One reason we’ve always gone to churches where hymns are sung is because the best hymnody is theology in song, meaning the study (ology) of God (theos) set to music. Much modern praise music unfortunately is more anthropology, more about man (anthropos), than God. And for my wife and I, something about two or three hundred year-old music lends itself to the sacred. The theology, though, is what we appreciate most, and I often learn or am reminded of truths about our astonishing faith that allow me to marvel all over again at our great God and Savior.
One recent Sunday we sang the theologically rich old hymn every Christian has heard of, Rock of Ages. The author, with one of the best hymn writer names in history, Augustus Toplady (1740-1778), knew his theology. The theme of the Hymn comes from Exodus 33 where Moses asks the Lord to show him his glory, who he really is. In reply, The Lord declares his name, and adds, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” The Lord alone determines who will receive his mercy, or not. This truth is foundational to the revelation of God to his people about who he is. We can’t earn his mercy, or grace; he alone grants it as he will.
The beauty of the salvation for those to whom he grants it, his people, is that it is a complete and total salvation. Thus, in the first stanza, Toplady writes:
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
let me hide myself in thee;
let the water and the blood,
from thy wounded side which flowed,
be of sin the double cure;
save from wrath and make me pure.
This double cure saves us from God’s wrath, and at the same time makes us pure. In other words, the salvation granted to us in Christ is for sin’s guilt and power. The problem is that sin’s power over us seems, well, powerful. We fight it, but we often feel like a pummeled boxer down for the count.
The Apostle Paul can relate. He confesses in Roman 7, “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” Who can’t relate to that! In his frustration he cries out:
24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me out of this body of death?
The English doesn’t do justice to Paul’s emphasis in Greek because emphasis is determined by where words are placed unlike in English. He starts, “Wretched I am man.” In other words, he is emphasizing just how wretched he is. The extended meaning of that word captures well our struggle against sin: (beaten-down) from continued strain, leaving a person literally full of callouses (deep misery) – describing a person with severe side-effects from great, ongoing strain (significant hardships). If we haven’t felt that way about our sin, we haven’t really struggled against it.
I’ve heard it said, any dead fish can float downstream; it’s easy to go with the sinful flow because, well, we’re sinners! It’s really hard to fight against our natural sinful inclinations. As soon as we’re spiritually raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit, however, the fight begins; but we are not in this fight alone. Paul answers his question, and affirms Toplady’s double cure:
Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Amen!
Most Christians have no problem believing God saves us from the guilt of sin, justification, but we tend to think the pure part, sanctification, is our job. The good news is that Jesus is both! I never really got this until maybe 10 years ago. Deep down I was under the impression my relationship with God was in some way determined by what I did or did not do.
First, I seemed to believe God would like me more if I was a good little boy, and less if I wasn’t. At some point I realized that wasn’t true at all because God’s wrath was fully satisfied in Christ, the whole enchilada. On the cross, Christ paid for the penalty and guilt of my sin, all of it, past, present, and future. In Isaiah 53 we learn he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; and “the punishment that brought us peace was on him.” So absolutely nothing we do or don’t do can make us any more acceptable to God than we are in Christ, ever.
But Christ is not only our justification, as Paul says in I Cor. 1:30, but he is also our sanctification. We’re not left to deal with the power of sin in us on our own, as if defeating it was up to our choosing, our will, our decisions. It is not! These are obviously part of the process of our sanctification, but they do not determine it. We tend to think we just need to try harder. Then I can finally live, as it used to be called, the victorious Christian life. Technically we call that hooey.
I want you to chew on something God made apparent to me: we can’t transform ourselves. That’s God’s job. As we read in Zechariah 4:6, “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty. As Julia Ward Howe wrote in the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Christ “died to make us holy.” The Apostle John tells us how instead of letting sin defeat us, we trust that Christ too is our sanctification:
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
This is the double cure! Not only are we forgiven for the guilt, but God promises to purify us from the power of sin. That is his job not ours! It’s even gooder news than I ever thought!
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