Evangelicals and Their Ambivalence to God’s Law

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. 18 For 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. 19 Therefore 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. 20 For 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 19th 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 20th 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:

25 But 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,
19 to 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: 

16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so 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 9th 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?

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, “16 Rejoice always, 17 pray 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:

29 For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him, 30 since 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:

2 In 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.

3 Many 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.
4 He 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.

5 Come, 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

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.

 

Recognizing the Spirit of God-Christology

Recognizing the Spirit of God-Christology

Jun 5, 2024 | Theology

For the first more than five years of my Christian life, theology was non-existent. There seemed to be this sense that theology was a distraction at best, and a waste of time at worst. If not overtly taught, I still picked up that theology would get in the way of the most important thing in the Christian life, my personal relationship with Jesus. That was mediated through the Bible alone, not books about the Bible. The Holy Spirit would enlighten me to the truth as I read, and that was all the theology I needed. In this version of Christianity, we read books about this relationship with Jesus, and how to live the holy life, but systematic study of doctrine was non-existent. Then I was introduced to Reformed theology at the ripe old age of 24, and it was as if I’d gone from street level up to the hundredth floor and could now see the panorama of the entire city.

One of the first things I learned is a word I’d never heard before, hermeneutics, or the general principles of interpreting a text. It came from Aristotle and can apply to any text, but given the importance of the Bible to the history of the world, it’s been associated almost exclusively with biblical interpretation. To say my Bible-and-me focus invited interpretive problems would be an understatement; it was a recipe for misinterpretation. Christians will obviously never agree on every interpretation, but once we agree the Bible is the authoritative, inspired infallible word of the Living God, the disagreements are relatively minor.

As we come to the text of Scripture, we need to keep these four things in mind if we are to interpret it rightly:

  1. Authorial intent: what we can assess the author intended when he wrote the words.
  2. Audience understanding: what the intended audience would have been expected to believe the words meant. This means context counts, specifically the moment in history in which it was written.
  3. Scripture interprets Scripture: never read a text in isolation from the rest of Scripture.
  4. Scripture is all about Christ (Luke 24): the overarching theme of God’s revelation to us is Jesus.

To fully benefit from the scope of redemptive history revealed to us in Scripture, we must understand how the puzzle pieces fit into the overall big picture. The pieces can only give us a limited picture, and an easily distorted one. Fortunately, we’re not in this alone, which is why we must read more than just the Bible. We have easy access to books, and the Internet, to help us grow in our understanding of the big picture, and all the little pictures that make it up. If we are to obey the imperative of Scripture itself to grow in our knowledge, then we will want to take advantage of the great minds who have come before us, as well as those of our contemporaries. The treasures are endless.

Christology: The Study of Jesus
The life of Jesus is one such puzzle, and people have been taking pieces of Jesus and distorting the picture for 2,000 years. It is important to understand that first century Jews had no categories for a Messiah like Jesus. Jews had been waiting for a Messiah for 400 years, and nobody expected who the Messiah turned out to be. For all of them, family, friends, and foes, Jesus was a conundrum. For 1,500 years Jews had proclaimed the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

Now here comes Jesus of Nazareth taking prerogatives belonging only to God, like forgiving sin and commanding nature. No wonder they were confused. His resurrection helped them make some sense of who Jesus was, but it took the church 300 years before there was a consensus that Jesus was who all Christians now believe he is, the God-man.

There were a variety of Christological heresies, but all erred in one of two directions. They either emphasized Jesus’ Humanity at the expense of his divinity, or his divinity at the expense of his humanity. The most substantial and dangerous of these heresies was Arianism, a form of Unitarian theology that asserts Jesus is not divine, but a created being. In the early 4th century it seemed like the whole world was buying into Arianism. But God raised up a man named Athanasius who stood fast against this heresy, gaining the appellation Athanasius contra mundum, or against the world. He stood against the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the time and was instrumental in the Council of Nicaea in 325 which established basic Christological orthodoxy and produced the Nicene Creed recited in churches throughout the world ever since. The orthodox doctrine of Christ is succinctly explained by Charles Hodge in his Systematic Theology:

The Scriptural Facts Concerning Christ
The facts which the Bible teaches concerning the person of Christ are, first, that He was truly man, i.e., He had a perfect or complete human nature. Hence everything that can be predicated of man (that is, of man as man, and not of man as fallen) can be predicated of Christ. Secondly, He was truly God, or had a perfect divine nature. Hence everything that can be predicated of God can be predicated of Christ. Thirdly, He was one person. The same person, self, or Ego, who said, “I thirst,” said, “Before Abrham was, I am.” This is the whole doctrine of the incarnation as it lies in the Scriptures and in the faith of the church.

Everything in Christianity turns on this doctrine, that Jesus was fully God and fully man in one person. Our salvation depends on it.

The Testimony of Scripture is Clear
Despite the church grappling with this issue for hundreds of years, this was the New Testament witness from the beginning. The Apostle John writes (I John 1:4):

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.

John’s exhortation to “test the spirits” is how we know if a teaching is orthodox or heresy. And it follows if the incarnation is true, if God became a man, then the gospels are factually historical, miracles and all. It’s breathtaking as well when you consider that God paid the penalty, death, for man’s offense against Himself by becoming fully like the one who committed the offense. This fact is why there is no other religion on earth comparable to it, not to mention it claims all the others are lies and it alone is the truth about the nature of reality.

Tomes have been written on Christology, but I will highlight a few passages that declare the unequivocal divinity of Christ.

Paul says in Colossians 1

15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Some think “firstborn” is indicating Jesus isn’t eternal like the Father, but all orthodox theologians in the history of the church agree this is in reference to the resurrection, as Paul says in v. 18, that Jesus is “the firstborn from among the dead.”

I Corinthians 1:30  and Jeremiah 23 are a powerful incarnational combination. Paul declares that, “Christ is our righteousness,” and in a Messianic passage, Jeremiah declares that Yahweh, Israel’s covenant making God, is “our righteousness:

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 Righteous.

Paul is definitively asserting that Jesus of Nazareth is Yahweh, Israel’s covenant making God!

Paul also makes the connection clear in Philippians when he says in Philippians 2,

9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

This is a clear reference to Isaiah 45 when Yahweh, Israel’s God, declares,

Before me every knee will bow;
by me every tongue will swear.

Without an anti-supernatural bias, the gospels also clearly portray Jesus of Nazareth as both man and God, which is why Paul can so definitely assert that Jesus is God.

I will end this brief survey with the words every true Christian should proclaim, confessing of Jesus with Doubting Thomas, “My Lord and my God!” In reply Jesus promises: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Test the Spirits: It Takes Work
Few people are called to be theologians or pastors, but Christianity is a religion of a book, and thus we are enjoined throughout that book to grow in our knowledge of the faith. Too many Christians think that is for others, intellectual types or pastors and such, but it is for every single Christian. Given we live in the 21st century when knowledge is inexpensive, often free, and easy to get, we have no excuse to not “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.”

The question for every Christian is whether we see Christianity as a spectator or as a participant, are we on the field, in the battle, or just observing from the cheap seats. Obviously, that’s a rhetorical question, but we might want to make ourselves familiar with the Bereans. Paul and his companions had been in Thessalonica, in modern day Greece, and the Jews in that city were none too happy, so they were kicked out and sent on their way. They travelled to the city of Berea, two days walk, and the Jews there were of a different sort (Acts 17:11):

Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

Noble, I like that word. It speaks of qualities that are admirable, dignified, regal, and all of us would rather be seen as this than the alternative. And what made the Bereans (the only time they are mentioned in the New Testament) noble is that they were not willing to just take Paul’s word for it. Christianity doesn’t work that way, or shouldn’t. Keep in mind whenever the New Testament speaks of Scripture, graphé or the writings in Greek, they are speaking of the Old Testament. The entirety of New Testament Christianity is built on the foundation of the Old Testament writings, and since all of it is about Jesus, the ultimate biblical hermeneutic, the Bereans felt compelled to see if the writings really did testify that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah.

That too is our charge, except now we have the New Testament and 2000 years of Christian history to look back on to examine and test the spirits, as John exhorts us to do. For those of us who are Protestants, our ultimate authority is not in any church or man, but in Scripture, and it is up to each one of us to examine the Scriptures to see if what we’re being taught is true. We’re not in this alone, however, as if it’s just us and the Bible. We have an advantage over the Bereans in that we have the great creeds of the church, the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, as well as the Protestant confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries, such as the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Belgic Confession (1559), The Canons of Dort (1618-19), and the most famous, the Westminster Standards (1643-1649). The Baptists have the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith. These are all from the Reformed tradition, but modern Evangelicals can espouse most everything in them.

From the very beginning, as John’s exhortation implies, anti-Christs have been a part of the church’s experience. The narrative of the fall in Genesis 3 tells us that our experience against evil in this fallen world is to be a constant feature of existence. The offspring of the serpent is given the ability to strike the heel of the woman’s offspring, which is Christ and his church, but Christ and his church (his body) will in turn be able to strike the offspring of the serpent’s head. The damage we can inflict on our mortal enemy is far worse than he can inflict on us, but it takes diligence, persistence, and dare I say work, to do that.

In our secular age that often looks different than previous eras. The cults of today bear little resemblance to the Jim Jones or David Koresh’s of the world. They look more like Hollywood movie stars or “influencers” on the Internet, business titans, or politicians, all thoroughly secular. Though they are not overtly “religious” they are all religious nonetheless, and the spirit of antichrist is everywhere. So in the face of this vacuous secularism we declare with John that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh from God, and is God, and at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father, now and forever.

 

The Lord is Our Righteousness

The Lord is Our Righteousness

Apr 3, 2024 | Theology

The most important truth of the Christian life for me, the one that has had the most enduring impact is learning through time and experience, that Christ is my righteousness. In a dry and struggling time in my Christian journey, I decided no matter how I felt, I was going to read the Bible and get on my knees and pray every morning. That was somewhere in the 2010-2012 range. That made all the difference in the trajectory of my Christian life. It is not for nothing that Jesus tells us to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness,” and all the other stuff we might want will be added as well. Somewhere as I began doing that, I rediscovered a verse where Paul communicates what Christ is to us in a way I seemed to have missed for over three decades as a Christian (I Corinthians 1:30).

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

It’s not that I didn’t understand the theology behind this, having studied it all in depth in seminary and beyond, but for whatever reason in my lived experience, the deeper meaning of imputation wasn’t mind blowing enough to me. That’s a strange theological phrase (I made it up just now so I want credit when it’s used!), but being blown away is central to the dynamic of the exhilarating Christian experience I now live. If it’s going to be real for us, it is because we constantly marvel at it.

Philosophy Begins in Wonder
Going from experience and theology to philosophy might seem like a strange connection, but not as the Ancient Greeks Plato and Aristotle understood it. This phrase, philosophy begins in wonder, was a primary motivation of their lives. To them, because they didn’t have the revelation of God in Scripture or Christ (having lived BC), the most important thing to them was philosophy because it was about understand truth and the nature of things. Philosophy in Greek means the love (philos) of wisdom (Sophia).

Both men started their philosophies in observation of nature and human nature, which leads to wonder. How could it not! Especially nature. It also assumes human ignorance, and revelation, although being pagans they wouldn’t have a category for that Jewish and Christian concept. To wonder is to cause to be astonished in admiration and amazement of something. We can’t help but wonder when we see a beautiful sunrise or sunset, a full moon, a newborn baby, or marvelous work of art or music. God, the master artist and engineer, made it that way; it’s called creation. But given we live and swim in the suffocating atmosphere of secularism, wonder doesn’t come easy. It’s beaten out of us in a life focused on the mundane, the here, the now. So Plato and Aristotle said we have to be taught how to wonder, to learn how it’s done to make it an habitual part of our lives. It is the same in our relationship to God in Christ.

Coming out of my dry and struggling period, I realized being aware of the depth of my sin, and my shame for it, was a blessing. Putting it crassly, the job of the Holy Spirit is to convict us of sin, as Jesus explains to his disciples prior to his crucifixion (John 17):

8 When he comes, he will convict the world in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: 9 about sin, because people do not believe in me; 10 about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; 11 and about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.

There is a theological tsunami for good in those verses revealed in the gospel we cannot explore here, but the word convict is central to the flourishing of good in our lives and in this world. The Greek word means to expose, convict, reprove. It’s extended meaning is to convince with solid, compelling evidence, especially to expose (prove wrong, connect).

Given we are born rank sinners, haters and enemies of God, and deeply evil, this shouldn’t be a tough job for the Holy Spirit, but we’re duplicitous self-delusional little buggers. We’re very good at denial, especially self-denial. We’re also living in a spiritual war we can’t conceive, and Satan is good at feeding our ego, so becoming fully aware of the true nature of our sinful state isn’t easy. In fact, it can be quite painful, which is why I Corinthians 1:30 is so important. For me it was life changing.

A Life Altering Relationship with God Also Begins in Wonder
I learned through this process that grace is a difficult thing to wrap our minds around, and sinners that we are, we easily tend to disfigure it into something it is not. On one side of the divide we can turn it into a license to sin, as if obedience is somehow optional when we’re under God’s grace. On the other is believing we have to merit his grace, which is a contradiction in terms; you can’t merit what cannot be merited. Often we go like ping pong balls between the two. For me, I subconsciously thought if I do certain things, and don’t do other things, God will like me just a little bit more.

The revelation that changed everything was that this was a lie. God can’t love me any more or less than he loves me in Christ. Nothing I do or don’t do, have done or haven’t done, can change that. At the same time what I do or don’t do matters very much, but more on that below.

The reality of God’s total acceptance of me finally hit home when I heard a pastor I know say, God’s wrath was fully satisfied in Christ. I knew this. I went to seminary and studied this. What was different? Life! After more than three decades buffeted by the headwinds of existence in a fallen world among fallen people in a fallen body, things looked different. Everything had a different shade of meaning to it, a different texture, a different feeling. It was kind of like Dorothy in Kansas before the storm, everything was in black and white. Then the tornado comes, blows the house off the ground, and it eventually lands in the technicolor land of Oz. In the gospel land of Oz, however, the man behind the current is the living God!

You might wonder how exactly this works. Unfortunately there’s no step-by-step gospel manual because it’s a relationship with a real person, but one who happens to be invisible and communicates to us primarily through a book, and also somehow through His presence living in us. It starts, though, with acknowledgment of our sin. We call that repentance, and because we are naturally adept at sinning, both sin and repentance are daily features of the Christian life. And going back to what I said above, if we’re not reading Scripture and praying daily, how in the world are we going to repent.

The word repent in Greek, metanoeó-μετανοέω , means to change one’s mind or purpose. It requires deep thinking and assessment of our lives and actions. The extended meaning is literally to think differently afterwards. After what? Giving thought, or contemplating our actions and how they reflect our sinful selves, and determining by the grace of God we will not be that kind of person anymore. Because we are not very good at not being sinners, we repent daily. Then we put on Christ’s righteousness, and revel in God’s acceptance of us in spite of who we are. That is called love, and as Paul describes it in I Corinthians 13, keeping no record of wrongs.

As this process and dynamic became habitual in my life (I start my daily morning prayers with praise, repentance, and thanksgiving), everything looked and felt different, as I mentioned above. At various times, be it at church services or reading or talking to someone, I get emotional, as in tears emotional. These times come when I seem to grasp that Christianity and God are real, that what we believe is true, and not some made up stuff by a rag tag bunch of first century Jews. In other words, as Paul declares, they were not liars. If it is real, and we really grasp what it means as sinners to have a relationship with our infinitely holy almighty Creator God, how could we not get emotional! As I said, we’ll be continually blown away as we realize He really does love us even though He ought to condemn us.

The Christian Life of Wonder Leads to Obedience
This love will then naturally flow out into love and service to others. That’s the entire point of the gospel, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. I’ve always thought God commanding love is a strange thing because I subconsciously fell for love being an emotion, and emotions can’t be commanded. But biblical love is a verb, or actions born of decisions to love God and others, and ourselves. If we truly love we will act, and one of the most important of those actions is forgiveness. John tells us in his first epistle that we can love because God first loved us, and God loved us in Christ on the cross in the ultimate act of sacrifice imaginable, the Creator himself becoming one of us to die for us to pay the penalty we deserved. It’s absurd! Which is one of the many reasons I believe it’s true. And If He loved us so absurdly, so to speak, how could we not love others!

We can read I Corinthians 13 and contemplate what that means in relationship with others. There are many directions and exhortations in the epistles to help us put the puzzle pieces of love and service together. We must never, though, be under any illusion that loving others, or ourselves for that matter, will be easy. It’s the hardest thing we’ll ever do because we are absolutely self-centered, but it is also the most rewarding. We also, if we claim the name of Christ, have no choice. It is the perpetual imperative of the Christian life: Thou shalt love, whether thou likes it or not! But that shouldn’t be all that difficult if we really buy into God’s promises of blessing for obedience to Him. I got a glimpse of this last time I was making my way through the Old Testament, and came upon these, sorry, mind-blowing verses in Jeremiah 23 that perfectly connect with I Corinthians 1:30:

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:
Yahweh our righteousness.

I changed the capitalized version of The Lord in my NIV to Yahweh because anytime you see that in the Old Testament it is the name of Israel’s personal covenant God. And putting two-and-two together, this means that Jesus is Yahweh! We know and are taught this because we are Christians and thus Trinitarians, but if we’re to lead a Christian life of obedience that is honoring to our Savior God, it will begin in the wonder and marvel of God himself coming to rescue us from the wages of sin, death. And that isn’t just eternal death with a resurrected body, but living that eternal life here and now, spreading salvation through love and service to all those we meet.

As I said, knowing we will benefit by our obedience gives us the motivation to do it, or at least try, and God will give us the ability. Yes, it’s mostly baby steps, three forward, two back, but we can by his grace and Holy Spirit in us (convicting us), make progress. What makes these verses so beautiful in this regard is the promise of blessing we see in them.

The Lord through Jeremiah is not speaking about physical land or places. God’s covenant promises to Abraham and the Patriarchs were never about a mere plot of land in the Middle East. They were always for the entire earth, and the peoples who inhabit them. Because our King Jesus is now sitting at the right hand of God with all authority in heaven and on earth, he reigns wisely in our lives and in the world. He is in control of all things, as Paul says in Romans 8:28, for our good which is His glory. We, His church, are now Judah and Israel who are living in safety.

The guide to living in safety is His law-word, and our obedience to it. When we stray, as we always will as sinners, He guides us back through loving discipline as a father lovingly disciplines his children. His wrath fully satisfied, He can no longer punish us, so nothing He does to or for us is in anger. We must believe in the message of the entirety of Scripture that the love of God lavished on us in Christ can never fail because He himself in Christ is our righteousness.

 

 

The Importance of Knowing the History of Redemption for your Faith

The Importance of Knowing the History of Redemption for your Faith

Jan 31, 2024 | Theology

My favorite metaphor for the Christian life is puzzles and puzzle pieces. Without the big picture into which all the pieces fit, the puzzle pieces are, well, puzzling. Without God in Christ, the ultimate big picture, the pieces never seem to fit. We look at one piece and wonder what in the world it means. Life becomes like a Woody Allen movie ending in frustration or resignation. Why do you think he always seems to have that look of sadness on his face? A God-less universe can do that to a person. This metaphor is why my favorite quotation from C.S. Lewis is on the cover of my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent:

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.

Even in the conundrum that is life, in Christ it can make sense because we can trust him in his Almighty power and goodness and wisdom to make sense of it for us. And in him the pieces really do fit, which is why I was so confident in raising our children in the Christian faith. I knew they could never find in any other worldview the comprehensive understanding of every single puzzle piece of life, even those that take some time to figure out, and those to which we’re just not given answers. Which brings me to the history of redemption, and its importance for our faith.

That history is found in our Bibles, and our Christian life has no meaning apart from the entire story we read there. The Bible is God’s breathed out revelation, his word, about what this puzzling thing called life means. Without it, we are stuck in our own minds with the pieces trying to figure it all out, an impossibility as the history of philosophy and religion apart from Christianity makes abundantly clear. Without revelation all we have is speculation after endless speculation, and more endless speculation. What makes one speculation right and another wrong? Who knows! Nobody. That’s the point. Without revelation we’re stuck in a box with no exit or window for light to shine in. Eventually, the only way to determine right and wrong is power, might making right, which is why life in a God-less universe is so dangerous. Inside the box we initially got paganism, and through the Hebrews and the Jewish religion’s fulfillment in Jesus Christ, paganism was eventually defeated in Christendom. In the 18th century, however, revelation was rejected and mankind decided it liked life in the box better by trying to figure it out through reason, and secularism became the new paganism. We’re right back to might makes right and the will to power.

Thus the necessity of God’s revelation in Scripture and Christ, not only for civilization to survive, but also to thrive. This starts with each individual Christian understanding the importance of redemptive history for their own faith, and then together we’ll be capable to obey Christ’s command to the Apostles to disciple the nations. Being familiar with the ultimate big picture is critical if we’re to successfully be part of advancing God’s kingdom on earth, also in the Lord’s Prayer in obedience to Christ’s command.

What Exactly is the History of Redemption?
That’s an easy question to answer. We find the entire story in Genesis 1-3. God created the world good, man rebelled, everything went to hell, and man’s Creator promised to make it all right. The story plays itself out from Genesis 4 to Revelation 22, and we are right smack dab in the middle of it! Of course there are a few details, and they make all the difference. It is unfortunate so few Christians know those details because all those pieces make the frustrating pieces we have to deal with every day fit so much better.

I was prompted to write this because of a conversation I had recently with a family member. She asked me what a zealot was because someone told her Jesus was a zealot and not what the gospels proclaim him to be, Lord and Savior. It was gratifying that I knew enough through my years of study and learning to walk her through the history of Israel, and how the zealots came to exist as a response to Israel’s oppression by foreign powers.

Oppression in Israel’s history is a critical part of redemptive history. God called Abraham and the Patriarchs specifically to lead them into 430 years of slavery, which is a very odd thing for a god to do to his people in the ancient world. And four centuries is a very long time! In the history of His people, God often communicates in metaphor, and this was an extended metaphor for the slavery and bondage of sin. The Exodus continued the metaphor. The only possibility of escape and freedom from the bondage of sin is revealed to be the power of God. We get a strong hint of God’s power, not our choosing, being the operative principle in the redemption from sin in the life of Abraham. He’s called by God from his homeland to go to a land He will show him. God makes a covenant promise with Abram that his offspring will be like the stars in the sky and sand on the seashore, and be a blessing for all the peoples of the earth (Gen. 12). He then tells Abram he will fulfill both sides of the covenant promise, His side and man’s (Gen. 15).

The problem is that Abraham, his name since changed to mean, “farther of a multitude” (Gen. 17), and his wife Sarah are old, and not just old but really old, as in it is impossible for them to have children old. God made the initial promise when Sarah was already beyond child bearing age, but he then made them wait 25(!) years before Isaac would be born. That would put Abraham at 100 and Sarah at 90. Having a child at that age is obviously impossible. A year prior to the birth, God in the form of three men visited the childless couple and said He would return in a year and Sarah would have a son. She laughs because the idea is ridiculous, and He asks the rhetorical question: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Of course not! God wanted to get across the point that with man what is impossible with God is made possible, and God made this abundantly clear throughout redemptive history.

After the Hebrews are freed from their slavery, they celebrated their deliverance every year, and still do, at Passover. For the Hebrews and the Jewish people to this day, the Exodus is central to their image as a people: they were never to be the slaves of anyone. Unfortunately, Jews who rejected Jesus as their Messiah failed to realize the Exodus was a metaphor for sin, not God’s promise that they would never experience political oppression. They also thought the promise was for a physical plot of land in the Middle East and not the entire earth. That is a big miss! Having misread God’s message, the Hebrews thought God’s promise was fulfilled 400 years later with King David and the glorious reign of Solomon, but as soon as Solomon died, everything started going back to hell. Israel split into the northern ten tribes, called Israel, its capital was Samaria, and the southern two kingdoms were called Judah with Jerusalem being their capital.

The Rise of the Prophets and Israel’s Oppression
As you read through the Old Testament it is vital that you connect what is going on with and through Israel to you as part of God’s chosen people in Christ. Remember and commit to memory Matthew 1:21, a verse vital to understanding where you fit in this vast history. The Lord appeared to Josph in a dream and told him that Mary “will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua (Yeshua), which means The Lord Saves. Jesus didn’t come to try to save his people, or to make it possible; he came to make it actual. That’s what God does; He makes the impossible possible. We begin to see this much more clearly when the prophets come on the scene.

Israel’s civil war was a period of geopolitical conflict. Isaiah was the first prophet coming approximately 730 BC, and his writing is probably the most pointedly eschatological of all the prophets. The northern kingdom was destroyed in 722 by the Assyrians and the ten tribes scattered and lost to history. Judah lasts approximately another 150 years when Jerusalem is destroyed and the Babylonians take most of the people captive to Babylon. After 70 years, God brings the now called Jews back to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple and their religious life, and it stands until 70AD when it is destroyed by the Romans. This entire period is also metaphorically rich for our personal journey of faith. The prophets warn and promise, the people do well, then rebel, and this happens over and over, not unlike our own struggle with sin. God consistently promises that He will be their Savior because they obviously can’t save themselves. The verses promising this are practically innumerable, but Jeremiah 23:5,6 are a powerful reminder that this salvation in which we trust is God’s work in us out of which we work out our salvation with fear and trembling:

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.

This branch is Christ who is king now sitting at the right hand of the Almighty ruling over all powers and authorities to the end of ultimately fulling the redemption of His creation. Jews thought the references to Judah and Israel were literal references to land and the people who inhabit it instead of the salvation from sin. That is also a very big miss.

The Unexpected Messiah
Micah, the last prophet to speak God’s words, lived 430 years before John the Baptist arrived. He tells us about a messenger for the coming of the Lord which would be fulfilled in John. During those years of silence the concept of a Messianic Savior developed that had nothing to do with the actual Messiah who was born in Bethlehem, Jesus of Nazareth. Part of the reason had to do with what transpired for the people of Israel during those 400 years.

After the Babylonian exile (586-538BC), the Jews were ruled by the Persians until Alexander the Great defeated them in 333, who then conquered Judea shortly thereafter. When Alexander died, the Jews were ruled by a combination of Greco-Macedonian kings, until finally in 160s to 150s they gained some semblance of independence under the Maccabees. Less than 100 years later, however, the Romans gained control over Judea; and in 37, Herod the Great, a questionable Jew, was appointed “King of the Jews” by the Romans. There was a whole cross current of ideas among the Jews trying to deal with this centuries long upheaval, some through violence, some isolation, others religious observance.

As a people whose self-conception would not allow slavery and oppression, living under hundreds of years of it developed a burning desire for Yahweh to send his Messiah to finally deliver them. There were many conflicting conceptions of who this Messiah would be, but everyone agreed he would be a human ruler like David anointed by God (the meaning of Messiah) to wipe out Israel’s enemies and finally restore Israel to its former glory. The disciples were still thinking along these lines when just prior the ascension, they asked Jesus, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” The Zealots were among the most, well, zealous of those fighting against the oppression of the Romans, and they often used violence to do it. Needless to say a Messiah like Jesus was the last thing they would ever accept.

The History of Israel and Me
From a Christian perspective, we can see in this broad overview of redemptive history God’s plans through it all to save me personally. I wasn’t an afterthought who God would possibly be save if I just made the right choice. God choose me! And in Christ before the world was even created. Once God choose Abram to get the ball rolling, it only took 2000(!) years for the plan to unfold to fulfillment. We have much to learn from all of that time, and the more we learn about it the more profound will that fulfillment be in us. As Agustine famously said, “The New (Testament) is in the old concealed, the Old (Testament) is in the New revealed.” The more effort we put into unearthing what is concealed, the more what is revealed will absolutely blow us away, not to mention transform our lives and our world.