the obedient life of christ was not vicarious

I know we should not use the weakest expression of a position to criticise it.  I know it is easy to knock straw men.  The following example is both.  However, it is a view that I hear echoed regularly online; it may be a weak expression of a belief but it is certainly a prevalent one.  Here’s the quotation:

‘The believer is lukewarm, his/her Saviour was consumed by zeal. The believer is prayerless, but Christ continued all night in prayer to God. The believer is sluggish in obedience, but Christ delighted to do the will of the Father. All this and more – he is our peace, he is our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption – when the law comes asking for obedience, believers can point to the Substitute in their law place.’

This is a belief founded on the view that the life of Christ is vicariously ours.  We are told that Christ’s active obedience to the law is our righteousness before God.  His death is not enough to declare us righteous, we also need an ‘active’ righteousness, a life lived.  I have tackled some of the better expressions of this position elsewhere in detail, here I am simply observing the absurdity of a popular expression of ‘imputed active obedience’.

I hope the absurdity of the quotation is obvious to all.  A Christian woman fails to dress modestly but Jesus dressed modestly on her behalf!  Is the corollary true?  I am not a good father and as Christ was never married he cannot have kept the law for me in this area.   The whole line of reasoning is monstrously inappropriate.  Christ’s life does not cover every situation believers over the ages have found themselves in an provide a corresponding ‘law-keeping’ for our ‘law-breaking’.  Yes indeed, Christ has glorified God in a life lived entirely in obedience.  Yes this life was necessary for our justification for the justifying death of Christ required a perfect sacrifice; the value of the death is in the life.  But it is not his life that atones but his death.  In the law the sacrifices that atoned were blood sacrifices.  Scripture could not be clearer:

Lev 17:11 (ESV)
For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.

Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.  Substitution lay in a death died not a life lived.  Consequently, we are said to be justified by Christ’s blood but never by his life (other than his life in resurrection which is something different).  The Law demands death for the law-breaker.  No amount of law-keeping by another can make a guilty man righteous.  Christ is my substitute by taking that death upon himself.  He took the curse of a broken law and so redeemed me from the law.  If I live now, I live on the other side of death in a resurrected Christ.  I stand in his righteous position before the Father.  It is a position that is beyond law and not answerable to law.

The great tragedy of this emphasis on IAO is that it takes atonement away from the cross and places it at the incarnation.  Notice how the writer finds his peace in Christ’s life rather than his death: ‘when the law comes asking for obedience, believers can point to the Substitute in their law place.’  The glory of the cross is occluded.  Yet in heaven the song of the redeemed is to the lamb, the one who has purchased men to God by his blood’.  It is at the cross that substitution takes place (Isa 53).  There redemption is accomplished (Roms 3).  It is Christ lifted up who draws all men to him.  The cross is the place of propitiation and where God’s righteousness in salvation is displayed (Roms 3).  It is in being justified by his blood we have peace with God (Roms 5:1).  We are reconciled to God through the death of his son (Roms 5:10; Col 1:10).  It is on the cross he suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he may bring us to God.  In the words of an old hymn concerning the cross:

Bearing shame and scoffing rude

In my place condemned he stood

Sealed my pardon with his blood

Hallelujah, what a Saviour.

 

The lesson for us all is – let the Bible speak and not theological constructs.  When we adopt constructs and then extrapolate on them, we end up with positions that are risible.  Moreover, it seems to be a rule that the construct eventually supplants the truth.

the great sin

Humanity speaks as if crimes against humanity are its greatest crimes, but they aren’t.  Humanity’s greatest crimes are its crimes against God (the greater the offended, the greater the offence).

The great crime of society , its great sin, was not the fall – great though this sin was.  In the fall humanity rejected God as a good and faithful Creator.  Man rejected God who had given him everything to enjoy and made only one prohibition by way of a test.  Neither is the great sin of humanity its rejection (representatively through Israel) of God’s Law.  This rejection too, of course, was culpable and damning, yet it was not the worst rebellion.  In Law, God is rejected largely in his holiness and righteousness.  Rejection of the Law proved humanity’s inability to be righteous.  It proved his hostility to what was good and right and its hostility to God’s goodness revealed in his redemption from Egypt and provision for his people.

However, the real nadir of humanity, the real proof of the utter corruption and horror of Adamic humanity, is the death of Christ on the cross.  In Christ, God came revealing as never before a heart of love and grace.  He came not in judgement but salvation; he came not to accuse but to restore.  He came in saving grace not to good people but people who had continuously rejected his words and taken his protection for granted.  He came in meekness, grace, gentleness, healing and kindness and despite coming revealing the full vulnerability of his heart and love he was rejected in the crucifixion of Jesus.  Here is my son surely they will reverence him?  The greatest sin, and crime, is against God in his greatest display of grace and goodness.

And so the question raised in the garden, and explored in the law, is fully answered at the cross, the state of the human heart.  It is not the law that fully exposes the sin of the human heart, it is the cross.  Thus it is only after the cross that men are described as ‘dead in trespasses and sins’.  Thus too we read in John that the work of the Holy Spirit sent into the world after Christ’s death is to convict it of the sin of rejecting Christ.

John 16:7-9 (ESV)
Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me…

The world’s condemnation comes from a rejection of the Christ and is pronounced by God in that very rejection.

John 3:18 (ESV)
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

John 12:31 (ESV)
Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out.

Rom 8:3 (ESV)
For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh,

he shall save his people from their sins…

Matt 1:20-21 (ESV)
But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

Matthew places right at the heart of the Christmas story or incarnation its purpose, ‘He shall save his people from their sins’.  A plea to all preachers this Christmas, don’t stop at the cradle… get to the cross and the resurrection.  Show with hallelujahs how he saves his people from their sins.  Nothing less is gospel.

where are you adam?

When God asked Adam in the garden where he was, it was not because he, God, did not know, but because Adam did not know?  It is the first question in the Torah, the shortest question in the Torah (in Hebrew apparently only one word),  and probably the most penetrating question in the Torah.  Adam answered with an evasion, and a pitiful evasion at that (I was naked… ).  God brushes it away like a gossamer thread.  But it is more than an Adam question.  It is an everyman question.  It is the existential question God asks each of us.

The question is, will our answer be honest – I’m lost – or as pathetically evasive as Adam’s?

what happens when eve tells adam what to do and adam lets her…

The whole of Scripture demands careful reading.  Nothing is insignificant.  This is nowhere more true than in the opening chapters of Genesis.  These chapters are laden with symbolism.  The narrative of Gen 1-3 is pregnant with the big issues of human history.   In a couple of previous blogs (here, here and here) we reflected a little on the text of Scripture which gives the account of ‘the rebellion’ or ‘the fall’.

Gen 3:1-6 (ESV)
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” ​​​ And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

I thought today I should reflect a little on one of the human failings that facilitates the fall, a creational irregularity that contributes to the rebellion.   In Gen 2 we are told that Adam is created first and then Eve.  This is significant.  Priority in creation conferred leadership (1 Tim 2:13).  Moreover, in the Genesis account, Adam was the source of Eve; she came from his body (Gen 2:21).  This too is significant.  The narrative point is that source and origin confer rights; the woman,  coming as she does from the man is intended to reflect the worth of the man in her submission to him (1 Cor 11:8).   Furthermore, we are expressly told the woman was made as a help for the man and not (at least in the most formal sense) vice versa (Gen 2:18).  A point again plainly stated in the NT (1 Cor 11:9).  We could add further indications of male leadership.  For example, Adam names Eve.  To name in the ancient world was an indication of authority (a bit like the implied authority of parents in naming their children still is today).

This male leadership is sometimes called patriarchy or more often today it is known as complementarianism.  It is called complementarianism as a way of recognising that males and females created by God are different and have different callings in life, callings which were never intended to be in conflict but to be complementary.  Now it is not my intention to try to tease out these different callings or roles.  I want simply to observe as the previous paragraph has made plain that fundamental to this distinction is the calling of men to lead.

Of course, even as I wrote the previous sentence, I realised how utterly reprehensible it is to the modern ear.  It is considered impossibly oppressive.  It is thoroughly retrograde and unpardonably recidivist.  Patriarchy may have been the basis of every civilization in all of previous history but we are enlightened, we know better.  Any half-human, half-moral, half-intelligent person knows that the only right position is full egalitarianism.  That is, male and female are not only equal in value and importance (which no complementarian denies) but any suggestion of gender meaning role differences is toxic and grotesque.   The patriarchy or complementarianism of Genesis 1-3 does not stand a prayer in our modern world.  It has as much credibility as claims that the world is flat.  I know this.

Yet, while the Bible does not claim that the earth is flat, it does teach again and again, in both old and new Testaments that God has conferred leadership on the male.  In fact, implicit in the narrative we are considering is that the misappropriation of roles by both Adam and Eve contributed to ‘the rebellion’.  The narrator is careful to inform us that the serpent spoke to Eve.  It is Eve that is beguiled and deceived.  Then Eve urges Adam to eat the forbidden fruit and Adam follows her bidding.  The point is clear, both acted outside their God-given callings.  Eve took the lead in a critical decision to disobey God and Adam in culpable weakness allowed her to do so.   Sin entered the world because neither maintained their God-given roles.

This, Paul forbids women to teach in the church for two reasons, one formal the other material.  The formal reason, that is, the essential reason, is that because of male priority in creation God has placed the responsibility of leadership and therefore  teaching in the church to the male (1 Tim 2:11-13) .  We may add to this a material reason, or if you like a reason evident from observation, namely, that given Eve was deceived by the serpent, and Adam was not it is clear that God knew what he was doing in placing leadership in the hands of the male; women seem more easily duped (1 Tim 2:14).  If you disagree with the latter comment then your beef is not with me, but Paul.  In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, your quarrel is with the Holy Spirit.

What is my main point in this post?  It is that reneging against biblical gender roles and the great rebellion go hand in hand in the biblical narrative.  The modern drive for a full-blown egalitarianism in society is simply an indicator of its defiance of God and his revealed pattern in creation.  This defiance by society is already having tragic consequences.  Neither men nor women feel sure of  their identity and responsibilities.  Their image is increasingly shaped by the media – the least responsible culture-conditioner imaginable.    Men are shoe-horned into caricatures of  either machismo-ism or homosexual effeminacy.  The new ‘metrosexual man’ is as concerned with his looks, dress and smell as his female counterpart, probably more so.  Meanwhile women discover their ‘freedom’ has pretty well turned them into the sex-objects of the worst kind of male fantasy; a new kind of sexualized woman: the hard-hitting Lucy Lui; the Terminator’s Sarah Connor; Sigourney Weaver’s ‘Ripley’;  Kate Beckinsdale’s  Underworld ‘Selene’; or Uma Thurman’s ‘The Bride’ in Kill Bill.  The list goes on.  The female who is more deadly than the male is part of C21 lore.

In the new egalitarian society boys don’t grow up to be men, they remain ‘boys’ with all their boyish evasion of responsibility.  All are charmingly irresponsible and befuddled Hugh Grant’s.   They marry later, if at all.  They father children but do not raise them.  Women wear the trousers and carry the responsibility.  They study, achieve, provide the income and keep the home (not so egalitarian in reality).  Men become touchy-feely while women are stoical and hard.   The role reversal works out at so many levels.    But the net result is marriage deeply suffers and society begins to disintegrate.  The net result is the rebellion deepens.

Of course, there are other factors that play into the troubles of society, but the setting aside  of a responsible complementarianism, as in Gen 3,  is undoubtedly one.

What a loss of complementarianism means for the church will be the subject of a future post.

excuses… excuses… excuses

Gen 3:11-13 (ESV) He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

Anna Russell  (sixties songwriter)

I went to my psychiatrist To be psychoanalyzed To find out why I killed the cat And blacked my husband’s eyes. He laid me on a downy couch To see what he could find, So this is what he dredge-ed up From my subconscious mind: Refrain: Hey, libido, Bats in the belfry, Jolly Old Sigmund Freud.

When I was one, my mommy hid My dolly in a trunk, And so it follows naturally That I am always drunk. When I was two, I saw my father Kiss the maid one day, And that is why I suffer now From kleptomania. Refrain: At three, I had the feeling of Ambivilance towards my brothers, And so it follows naturally I poisoned all my lovers. But I am happy; now I’ve learned The lesson this has taught; That everything I do that’s wrong - Is someone else’s fault. Refrain:

the tempter’s tactics… entrapment

Gen 3:1-6 (ESV)
Now the serpent was more crafty [subtle] than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” ​​​ And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

When we read the Genesis account of the original temptation one thing that strikes is that the serpent never suggests outright that Eve should eat the forbidden fruit.  What he does is plant suggestions in her mind.  He is, as the text says, subtle.  Temptations that are likely to trip us are not so much those which frame sin in terms of obvious disobedience but that instil different angles that seem plausible and  attractive.

I am reminded of  probably the most powerful drama I have seen on the theme of temptation.  Taylor Hackford’s compelling drama ‘The Devil’s Advocate‘ (a play on words at a number of levels) stars Keanu Reeves as an able young small town Defense Attorney, Kevin Lomax, whose skills bring him to the attention of a prestigious New York law firm called ‘Milton, Chadwick and Waters’ and he is offered a job.  Against his evangelical mother’s advice he decides to take it.

He soon comes to the attention of the head honcho of the firm, John Milton (a not too subtle allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost).  Milton is brilliantly played by Al Pacino.  Unknown to Lomax (and the audience) at this point,  Pacino is in fact Satan.  Milton sets out to capture and debase Lomax.  Slowly but surely he orchestrates his downfall.  He does so by suggestions to Lomax’s mind.  He never instructs he simply paints scenarios.

Lomax follows the suggestions and destroys himself and all he loves in the process.  In the dénouement, when Lomax confronts  Milton he finally discovers who Milton is .  He blames Milton for the decisions he has made but Pacino (Milton and the devil) sets him right; he, but suggests, Lomax chooses, Lomax decides.

Kevin Lomax: You made me do it!

John Milton: No, I don’t work that way, Kevin.

...

John Milton: You were right about one thing. I have been watching. Couldn’t help myself. Watching, waiting, holding my breath. But I’m no puppeteer Kevin, I don’t make things happen. Doesn’t work like that.
…
John Milton : Free will, It’s like butterfly wings. One touch and it never gets off the ground. I only set the stage. You pull your own strings.

Milton  (Pacino and Satan) goes on to demonstrate that all Lomax’s decisions were ultimately his own.  Milton may corrupt but Lomax is only too willing to be corrupted.

The film is raw and so not one to readily recommend.  Like many other American movies it does not trust the intelligence of the viewer and so spells out in the dénouement more than it need.  However, that being said, as morality tales go, it is on the money.

Below are some further interesting quotations from the film.

Kevin Lomax: Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Is that it?

John Milton: Why not? I’m here on the ground with my nose in it since the whole thing began. I’ve nurtured every sensation man has been inspired to have. I cared about what he wanted, and I never judged him. Why? Because I never rejected him in spite of all his imperfections…I’m a humanist. Maybe the last humanist. Who, in their right mind, Kevin, could possibly deny the 20th century was entirely mine? All of it, Kevin. All of it. Mine. I’m peaking, Kevin. It’s my time now.

John Milton: Vanity – definitely my favorite sin.

John Milton: Don’t get too cocky my boy. No matter how good you are don’t ever let them see you coming. That’s the gaffe my friend. You gotta keep yourself small. Innocuous. Be the little guy…

John Milton: Underestimated from day one. You’d never think I was a master of the universe, now would ya?

John Milton: Freedom, baby… is never having to say you’re sorry.

Don’t be a Lomax…avoid entrapment.

the first lie… embellished

Gen 3:2-5 (ESV)
And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

In the last blog we noted the received wisdom of practised liars; if you’re going to lie then lie big.  They must be right because the original liar whom Jesus calls,  ‘father of lies‘ and  John calls ‘that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world‘ clearly believed this maxim.  Not only is Eve told disobedience will not bring judgement she is promised it will bring joy; far from bringing death, the liar promises disobedience will bring life… you shall be like God, is anything more life-like than this?

Like all practised liars, the serpent spoke half-truths.  Adam and Eve did not die immediately (at least not physically, though they died in a more profound way).  And they did gain a god-like independent knowledge of good and evil as the liar promised but it far from enhanced their joy.  Like all who eat forbidden fruit, however, initially inviting in time they find its taste is bitter and ultimately deadly. What Adam and Eve discovered is that the only way they could have the knowledge of good and evil was by becoming evil.

Immediately self-consciousness replaces innocence and fear of God replaces a sense of acceptance.

Gen 3:7-10 (ESV)
Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.  And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”

The first ‘knowledge of good and evil’ they have is not of ‘good’ but ‘evil’, their own evil.  Recrimination,  blame, and blame avoidance strategies kick into play and the treadmill of human conscience, ‘accusing or excusing’ has begun.  The whole sorry tissue of evasion ends in death, death for Adam, death for Eve, death for everyone, and so Jesus reminds us ‘Satan has been a murderer from the beginning’ (Jn 8:44); lies and liars destroy, they kill.

When we begin to dissect the anatomy of a lie in Genesis it should cause us as Christians to hate lies.  Paul says to the Colossians,

‘lie not one to another seeing that you have put off the old self  with its practices and have put on the new self’ (Col 3:9)

and to the Ephesians,

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another (Eph 4:25)

For a Christian to lie is to deny his new standing in Christ and his part in the body of Christ.  It is to deny Christ, who is truth.  Our culture here in the UK in the last 25 years or so has become one where people easily and regularly lie without shame.  Not to lie if it will get you what you want and make life easier is a sign of mental weakness (notice the assumptions implied in modern lies are just the same as those in the first lie).  It is all too easy for Christians to adopt the manners of their culture.  The C1 culture of Crete had a penchant for lying but Paul reminds the believers there they must be different.  As believers we should remember the ancient wisdom: one of the seven things God hates, is ‘a lying tongue‘ (Prov 6:17).  Indeed, according to James, we lie when we behave in ways inconsistent with truth, we ‘lie against the truth‘  (Jas 3:14).

To lie is to be ‘of your father the devil’ (Jn 8:44).  It is to side with anti-Christ ( 2 Jn 7) and be willingly complicit in his lie.  We must take care for those wishing to believe the lie often find that God gives them what they wish for (2 Thess 2:11).

Which brings us to a second observation.  Bad, and bad enough, as everyday lying is for a believer, the greatest lie we can become inveigled in is that of false teaching.  Distortions of gospel truth are the greatest lies of all.

Thus Paul reminds us that the great apostasy of humanity was ‘to exchange  the truth of God for a lie’ (Roms 1:25).  When Jesus excoriates the Pharisees as liars, who have as their father the devil, who is the ‘father of lies’ it is because they contradict him and his teaching (Jn 8).    We need to consider carefully what we  teach or embrace, for God does.  When we casually accept or advocate teaching with little thought as to whether it is true to Scripture but simply because it is new, trendy, appealing and/or comfortable then we are embracing the lie (1 Jn 2:22).  And we are opposing Christ who is the truth and speaks the truth (Jn 8).

False teaching is the most damnable of damnable lies.

The ‘liar’ in John’s epistles is the one who does not live according to the gospel (1 Jn 2:4, 1 Jn 4:20) and the false teacher (1 Jn 2:21,22).

1John 2:18-25 (ESV)
Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that he made to us-eternal life.

John identifies true believers as those who hold to truth.  And truth is the message they have heard ‘from the beginning’, that is, the apostolic teaching.  The ‘liar’ is the person who dismisses, distorts or despises that message.

As we evangelicals are busily writing off as merely cultural large swathes of what the Bible teaches we should be asking ourselves whether we are ‘of the truth’ or ‘embracing the lie’.

In Revelation we read of the redeemed who inherit the Kingdom.  They are the army of the Lamb.  Those who have stood beside him in the battle for truth.  They have foregone much that was pleasurable in life that they may be pure for him (like ancient soldiers in Israel who avoided marital relations on the eve of battle) and have resisted the lie wherever they found it, sometimes at great personal cost, that they may follow the Lamb wherever he goes.   John sees them in his vision.  He writes,

Rev 14:1-5 (ESV)
Then I looked, and behold, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads. And I heard a voice from heaven like the roar of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder. The voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing on their harps, and they were singing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth. It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins. It is these who follow the Lamb wherever he goes. These have been redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are blameless.

Later he sees another group.  It is those forever outside the Celestial City, assigned to the Eternal Burnings   Among the ghoulish crowd are ‘liars’.

Rev 21:8 (ESV)
But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”

the first lie…

Gen 3:2-4 (ESV)
And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.

Interesting to note that the first lie was a denial of judgement.  It has been the primary and prevailing lie ever since.  Received wisdom says, if you are going to lie, then lie big; the bigger the lie, the greater its panache, the more likely it is to be swallowed.  Well this one was a whopper.  Perhaps that contributed to its success.

More importantly, it succeeded because it suited Eve to believe it; she liked the look of the forbidden fruit.  The most successful lies are those people want to believe.  Who does not wish to believe that there are no evil consequences of doing what one wants to do?  That there is no day of accountability, of reckoning, is a lie many still want to believe, and do (2 Pet 3).  But it doesn’t stop it from being a lie.

Believing it ain’t so, don’t make it so.

Gen 5:1-5 (ESV)
This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years; and he had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died.

when evil is ‘cool’

Os Guinness in his book ‘Unspeakable: facing up to the challenge of evil’, notes how evil grows exponentially in our modern culture because of our ‘unbridled passion to transgress, the drive to destroy traditions, flout standards, and defy conventions’. It has been fuelled by our fascination with people of excess who make evil ‘cool’ and incite the ‘passion to transgress’.

He writes,

‘… the excesses of the great ones and the fascination of the general public come together in an unholy package.  The ‘splendidly wicked ones’ whether presidents,, sports heroes, or rock stars are unstoppable, and we are unable to avoid admiring, envying, and excusing them.  So they range free in the higher altitudes of our society, while our ethics are disarmed, evil as transgression is made heroic, and the siren lure of real evil grows ever more irresistible.

Thus, radical idea by radical idea, violent film by violent film, explicit song by explicit song, brutal video game by brutal video game, edgy cable show by edgy cable show, and shameless scandal by shameless scandal, the momentum grows and the binding forces concentrate.  What was once unimaginable becomes thinkable and then fashionable.  What used to be abnormal is now normal.  Where we were shocked, we are now indifferent.  What started as soft-core ends as hard-core.  Where before the definition of deviancy slowly became more limited, now in a mad scramble for ratings and market share, there is and all-out race for the bottom in the name of ‘daring’ and the ‘edgy’ – which always turns out to be the violent, the vulgar, the explicit, and the tasteless.

Each transgression builds on the last one and binds us to the next one.  To break off at any point is to cast everything up to that point in a bad light, so each transgression serves as the permission and the dare to press to the next.  The result is an entire society following the addict’s piecemeal slide into bondage and a civilization’s descent into decay.’

A choreographer of Madonna’s reveals, ‘Madonna told me to break every rule I could think of and then when I was done to make up some new ones and break them.’  This is secular celebrity liberal wisdom naked and unashamed.  It is also the ancient ‘wisdom’ of the serpent intensified and made irresistible.  The lust for forbidden knowledge and forbidden fruit incites society  to overthrow its boundaries.  We have refused to accept limits and so evil arises from its long sleep malevolently intent on crushing all who have carelessly summoned it.

lurking evil

The Daily Mail (yes I know) has an article discussing, in the wake of the Cumbria massacre, human evil.  It is a good article and so far as it goes more or less expresses biblical thinking.  Below is an extract.

The deep, primitive horror of what occurred in Whitehaven is rendered even more sinister by its stubborn resistance to explanation…

Friends and neighbours have so far said that Bird was an ordinary chap, capable of casual greeting. He was friendly and co-operative, in no way threatening or dangerous. But that can only be because they did not know him.

Apparently nobody did. Perhaps the only man who did know what was going on inside his head was Derrick Bird himself.

But it is doubtful, even then, that he would have had the ability to analyse and work through the storm that was developing inside him. Indeed, it is precisely because he could not do this that his personality finally disintegrated into violent, arbitrary anger…

At last he crumbled. What makes this kind of terrible event even more terrifying is its unpredictability. It might never have happened at all.

Bird could have gone on through the rest of his life with a damaged understanding of his world happily hidden behind an untroubled exterior. Thousands of us do.

Indeed, many of us can take our secret anxieties to the grave. The human mind is often capable of self-repair to some extent, of keeping the monster of disintegration at a distance, of covering it up and finding temporary safety-valves to hold the lid in place.

But not always. For the uncomfortable truth is that there is the potential for a Derrick Bird explosion within all of us. We must be thankful that it happens so extremely rarely. But it would be foolish to pretend that it is impossible for you, for me, or for my neighbour to explode in such a catastrophic way.

We are all of us mysterious.

We may, as Christians wish to say that Cumbria is not resistant to explanation  and say the explanation is found in the Garden of Eden – its roots lie in a humanity defiant of its Maker.  We may wish to say a better conclusion may have been ‘we are all of us sinners’.  That being said, the writer does not try to shirk the evil in the human heart.   He does not try to place Derrick Bird in a separate humanity different from the rest of us.  He does not try to distance the everyday person from Bird.  In fact, Bird was an ‘everyday person’.  He realises that Bird is one of us and the same potential lies in us all. Here he is in line with biblical thinking.  We are not ‘born good’ we are born dysfunctional.  We are born with a heart inclined to evil.  Evil spills out of us in a thousand different ways day by day.  That it does not spew in a murderous rampage is not due to some innate goodness but to a myriad of restraints that prevent our worst inclinations from taking their head.  Sometimes a confluence of circumstances (internal and external) conspire to break down these restraints and allow us to give vent to our murderous tendencies.  What we sometimes feel and think we actually do.

Of course, it is only possible to say what Bird did was evil if we believe there is a God.  Otherwise categories of right and wrong are only socially engineered and pragmatic.  When we speak of ‘evil’ we are maintaining that something is absolutely, unequivocally and undeniably wrong.   Such an assertion demands a Creator.

flesh and spirit in romans, and beyond (3)

We have been considering two alternative realities in Paul’s theology – the flesh and the Spirit.  For clarity’s sake we should emphasize again that these two realities – flesh and Spirit -  although involving principles and peoples are for Paul perhaps primarily , provinces or principalities.  They represent two realms, spheres, kingdoms, – two distinct cosmologies or creations.

With the First Coming of Christ, especially his resurrection and subsequent glorification, the long promised eschatological Age of the Spirit arrived (at least in embryonic form).  From Pentecost, and the outpouring of the Spirit as the crowning gift of the New Covenant, history was thereafter divided into two eras – the old era/age/world of ‘the flesh’ and the new era/age/world ‘of the Spirit’.  Humanity therefore is now  also divided into two; either we are ‘in Adam’  and belong to the old era and so are ‘in the flesh’ or we are ‘in Christ’ and belong to the new era and so are ‘in the Spirit’.

flesh

‘Flesh’ in the first instance is a word without moral connotations.  It is virtually a synonym for the first creation.  It was a creation described by God as ‘very good’.   Yet, although ‘very good’, it had inherent weaknesses.  It was for example (unlike new creation) a realm that sin and death were able (and permitted) to enter.  More significantly still, it was a creation in which God placed responsibility on man without empowering him to fulfil it.  Adam received a divine fiat – he must not eat the forbidden fruit and if he did he would die (Gen 2:15).  Herein lies creation’s essential weakness: its identity and destiny is tied to the obedience of  its human head, Adam; its well-being depends partly on man and not totally on God. Adam’s name means ‘frailty’ (Cf.  Mark 14:38;  Gals 4:13; ), signalling his weakness, and perhaps too, the precarious nature of creation itself.  At any rate, Adam disobeyed the divine fiat, failed in his responsibility, and sin gained a foothold.  The first creation was in trouble.

However, God was not wrong-footed. God’s plans did not depend or centre on the first creation but on the second.  It was not the ‘first man’, Adam, in whom God’s purposes were to be fulfilled, but the ‘second man’ , Christ (1 Cor 15:22, 45, 47; Roms 5:12-21); God’s final vision was a creation not of  ‘flesh’ but ‘Spirit’ (1 Cor 15: 42-49).  He planned to deliver humanity from the frailty, failure and futility of the first creation and bring him, by grace,  into the fullness, faultlessness and finality of the second and new creation.  In a word, the vulnerability of the first was but a prelude to the vigour of the second. He planned to do this to his own glory through Christ, his Son (Eph 1:3-9); as always with God, the last, truly would be the first (Matt 20:16), for, in yet another sense, he was first (Jn 1:15; Col 1:17).

We have already reflected a little on how God in Christ accomplished this – see here and here.  God’s Son, in Jesus, was born, in weakness, into the old creation, the realm of ‘flesh’ (Roms 1:3) that he might rescue his people from it and bring them, with him, through death and resurrection into the powerful realm of ‘the Spirit’ (Roms 1:4).

What ‘flesh’ is, is clear in Romans and beyond.  It is weak.  In Christ flesh in weakness  is revealed (Roms 1:3; 2 Cor 13:4; Hebs 4:15).  However, flesh is not only weak, in all other than Christ it is wicked and wanton.  In Romans the corrupt and ultimately hopeless nature of ‘flesh’ is unravelled.

flesh is culpable

In Roms 1:18-3:20 Paul sketches the utter failure of  humanity to meet its responsibilities.  He demonstrates that all humanity – gentile and Jew – have failed in their obligations and responsibilities and consequently are exposed to the wrath of God.  In Ch 1, he establishes that gentiles have failed in their responsibility and so are sinners for knowing God they did not glorify him as God but became idolaters (1:18-23). As a consequence they are both ungodly and unrighteous (1:18).   In ch 2, he establishes, rather more surprisingly, that Jews too are sinners (2:12-24).  I say ‘surprisingly’ for Jews, because of their special relationship with God, were inclined to consider themselves above the accusation of sin; gentiles were sinners, not Jews (Gals 2:15).  However, Paul’s conclusion is as ringing as it is remorseless. Citing the every OT Law in which Jews boasted and that symbolised their special favour with God he indicts them,

Rom 3:10-12 (ESV)
“None is righteous, no, not one;  ​​​​​​​​no one understands; no one seeks for God.  ​​​​​​​​All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”

The Law, it appeared, did not absolve from sin it accused of sin and indeed aggravated sin (3:20; 7:7,8).  It exposed sin (3:20).  The conclusion is stark: if the Law in which they boasted , a symbol of Jewish superior moral knowledge and privilege, (2:17-20; 3:1-3) did not shield them from the accusation of sin, but in fact asserted it (3:9-19), then who could be declared just and good?  Who possibly could escape the wrath of God?  If the most privileged were sinners who then could be righteous?

Who had lived responsibly?  The answer was none.  If the best and most favoured were sinners then all were sinners.

Rom 3:9 (ESV)
What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin,

Rom 3:19-20 (ESV)
Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no flesh will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

And so Paul establishes the guilt of all.   Humanity has utterly and universally failed in its responsibility.  Before God all are culpable, all are sinners.

But why are all sinners?  Why are there no exceptions?  Why do none (except Christ) break the mould?

flesh is captive

Ch 5-8 develops the answer.   The answer is, however, already alluded to in the above text.  Paul says we all sin because all – Jew and Greek – are ‘under sin‘ (3:9).  Here a significant conceptual change takes place.  Until this point Paul has focussed on SINS.  Sin has been individual acts of unrighteousness.  Now sin as depicted as a power, an authority, and a controlling tyrant.  Sin is personified; it is no longer an act but an actor.  The focus in Ch 5-8 shifts from SINS to SIN.  We discover we commit SINS because we are controlled by SIN; we are ‘under [the rule of] sin‘ (Gals 3:22).   To be ‘in the flesh’ is to be enslaved to sin, conspiratorially so, but enslaved none the less (6:17).  Romans 7 expresses this unambiguously,

Rom 7:14 (ESV)
For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin.

In fact, to be ‘in/of the flesh’ is to be ‘under’ other authorities too.  It is to be ‘under judgement‘  or wrath (3:19; Cf Eph 2:3); ‘under Law‘ if Jewish (3:19; Gal 3:23); ‘under a curse’ (Gals 3:10); and ‘under the basic principles of this world‘ (Gal 4:3).  And, although humanity  ‘in the flesh’  is not described in so many words as being ‘under Satan’ or ‘under the world’, other language expresses the same idea (Eph 2:1-2).

To be in the flesh is a dire condition.  It is not simply to be weak and guilty, but to be in the grip of destructive powers that one can neither control nor escape (Roms 7:5: 8:6).  Like Gollum in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, those in the flesh are in the grip of destructive powers which they nevertheless willingly serve.  The picture is both repulsive and pathetic.  Gollum is Adamic humanity.  To be  an heir of Adam is to be bequeathed condemnation and death (5:12-21).

flesh is contrary

If the foregoing is bad then it is in Romans 8 the real horror of ‘flesh’ is exposed.  The chapter is visceral in its exposé of ‘the flesh’.

Rom 8:6-13 (ESV)
For to set the mind on the flesh is death… For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God… For if you live according to the flesh you will die.

‘Flesh’ in its responsibility before God, is not simply weak, guilty, and enslaved, but also antagonistic and contentious; it is implacably hostile to God (Roms 5: 10; Gals 5:17; Col 1:21; 1 Jn 2:16; Gen 6:12).  There is nothing good in flesh (Roms 7:18).  Responsible man ‘in the flesh’ – if I may alliterate with abandon – is frail, failed, fallen, fettered, and an irremediable foe of God. Flesh, Adamic humanity, is ‘beyond salvage’ and with it the whole creation it represents; all is condemned and must die (1 Cor 15:21,22).

the end of flesh in the flesh of Jesus

And in Christ death is exactly what it received.  Humanity ‘in the flesh’ was humanity responsible to God.  It was humanity under obligation to obey and in this responsibility it singularly and spectacularly failed.  ‘Flesh’ became corrupt humanity in opposition to a good God, a rebel without a cause; it became moral filth (1 Pet 3:21).   In the moral landscape of a holy God the abomination that ‘flesh’ now is cannot be tolerated.  Flesh must be condemned and finished.  This happened on the cross.  When Christ came in the likeness of sinful flesh, he came that in his body of flesh sinful flesh may be condemned and finished.  In the flesh of Christ, flesh – rebellious Adam – received its due – death.  And thus Adamic humanity, humanity in flesh, came to an end.   In resurrection Christ was no longer in the flesh but in the Spirit; death in the flesh gave place to life in the Spirit (1 Pet 3:18).

Thus the Christian is not ‘in Adam’ or ‘in the flesh’.  He needs no ‘flesh’ righteousness (which is what IAO is all about) for he lives not in the world of ‘flesh’ but of the world of ‘Spirit’.

Rom 8:3-6 (ESV)
For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

In the cross, Jesus shed his blood for our sins and so we are justified (Roms 5:9).  However, our righteousness although involving acquittal (Roms 4: 7,8), is much more.  For not only did the cross bring to us forgiveness through Jesus’ blood it also through Jesus’ death brought to an end our life in the ‘flesh’.  ‘The only hope for humanity is if they die to the realm of flesh and live in a different realm.

In Christ this is exactly what has happened.  We are participants in his death and resurrection.  This means we share in his death to life ‘in the flesh’ and share in his resurrection life ‘in the Spirit’.  There are two senses in which the death of Jesus saves.  Firstly in shedding his blood Christ atones for our sins (Roms 3:21-26) and secondly in his death he brings flesh to an end.  ‘Flesh’ cannot be redeemed, renovated, renewed, or ‘righteoused’, it can only be eradicated; flesh must be put to death, terminated. It has been for believers in Christ and will be for unbelievers in the eternal destruction of the Lake of fire (Gen 6:12,13, 1 Cor 5:5; Gals 6:8; Rev 20).  Our righteousness, as believers, before God is new creation righteousness, the righteous standing we have in a resurrected and reigning Christ who was ‘delivered for our offences and raised for our justification‘ (Roms 4:25). Moreover, it is new creation life, life in the Spirit (Roms 1:4, 2:28, 7:6, 8:1-16).

2Cor 5:14-15 (ESV)
For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

Rom 8:9-11 (ESV)
You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

Flesh and Spirit are not two friendly states, they are worlds at war.  They are antagonists, colliding creations. ‘Spirit’ and ‘flesh’ cannot become friends

Gal 5:17 (ESV)
For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.  (Cf  Gals 3:3; 4:29; 5:16; 6:8)

But we begin to get ahead of ourselves.  This blog is intended simply to sketch an anatomy of ‘the flesh’.  The implications of what it means to be dead to ‘flesh’ must wait for another blog as too must any discussion of life in the Spirit and its implications.