didn’t actually happen, who cares what kind of spiritual or practical lessons we might learn from it. If it didn’t happen, it’s a lie, and I’m not interested. As I say, if the Bible isn’t true, throw it in the trash. I have more important things to do than waste my time on invented stories claiming they are true. Yet, all the world’s religions want a piece of Jesus even while they reject the supernatural Creator God Jesus of the Bible. For them it’s a pick and choose Jesus. They want nothing to do with actual Jesus of the Bible, Israel’s Messiah and the Savior of the World, and the one who not only can walk on water, but created it! So, first let’s establish the historical nature of the event portrayed in the gospels. To do that, I will use an argument I develop in my book, Uninvented: You just can’t make this stuff up!

Jesus’ Special Relationship to Water and Nature
Nothing is more absurd to the skeptic than Jesus walking on water or stilling a storm just by his command. Impossible, so they tell us. However, the way in which these stories are told is powerful evidence for their veracity. Before we get to Peter, we’ll look at the power of Jesus’ word over creation, told in Matthew (8), Mark (4), and Luke (8). The details are similar in each telling. Jesus gets into a boat with his disciples and says they are going to the other side of the lake (of Galilee). Obviously exhausted, Jesus falls asleep while a furious storm comes up. Terrified, the disciples wake him and plead with him to save them. Jesus’ reply as Matthew reports it is priceless:

²⁶ He replied, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm.

Are you kidding me? What kind of question is that! How could they not be afraid? A raging storm on a dark night in the middle of a large body of water on a small boat is the perfect recipe for terror. But Jesus is as cool as a cucumber. Mark reports another question they ask in the midst of the squall: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” That’s almost funny. Didn’t Jesus say before they even got into the boat, “Let’s go over to the other side of the lake”? Yes, in fact he did. He didn’t say, we’re going to the middle of the lake to drown. I guess when Jesus says something, he means it, storm or no storm. After the storm is calmed, the disciples’ response is even more priceless than before:

They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

So let me get this right. They are terrified during the storm when they think they’re going to die, and now they’re terrified of the guy who saved their lives? The answer to their question, and its implications, must have been troubling to say the least. The portrayal of the story has verisimilitude in spades, it reads real, not at all like mere human fiction.

As I said, if this is a made up story, it’s a lie, and in this case we would have roughly a dozen liars. Then, are we to believe they all made it up, and continued to stick to the story even when they all knew it wasn’t true? We only have two choices, either it happened, or it didn’t. And it’s an awfully odd story to make up if it didn’t really happen. Imagine them getting to the other side of the lake and telling people what happened. They probably didn’t, at least initially. It’s too preposterous! They hardly believed it themselves. There is also nothing comparable in Israel’s history. Even when Elijah called down fire from heaven in his encounter with the prophets of Baal (I Kings 18), he prayed to the Lord, and it was the Lord who did it, not Elijah. Here, Jesus himself is exerting power over nature by his mere word. God does such things, not man, yet here was a man doing it. No wonder they were freaking out. It made no sense! And to top it off, there was no expectation of the long-awaited Messiah having such power, none.

If this isn’t crazy enough, imagine making up the story about Jesus and Peter walking on water (Matt. 14, Mark 6, and John 6). There is nothing remotely like this in biblical history. Instead of Jesus getting in the boat with the disciples this time, he has them get in, and says he’ll meet them on the other side. This has the same problem as the previous episode on the lake for those who deny it happened; it’s a very strange thing to make up. Sometime after three in the morning on a wave-tossed and windy lake, the disciples see what they take as a ghost walking on the water, and it terrifies them. Who wouldn’t be? They respond like real people encountering something unimaginable. Jesus tells them not to be afraid, it is him. In Matthew’s account, impetuous Peter wants a little proof that it is in fact Jesus, so he asks Jesus to tell him to walk out to him on the water. Bad idea. As soon as he sees the wind and waves, he starts to sink. Terrified, Peter shouts, “Lord, save me!” Jesus’ response fits a realistic narrative perfectly:

³¹ Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”

Again, what kind of question is that! Well, Jesus, because, you know, maybe people just don’t walk on water? That reads so real. Then, Matthew writes something utterly un-Jewish: “those who were in boat worshiped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’” Worshiping a man, any man, even if he walks on water, is blasphemy. Mark has a little different take, saying that even though they were amazed, they really hadn’t understood. Jesus had just previously fed more than five thousand people with a few loaves, but “they had not understood.” Both accounts reflect perfect human ambivalence to something so inconceivable. I’ll quote Jewish Christian biblical scholar Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889) as to why it takes more faith to believe this is made up, than it having actually happened:

Not only would the originations of this narrative . . . be utterly unaccountable—neither meeting Jewish expectancy, nor yet supposed Old Testament precedent—but, if legend it be, it seems purposeless and irrational. Moreover, there is this noticeable about it, as about so many of the records of the miraculous in the New Testament, that the writers by no means disguise from themselves or their readers the obvious difficulties involved.

In other words, it doesn’t read at all like legend or myth because there is no point to it or no precedent for it in Jewish history. The disciples are as shocked by it all as anyone would be encountering something so seemingly impossible. We must remember as we read the Bible, what we know as modern fiction didn’t exist in the ancient world. The gospel writers had no category in their minds of trying to write something that didn’t happen to try to make it look real.

As I also argue in my book, the burden of proof is on those who claim the story isn’t real and just made up. The only reason they can give for claiming this comes from an anti-supernatural bias they bring to the text. In logic it’s called begging the question, or assuming the premise before they get to the conclusion. In this case, miracles can’t happen, these are miracles, therefore, these events didn’t happen. Sorry, that won’t work because it’s pure bias. Having established the historicity of the events, let’s look at the theological implications.

Jesus is God: The Doctrine of Christology
Christology is simply the study of who Jesus as the Christ was, and is. We learn two things about Jesus in these stories. The first is his humanity. We see this in his falling asleep while they are in the boat on the lake; even while the storm is raging he’s still asleep and the disciples have to wake him up. Just prior to this Jesus had fed the five thousand with a few loaves and fishes, and had spent the entire day healing the sick. Most orthodox Christians probably tend to overemphasize the divine Jesus at the expense of the human Jesus, while liberal types do the opposite. The liberal Jesus is pretty much human. The testimony of Scripture and the entire history of the church, however, declares Jesus is both fully God and fully man, something, remember, utterly inconceivable to obsessively monotheistic Jews at the time, or any time.

Christology was a struggle for the church for several hundred years. All the first Christians were Jews, so a man who proclaims by his words and deeds he is God wouldn’t compute. In fact, as we see in the gospels, his claim to divinity was why he was put to death. When the high priest asked Jesus after he was arrested to tell them if he was “the Messiah, the Son of God,” his affirmation of equality with God leaves no doubt, and the high priests’ response confirms it:

⁶⁵Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “He has spoken blasphemy! Why do we need any more witnesses? Look, now you have heard the blasphemy. ⁶⁶What do you think?”

And they all agreed, Jesus was worthy of death.

We see how difficult this was for Jews to accept in the story of doubting Thomas, who refused to believe Jesus had come back from the dead. As he said:

“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Did he think Mary and the others were lying or delusional? It’s more likely he didn’t know what to think. Not being a modern post-Enlightenment person who automatically disbelieves in miracles, it wasn’t that Thomas couldn’t believe Jesus came back from the dead. After all, he’d seen him bring Lazarus back to life after he’d been dead four days. I think, rather, it was Thomas as a Jew finding it impossible to believe the supposed Messiah would die on a Roman cross, hung on a tree enduring God’s curse. All Jews knew this passage in Deuteronomy 21:23:

his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance.

You can see why the disciples so quickly wanted to get Jesus off the cross before the Sabbath started. Knowing this is what makes Thomas’s declaration after he encountered the risen Jesus and saw Jesus’ wounds so Christologically powerful:

²⁸Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

Yet for hundreds of years heresies would arise denying exactly this, that Jesus wasn’t only just a god, but The God, Yahweh himself, Israel’s covenant making Creator God. This controversy was finally put to rest at the council of Nicaea in 325 from which we get the ringing declaration of the Triune God. Jesus was fully God and fully man, a theological fact upon which our salvation from sin depends.

What Peter Walking on Water Teaches Christians About Faith
Before I get to the lessons, one comment on the word faith. We tend to use it in a non-biblical way to mean intellectual assent. I believe in something, have faith, because I’ve been given logical reasons to do so. I intellectually assent to such and such because I believe it. However, faith in the biblical sense is a synonym for trust. This includes using our intellects, our minds, but so much more. The first dictionary definition I came across defines trust well:

assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something, one in which confidence is placed

We can immediately see the focus of trust isn’t me or so much what I believe, but the person or thing I’m believing in, the one or thing in which I place my trust. This is perfect for our story, but more importantly, trust not only includes our mental faculties, but our entire being, our emotions and will as well. My favorite verse about trust in the Bible is Isaiah 26:3, short and sweet:

You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you.

We don’t have perfect peace, we don’t trust. This means no worry, fear, anxiety or doubt. I repent every morning for my worry, fear, anxiety, and doubt because I’m a sinner, and sinners sin. It’s a battle to attain perfect peace, and always just beyond our grasp. Think of it like Peter walking on the water. He’s actually pulling it off. Notice carefully what is making the impossible possible:

Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. ³⁰But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”

The contrast says it all. For those few seconds he was obviously looking at Jesus and almost didn’t notice the tempest raging about him. The moment he does, fear kicks in, and he starts sinking. Fear, of course, was a perfectly reasonable response, and once he took his eyes off Jesus fear, and thus sinking, is inevitable.

This is the perfect metaphor for the Christian life because of Jesus’s response. It takes us back to Christology, and our own ever present sinful inclinations to live by sight, and not by trust. When Jesus says to peter, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” you almost have to laugh? I can imagine Peter thinking in that moment if thought was even possible, “What, are you kidding me? How in the world could I not be afraid? Walking on water is impossible!” Well, if Jesus really was God, Creator of the universe, and all the physical laws of the universe are under his control, then fear was in fact not warranted at all. Jesus seems to be saying, if you would just trust me, you wouldn’t have even seen the wind and the waves, only me, and you would have been able to do the impossible without fear.

We know however, in real life in a fallen world in a fallen body among fallen people it doesn’t work that way. Lack of trust is built into the proverbial sinful human cake. The faith-trust dynamic, and thus struggle, is perfectly captured by Blaise Pascal in his description of human nature:

What kind of freak is man? What a novelty he is, how absurd he is, how chaotic and what a mass of contradictions, and yet what a prodigy! He is judge of all things, yet a feeble worm. He is repository of truth, and yet sinks into such doubt and error. He is the glory and the scum of the universe!

Therein lies the battle of trust. The question for us is, which of these will win in the battle of daily life. This reminds me of the story in Mark 9 when a man brings his son who is often violently possessed by demons, and the man pleads with Jesus to help them. Jesus replied, “all things are possible for those who believe.” In what must have been a heart wrenching scene, the father responds:

²⁴Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

The word for belief in Greek is pisteuó-πιστεύω, or trust. This is my daily prayer because I fail continually, “Lord, help my lack of trust!”

Thankfully, sanctification is real because Jesus died, as the hymn rightly says, “to make men holy.” This isn’t only positionally before the Father, justification, but actually changes who we are, what we think and what we do. That’s why Paul in I Corinthians 1:30 shares with us these comforting truths:

And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

When we struggle to trust Him, so experience the seemingly ever elusive perfect peace, we must remember to keep our eyes stubbornly focused on Jesus and do our best to ignore the wind and the waves. We just might find ourselves walking on water, even if only for a fleeting moment, until the next time.

The Importance of Both the Inner and Outer Body for the Christian

Nov 27, 2024 | Theology

Since I got active on Twitter in early 2024, I often come across comments like this as people debate spirituality and physical fitness:

From by what I can gathered and have observed by those who predominantly post about masculinity, not all but some, focus more on outward appearance than the inward man. Being physically in shape is great but being spiritually minded is far greater.

This is undoubtedly true, not least because Paul tells us this exactly in I Timothy 4:8:

For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

If that was all there was to say I wouldn’t be writing or talking about this, and given I’ve had a massive red pill experience regarding physical health because of Donald Trump and then the Covid scam, I have a very lot to say about it.

When I say because of Donald Trump, it wasn’t so much about Trump per se, but the reaction to Trump when he came down the escalator in June 2015. Even though I was not a fan of Trump, and in a way despised him and everything I thought he stood for, the reactions to Trump were so unhinged I thought, nobody can be that bad. So I started to take him seriously, and a year later in the Illinois primary I begrudgingly voted for him over Ted Cruz, and not with a little guilt. I never looked back, though, because the lies of the media, the Democrats, and NeverTrump Uniparty Republicans made me actually begin to appreciate the guy. I thought, he must be a singular threat to their grift to engender this much hatred, and it’s only gotten worse. They’ve even driven the Republican Party to become the Trump party,

something unfathomable just a couple years ago. What has this all to do with health? As it turns out, Everything.

Covid, The Neutron Bomb of Truth
Not too long ago this phrase popped into my mind as a metaphor for how powerful Covid was as a societal red pill about health, and other things as well. Theoretically, a neutron bomb is a weapon that kills by irradiation killing everything that lives while sparing property. So when this particular bomb exploded around the world in 2020, it effectively killed lies about health and modern medicine that had developed in the previous hundred years, while at the same time sparing the property, so to speak, of our every day lives. No longer could those of us affected by it see anything related to our health in the same way. This included the modern medical industrial complex, Big Pharma, and those things that contribute to feeding the beast while destroying our health, like Big Food and Big Ag.

When my cousin told me in March 2020 that Covid was a scam, I was nonplussed, a word that means the opposite of what it seems to mean; to perplex or bewilder someone; to confound or flummox. The “experts,” the CDC, the WHO, governments and media organizations everywhere on earth treated Covid as if it was akin to the Bubonic plague, aka, the Black Death, a real pandemic that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. A rough estimate is that 25 million people in Europe died from plague during the Black Death, and the population of western Europe would not reach its pre-1348 level for 250 years. I don’t remember seeing anything during the Covid years like Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s, “Bring out yer dead.” All I remember is masks, masks, everywhere masks. I wouldn’t wear one. Initially it was intimidating, but I learned, for example, to enjoy going to the local Walmart and being the only person in the entire store without a mask, virtue signaling of another sort. I kind of miss those days.

My cousin also started me on my health journey, giving me reading suggestions, while I started searching out resources online about the history of medicine, and how we got to the place where modern medicine seemed to be getting it all so wrong. I learned that modern medicine isn’t so much health care as disease care, the focus on treating symptoms. Like everyone else, I believed it was medicine that healed us. After several years of this journey, and slowly making changes in eating and exercise habits, I had a final red pill experience that in effect confirmed everything I’d been learning since the bomb dropped.

Earlier this year I came down with an unpleasant case of dermatitis, with itchy red splotches all over my body. It started when I noticed white flakes, lots of them, coming out of my hair, and I’ve never had dandruff. It got so bad, gross really, that scabs were appearing on my scalp and I was losing small chunks of hair. That will freak you out! I had been thinking of finding an integrative or holistic doctor for some time, and this was the opportunity to do that. But initially I went to a dermatologist, a skin doctor that I knew was your typically modern medically educated professional. I learned this was Seborrheic dermatitis. They prescribed some medicine and gave me a paper explaining the condition, and on it were these words I could hardly believe I was reading: “Dermatitis is an immune response of the body with no known cause.” What? Are you serious? Talk about nonplussed; I was shocked. And the more I thought about it the more ticked off I got.

The medicine was a steroid cream and some anti-fungal shampoo and some other medicine for my scalp. Not too many years before, pre-Covid, I would have continued to use it, and since it only treated symptoms would likely have had to use it for the rest of my life. What a depressing thought knowing what I now knew. Looking at these ugly red splotches on my arms and legs and the terrible itching was the final motivation I needed to find a holistic, integrative medical professional to figure this out. I found a local nutritionist who had me take several tests, and discovered I had severe fungal and bacterial overgrowth in my gut which led to something called leaky gut. She put me on a protocol of herbal supplements, a specific strain of probiotic, and helped me tweak my diet, and by golly the dermatitis went away! No more ugly red splotches, no more itching. My body like God intended healed itself, no medicine required. Talk about mind blowing.

This doesn’t mean medicine doesn’t have its place, but even when it’s appropriate it isn’t what heals us so much as it allows the body to heal itself. That was the paradigm shift, that God created our bodies, and the ridiculously complex immune systems he gave us, to heal themselves. After six decades of believing the former, it was not an easy transition to fully embrace the latter, but dermatitis sealed the deal. I was automatically conditioned, like everyone had been prior to Covid, to run to the doctor whenever anything was wrong. I now look back with 20/20 hindsight and realize God had been leaving health breadcrumbs throughout my life to help me begin to see that he’s provided everything we need in creation to live healthy and well-functioning lives. Prior, like most others, I believed health and disease was a crap shoot, a matter, for lack of a better term, of luck. Now I know better. We are responsible for our health, or lack thereof.

The Apostle Paul and Bodily Exercise
For much of my Christian life I mocked those who were obsessed with health and exercise. I wanted to be healthy and exercised, but I assumed the people who obsessed about it were deluded, thinking they could live forever. Then Covid. I slowly came to believe our health isn’t merely something that’s nice to have if we’re fortunate, and something to be wished for, but something we have control over. It’s not a crap shoot, a mere roll of the dice. If we just happen to get the wrong number, bad luck, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, whatever. That is what we’ve been programmed to believe by a well-meaning medical establishment that is blind to their own indoctrination. Thankfully, with the explosion in knowledge and the Gutenberg Press of the 21^st century, the Internet, distributing it to anyone who wants it, the indoctrination is slowly being revealed for what it is, false information, also known as lies, about human health and disease.

Living 2000 years ago when the average lifespan was probably 30 or 40 years old, and knowledge about disease and health was guesswork, Paul couldn’t imagine what we know now. I would like to believe if he were writing to Timothy today, he might write something like this:

For physical training and your health is of great value, but godliness has even more value and for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

Paul and people in the ancient world in general did have some idea what they did had some effect on their health. He even implies in chapter 5 that Timothy’s ill health is bad for his ministry and that he should do something about that:

²³Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.

Think about what he might say if he had our knowledge about the human body and could suggest more than wine. Or what he might say about how much value physical training and our health has if the choices we made allowed us to live productive, healthy lives into our 90s. Let’s look at this theologically and get a big picture perspective on these issues.

God has chosen to reveal himself to us in two ways, one through His creation, and the other verbally through His word, Scripture, in Greek, graphé-γραφή, the writings. In Matthew 4, Jesus tells us that “man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Here Jesus is telling us both are required for life, physical substance from the earth and spiritual substance from God’s word. Without either one we die. Regarding the former, God’s material created order, Paul tells us this in Romans 1:

²⁰For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so they are without excuse.

We can see the maker of matter through His matter, the Creator of all things from His creation. Through it He is “clearly seen,” no ambiguity, no guesswork whatsoever. And since all knowledge has it origin in God, we gain knowledge of God through His creation. In the Middle Ages, Christians came to see these as two books, the book of nature and the book of Scripture.

Related to both, is the concept of progressive revelation. As we can see in Scripture, God doesn’t pull up the dump truck of revelation and unload it all at once. Rather, he slowly, painstakingly slowly (God is never in a hurry), revealed Himself and knowledge about the nature of reality over 2000 years to give us our Bibles. When the canon of Scripture was closed, that didn’t mean God stopped revealing himself. The Bible itself being the revelation of God is a bottomless ocean, the depths of which can never be fully comprehended, but He’s also revealing Himself slowly but surely in creation. Knowledge grew slowly through the first 1500 years of so of the church, but when the scientific revolution started this process picked up speed. People who lived at the turn of the 20^th century were dumbfounded at the growth of technology and knowledge. A hundred years later that had multiplied exponentially, and in the third decade of the 21^st century, human knowledge is mind boggling. All of it is revelation from God, including knowledge about the human body and our health.

Our Health, Our Responsibility
When we lived in Illinois, the Chicago area, we went to a large church, and because we’re not fans of modern praise music, we attended the traditional service, which meant there were a lot more older people there. Many times I would see some old guy with a cane or something hunched over hobbling down the isle to his seat, and I would tell my family, I don’t want to be that guy. Yet I really didn’t believe I had control of whether I became that guy or not. Sure, to some degree I did, but I still bought into the crap shoot mentality of health and illness. Knowing better now, I see Jesus’ words in the parable of the master and the servant in Luke 12 as relevant for this discussion:

⁴⁷And that servant who knew his master’s will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating. ⁴⁸But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating. Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.

Related to health and the body, we can’t pretend the last 2000 years didn’t happen, specifically that there has been an explosion of knowledge about the human body, disease, food, exercise, and optimal health. Nor can we pretend that we don’t have agency, and that the choices we make have implications for our health, nor that all this is a gift of God to be utilized for his glory and in service to others. To whom much is given applies here as much as to any of the other gifts of life God has graciously granted us. We’re also taught by Jesus in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 that he expects us to invest what he’s given us to multiply it and not bury it in the ground.

Lastly, who wouldn’t rather be healthy than sick? If God has given us the knowledge and technology to be the former rather than the latter, why wouldn’t we do that? And further, if being healthy allows us to more effectively and for more years be part of God’s glorious effort of bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, shouldn’t we do that? Think about the implications of this. Effectively, it means physical training and our health has great value not only for this life but for the one to come. There are spiritual, eternal implications for the choices we make regarding our health, including how much we exercise, what we eat, how much we sleep, and how we handle our stress. No more do we need to play the physical off the spiritual, as if somehow they were either in conflict or mutually exclusive. They are both oriented to the same end; the telos, purpose, of each is the glory of God, our good and the good of others. Because of this, the Apostle Paul would tell us:

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

What I’ve learned and what I’m sharing here is that physical health and it’s connection to spiritual reality is part of the 21^st century Great Awakening. As a convinced postmillennialist, I now believe that what Isaiah tells us about the “new heavens and earth” in chapter 65 is becoming a reality it our time.

²⁰“Never again will there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not live out his years;
the one who dies at a hundred
will be thought a mere child;
the one who fails to reach a hundred
will be considered accursed.

What an exciting time to be alive! And remember, God has chosen us to be here, you, me, and everyone one else, to be alive at this very moment, as Paul tells us in Acts 17:26:

He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.

Onward Christian soldiers!

To a Thousand Generations: The Triumph of the Covenant

Oct 23, 2024 | Theology

I was born and raised a Catholic which was my religious life until I went away to college at 18 and was born-again into an Evangelical and Protestant faith bearing little resemblance to Catholicism. The primary reason I embraced this new version of Christianity was because I learned the Bible stated clearly, many times, I could be assured when I die I would go to heaven, that such assurance was mine if I trusted in Christ. How come, I wondered, I’d never been told this in my 18 years as a Catholic. The fear of going to hell when I died was a very real presence in my life, and as I understood the Catholic faith I could not have assurance of my salvation. When I learned of this I was not a happy camper, and became virulently anti-Catholic for a number of years.

I was born-again into a typically Baptist environment of the 1970s “Jesus Revolution,” and like my boomer brothers and sisters was dunked and re-baptized because I guess I thought the first one didn’t take, or something. Being a Baptist was among the anti-Catholic responses of my young faith, and baptizing babies made no sense to me, or any sense to anyone I associated with in the first five years and four months of my Christian life. Then by God’s wonderful providence, I met a man named Steve Kennedy. One evening I went to his house in Newport Beach to meet him for the first time, and he introduced me to Reformed Theology. He would become a mentor of mine, and change the course of my young life (I have a wife and three children and two and a half grandchildren because of this secondary cause). I could accept TULIP, that made sense, but baptizing babies? No way! That was Catholic!

One Sunday morning not too long after I met Steve I went to a Reformed Baptist church, of course, and it so happens, also in God’s wonderful providence, they were doing a baby dedication that morning. I had learned from Steve the biblical concept of covenant, something rarely discussed in the non-Reformed circles I’d been involved in. As they were dedicating their babies a thought unbidden crashed into my brain; they are treating their children as strangers to the covenant! And it ticked me off. I have no idea where the thought came from, but it was powerful and I was instantly converted to paedobaptism. I could see in an instant that the faith of our fathers was, is, and always would be a generational faith. The Lord thought this idea was important enough that just prior to the Israelites going into the promised land after 40 years wandering in the wilderness, He felt the need to emphasize the specifically generational nature of the faith. We read this in Deuteronomy 7:9, and there are many more, but this specific verse gives us the practically eternal nature of His covenant faithfulness:

⁹Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.

If a generation is 20 years, that would be 20,000 years! We’re just getting started!

The Bible teaches us that baptism, and this includes baptizing babies, is more about God’s covenant faithfulness than it is about our personal decision to trust Christ. As the Westminster Confession says, it is a “sign and seal of the covenant of grace” (28). When Christ came, God’s covenant promises didn’t all of a sudden become solely focused on individuals, but were now capable of being fulfilled to the generations because of what he accomplished on the cross. Jews in the first century, including Jesus, were incapable of seeing their ancient faith in individualistic baptistic terms because God’s covenant promises to His people was always about “you and your children” (Acts 2:39). Our generational faith is rooted in the concept of covenant.

The Centrality of Covenant in Biblical Religion
I can say this with absolute certainty: There is nothing as important in the redemptive history found in our Bibles as the covenant. There is actually more than one, but they are subsumed in the ultimate covenant of redemption made between the Triune God in eternity past. Jesus in John 6 gives us a glimpse of what happened in this covenant when he says:

³⁸For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. ³⁹And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. ⁴⁰For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.

Jesus was given his name (Matt. 1:21) to accomplish what he shares with us here, that “he will save his people from their sins.” His people, the ones he will save from their sins, are the people God the Father gave the Son in eternity past, specifically to raise them up at the last day. Those given by the Father will believe in the Son, will come to faith in him. You can theologically call this whatever you like, but I call it biblical, and it is bound up in God’s covenant promises revealed to us in redemptive history.

I will contrast the biblical concept of covenant with the primary competing alternative in the modern West, secularism, later, but its centrality to redemptive history happens immediately after the fall in Genesis 3. When Adam and Eve rebelled and introduced sin and all its consequences into the world God reveals that the solution to this catastrophe has already been put in place, and notice who is calling the shots:

¹⁵And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will strikeyour head,
and you will strike his heel.

I like the NIV using “crush” for the second “strike” but the Hebrew uses the same word. Clearly, striking a head will be more damaging than striking a heal, and ultimately cause fatal damage. We also learn from this promise of God that humanity will be divided into two mutually exclusive camps, the offspring or seed of the woman, and the offspring of the serpent. As much as we might not like the implications, this was all determined before God even created the world, and we’re playing our part in this cosmic drama.

The covenant next appears with Noah in Genesis 9:

⁸Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: ⁹“I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you ¹⁰and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. ¹¹I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Although this isn’t specifically a promise related to salvation from sin, notice again it is to Noah and his descendants, as are all the covenant promises of God to His people.

God’s covenant implementation starts in earnest with Abram in Genesis 12 when He calls him out of his homeland to another land and that he will make him “into a great nation.” The covenant will be made official in chapter 15, but in chapter 13 showing Abram the land he will inherit he says to him:

¹⁶I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted.

The promise, the covenant, is always to Abram and his offspring. In chapter 15 the Lord promises Abram that his offspring will be as numerous as the stars in the sky, and then he performs a very strange ceremony to modern sensibilities to confirm the covenant with Abram. Covenants were legal agreements in the ancient world with blessings and curses as stipulations, shown vividly in this ceremony. The strange thing about this ceremony isn’t just animals being cut in half, which was common at the time indicating that if the stipulations were not followed, may that party end up like the animals. What was strange is that the Lord in the ceremony indicated he would be responsible for both sides of the agreement. It was a unilateral covenant for two parties because man could never hold up his end of the agreement.

In chapter 17 the Lord confirms his covenant with Abram through the sign and seal of circumcision and changes his name to Abraham. The key point is that God’s covenant promise to Abraham is generational:

⁹Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. ¹⁰This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised.

When Isaac is born, the Lord puts Abraham to the ultimate test asking him to sacrifice his son, his only son, and when he passes the test by completely trusting the Lord in the face of such an absurdity the covenant is yet again confirmed:

¹⁷I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, ¹⁸and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”

The Lord confirms his covenant with Isaac and Jacob, and the details yet again make the point that God’s covenant promises have always been, and continue to be, generational. This did not stop with the New Covenant. As I quoted Peter above, it is and always will be, “to you and your children.”

The Appeal of the Redemptive Covenant Story to the Next Generation
All Christians of whatever theological tradition want to pass their faith on to the next generation and generations to come, but this isn’t happening to the extent it should be. Thus the rise some years back of the “nones,” those who pick “None of the above” when asked on surveys about their religion. This is unacceptable. Why is it happening? When I wrote my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, starting in 2015, the “nones” were big news. When I read my first story of what we now call a “deconversion,” I was livid. How in the world, I thought, could the competing faith of secularism, a life where God is secondary or not welcome at all, be more appealing to young people raised in Christian homes than Christianity? If we can’t sell our children on the attractiveness of the Christian story, something is wrong. Or we’re not trying, thinking their faith will take care of itself. Many parents take their children to church and assume that will take care of them, but it won’t. As I title the first section of my book, “It’s All About Parents.” We determine whether their faith is generational or not. And for those who don’t like the sound of that, we are as responsible in our lives as God is sovereign over them. How do we do that?

The answer is actually quite simple. It’s all about the story. Apologetics, or defending the veracity of Christianity is crucial, but that is all part of helping them see the grand narrative structure of the story we as Christians are part of. Every human being whether they consciously think about it or not, and most don’t, see themselves as part of some kind of narrative, a story arc, that gives meaning to their existence. In the 21^st century post-Christian West the competing story is a ubiquitous all pervasive secularism. Either we sell our children on God’s covenant story in history, or the secular culture will sell them on its story. And the secular culture is selling them twenty-four/seven. Thankfully, the secular story is weak and pathetic, but it’s up to us as parents to make the case to our children, and it’s a very easy case to make.

Since the so-called Enlightenment, Western civilization has had two diametrically opposed origin stories, and thus two ways to read history. As rationalism ascended post Descartes in the mid-1600s, and God was relegated to the fringes of society as persona non grata (an unwelcome presence), there needed to be some other plausible account of things. The most common question in all of human history, why? will be asked and must have an answer, even if it’s one as absurd as everything came from nothing for no reason at all. Enter Satan’s greatest post-fall invention into the stream of history, Charles Darwin and his 1859 Origin of species. It’s brilliant! Perfect, really. As atheist Richard Dawkins said one hundred and fifty years later, evolution has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist—albeit a deluded one. But the insidious beauty of Darwinian evolution was that in the 19th century it was a plausible explanation for heathens who insisted man gets to be his own god. Looked at from the scientific knowledge of 2024, however, and it is almost comical, if it weren’t so tragic.

Survival of the fittest was sinful man’s attempt to imbue life with meaning, hope, and purpose where it inherently has none. Without God the Creator, all we are is star dust, a chance collocation of meaningless atoms, so much lucky dirt, a little more than mere animals who by some freak chance of “natural” selection can talk and think. We have to make our own meaning in a fundamentally meaningless universe, between two poles of meaninglessness, as the Great RC Sproul put it, where we came from, meaningless, and where we’re going, meaningless, back to dust. We have to build our hope on circumstances we think we’ll like, and create purpose in trying to attain them, all the while knowing we are hurdling toward inevitable death, turning into the dust from which we came. How inspiring! Life is basically a Woody Allen movie. One of my favorite scenes is in his 1986 hit movie Hannah and Her Sisters. Allen, unsurprisingly, plays a hypochondriac and he’s convinced he has brain cancer. This scene on the sidewalk is right after the doctor gives him a clean bill of health. He’s skipping and jumping saying he’s not going to die, then it hits him.

Woody Allen movies were a great apologetics tool I used with my children as they were growing up. We can have Christianity, which gives our lives real meaning, hope, and purpose, and it also happens to be true, or secularism which promises everything and delivers nothing, and to add insult to injury, it’s a lie. Life becomes a Woody Allen movie, ending either in despair or mostly resignation.

The Christian covenant story, by contrast, of God working out his purposes for our lives, and our children’s lives, and the world’s redemption is epic. And as they said in the old boomer movie days in the 60s, it’s in technicolor! I could write and talk for days about the meaning, hope, and purpose Christianity gives our lives, but I will restrain myself, and not tax your patience. I will end with two quotes, one from the greatest apologist and story teller combo of the 20^th century, C. S. Lewis, and the other from the Bible. Lewis, an ex-atheist realized in his 30s that atheism had zero explanatory power, meaning it has no plausible explanation for anything:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

We either give our kids puzzle pieces for a puzzle that doesn’t even exist, or we give them the story into which all puzzle pieces ultimately fit. The Apostle Paul said something about those pieces fitting together by the Puzzle Grandmaster in Romans 8:28:

²⁸And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

I used to joke with my children, and often still do, that Paul certainly didn’t mean all; maybe 95%, but all? Yep, every single thing, every moment of every second of every day, God is working in us, on us, and through us for our good and his glory. Talk about hope, meaning, and purpose! Add to that we get to change the world in our own little corner of it, to advance God’s kingdom on earth and His glory to this fallen world.

That, brothers and sisters, is an easy sell. And children raised with it, will never abandon their faith.

Evangelicals and Their Ambivalence to God’s Law

Sep 4, 2024 | Theology

I’m currently reading Greg Bahsen’s Theonomy in Christian Ethics, an extensive study about God’s law (theos-nomos) as it applies to ethics, the study of the principles of right and wrong conduct. We Evangelicals tend to have a love/hate relationship to God’s law. On the one hand it’s God’s, so we know it is a reflection of his character and our obedience is required. On the other, it condemns us because keeping it to the degree we must is impossible for sinful human beings. When Jesus says, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48), I reply, good luck! Calvin calls this use of the law a mirror because when we look into it, it’s not pretty. It condemns us specifically so we can realize our helplessness before our Holy Creator God, and be driven to Christ and his shed blood for us, he who fulfilled the law in our place.

Unfortunately, for most Christians because of the history of revivalistic fundamentalist Christianity, this is about as far as it goes. Our tendency is to be antinomian, against law, because we are saved by grace and not by works of the law, as Paul says for example in Galatians 2:16. We see God’s law as primarily if not solely a hostile force. If we’re honest, though, we’re not quite sure what to think about God’s law, thus the ambivalence. Bahnsen shows this isn’t just lay people who think God’s law isn’t relevant to Christian ethics. He quotes numerous scholars from various Christian traditions, including his and my Reformed tradition, who all discount God’s law to one degree or another.

My first encounter to the relevance of God’s law to the Christian life came after I’d been a Christian for over five years. It came in the form of my introduction to Reformed theology and the soteriology of John Calvin. I learned to see the purpose of God’s law as relevant to the Christian life, not as something only to drive me to the cross. I’m sure I studied it in seminary and developed some convictions at the time, but that was a long time ago and the study of God’s law never became a priority after that. Then in August 2022 when I embraced postmillennial eschatology, I found people in that camp have no ambivalence toward God’s law whatsoever. I wrote about theonomy and God’s law in my latest book, but I’m really just beginning this journey of developing my own convictions, specifically how God’s law relates to my sanctification and applies to the governing of nations.

The Fulfillment of the Law
Unfortunately, as Bahnsen points out, Christians have effectively become secularists when it comes to law in society. The ethics of Christianity, of what is right and wrong, is only applied to individual Christians, and even there, God’s law is not embraced as relevant to the Christian’s sanctification. Christians have no problem citing the Sermon on the Mount as foundational to Christian ethics, but when it comes to the L word we get cold feet. For some reason we ignore or explain away this passage about Jesus not abolishing the Law right in the middle of that sermon:

¹⁷“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. ¹⁸For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. ¹⁹Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. ²⁰For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

I’m not sure how you get from this to God’s law being only a mirror for the Christian to drive him to Christ, but that’s been the dominant view in Evangelicalism since the Second Great Awakening in the early 19^th century.

First let’s ask what it means when Jesus says he’s come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. Bahnsen goes into great detail, quoting numerous scholars and perspectives. Giving away his own, he titles this chapter, “The Abiding Validity of the Law in Exhaustive Detail.” No ambivalence there! After an extensive survey of various scholars and lexical analysis of the text, he comes to this conclusion:

It is hard to imagine how Jesus could have more intensely affirmed that every bit of the law remains binding in the gospel age.

He also quotes Charles Spurgeon commenting on v. 17 which for most Christians lends significant credibility:

The law of God he established and confirmed. . . . our king has not come to abrogate the law but to confirm and reassert it.

What Jesus is saying about abolish and fulfill is related directly to something the Pharisees, the most respected Jewish religious professionals of the day, did to in some way abolish or abrogate it, to somehow make it null and void. We know from a later rebuke of Jesus that they “strain out a gnat and swallow a camel” (Matt. 23:24). The Greek word refers to straining water through a cloth or sieve to remove impurities, which relates back to an obscure part of the law they interpreted as meaning they should purify their water. They were so focused on the details of the law, the smallest minutia that in fact they went beyond the words and intent of the law, and at the same time ignored immense sins (swallowing camels) like pride, greed, and arrogance.

There is a lot of debate, and always will be, as to what exactly all this means. We know from the Apostle Paul that righteousness cannot be obtained by obedience to the law. We also know as Protestant Evangelical Christians, if that is what we are, that Christ lived the perfect obedience to the law that is required by God’s holiness, and his righteousness has been legally granted to us in him, it is forensic. The law could never do this, thus it condemns us, but the law itself is still valid for us, as Jesus says, not one jot or one tittle (KJV v. 18) shall pass away until everything is accomplished or fulfilled. Most agree this means at the end of the age, the consummation of all things in the second coming of Christ. It is necessary then to conclude what Bhansen does, though many won’t, that the law has an abiding validity in exhaustive detail. Of course we all know, pun intended, the devil is in the details.

Misunderstanding God’s Law as Totalitarian
What is it about God’s law that creates such ambivalence in modern Christians, both as relates to us personally as Christians, and its application in society? I recently realized the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of law itself. We tend to think of law as totalitarian, but experience law as liberty. The two concepts, totalitarianism and liberty, are diametrically opposed to one another. The former seeks to control everything, all thought and behavior, while the latter gives wide latitude for people to determine their own thoughts and behavior.

I use the contrast of the French and American Revolutions here frequently to explain the only two choices of existence in a fallen world, totalitarianism and liberty, the former inspired by an anti-Christian secularism, and the latter by a widely accepted Protestant Christianity. Robespierre and his buddies on the left introduced what came to be called the Reign of Terror. Anyone not thinking and acting a certain way was condemned to death by the infamous Madam de Guillotine. In American, by contrast, the people were free to think and act within the confines of the law with a limited government, and we call that liberty.

The modern world has given us numerous revolutions inspired by the French, each one bloodier than the next. We learn from the 20^th century varieties the true nature of totalitarianism which by contrast enables us to better understand liberty and its relation to law. A simple definition of totalitarianism is total and comprehensive control of all aspects of life, including all thought and action of the people. This is of course impossible, which is why totalitarian regimes never last. In addition to raw history, there are numerous fictional accounts that give us a window into the totalitarian mind, the presumption that total control is possible. One is the classic novel by George Orwell, 1984. The protagonist, Winston Smith, resists the ubiquitous thought control throughout the story, lying when it is required to escape punishment, but it doesn’t work. The state in the form of Big Brother demands total, sincere fealty, and in the end brain washing accomplishes this in Winston when he genuinely falls in love with Big Brother. He now believes two and two equals five. The total in totalitarianism is complete. The other is much less well known, a 1983 movie called The Lives of Others about life in Soviet East Berlin and their secret police, the Stasi. This is an excellent depiction of the inevitable failure of trying total control human beings, who because they are made in God’s image cannot be totally controlled.

It is important to explore the failed attempts at implementing totalitarianism in various countries to contrast it with liberty, but more importantly, to show us what law is not, and specifically God’s law. I am convinced that the ambivalence or hostility to God’s law is in the misunderstanding of it as fundamentally totalitarian, as if the purpose of the law is to control every aspect of people’s lives. In fact, just the opposite is true. James in chapter 1 of his epistle is imploring Christians to be not just hearers but doers of the word, and then he says this:

²⁵But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it—he will be blessed in what he does.

The word freedom can be translated as liberty, and means freedom from slavery. James uses the same phrase in chapter 2, ^“So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty,” the context being the Ten Commandments. We see this as well in the Old Testament in Isaiah 61:1, something Jesus proclaims as he announces his ministry in his hometown of Nazareth (Luke 4)

¹⁸“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
    and recovering of sight to the blind,
    to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
¹⁹to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

This liberty can be found only within the confines of obedience to God’s law, which can only truly be had by those freed from their bondage to sin by the gospel. God’s law is not a fence to keep us in, but a guardrail to keep us safe so we don’t careen down the cliff and crash into a ball of flames on the rocks of life.

The Law’s Abiding Validity for the Christian and Societal Life
First and briefly, it seems the law’s validity for our Christian lives and sanctification should be obvious. I will quote Paul from 2 Tim. 3 to make the point:

¹⁶All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, ¹⁷so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

The Scripture Paul refers to is the Old Testament, the only Bible they had. All includes God’s law, every jot and tittle, lived as best we can in love, which as Jesus told is the fulfillment of the law. Read Psalm 119 if you need a reminder of the importance of God’s law for God’s people.

The abiding validity of God’s law for society is more complicated. There is a reason God starts the revelation of his law with the Ten Commandments. Those are the broad principles under which people should live to have true liberty and human flourishing, both individually and in community (i.e., nations). God didn’t start with details, with the minutia. Those developed over time because of the messiness of life lived in a fallen world among fallen people in fallen bodies. Take the ninth commandment to not lie or bear false witness against your neighbor. The command to not lie is not absolute. Rahab the prostitute lied to protect the Hebrew spies in Jericho, and not only was this prostitute and her family spared from the city’s destruction, but she is in the hall of fame of faith in Hebrews 11. Leave it to God to put a prostitute in the hall of fame of faith! Or take Corrie Ten Boom during WWII in the Netherlands when the Nazis took over. She was part of a group hiding Jews from the Nazis, and when they were asked if they were hiding Jews, of course they said no, they lied, and saved lives.

Over time people being the sinners they are, brought specific issues before Moses so he could judge conflicts and dispense justice. It soon became too much for him. When his father-in-law Jethro saw this, he told Moses to appoint judges among the people so he wouldn’t have to do it all himself. Out of this arose something we call case law which are laws based on precedents from previous cases because of the many varieties, for example, of bearing false witness. In the Christian West Alfred the Great in the 9^th century in what is now England established his law based on the Ten Commandments, out of which eventually flowed the liberty developed in England and fulfilled in America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The primary principle is one of government of limited means, and laws with broad boundaries in which people can live freely without any coercion of the government.

How we decide what the validity of the law is in exhaustive detail, in Bahnsen’s words, is the challenge. The important thing to remember is that exhaustive detail is not totalitarian. If we do not break the law we are free to do whatever we want within the confines of the law. And the fewer the laws the healthier a society. A representative republic like America should not need a plethora of laws to cover a self-governing people. America as currently constituted is not a healthy society as indicated by its multitudinous laws.

Also, thinking there are simplistic answers like there is a one-to-one correlation between Israel’s laws and America, for instance, is a category error. America isn’t Israel, and every nation is unique in how it is arranged. Finally, we must remember there is no neutrality, thus the issue isn’t theocracy or theonomy; every nation is ruled by a god or a worldview and set of ultimate values. The question is which God. The question in the West is will it be the god of secularism and tyranny, or the God of the Bible and liberty. As Paul says in Romans 13 discussing the Ten Commandments, ^“Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” The goal of a biblically based theocracy isn’t control, but loving our neighbors so our society can truly flourish. Only God’s law can do that.

Christians Granted on Behalf of Christ to Suffer for Him: To What End?

Jul 10, 2024 | Theology

Nobody likes to suffer. Nobody likes pain. Discomfort discomforts us. Why do we complain? Because we don’t like something. Why don’t we like something? Because we only seem harm in it, not benefit. We are under the impression if everything in our lives is going our way, is to our liking, then that is good. When things don’t, that is bad. Why do we think this? Because the stuff that is not good is generally unpleasant, and unpleasant is well, unpleasant! When we become Christians, however, this way of thinking, a worldly, secular, God-less way, should stop. Of course, we can’t go cold turkey because we’re used to seeing the world this way, and complaining comes naturally. Take a look at the Israelites after God brings them out of the bondage of their Egyptian slavery. They complain about dying of thirst and hunger in the desert, and long to go back to the “fleshpots” of Egypt. We mock them for such stupidity, as if we would do any differently. We would not! We’re complainers too. It’s one of the features of being a sinner.

What is the most common question in the history of humanity? Why God? And because there is no answer outside of the truth revealed to us in Scripture and in Christ, we think the only answer is, just because; deal with it. Because people don’t get the answer they want, many get angry at God and reject him. I have the answer though, and while it doesn’t make life any easier, it’s a wonderful way to live.

I’ve only been at this Christianity thing for 45 or so years, so I’m just getting started, but God has taught me a few things along the way, the process always a version of pain and frustration, mostly little and petty, sometimes more than a little. Some time ago I was speaking to a family member about the travails of his life, and an apt phrase came to mind I’d never heard before that I remember. I told him, what you’re going through is the “pain of sanctification.” That, brothers and sisters, is called life. I hate to break it to you, but if everything is going well, and life is easy, that’s not good. We learn nothing floating downstream. There is no sanctification in ease. It is the natural friction of life that builds spiritual strength. Life is like climbing a mountain, mostly up. Just when you get to the peak and take a little breath, you look up and notice there is a higher mountain up ahead. Ugh.

This seemingly unfortunate fact of existence is why we are enjoined throughout Scripture to give thanks, sometimes exhorted, others commanded. It won’t surprise us that the word thanks or thanksgiving is found most often in the book of Psalms. The one verse that convicts me most is from the Apostle Paul in I Thessalonians 5:18:

Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

Although Paul is often blunt, this is unusually blunt. And he prefaces this command with two others, “¹⁶Rejoice always, ¹⁷pray continually.” Those are three pretty all-encompassing adverbs! All, always, continually. Doesn’t leave us much wiggle room now does it. We get a magazine from Voice of the Martyrs every month, and these commands take on a different hue at that level of suffering. For most of us who live in material prosperity and liberty, we’ll never know that kind of suffering, but Paul’s commands apply to all of us equally no matter what God calls us to or he allows or causes life to throw at us.

I started doing down the sanctification rabbit hole when I read Philippians 1 earlier this year, and parked for a bit on verse 27 where Paul says, “conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” I wondered what Paul meant when he wrote those words, and what he was thinking what such a manner looks like. When I got to verse 29 is when I took the dive:

²⁹For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him, ³⁰since you are going through the same struggle you saw I had, and now hear that I still have.

Is there, I wondered, some connection between living in a worthy manner and suffering.

John Calvin Gives the Answer
That name does strange things to some people, as we say nowadays, triggers them. For those of you who might be guilty of that, just ignore the name and focus on the content. Most people who don’t like Calvin or Calvinism have never read him, and if they did they would be pleasantly surprised when he doesn’t at all fit their negative stereotype. Sorry, but I had to defend my man Calvin because so many think they know what he believes, and they have no idea.

Anyway, I’m reading very slowly through Isaiah with Calvin. The morning I read Phillipians 1, I also read a passage as he is working his way through chapter two. You’ll notice reading through Isaiah that God’s judgment against Israel is a consistent theme. We tend not to apply it to our lives because, after all, we believe in Jesus, and as Paul says, we are “in Christ,” so God’s wrath and judgment was fully poured out on him for us. Correct, but we’re still confronted with the inconvenient fact of our sin, which as we are all aware doesn’t go away, at least not easily or without a struggle. That process is the pain of sanctification.

Isaiah 2 is a magnificent Messianic chapter, and depending on your understanding of the term, “last days,” will determine how you interpret it. Being postmillennial I see it as having commenced when Jesus rose from the dead, ascended to the right hand of God, and sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost. I believe these stirring words from this chapter were fulfilled on that day:

²In the last days

the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
    as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
    and all nations will stream to it.

³Many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
    to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
    so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
    the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
⁴He will judge between the nations
    and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
    and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
    nor will they train for war anymore.

⁵Come, descendants of Jacob,
    let us walk in the light of the Lord.

I don’t have the space to argue the postmillennial position here, but if you’re curious why I would think something so counter intuitive to modern Evangelicals, read The Millennium by Loraine Boettner and Victory in Jesus: The Bright Hope of Postmillennialism by Greg Bahnsen.

The fundamental fact of redemption is that Jesus accomplished all this in his first advent, and the working out of that redemption of His people and His earth applies not only to the church, but to the entire world. Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords. Remember, John tells us that God so loved the entire world, the cosmos, so not just the individual people who make up His body, His people. And as we know, God is never in a hurry, and his working redemption in history is a very slow incremental process, like a mustard seed becoming the biggest tree in the garden, and yeast working its way through a huge batch of dough (Matt. 13). We’re only 2000 years in, but my what God has accomplished so far is magnificent. Imagine what he can do in the next 2000!

Which brings us to judgment and Calvin, and the purpose of it in the Christian life, or sanctification. Calvin takes verse four specifically to be about this fact, that God is judging “between the nations” to bring peace on earth, good will toward men, a reminder of yuletide. Calvin tells us the word rendered “settle disputes” means to expostulate, sometimes to correct, and likewise to prepare. He continues:

But the ordinary interpretation is most suitable to this passage in which the Prophet speaks of the reformation of the Church. For we need correction, that we may learn to submit ourselves to God; because, in consequences of our obstinacy which belongs to our nature, we shall never make progress in the word of God, till we have been subdued by violence.

Have you ever thought you, wretched sinner that you are, need to be subdued by violence? Me neither. That seems kind of harsh, but as he says, we are obstinate little buggers, and God often has to go to extremes to get our attention. I know he does with me. This is the reason I would never want to be young again; I’ve gone through enough “violence” for one lifetime. I would also change none of it because God is making me the man he wants me to be, like it or not! And most of the time, I do not. Although I trust because of the results maybe others like me a little more.

As an aside, Calvin throughout his writing refers to the OT saints as “the Church.” We, Calvin and I, and Presbyterians in general, believe God’s people prior to the coming of their Messiah are part of the same covenant community of God’s people after his death and resurrection. So Israel was the Church, God’s “called out” ones, Greek ekklésia- ἐκκλησία, as clearly Israel was.

What is the Purpose of Suffering in the Christian Life?
Given a cross on which people were brutally tortured and crucified is at the heart of the Christian religion, it doesn’t surprise us that suffering is as well. Suffering, however, is something human beings don’t even like to think about, let alone endure, but think about and endure it we must. The problem is that our understanding of suffering is too narrow because we think it is primarily physical in nature, but it can be psychological and emotional as well, and whatever the suffering might entail, for the Christian none of it is in vain.

We also don’t think of suffering as a blessing, but as something that is primarily negative, and to be avoided . As I said above, nobody likes to suffer, but as Paul says suffering has been granted to us by God. That doesn’t sound like a negative, does it. The Greek word Paul uses for granted is where we get our English word charisma, and it means to show favor or kindness. Thinking of suffering as a favor is counter intuitive to us, even nonsensical, but that is the Christian understanding of suffering. For a Christian, suffering is an unpleasant, inconvenience, and sometimes bad can be good because God promises all of it is for our good and His glory. Nothing that happens in the Christian’s life is in vain.

Which brings me to one of the most important blessings of the Christian life, our God-given telos, the Greek word for purpose. The origin of the concept comes from Aristotle and his four causes. For The Philosopher, as Aquinas called him, a cause was the reason for the existence of a thing. So let’s use a mundane example to explain the idea, a table.

Formal Cause-The idea or concept of the table in the mind of its creator.
Material Cause-The physical stuff, wood, out of which the table will be made.
Efficient Cause-The person doing the crafting of the table.
Final Cause-The purpose, or telos, of the thing for what it will be used.

For the Christian, our telos, the cause of our existence is God, and not just any divine being, but God in Christ. Big difference, as we’ll see. The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks: What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. The only true fulfillment comes from our relationship to our Creator in Christ and through Christ. God is our formal, material, efficient, and final cause.

By contrast, people who have imbibed secularism like the air they breathe, and its Darwinian assumptions, have no formal cause or final cause. Add to that depressing fact that the material of which they are made comes from nothing for no reason at all, and the efficient cause of their existence is chance because circumstances with no purpose do the crafting. The final cause, the purpose of their existence as they see it, is their fulfillment and happiness. This vision of their reality doesn’t offer much of either of those. In America, upwards of 50,000(!) people every year successfully kill themselves, and many more try. Millions are addicted to various medications to ease their anxiety and depression. The telos of chance is a fickle God indeed.

All Things Work for Our Good
To finish this up let’s go back to Calvin and his blunt assessment that God needs to subdue us “by violence.” We learn in Hebrews 5 that Jesus “learned obedience from what he suffered,” and if so for the Son of God in the flesh, how much more we who are by nature self-centered rebellious little cretins who want to be our own gods. We have to be continually reminded of this inconvenient fact of our beings because our capacity for self-deception is endless. Thus the necessity of suffering in our lives. And just because it isn’t physical doesn’t mean it isn’t any less traumatic.

The title of this section is from Romans 8:28. I often joked with my children as I was raising them in our generational faith, that surely, Paul didn’t mean all. I mean, maybe 98 percent, but all? That’s crazy. Unless, of course, God is God, and in fact our Savior. Paul tells us he is confident “that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6). God finishes what he starts because He is God. God is sovereign, which means all powerful, which means, his will cannot be thwarted even by we rebellious sinners. Your theology may not allow you to believe this because we see people, and ourselves for that matter, resisting God all the time. But do we not take into account that too is not beyond God’s sovereign control of all things? He is not in control of only some things, or he would not be sovereign, and we would be. That is not an option. It’s one or the other.

Instead of trying to figure how all this works, how God is sovereign and yet we are accountable beings who have agency and whose choices really matter, we can let God be God and trust him. It all comes down to trust in the character of God, his goodness and love, and his absolute power. Either you believe this or you do not. I can promise you something if you do, Isaiah 26:3:

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.

If we want perfect peace, we’ll trust in Him, even through our suffering. I didn’t say it would be easy. Something to remember: work like it depends on you, pray because it depends on God.

Moralism and the Horrible Freeing Ubiquitousness of Sin

Jun 19, 2024 | Theology

Sin is all pervasive, ubiquitous. Like oxygen, in a fallen world it is everywhere.

In my first 5 plus years as a Christian I tried very hard to be more moral, to do what is right and be obedient to God, but I wasn’t very good at it. Thus, guilt was a constant companion. Then in February 1984 I was exposed to Reformed theology, soteriology to be exact, and realized my self-focus was a kind of morbid introspection. Christianity for me had been a matter of will, and if I could just determine strongly enough that I would overcome sin, by golly, I would overcome it! I knew I was a sinner and that perfection was not possible, but I guess I felt like it should be. I knew very well of forgiveness, the cross, and Christ as my Savior, so I had what the famous hymn calls blessed assurance. Nonetheless, there was always this nagging thing called sin that dogged my every step.

When I was introduced to Calvinism the best way I can explain it is that it was upside and down and inside out from how I had been looking at Christianity and my Christian life. Simplistically put, my focus shifted from me to God. My journey since, over 40 years, has taught me a lot about myself and sin, and specifically that sin is my constant companion. As my title implies, there is something terribly freeing about that. I came to call what I had been doing previously the fatal externalizing of sin, as if sin was merely what I do and not who I am. Or more accurately according to the Apostle Paul, sin inheres in my flesh, in Greek, sarx-σάρξ, and thus it is inescapable.

One conclusion I came to fairly early on is that if we see sin merely as something we do, and that it is primarily a matter of our will, then what we’re in effect doing is trivializing sin. Viewed this way, sin isn’t a mystery, terrible and profound beyond our comprehension, but something with enough effort we can control. That’s why I came to call it a fatal externalizing of sin because when it becomes an issue of our will, we are trivializing both sin and God’s salvation of us in Christ. The more profoundly deep and disturbing and powerful sin is, the more profound is the salvation from it. We can’t defeat sin by our will power, ever, as Paul makes abundantly clear in Romans 7. The struggle makes us a complete conundrum to ourselves, as Paul says, I don’t understand what I do. What I want to do I don’t do, and what I don’t want to do I do. He comes to the end in complete turmoil declaring himself a wretched man and asks, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” And he replies, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” He alone is our hope. But what exactly does that mean for how we live our Christian lives?

Before I get to that, I started thinking about all this when I came across this passage on sin from Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. He’s basically making a point about the profound nature of sin:

If we search the remotest past, I say that none of the saints, clad in the body of death (cf. Rom. 7:24), has attained to that goal of love so as to love God “with all his heart, all his mind, all his soul, and all his might” [Mark 10:30 and parallels]. I say furthermore, there was no one who was not plagued with concupiscence. Who will contradict this? Indeed, I see what sort of saints we imagine in our foolish superstition; the heavenly angels can scarcely compare with them in purity! But this goes against both Scripture and the evidence of experience. (VII, 5)

Calvin delineates three uses of the law and is speaking here of the law as a mirror that makes us painfully aware of our own sin compared to the holy law of God. The word concupiscence is not used anymore, but it means ardent desire, often sexual, but it’s much broader than that. What Calvin has in mind is the Tenth Commandment:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

The Tenth Commandment reveals to us that sin is a matter of desire as much as a matter of action. We can possibly get away with coveting without our neighbor knowing, but God knows, and in due course it will destroy us. No sin stays hidden or internal for long, which is why God warns us against it.

Daily Repentance
It wasn’t too many years ago that I realized the significance of Martin Luther starting his 95 Thesis with the foundational nature of repentance to the Christian life:

(1) When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” [Matthew 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

How could the Christian’s entire life be one of repentance unless their entire life was one of sin? Repentance is only necessary where there is sin. Most Christians, however, don’t appear to be rank sinners, anymore than they appear as disheveled and dirty bums. I’ve remarked to my wife many times over the years how incredibly kind and decent Christians are who I’ve come across at churches over 45 years, yet to our secular Christ hating elites Christians are hypocritical, narrow minded, homophobic, self-righteous bigots. I’ve never really met any of those, but I suppose one day I might.

Before I get to this ever present dynamic in the Christian life, I want to share the next two of Luther’s 95 thesis that clarify his meaning:

(2) This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.
(3) Yet it does not mean solely inner repentance; such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh.

First, Luther was just beginning to question the Catholic Church, of which he was a priest in good standing, so he needed to differentiate repentance from penance. He still believed in the latter at this point, but it was important not to confuse the two. Repentance doesn’t require a priest or someone else’s forgiveness because it is a requirement of right relationship to God in Christ. We might even say that the forgiveness in Christ is conditional. I know that will give some Christians pause, but it is simply biblical. One example is a verse all Christians should have memorized, 1 John 1:9:

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

If we do not confess our sins to God, that is agree with Him that whatever it is we have done or think or feel, is sin, then He will not forgive and purify us. It means forgiveness is conditional.

Second, Luther is saying in thesis 3 that “inner repentance” by itself is worthless if it is not accompanied by outer holiness and obedience to God’s law, i.e., “mortifications of the flesh.” Faith without works is dead is Christianity 101 (James 2). In Romans 6 Paul expresses his horror at the notion some were pushing that grace gives us license to sin. Christianity if it is real, and real in our lives, must make a stark difference in how we live, even if for some people it doesn’t appear much different on the outside, in their moral lives. Even the nicest little old ladies and the respectful young men that help them across the street are rank sinners deserving of hell, or sin isn’t sin. For those of us who don’t have the problem of appearing better than we are, there is hope for real change, which I will address below.

In my own Christian walk as I learned all this, and not too many years ago, I began to practice daily repentance every morning. It was probably around the time, 2012, when I made a commitment that every morning I would read the Bible and get on my knees and pray, one that I have kept ever since. I hadn’t come across Luther’s take on repentance yet, but part of my daily routine was a passage of Scripture I learned as a teenage Catholic in Mass one Sunday, Luke 18. Even at 16 or 17 years old I knew I had a lot more in common with the tax collector than the Pharisee. Like him I could beat my breast and ask, “God have mercy on me a sinner.” I remember the thought popping into my mind: “I can do that!” Given I knew I was a sinner and proficient at it, going away justified was appealing to me.

Christ is Our Righteousness and Sanctification
Which brings me to Christ as our righteousness. Sometime after I started daily repentance, I heard someone say something I’d known pretty much all my Christian life, but which struck me with a force I hadn’t felt before: The wrath of God was fully satisfied in Christ. This meant God could no longer be angry with me. The word propitiation is used four times in the epistles, Romans, Hebrews, and twice in I John. Here is one of the latter:

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

The Greek word is defined as:

(a) a sin offering, by which the wrath of the deity shall be appeased; a means of propitiation, (b) the covering of the ark, which was sprinkled with the atoning blood on the Day of Atonement.

Some translations use atonement instead, but that word doesn’t convey the concept of wrath or magnified anger. Sin is so horrific in its destructive effects on God’s creation, especially his greatest creation, man, that anger is the only appropriate response.

A critical point must be made in this regard. We live in a moral world of right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice. Every human being knows wrongs must be punished for justice to reign, and if they are not that is terribly morally wrong. In a court of law, if judges decide not a punish a law breaker because they just don’t feel like it, everyone knows that judge must be terminated or society will fall apart and chaos will reign. We don’t have to be taught that justice is required for peace, which requires punishment that brings atonement, reconciliation, or restitution, paying back for the wrong committed. How much more is this dynamic required for a holy infinite God and his rebellious creatures! If God simply forgives man without punishment, there is no justice and God would be like the judge who deserves to be fired. The entire earth would be filled with chaos because people would have no incentive to change; God will forgive me, no big deal. But the wages of sin is death because all sin does is bring death and destruction, its horrible wages.

To get a better grasp on just how serious God takes all this sin business, take some time to read again (and if you haven’t read it yet, you need to read it, now!), Isaiah 53. This was written 700 years before the passion of Christ, and it is brutal. Only God himself in the person of his son could pay the infinite price He required, and in order for God’s justice to be met and his wrath satisfied, appeased, it had to be done exactly this way.

Transformation is God’s Job
Which brings us to I Corinthians 1:30. I was aware of this verse much of my Christian life, but at some point post 2012, it struck me with a force I’d never encountered before:

And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

The standard which God requires for right relationship to Him, perfect righteousness, or always doing right as Calvin describes love, is Jesus. We trust that he is that impossible standard for us, no more guilt, shame, or needing to measure up to a standard we can never match anyway. And that’s only the beginning. Christ is also our sanctification, or the process of progressively becoming more like God Himself in Christ.

This was really the mind blower for me because as born-again, Protestant Christians, justification, how we’re made right with God, is the doorway into the Christian life. Once we walk through that, we’re in. The challenge though, is as soon as we hit the foyer, Romans 7 slaps us upside the head. Or at least it should, if we understand that sin is more than merely outward conformity to the law. I will say it as clearly as I can: We cannot overcome sin. That brothers and sisters is impossible. But you know who can? In Paul’s response to this dilemma: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” It is he who can rescue us from this body of death, both now in this life, and in the forever resurrected life to come.

This reminds me a something I read in Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology very early in my Reformed journey: Christianity is the work of God in the soul of man. Which means it is a supernatural work, a work beyond the natural, beyond what we ourselves can do. In a lightbulb moment talking to a family member some years ago I said our transformation is God’s business. I can’t change myself, not possible. If I think I can, I’m in for frustration and disappointment. Because Jesus is my sanctification, however, I am promised a real change in my being only the Holy Spirit living in, with, and through me can accomplish. All the pressure is off, and daily repentance reminds me that it is “not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit says the Lord Almighty.” (Zech. 4:6)

Lastly, the deeper and more profound the nature of sin, the deeper and more profound is the forgiveness, mercy, and grace of God I experience in the love He has poured into my heart by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5). I am totally unworthy, yet receive the lavish riches of his grace. Knowing this experientially in my life, not only am I compelled to love others, but God is making me able to love others, helping me to want to love others, especially those I don’t want to love. This is how we change the world.

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Peter Walking on Water – You Can Too!

The Importance of Both the Inner and Outer Body for the Christian

To a Thousand Generations: The Triumph of the Covenant

Evangelicals and Their Ambivalence to God’s Law

Christians Granted on Behalf of Christ to Suffer for Him: To What End?

Moralism and the Horrible Freeing Ubiquitousness of Sin

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