celebrating the son-rise

(A guest blog by Jim Gamble.)

It was good to celebrate and proclaim the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus on Easter Sunday. Some argue that it doesn`t really matter whether Jesus was physically resurrected or not and others deny the resurrection altogether, they see it as mere myth or legend. This sort of scepticism is not new of course, even in the early church some Christians had fallen for this error. They had been deceived by the philosophies of the age which said there was no physical resurrection of the dead.

We can read the Apostle Paul`s response to this heresy in 1Cor 15 .

1Cor 15:3-11 (ESV)
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

From v 3 – 4 we see that the reality of the physical death and resurrection of Jesus is so important that God foretold these events hundreds of years before they took place. Twice Paul repeats that phrase – according to the scriptures. The OT prophesied that God would send his Son to die for our sins. But Jesus didn’t just die. He was also raised from the dead, according to the Scriptures.

V 5 – 8 provides some of the historical evidence that God raised Jesus from the dead. God doesn’t expect us to have blind faith or to believe in fairytales and myths. We have already referred to the witness of the OT to the death and resurrection of Jesus and here we also have reference to the eye witnesses who saw Jesus after the resurrection. V5 says that Jesus appeared to Peter, and then the twelve , then to 500 of the brothers and so on … and last of all to Paul himself or Saul of Tarsus as he then was.

Not only did all these people see the risen Jesus, they were changed as a result. This is additional dramatic evidence because on seeing Jesus after his resurrection they were transformed from cowering wrecks into courageous witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus. The reality of the resurrection of Jesus gave them the confidence they required to face persecution. The resurrection has this kind of  transforming power.

The main thought then in this short late-Easter blog is this :

The Resurrection has Transforming Power.

The resurrection of Jesus transforms our lives. Just by dwelling on the resurrected Jesus we will be transformed and will find that Jesus himself is at work in us, changing our appetites and desires. All of us are not changed to the same degree. Often we lose the wonder of Jesus and forget to concentrate upon him. But as we dwell on him and in him, Jesus is at work changing every believer to be more like himself.

The courage, the moral strength and resilience, the peace and joy that belong to Christ, he gives to us. His life dwells in those who trust in him. His resurrection gives us the certainty of coming resurrection. This certainty completely changes our present outlook in life.

If there is no resurrection then what have we to live for?. All we have to live for is the pleasure of the moment.  Notice what Paul says in v30 – 32.  ‘And as for us why do we endanger ourselves every hour? I die every day` he says in v31, then he adds, ‘what have I gained by this if Jesus has not actually been raised? If there is no resurrection he says in effect in v32 we may as well just eat drink and be merry for sooner or later we will die.’

You see the point Paul is making?  He is not interested in being a masochist. It is because he is convinced of the reality of the resurrection that he is ready to subject himself to a life of danger. He is willing to face all kinds of hazards including shipwreck, beatings, imprisonment and execution. In fact, it seems almost all of the initial disciples were executed because of their refusal to deny that Jesus rose again.

Paul even describes his sufferings in 2 Cor. 4:17 as ‘light and momentary troubles’ and as ‘achieving an eternal weight of glory that far outweighs them all’. He is so convinced about the glory of heaven that he can let the things of earth go.

Like Paul then, let’s fix our eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen. We can be so focused on our job, our families or on sport or entertainment. Some of us may have been more excited about the Masters at Augusta on Easter Sunday than about the Master! Some of us get more excited by the latest iPad which will be quickly superseded and become obsolete than by eternal realities. Paul reminds us that what is seen is temporary but what is unseen is eternal and imperishable.

Jesus is enthroned in heaven for ever. All power and all authority is given to him. He reigns and he is reigning inside every believer. To meditate on the risen, reigning Lord Jesus brings motivation to be like him, it brings hope, optimism, enthusiasm and certainty.

Only by setting our minds on the one who has been raised victorious over sin and death will we be able to live with victory over sin. His triumph over sin and death opens up for us a life of freedom from fear of death and slavery to sin. The Resurrection of Jesus has that kind of transforming power in our lives.

The Resurrection also has Justifying Power.

Justification is simply “the act of God declaring men free from guilt and acceptable to him”.

God raised Jesus on the third day as the guarantee that all who put their faith in him are forgiven. They are free from the guilt and penalty of sin. The price has been paid by the death of Jesus. If the cross was Jesus` payment for our sins, then the resurrection marked God`s acceptance of that payment.

Paul is very clear in v 17 of our chapter regarding the implications of denying the resurrection.

17 If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. And of all men we are most to be pitied.

That’s how vital the resurrection is. The resurrection of Jesus is verification that his death has paid the full price for sin. Because he has been raised justification is certain.

Rom 4: 25 `He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification`.

So then, in the resurrection of Jesus, God is declaring us to be just, to be righteous. This is only possible because in the resurrection the Father declares his Son to be righteous, he vindicates his Son, he vindicates his claims to be the Son of God in power and he shows his absolute delight in his Son .

So too in the resurrection of Jesus we can be justified and the delight of the Father and the vindication of the Father rests upon us. With that justification comes peace. Being justified by faith we have peace with God and assurance of heaven.

Heaven is guaranteed because of the resurrection.

V30 But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead , the first fruits (the guarantee) of those who have fallen asleep.

We are freed from the fear of death. Some of us will have witnessed fellow believers and loved ones (some elderly and some not so old) calmly facing death without fear. With the confidence which comes through believing that Jesus has been raised from the dead. In the sure and certain knowledge that the day of resurrection is coming soon for all those who have been transformed and justified by the death and resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

`This is of first importance that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures`.

Let`s continue to focus our minds on our risen, reigning Lord Jesus not simply in the period of Easter but throughout the year.  Easter is the reality that shapes the whole of our lives.

funerals, fasting, feasting, and the first day of the week

Emergents (enchanted by the ‘Big Tradition’), some Old Life Reformed (emphasising the institutional church and sacraments), some Federal Vision folks like Peter Leithart (with a similarly high ecclesiology), the rising influence, in the States at least, of evangelical Lutheranism (which tends to stress liturgy), our ecumenical romance with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, the popular influence of Anglicans like Tom Wright, the childish drive for the novel and sensual that marks a culture bloated on narcissism, and the shallow gospel of many Western believers have converged to create the perfect liturgical storm.   It is a storm threatening to swamp gospel fulness and freedom in Christ.  Evangelicalism, in many quarters, is all too ready to exchange the real for rituals and regulations, the freeing for the enslaving, Christ for the childish and cultic legalistic ceremonies.  Ritualistic faith is on the increase, an inevitable result of  faith that fails to ‘hold fast to the head’ (the risen reigning Christ in heaven) and instead seeks religious experience and assurance in that which is sensuous and ceremonial, that which is merely ‘earthly’ (Cols 2:16-20); when the substance is lost the shadows rush in to fill the void.

My previous post (but one) protested strongly against the present evangelical love-fest with all things liturgical (liturgical calendars and its seasons such as lent).   However, you may well read the post and say, ‘That’s all very well.  I see the force of your argument.  However, does not Christianity have its special day (the first day of the week), and its rituals (baptism, the Lord’s supper), and does it not promote fasting?  Is there contradiction here?’

It is this latter question I wish to address.

a believing hermeneutic

Whenever we find what we perceive to be a tension in Scripture the way forward lies in believing faith that seeks to do justice to both statements without playing off one against the other or adopting one to the exclusion of the other.

With this hermeneutic, we may well conclude that in principle New Covenant faith radically abandons ritualistic religion reducing many religious days to one, many different rites and ceremonies to two simple acts, and  regular ritually obligated fasts to the occasional and voluntary.  We may not understand why any special day or ritual is left but this is a question faith need not have answered to live obediently.  We do not have to fully understand a matter to be taught and guided by what is revealed.

This seems to me terribly important.  Christians ought to have a humble submission to God’s Word that believes and obeys without requiring all questions answered.  We must avoid the critical superiority that robs Scripture of its authority and impact by a thousand clever avoidance questions and arguments.  I am not advocating a faith that does not inquire, study and seek to learn.  Far from it.  Godly scholarship is a gift from God.  However, scholarship is not always godly, not always believing, and certainly not always submissive.    Scholars, like the rest of us, too often read the Bible without that childlike trust and submission.  When this is the case no amount of scholarly nous will compensate, indeed it is likely to blind; spiritual truth is spiritually discerned.

Church tradition can also be a force for good or ill.   Church tradition like scholarship can be good if the tradition encourages making Scripture humbly studied the authority for faith and practice, but where the tradition makes the authority the tradition itself (whether confessional or non-confessional)  spiritual blindness is inevitable.  Both scholarship and tradition are powerful forces to buck, yet a believing hermeneutic must be willing to challenge both.  Neither are final authorities.  Only Scripture is truth.

There is only one guard against deception and that is a heart and mind subject to the Word and depending on the Spirit.  This is ever the way of understanding and blessing.

sabbaths and sunday, law days and love days

We can, however, go a little further in addressing the apparent tension expressed above by noting some basic differences between OT regulations and NT practices.

We should remember that the nature of religion that allows man to save himself (as the Mosaic Law did) is to focus on what is external and ritualistic.  Such religion is typically full of rules and regulation, things to do.  The Mosaic Covenant (this do and live) was certainly like this.  The Sabbath was the key sign of the Mosaic Covenant (Ex 31:13) and exemplifies this principle.  So important was the Sabbath that it was enshrined as part of the Ten Words in the tablets of stone.  Remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy was a vital component of covenantal obedience.  It was a regulation carefully drafted with various activities proscribed.  Failure to observe it was punishable by death (Ex 31) and honouring it was the way of life (Isa 58:13,14).  We should not miss the fact that Sabbath observance was a legal obligation with much hanging on it.

However, when we come to the NT and the day Christians observe, the atmosphere is quite different.  Firstly, of course, Christians do not observe the Sabbath.  It simply will not do when Sabbatarians, in an attempt to claim Sunday as  the Christian Sabbath, argue for one day in seven.  The Sabbath is not any one out of seven, it is specifically and intentionally the seventh day.  It is the day when God rested having created for six.   There is simply no suggestion in the NT that the Christian day is a Sabbath, in fact the opposite is the case (Col 2:16).  The very choosing of another day clearly signalled a decisive change in covenantal relationship since the Sabbath was the covenantal sign of the OC (Ex 31).

But what of the Christian day of worship – the first day of the week?  Is this enshrined in a  statute or written on a tablet of stone?  Is there a command that Sunday must be remembered and treated as holy?  Is it defined as a day of rest? Is there a sanction of death on those who fail to observe it?  Clearly not.  Why do Christian’s worship on a Sunday?  We worship on a Sunday because that is the day of Christ’s resurrection.  Indeed, after his death the resurrected Christ appeared only to his disciples on Sundays (the first day of the week).  It would appear that the Holy Spirit so impressed upon the young church the association between the resurrection of Jesus and the first day of the week that  it quickly became the day of Christian gathering and worship.  Soon it was simply known as ‘the Lord’s day’ (Rev 1:10).  Love for the Lord had set it apart.

My point is, it was no mere legal regulation or ordinance that gave the first day of the week its significance but love for the one who was identified as Lord in resurrection on this day.  In this way the Spirit impressed on the heart of the infant church the appropriateness of Sunday for Christian worship.     The Sabbath signalled the end of the old creation: the first day of the week the beginning  of the new creation.   The Sabbath was for man, the first day of the week is for the Lord.  Sunday is not for Christians a day of rest but a day of worship.  Let me repeat, Christians worship on a Sunday not from duty, not from fear of judgement, and not to gain merit.  They gather out of love for their Lord.

Can I observe in passing, this is why the Lord’s Day observance society is so wrong-headed.  The Lord’s Day was never intended to be foisted on society.  It was intended for Christians and not the world.  It was a day when believers were drawn together to worship out of love for their Lord, not for unbelievers to observe by legal enforcing.  The whole premise is wrong.  We so easily lapse from grace into legalism.

These two days, it seems,  illustrate the different principles that guide the different covenants, the difference between the legal precepts of the old and the gracious privileges of the new, in particular, those of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

baptism and the lord’s Supper

We speak of these as ‘ordinances’.  The word means ‘an authoritative command or order’.  Yet I wonder whether this word is best suited.  For, yet again, juridical language is entirely absent.  Both baptism and the Lord’s Supper may be better termed privileges than ordinances.  In both cases we receive from the Lord.  In both cases, the emphasis is far less on what we ought to do than what grace has accomplished.  Both indicate blessings bestowed.

In our baptism we are carried through waters of judgement and death (safely in Christ our ark) and emerge  to the privilege of a new world and life the other side of the deluge.  Sin is gone in the judgement of the waters and we stand before God in resurrection with no more conscience of sins (2 Pet 3:21).  Baptism is rich with the symbolism of grace; it brings us through judgement into a new creation.  (In terms of command, the preponderance of verses focus on the command to baptise rather than the command to be baptised.)

In the Lord’s Supper, again we receive.  We sit at the table of the Lord and eat what he provides.  He is the spiritual host.  And he is the spiritual food (specifically in his death).  The focus is what is graciously given.  Again there is no legal or juridical context. The context when the disciples are first introduced to the Supper could not be more intimate and familial.  Christ’s love for his own and his desire to fellowship with them is the atmosphere in which it is inaugurated (Luke 22:15).  His love is on full display.  He washes their feet, feeds them, teaches them, comforts and prepares them for the coming hours and days; having loved his own which were in the world he loves them to the end.

The Lord’s Supper is a love feast.  It is no formal ritual with eating a legal duty.  It is not rigidly confined by rules and regulations.  Nor is it elaborate or ceremonial.  The meal is the essence of simplicity.  It is simply bread and wine and we are free in when we eat it and where we eat it (Cf Acts 2).  What matters is the state of heart in which we eat (1 Cor 11).  We should eat realising that it is a meal symbolising the oneness of God’s people in the body of Christ (1 Cor 10:16).   We eat out of love for the Lord and a desire to fellowship with him and his people.  Any thought of mere obligation to a rite or ordinance fails to grasp what it is about; ritualism and relationship are mutually exclusive.

Much more of course could be said regarding these gospel privileges, however, my concern is simply to underline that both, like the Lord’s day, arise in a context of grace and relationship not law and ritual and both reflect the context in which they arise.  Be suspicious of every attempt to squeeze ritualistic drama from these privileges for the less we appreciate their inner spiritual realities the more we will make of their externalities.

We should also note in this context that neither has any intrinsic ‘magical’ saving quality.  They have no sacramental value of themselves.  Being baptised and taking the Lord’s Supper does not confer grace or guarantee spiritual security.   1 Cor 10 makes this very clear; it is possible to be both baptised and regularly take the Lord’s Supper yet be destroyed by God.

fasting

Paul is quite clear that denying ourselves bodily needs and provisions is no virtue in itself.  The Mosaic Covenant (Judaism)  made numerous ascetic ritualistic demands on the people.  Not so the NT.  In fact,  it explicitly condemns ascetic impositions (Col 2:20-23) describing such teachings as the teaching of ‘deceiving spirits’ and ‘doctrines of demons’ (1 Tim 4:1-5).  Real self-denial, we discover, is not a denial of the body but a denial of the flesh (our Adamic human nature opposed to God).  Yet, fasting is something the NT assumes God’s people may do from time to time (Matt 9:15) normally depriving ourselves of some legitimate bodily need (usually food).

What are we to make of this apparent contradiction?  The first thing to be said is that in the New Covenant fasting is always voluntary (whether by an individual or a group).  There is no imposed season for fasting.  There is no rule that tells us we must fast.  Indeed there is no injunction to fast. Yet  Jesus assumes his people will fast and Paul tells us he often fasted.  We are not told when to fast, where to fast, how to fast, or how long to fast (though it should not be of such a time that Satan can take advantage Cf 1 Cor 7: 5).  Again the difference between law and gospel becomes apparent.

If someone fasts it will be because the Holy Spirit prompts him or her to do so.  Such prompting appears to be definite and in lieu of a specific task or purpose.   Thus Jesus fasts before facing the temptation of Satan and the beginning his public ministry (Matt 4:2).   Some of the church at Antioch fasted as they were considering the future strategy of expansion.  When Paul and Barnabas were considering who to appoint as elders in various churches they fasted (Acts 13:2, 14:23).  It seems too that fasting was generally accompanied by prayer (Lk 2:37, 5:33).  The point is this was a time of intense seeking the mind of God and humbling oneself before the Lord.  It is to our shame that most of us know little of this today.  Prayer and fasting seem to be linked with spiritual power.  Perhaps we see here a reason for our spiritual weakness.

For our purposes, the main point to note is that fasting is not an institutionalised ritual that is part of an imposed church calendar but is an activity that arises out of a burden placed on the heart by the Holy Spirit.  How easily our legalistic hearts institutionalise and ossify activities that should flow from freedom in the Spirit.  The value of a fast does not lie in the hunger for food it creates but the hunger for God that created it.

conclusion

The heart of Christianity is a living relationship with Christ by faith.  We live in union with him, rooted and grounded in him, and nourished by him (Cols 2).  Everything that ritualises, institutionalises and mechanises this should be treated with suspicion.  How ready we are to make a ritual or a law out of what is intended to arise from the heart freely as it seeks God’s face.  How easily we turn from life in the Spirit to the deadening letter, from privilege to performance, from relationship to ritual, from the unveiled to the veiled, from the spiritual to the sensual, from grace to works.

Let’s make it our aim to discover the true grace of God and having discovered it, to stand fast in it.

lent…or the ashes of judaism that deface christianity

intro

Lent is the forty days before Easter in the Christian liturgical Calendar.  It starts with Ash Wednesday and ends on Holy Thursday.  It is traditionally celebrated in the West by Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Anglicans.  Until fairly recently, for most evangelicals, the very hint of liturgical calendars and days like ‘Ash Wednesday’ and ‘Holy Thursday’ would have been enough for them to run a million miles.  No longer.  Liturgical calendars are de rigueur.  Evangelicals are outing as ‘liturgy-men’ and proud of it.  Celebrating Lent is where it is at in modern spirituality.  A cursory glance at many evangelical websites will make this plain.   Goodness, even Michael Horton has jumped on the bandwagon.  Everyone’s loving lent.

Have conservative evangelicals got it wrong all these years?  Have they been too strict, too stuffy, and too legalistic (an ironic claim in this context if ever there was one)?  Do we need to invest in the ‘Big Tradition’ and rediscover these disciplines?  I guess, my tone in writing so far will reveal where I stand on this issue.  I am appalled at how casually evangelicals are buying into traditions that are essentially Judaistic and sub-Christian.  At best these are a pointless distraction but the reality is much worse; they are actually an indulgence of ‘fleshly’ religion which draws away from Christ.  Strong words, I know.  Not likely to please many.  Such sentiments will be castigated as intolerant and narrow-minded for sure.

Let me say, at the outset, I don’t mean to be unkind or harsh.  As Brian McLaren would protest, how can a mild-mannered guy like me ever be misunderstood in this kind of way?  In fact, if Lenten-men were simply those who have observed it for centuries then I probably would have said nothing.  However, when those who were traditionally free from this kind of childishness (a word I shall later justify), even slavery (another word I shall endeavour to defend), begin to lapse into religious shadows that in Christ are fulfilled and abandoned, I feel compelled to protest.  I am jealous that Christ is being lost in the paraphernalia of human religiosity.  Indeed, all who grasp what it is to be a believer who has died and risen with Christ ought to be jealous for Christ’s glory and care deeply when they see believers submitting to what Scripture calls ‘weak and worthless elements‘  and being enslaved by them (Gals 4:8).

Paul writes, in a context closely allied to the matter in question (rites, rituals and regulations),

Gal 3:1-5 (ESV)
O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain-if indeed it was in vain? Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith.

The Galatian Judaizers were advocating Christ plus the Mosaic Law, and especially its emphasis on rites (Gals 5:2, 6:12), purity laws (Gal 2: 11), and liturgical calendars (Gal 4:10).  For Paul, the whole methodology and minutiae of the Law, symbolised in circumcision, was addressed to man in the flesh and not the Spirit; it is a methodology (a religion) for flesh (Gals 3:3, 4:21-31; 6:12) that is fulfilled and finished in Christ.  It is my conviction that adopting liturgical calendars, special festivals, dietary laws, symbols of penance and self-humiliation, and bodily self-denial rites as an end in themselves or as part of a religious calendar is to embrace the old covenant of law as a means of relationship with God and is seriously regressive in our walk with God (whatever protests are made to the contrary).  When the Christians of Galatia are tempted to do this, Paul says, ‘I am afraid I have laboured over you in vain‘ (Gals 4:11).  In accepting these principles of law ‘Christ will be no advantage to them‘ (Gals 5:2).  Thus the Galatians are urged,

Gal 5:1 (ESV)
For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery

Of course, those evangelicals who advocate Christian Calendars are at pains to point out that liturgical observances do not save.  They do not affect our justification or standing before God.  Nor are they to be imposed as a rule upon the church, but are a matter of Christian freedom.  Indeed, the legalist, it seems, is someone like me who opposes rites and rituals, certainly any promotion of them. I am apparently denying freedom in Christ to those who wish to worship and serve as they wish.  The irony is rich.  For, of course, it is precisely those who promote such practices that Paul regards as legalists.  Indeed it must be so, for they are promoting OT law not NT gospel; if you promote law you are ipso facto a legalist.

no nt mandate

Show me one text from the NT epistles teaching that Christians should live by religious calendars, or dietary laws, or observe special feasts, or abstain from foods, and so on.  It cannot be done.  Such rules and regulations in the NT are conspicuous by their absence, which is singularly odd because one would expect that if such disciplines are so helpful  the NT would be replete with exhortations to pursue them.  But it is not, for they are not (helpful).  The silence of Scripture here is deafening.

They do not ‘save’, their evangelical protagonists agree.  Yet, if this is so, and it is, why commend them?  If I can grow in my Christian life fully without religious rules and rituals, and I clearly can since the NT never advocates them, then what is their purpose?  Moreover, we should not be so confident that these ‘disciplines’ will remain a matter of ‘freedom’ in the consciences of those who embrace them.  The witness of history and Scripture is against this.  What begins as voluntary soon becomes established tradition and finally binding truth.  Whatever we give ourselves to we become slaves to (Roms 6:16).

It is little wonder Paul is so opposed.  He has great patience and sympathy with people who have been converted from legalistic religion.  He bears with weak consciences in Jewish converts who cannot feel free to eat certain meats etc.  He knows it can take time for these consciences to find their full freedom in the gospel (Roms 14,15).  Yet he is in no doubt that these consciences are ‘weak’.  They are not gospel-trained consciences fully aware of their freedom (from religious legalistic observances) in Christ.  However, while he bears with weak consciences, he has no patience for those who promote and teach the value of ritualism to others.  He is opposed to this root and branch and challenges any teaching that suggests or imposes such practices.  There is simply no freedom given in the NT to promote and champion Judaistic practices however ‘Christianized’.  The reality is, that there is no such thing as ‘Christianized’ Judaism (or at least the only version is its fulfilment and finish in Christ) only ‘Judaized’ Christianity.

Some of the above is contention I have not yet proved.  Let me regroup before engaging.

I am opposing religious calendars, man-made rules, and religious rites for holiness for two reasons:

• because the NT nowhere recommends or suggests them for the life of godliness.
• because the NT actually opposes them and suggests they deflect us from Christ.

I have made the case for my first contention, follow me as I now make the case more fully for my second contention: the NT actually opposes them and suggests they deflect from Christ.

colossians 2:1-3:4

The key NT text refuting calendars and man-made religious disciplines for holiness is Colossians 2/3.  I urge you to read this text carefully and prayerfully.  It is a clear and powerful criticism of all attempts to introduce religious ritualism into Christianity.  Below, I want to outline its main thrust and thesis.

christianity is christ

Paul’s central and vital point in this chapter  (and in Colossians as a whole) is that Christianity is essentially a relationship with Christ by faith.  Everything that matters is found in Christ alone.  Christ is supreme (Col 1:15-21).  God’s great revealed secret, hidden in the past (in OT events, figures etc) is Christ (2:2).  In Him, lie all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (2:3).  Further this revealed secret is that Christ lives in God’s people (1:27).  This union between Christ and his people is the sum of what the gospel and Christianity is all about.  As Paul writes,

Col 2:6-7 (ESV)
Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught…

Living in our union with Christ is the be-all-and-end-all of Christianity.  We are ‘filled’  or ‘complete’ in Him, the one in whom God’s fullness dwells (2:9,10).  We have no more than Christ and need no more than Christ.  Indeed there is no more than Christ (Col 1:15-19).  Paul reminds us too that this union is a union of death and resurrection.  That is, to be united to Christ is to participate (by faith and through the Spirit) in the death and resurrection of Christ (2:8-11).  Like Christ we have died to this world (and so, as we shall see, to all its religious observances) and live in resurrection life to God.  Our ‘life is hid with Christ in God’ (Cols 3:3).  This means that Christ in heaven is the source, story and raison d’etre of our life.  We find and enjoy life as we set our affections on Christ in heaven.  As we put to death what is earthly (living for the things of this world as well as the sins of this world) and set our minds and hearts on the invisible world perceived only by faith we triumph in faith.  This, and this alone, enables us to grow in grace.  In this way alone ( looking to Christ in heaven and putting to death what is earthly) are we, ‘filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,  so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.’ (Col 1:9,10).

This is what it means to be ‘connected to the head’ (Cf 2:19).  To live other than by the faith union that puts to death what is earthy and lives by a heart absorbed with Christ in heaven is to fail to ‘hold fast to the head’ (2:19) and results in being ‘disqualified’ (2:8); or, in Galatian language,in being ‘severed from Christ’ (Gals 5:4).  It should be obvious that if we look elsewhere other than to Christ as the source of our life and power we are cutting the link of faith.   Only by a conscious living in, looking at, and living for Christ can we become ‘mature in Christ’ (Col 1:28).

false routes

Paul does not urge that the Colossians live in Christ in a vacuüm.  He writes because some were teaching otherwise.

Col 2:4 (ESV)
I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments...

syncretism

What precisely the Colossian heresy was need not concern us here.  Scholars delight in discussing such matters but rarely reach final conclusions.  In any case, the main components are clear and it is these that interest us.  It was a mixture of philosophy (2:8), mysticism (2:18) and Judaism (2:8, 11, 14, 16,17).  Singly, and as a whole Paul is opposed to these influences on Christian life and practice.  He says they ‘delude’ (2:4) for they are based on ‘plausible arguments’ (2:4).  They appear to promote sanctity (2:23) yet are merely ‘empty deceit… human tradition… elemental spirits of the world… having an appearance of wisdom… self-made religion… things on earth… not according to Christ’ and more  (Col 2:8, 20-23, 3:2).  Paul will have no syncretism of Christ and anything else.

Now, we should underline that what Paul is dismissing is not merely philosophy (what has Athens to do with Jerusalem) and mysticism (what has Eleusis to do with Jerusalem) but also Judaism or the Law (what has Sinai to do with Jerusalem, or better, the New Jerusalem ).  For many this dismissal of Law in Christianity is a bridge too far.  I confess, I do not really understand why.  Paul is consistent and clear in his proclamation that Christians are not ‘under law’ (Roms 6:15; 7:1-6; Gals 4:21; 5:18; 1 Cor 9:20).  While Christians can learn from the Old Covenant as we see how it points to Christ, we are in no way obligated to it.  It has no rights over us or claims upon us.  We are not called to obey it, nor to adopt it in any way.  In fact, we are told that there is a basic incompatibility between the forms of Judaistic Law and Gospel Christianity.  Jesus makes it clear that the gospel cannot be contained in the old forms of religion that belonged to law.

Mark 2:21-22 (ESV)
No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins-and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.” 

passé

This is vital to grasp.  Paul tells us the difference is profound; the law belongs to the old age and old world while the church belongs to the new age and new world.  It is those ‘alive in this world’ to whom the rules and regulations of law (moral, religious or otherwise) are of any relevance (Col 2:20). But Christians are not ‘alive’ in this world they have ‘died’ (2:11, 3:3) and they live in an age beyond this age and a world beyond this world.  They ought not to ‘submit’ (whether voluntarily or involuntarily) to regulations that belong to human religion (2:20) for they belong to an age which is passé.

earthly

This temporal distinction between the present and the future is tied into a spacial distinction between what is ‘earthly’ and what is ‘heavenly’ in Scripture.  This latter distinction is one that many modern evangelicals are reluctant to admit.  Yet it is clear and vital.  It is part of the distinction between the old and the new, the law and the gospel.  Jesus is ‘from above‘ and brings in a reality that is ‘from above’ (Jn 3:31; 8:23).  ‘Earthly’ things were revealed in the OT but as the one from heaven he reveals ‘heavenly things‘ (Jn 3:12).  Because he is from heaven he returns to heaven and on his return unites his people to him there.  We find our identity not in the earthly Adam but the heavenly Christ, not in the natural but the spiritual (1 Cor 15:45-49).  As a result we are a ‘heavenly people’ (Eph 1:20; 2:6) and our interests are to do with the realm where Christ our life is found (Gals 4:26; Col 3:1,2; Hebs 3:1; 11:6; 12:2).  The Law and its forms are ‘earthly’ and part of the elementary principles of ‘this world’.  They are merely an earthly copy or shadow of heavenly things (Hebs 8:5; 9:23). Thus they have nothing to do with the believer who is not ‘alive in this world’ but shares the resurrection life of Christ, a spiritual and heavenly life (Col 2:8-11).  This distinction is wrongly dismissed as dualistic and gnostic by some who should know better.  It is not.  It is the plain teaching of Scripture.  Ritual and rite are not merely passé but also unable to lift the soul above this world.  They cannot remove us from the realm of ‘flesh’.

fleshly, childish, enslaving, and inadequate

The law is Judaism. It belongs to the first creation, the earthly, the natural, this world.  It is called by Paul ‘the elemental spirits of the world’ (2:8).  Paul similarly describes the law in Galatians. He writes,

Gal 4:1-5 (ESV)

I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

His point is that Law, as a religion, functions much like a ‘disciplinarian’ or ‘nanny’.  These are hired to oversee children and in the past were expected to do so with firm discipline; they did not so much teach as control.  Law as the above text points out treated those under it as infants, as childish.

Although God-given, it was given to man in the ‘flesh’ (Roms 7:1-6; Gals 3:3; Cf Hebs 7:16; 9:13,14).  It was a ‘religion’ that attempted to curtail and curb human behaviour by external rules and religious regulations but it could dig no deeper.  It could not change hearts.  It could not give life (though it promised it for obedience) and it could not produce holiness.  When Israel was exiled the failure of law to influence flesh was proved.  This is why Paul says of law and all religion that is about undertaking rules, regulations, ritualistic restrictions that it are ‘of no value in preventing the indulgence of the flesh‘.  Mark these words well for they are very important.  However, holy and virtuously self-denying many rites and rituals seem to be THEY ARE OF NO VALUE IN PREVENTING THE INDULGENCE OF THE FLESH.   They may deny the body but they could not curb ‘the flesh’, that Adamic nature we have so opposed to God.  This is true of the rites not only of the law or Judaism but of every other religion.  In fact, from this perspective, Paul puts the Law or Judaism on the same level playing field as all other religions.  They all are elementary or rudimentary.  Paul tells the gentile Galatian believers who are being encouraged by Judaizers to embrace the Jewish Law that they would be as well going back to their old pagan religions for the law was no more effectual than they.

Gal 4:8-11 (ESV)
Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more? You observe days and months and seasons and years! I am afraid I may have labored over you in vain. 

Let the force of this sink in.  In Galatians, Paul uses two plural pronoun groups, ‘we’ and ‘you’.  ‘We’ applies to Jewish believers and ‘you’ to gentile believers.  In Ch 4:1-5 he speaks of ‘we’.  We Jews, he observes, were enslaved to the law (the elemental principles of the world). In 4-8-11 the gentiles were enslaved to their false religions; however, if having being freed from these they now embrace the Law then this is tantamount to a return to their old religions; they are turning back to ‘weak and worthless elementary principles of the world’ and to slavery once again.  Paul’s comparison shocks and is intended so to do.

It is impossible to read Gals 3:21 – 4-11 and avoid the conclusion that those who submit (freely or otherwise) to the law and its ordinances are regressing to what is childish and enslaving.  They believe they are embracing something new and exciting, something progressive and fresh, something that may help them to be holy and godly, but actually they are embracing what is weak, worthless and inferior.  Satan’s sardonic irony as he deludes is keen.

Neither human philosophy nor religious mysticism, nor rites, nor ascetic practices enable us to grow in grace.  None enables us to know God.  It’s no good claiming that these regulations were Jewish rather than Christian rules and regulations.  Jewish regulations and rites were God-ordained religious observances (indeed the only God-ordained ones) and pointed to Christ but they were merely shadows not the substance (2:17).  The substance was Christ.  If we want shadows of the gospel rather than the substance then Jewish ceremonies is the way to go.  None we invent improves on those God gave.  But Paul’s criticism is not of this or that particular liturgical calendar.  It is not specific Jewish days, months and sabbaths to which he objects (though sabbaths clearly shows these were law-based since none but Jews had sabbaths).  It is not certain diets and ascetic techniques he objected to.  He objects to the whole methodology per se.  The methodology was passé, earth-bound, childish,enslaving and inadequate.  Methodologically these rituals were of no value in preventing the indulgence of the flesh.  Indeed, they did the very thing that was the problem – they focussed on the flesh.  Law in any shape or form does not deny flesh, it excites it and promotes it (Roms 7).

Law and all human religion focus on the flesh and have confidence in it (Phil 3:3,4)  This is Paul’s constant criticism of the Judaizers.  They focussed on flesh, whether its status (Phil 3:2-5) or its performance (Phil 3:6).  Circumcision (the symbol of the Judaizers) was all about the flesh (Phil 3:2; Gals 6:12).  For Paul, circumcision epitomised the flesh because it was circumcision of the body and not the heart.  It is what a man did to himself and for himself.  In this circumcision was an appropriate symbol of law which was essentially a covenant of works, of human achieving.  The gospel, by contrast, is ‘circumcision without hands‘ that is, it is by and of God not man (Col 2:11).  The circumcision of the gospel happens at the cross when we die with Christ to the law and its ordinances (Col 2:14).   It is an act of God that removes all human involvement and so all human boasting.

We need to see that self-denial programmes of ‘touch not, taste not and handle not’ are fusty and futile.  The Law and Judaism was full of such prohibitions at certain times in the religious calendar yet they did no good whatever; the nation that had the law crucified its Messiah.  Indeed, Messiah himself teaches that it is not what goes into a man (the food he chooses to eat or not to eat) that defiles but what comes out of his heart (Matt 15:1-20).

Artificially imposed times and programmes of repentance and ascetic self-denial and the like all focus on self.   If we succeed they puff us up with pride and if we fail we feel defeated.   Nowadays they tend to be about giving up chocolates or alcohol or some other luxury related to the body.  For those more serious about their faith they may mean self-imposed severe bodily deprivation.  But whether the dilettante denials of the modern evangelical or the more serious denials of the older ascetics the result is the same – no effect in restraining the indulgence of the flesh, merely a means of focus on it (Cols 2:23).  Flesh (fallen human nature) loves to act piously (and to be seen to do so either by others or self).  It loves to appear humble and focus on its achievements, religious or otherwise. So rather than subduing the flesh these ‘ordinances’ satisfy the flesh. Thus they are not merely passé, earth-bound, infantile and futile, but counter-productive.  In addition,and perhaps most damning of all, they utterly fail to come to terms with the position of a believer in Christ.   Those who promote them have not grasped that growth in holiness is not by looking at self and undertaking various ascetic disciplines but by looking away from self and focussing on an exalted reigning Christ.

christianity is christ

What draws me away from the world and focus on self is not my body on earth but Christ in heaven.  As I love him, look at him, live in him (and he in me) then I have the power to put to death what is earthly.  It is the expulsive power of a new affection.  Christ, and only Christ, is our wisdom, justification, sanctification, and redemption (1 Cor 1:29).  Holding fast to the head is the only means of grace (Col 2:19).  The moment I put something else between, whatever shape this may assume, I am not holding fast to the head.  The hallmark of the ‘true circumcision’ is simply this- ‘it rejoices in Jesus Christ and makes no provision for the flesh‘ (Phil 3:3).  The question for all of us is simply, is Christ all?.  If Christ is not all then there is no maturity, only flesh.  Fathers in the faith (the spiritually mature) are recognised by this – they ‘know him who is from the beginning’ (1 John 2:14).  Paul’s cry of spiritual maturity is for Christ and yet more of Christ (Phil 3:8-16).  He did not want types and shadows, rules and religious observances; he wanted Christ.  He recognised in Christ he had everything and without him he had nothing.  The heart of a believer is satisfied and enraptured only by Christ.  In him, we have, ‘all things that pertain to life and godliness‘ (2 Pet 1:3).  Toplady is one among many who has expressed this in hymn.

Compared with CHRIST, in all beside

No comeliness I see;

The one thing needful, dearest LORD,

Is to be one with Thee.

Whatever else Thy will withholds,

Here grant me to succeed!

O let Thyself my portion be,

And I am blest indeed!

 

Loved of my GOD, for Him again

With love intense I burn;

Chosen of Thee ere time began,

I choose Thee in return!

Less than Thyself will not suffice

My comfort to restore;

More than Thyself I cannot have;

And Thou canst give no more.

to summarise

Allow me to once again briefly regroup.

Liturgical calendars with their special seasons and ceremonies are not progress but regress.  They represent a spiritual nose-dive.  Far from maturing, they are a regression to the childish and enslaving.  They do not lead to Christ but detract from Christ.  They are for those in the flesh and not life in the Spirit.  They limit our horizon to earth and do not raise our gaze to heaven.  I have every sympathy for believers raised in churches where Judaistic rites and rituals are taught.  Their consciences should be sensitively considered.  However, I have little sympathy with those who should know better.  I have little patience for evangelicals who have been free of such bondage yet now in the conceit of what they fondly call Christian freedom wish to promote and encourage what is weak and enslaving.  Such teaching receives stiff opposition from Paul (Col 2) and ought to be opposed by all who love freedom in Christ.

Let me say again that freedom in Christ does not mean freedom to worship as we please. Freedom in Christ is freedom to worship in spirit and truth.  It is freedom to live in Christ not shadows. There are forms of worship that are neither helpful nor appropriate for they lead us away from Christ; they disconnect us with the head.  They do not lead us into freedom in Christ but into slavery.  Such forms are neither commanded, commended nor condoned by the NT (Col 2).  That some who profess to be teachers of God’s people do not see this is culpably irresponsible.  We may rightly ask them as Jesus did Nicodemus: are you a teacher in Israel and do not know this?

My heart-felt appeal to my brothers and sisters in Christ is – do not be ‘bewitched’ by them.

a final comment

What then are we to make of fasting?  Doesn’t the NT promote fasting?  And for that matter, what about baptism and the Lord’s Supper?  Are not these ordinances?  These are good questions and I hope to address them.  But not in this post.  This post is already far too long.  I will try to address these questions in the next post.  For the moment, let me say simply this: whatever our questions, don’t allow these to undermine or relativize the plain NT teaching we have explored so far.  To exhort in a specific context: do not choke the living flame of the gospel with the Lenten ashes of Judaism.

grafted life

One of the profound gospel truths is that Christians participate in the death and resurrection of Christ not only in an objective or positional sense but in an experiential sense.  Something very significant takes place at conversion that entirely changes our lives.  We find ourselves in a life union with Christ.  A helpful illustration can be drawn from the world of horticulture.

Graftage (or grafting) is the horticultural procedure whereby the vascular tissues of one plant are inserted into those of another and they become one.  The nursery worker plants some seeds. The seedlings grow but are sub-standard as he knew they would be.  He wants a plant that is the same as a plant of approved quality.  And so he goes to the plant of approved quality, and from it takes buds which he grafts into the seedling. When the graft (life connection) is established, he calls his plant not by the name of the original seed, but by the name of the tree from which the bud was taken, for the grafted bud creates a new plant with a new life and nature, the life and nature of the source plant.

To prevent the tissue of the original plant asserting priority the horticulturist cuts away the old and worthless part of the tree.  He does not allow it to grow and assert itself (he puts it to death).  The only life that is cultivated is that of the grafted bud.  The whole tree must be known by the bud and everything else cut away.

The parallels with the miracle of implanted life in believers are obvious.   The original life is worthless.  That which is born of flesh is flesh.  A new life must be grafted in, the life of Christ through the Spirit.  For only this grafted life of Christ can produce Christ (fruit that delights God) . Only that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit.   For the new life to flourish the old must be regularly ‘cut out’.  It must be ruthlessly pruned otherwise it will destroy the new.  We only produce spiritual fruit for God if we are ruthless with the flesh.

Scripture uses the image of grafting.  However, it tends to use it in the reverse way from above.  Rather than the quality plant being grafted to the old, the old wild and sub-standard  plant is grafted on to the quality one so that it may grow and flourish taking its life from the strong parent plant  (Roms 11; Cf. John 15).  The metaphor viewed this way stresses the strength of the cultivated plant and the unity of life that exists in being united to it.  It stresses too that God acts in grace, ‘against nature’ (Roms 11:24).  Grace does a supernatural work contradicting and subverting the natural way of things.

we are not simultaneously sinners and saints (2)

In the previous post on this topic, I endeavoured to demonstrate that the NT regularly presents believers as ‘saints’ and not ‘sinners’; who we are ‘in Christ’ and not what we were ‘in Adam’ is pressed as the way believers should think of themselves.  Sometimes this raises the protest, ‘but does not Paul speak of himself as a ‘sinner’ in 1 Timothy?’

The passage referred to is the following:

1Tim 1:12-17 (ESV)
I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

At a cursory glance, this text appears to be Paul referring to himself, a believer, as a sinner.  After all, he uses a present tense (‘of whom I am chief’).  Now let me say, if Paul does describe himself, a believer, as a ‘sinner’,  I do not think this undermines the central thesis that Christians are saints not sinners and should view themselves as such.   We should look at the rule and not the exception to guide our theology.  If we build our thinking on a topic, biblical or otherwise, on the exception and ignore the rule we will soon find ourselves in trouble.

We must ask rather the purpose of the exception.  In this case the ‘exception’ is intended to inspire confidence in unbelievers that God’s grace can extend to them.  If God saved the chief of sinners (Paul) then no-one is beyond the pale of his mercy.  Now, if believers today describe themselves as ‘sinners’ for similar reasons, I doubt if any would object, certainly not I.  This post is not a wooden, blanket objection to Christians referring to themselves as  ‘sinners’.

Yet, the question is begged:  is the ‘exception’ really an exception?  I doubt if it is. In my view, when Paul terms himself ‘the chief of sinners’ he is so doing on the basis of what he was in his pre-conversion days and not his present life in Christ.

The present tense serves to emphasize that in Paul’s mind none has surpassed his wickedness. No-one has overtaken his distinction as the greatest sinner God has saved. He is certainly not saying that he thinks of himself as the chief of sinners on the basis of an assessment of his present Christian life: it is  an assessment based on his past life as a persecutor and blasphemer, a life so opposed to the gospel that it gives hope to all. Paul’s  life as a Christian would be no encouragement to the ungodly that they may find mercy, rather the opposite. Now, he recognises, the Lord judges him faithful, ‘ I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful…’. No, it is his pre-conversion life that gives hope to every sinner… if Paul acted as he did yet God showed him mercy there surely can be mercy for me. The chief, the most active, the most inveterate of enemies, was the best and most powerful of witnesses that the grace of God abounded over sin, and that the work of Christ was perfect to put it away.

And so the ‘exception’ is not as clear as some believe.

Why is ‘the rule’ important?

It is important, for if we regularly think of ourselves as sinners then we will live as sinners.  If my ‘faith-perspective’ tells me I am a sinner then it inevitably excuses sin; I am a ‘sinner’, that is what I am, therefore I should not be surprised if I sin, or dismayed by it, I am acting according to my nature.  To think of myself as a sinner simply puts me in bondage to sin.  For the word ‘sinner’ describes a state, a nature, or a condition.  The psychology is immensely damaging; give a dog a bad name…

This is why the NT is so vehement that believers are not sinners but saints.  Over and over again, Paul tells believers ‘this is what you once were… here is what you now are’.  He wants us to grasp the perspective of faith that we are God’s ‘holy ones’, his ‘set apart ones’.  We are ‘new creation’.  And his reason is blatant; it is that we live according to who we are.   Take an urchin and put him in a palace as a prince but keep telling him he is really an urchin and he will behave like an urchin for that is how he thinks of himself.  However, put an urchin in a palace as a prince and keep insisting he is a prince and must think and act like a prince and he will do so.   Who we believe we are affects how we think of ourselves and how we behave.  It’s hardly rocket science.

And so, repeatedly, Paul reminds believers of what they have become ‘in Christ’ as the rationale for godly living.  ‘How can you who have died to sin live any longer therein?’ (Roms 6:2). ‘ If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations?’ (Col 2:20). ‘Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self  with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.’ (Col 3:9). ‘If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.’ Col 3:1).

Is Paul asking us to believe a fiction?  Are we simply sinners trying to be saints?  No, a thousand times no.  Paul wants us to grasp that union with a dead, risen and glorified Christ in the Spirit, has made us an utterly new people.  We are no longer ‘in Adam’ but ‘in Christ’.  Our real identity is ‘new creation’.  As God looks at Christ in heaven he sees us too.  Christ glorified is our identity.  As Christ is, we are.  Beyond condemnation. Beyond sin.  Beyond accusation.  Beyond law.  Beyond this world.   And the present reality of this is conveyed to us by the indwelling Holy Spirit (who mediates the presence of Christ).  In his words to his disciples,

John 14:18-20 (ESV)
“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

He came in the person of the Spirit, that the life he received in resurrection his followers may receive too (because I live [in resurrection] you also will live).  We share in the resurrection life of the risen Christ.  We share his position and power (Eph 1:15-23).  As he is so are we in this world (1 Jn 4:17)… ‘holy and without blame before God in love’ (Eph 1:4).  Our lives are hid with Christ in God (Col 3:3).  This is our true identity and position and by God’s grace we have all the resources in Christ (everything necessary for life and godliness) to be who we are.; not sinners but saints.

what happens when someone sees the glory of god in christ?

Phil 3:1-16 (ESV)
Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you.  Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh. For we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh- though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith- that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.  Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. 

When Paul (Saul at that time) was travelling from Jerusalem to Damascus on his mission to stamp out Christianity and all who followed ‘the Way’, he was brought to an abrupt stop by a brilliant light that enveloped him.  He heard a voice from heaven; it was the voice of Jesus whose followers he was persecuting.  It was the moment when Saul the Persecutor saw the glorified Christ whom he was persecuting and he was instantly and forever transformed.

Philippians 3 comments on two central aspects of the transformation.

Paul lost all confidence in his personal righteousness and desired only the righteousness of God that came through faith in Christ

If any had a claim on God by his own standing it was Paul.  Paul was a Jew and Jews were God’s chosen people.  And Paul had a Jewish pedigree second to none, ‘circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews’.  If religious heritage or training could give a man a standing with God then Paul had it.  What is more he was a man who made every effort to live righteously.  He had a scrupulous zeal for God and for God’s Law, ‘as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless’.  And Paul, as he travelled to Damascus in the service of his religion, did indeed believe that his legacy as a Jew and his rigorous law-keeping declared him righteous.  He travelled that Damascus Road without a qualm or doubt, confident, even smug, in his integrity, his cause, his righteousness.

Until… until he was confronted with the piercing glory of the exalted Christ.  It was a glory, he was to say later, brighter than the sun (Acts 26:13).  Its brilliance threw him to the ground and left him without strength and blinded.  The voice came from heaven and he asked who was speaking?  The reply came, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting’. (Acts 9).  In that instant, the self-will and pride of Saul the Persecutor was broken in pieces.  In a moment of time his whole constructed world collapsed around him.  He knew that his heritage that he had such pride in was a meaningless bauble in the face of this glory; his religiosity was seen for the vain thing it was; his qualifications, however highly regarded, were as dung.  Everything of apparent worth to the flesh was seen for the empty vanity it was when faced with the weight of glory.

He knew too, with an absolute certainty, that his own righteousness, of which he had been so proudly complacent, could never stand in the searing glory of this light.  It fell woefully short of this glory.  It was  filthy rags.  His religiously fueled and ostensibly righteous attempts to wipe out the name of Jesus were exposed as the vilest offences against the authority of God.  For Paul had no doubts that this person who spoke to him was of unquestionable authority.  His will is immediately subject to this authority.  It could not be denied.  He blurts in abjection, ‘who are you Lord?’.

And he is told; I am Jesus.  In one searing terrible yet glorious moment of truth and insight he knew immediately and forever that the only righteousness that could ever stand in this holiness lay in he who spoke.  Before this light all human righteousness was darkness.  In its presence, the earth and the heavens must flee away.  From that moment of realization, Paul had but one determination, ‘to be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith’.  It is the determination of any who glimpse the glory of God in Christ; for them all self-righteousness disappears like the burning of the morning mists leaving them naked and exposed and there can be only one exclamation:

Jesus, thy blood and righteousness (in resurrected glory)

My beauty are, and glorious dress

 

Paul’s one all-consuming desire was to know Christ

When someone has seen a glorified Christ the things of earth ‘grow strangely dim’.  When the light  shines the shadows disappear.  When the sun shines the stars and moon are no more. Christ, and Christ alone, drives and fills the life.  Anything in this life upon which Paul placed value, good or bad, becomes nothing, less than nothing.  It is worthless before the glory of Christ.  All that gave Paul identity, standing, privilege and reputation in this world mattered not at all (Phil 3:5).  All that fed his sense of self-worth and personal accomplishment was utter dross (Phil 3:6).  Paul saw all law-pedlars, whether peddling its rituals or its rules, as base and evil.  He treats them with vitriol; they are ‘dogs’ who trust and glory in the flesh (Phil 3:2) and  draw hearts away from the glory of Christ Jesus in the gospel (Phil 3:3) .  The law, focuses men on their own importance and Paul who has seen the glorified Christ will have none of it.  Having seen Christ in glory he knows man in the flesh has no importance, no glory.  Only Christ is worthy of glory.  Only Christ is irradiated with the glory of God.  And so any who seduce others from the object of his love (the glorified Christ) are contemptible.  Elsewhere he targets philosophy, that ‘queen of the sciences’ accusing it of being hollow and empty; it counts as nothing, is mere empty conceit,  before the One in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col 2:8).  In life Paul is prepared to, and does, suffer the loss of all things, for Christ is the treasure that he seeks.  He has found the hidden treasure to obtain which a man will sell all that he has (Matt 13:44). Life in its fulness is found only in Christ.  There is no glory worth pursuing anywhere other.

Paul has tasted that the Lord is good.  He has learned a little of knowing Christ and knows that knowing him has a worth that eclipses all else.  He wants to know him more and more.  How can he do so?  He will do so, as by the power of the resurrected life of Christ in glory (for it is as a resurrected Christ in glory that Paul first knew Christ)  he puts to death all that is not of Christ in his life, all that is mere ‘flesh’ (true circumcision).  He will know Christ as he shares in his sufferings.  It is the only way for any to know Christ, now or ever.  We know him and fellowship with him only as we die to self, take up our cross and follow him.  The life of Christ on earth is always one of identifying with his rejection, his reproaches, his persecution, and his self-renunciation; it was for Christ and it is for us, for Christ remains unaccepted and hated.  And so, in this world we know him in glory in our hearts only as we know him through the cross in our lives.  We experience his life only as we share his death.  We know fellowship with the Christ of glory and rejoice with joy unspeakable through sharing the shame of the Christ of the cross. And we enter into future glory through accepting present sufferings.

Whatever, in God’s plan, these sufferings may be, even if they may mean death itself, Paul was prepared to undergo if this was for him the route to resurrection and glory in Christ.  For ultimately, knowing Christ, is being with Christ in glory.  Paul had seen him in glory and wanted to be with him there.  He was not there yet, merely travelling to it.  Thus, whatever the cost, whatever the demands the wilderness threw, whatever the pain involved, he would endure that he may enjoy the Promised Land.  Of course, for Paul, the Promised Land is not glory itself, but Christ in glory.  The Lamb is all the glory of Immanuel’s land.

It is the Lamb of Glory that fills his vision.  He has his eye singly on Him.  He thinks nothing of anything that is past – like the runner, his concentration is fully on the prize.  It fills his vision and concentrates his mind.  Christ is the goal and Christ the prize.

And so it ought to be for us all.  Not immediately perhaps, as with Paul, but as by grace we mature in faith it is God’s plan that we will increasingly grasp this perspective and live in it (v16).  So that, with Paul, we may all increasingly say ‘for me to live is Christ’.  And so, may our God, by his grace, enable us more and more to set our affections on things above – where Christ is.  May we, by faith, increasingly see Christ in glory.  And, in doing so, may we progressively learn to count everything else as loss compared to the excellence of knowing him, being found in him, and gaining him.

Once again, hymns capture the heart of the apostle so well.

        Jesus, my Lord, my Life, my All,
        Prostrate before thy throne I fall;
        Fain would my soul look up and see
        My hope, my heaven, my all in thee. 

                                                 Samuel Medley

        Compared with Christ, in all beside
            No comeliness I see;
        The one thing needful, dearest Lord,
            Is to be one with thee.

        The sense of thy expiring love,
            Into my soul convey;
        Thyself bestow, for thee alone,
            My All in all, I pray.

       Less than thyself will not suffice
            My comfort to restore;
        More than thyself I cannot crave,
            And thou canst give no more.

       Loved of my God, for him again
            With love intense I’d burn;
        Chosen of thee ere time began,
            I choose thee in return.

       Whate’er consists not with thy love,
            O teach me to resign;
        I’m rich to all the intents of bliss,
            If thou, O God, art mine.

                                               Augustus Toplady

My concern is that in the writing (online or in books) of many modern evangelical writers, learned and sophisticated though many are, I see few signs of this heart of the apostle, which is, of course, the life of Christ in maturity in a fallen man (and so he can exhort others to imitate him Phil 3:17).  There are plenty books on Christian social and political agendas, defending theological systems of one kind or other, apologetics, and so on, but few that seem to pulsate with a love for the glorified Christ, fewer still where the writer seems to have caught this vision and whose specific purpose is to draw our hearts out to him in glory.

I do not see a great deal of it in the church.   And, wretch that I am, I see little of it in me.  Why is the Western church without power?  Why does the world neither persecute nor believe her?   Why indeed.

we are not simultaneously sinners and saints (1)

One of the things you’ll notice that I keep banging on about in the blog is the need for us to see ourselves, we Christians, as God sees us.  That is, to see ourselves from the perspective of faith (faith is accepting all that God says, including what he says about us).  Christians reason all too often from what they perceive themselves as being to what they are.  They see they sin and thereforeregard themselves as sinners.  This is a mistake.  The Bible does not speak of us as sinners but as saints.

Some are willing to speak of themselves as saints but insist they are still sinners.  They cite Luther’s famous words, ‘simul justus et peccator‘ or ‘simultaneously justified and a sinner’, or, ‘both saint and sinner’.  You can even buy t-shirts with the slogan emblazoned.  Now, if Luther simply meant that although we are saints we still sin then that would be fine.  Perhaps he did.  However, he is not interpreted this way.  We are told that we must view ourselves as ‘sinners’ as well as ‘righteous’.

What is wrong with Christians thinking of themselves as ‘sinners’?  Well, firstly we should note, the Bible never does.  Repeatedly we are referred to as ‘saints’ but never as ‘sinners’.  In fact if we are justified in Christ we are quite explicitly said to be no longer sinners.  Take the following text, for example,

Rom 5:6-10 (ESV)
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person-though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to  die – but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

Do you observe the logic and the contrast involved?  Paul argues from the greater to the lesser in two interconnected ways.  Firstly if God loved us enough to give his Son in death to save us will he not continue to save us in Christ’s life in resurrection?  Secondly, if God loved us enough to save us while we were unloveable, ‘without strength… sinners… enemies’, then will he not love us and continue to save us now that we are no longer ‘without strength… sinners… enemies’?  For this is the clear implication.  Indeed, he clearly states we are no longer enemies (we are reconciled).

When the Bible describes someone as a ‘sinner’ it is describing a state, a condition, a standing, an order of being.  It is a description of humanity outside of Christ.  Words like,  ‘sinners… the unrighteous… enemies… aliens.. lawless… ungodly’ describe people who are not Christians.  They describe what Christians ‘once’ were but are no longer.

Notice in 1 Cor 6 unconverted people are described as ‘the unrighteous’.

1Cor 6:1 (ESV)
When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints?

The ‘unrighteous’ like the word ‘sinner’ is a designation for those who are unsaved.  In 1 Tim 1 Paul lists a variety of words to describe people outside of Christ.  These all stand in contradistinction to ‘the just’ by which he means believers. Notice the word ‘sinner’ is included in the list of those outside Christ.

1Tim 1:9-10 (ESV)
understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine,

Indeed in using the term ‘sinner’ for those who are not part of the people of God he is simply echoing the language of Jesus.  In the Sermon on the Mount, speaking to believers, he says

Luke 6:32-36 (ESV)
“If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. 

For Jesus, ‘the righteous’ and ‘sinners’ are mutually exclusive groups.

Mark 2:17 (ESV)
And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “… I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” 

Luke 15:7 (ESV)
Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. 

I quote these texts without discussing how one becomes ‘righteous’ but simply to observe that in Jesus thinking to be in one category means not being in the other; if one is ‘righteous’ then one is not a ‘sinner’.  Peter, the apostle, quoting the OT book of Proverbs, uses a similar taxonomy.

1Pet 4:18 (ESV)
And ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​“If the righteous is scarcely saved, ​​​​​​​what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?” ​​​

Clearly, Jesus and the NT writers are using well established categories.  Paul explains how we belong to one of the two categories in Romans 5.

Rom 5:19 (ESV)
For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

Here the wider framework of ‘sinner’ and ‘righteous’ (or saint) categories is revealed.   Those who belong to Adam are constituted sinners and those who belong to Christ are constituted ‘righteous’.   Do Christians belong to Adam?  Are Christians ‘in Adam’?  The consistent voice of Scripture is that we are no longer ‘in Adam’ but we are ‘in Christ’.  Indeed these are, like ‘sinner’ and ‘righteous’, mutually exclusive families.  Paul uses two parallel expressions that make this point.  One expression he uses is the ‘old man’ and the ‘new man’ (or ‘old self’ and ‘new self’).

Col 3:9-10 (ESV)
Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

Eph 4:22-24 (Darby)
namely your having put off according to the former conversation the old man which corrupts itself according to the deceitful lusts; and being renewed in the spirit of your mind; and your having put on the new man, which according to God is created in truthful righteousness and holiness.

Again these are absolute categaories.  A similar absolute category distinction is ‘flesh’ and ‘Spirit’.  ‘Flesh’ is the nature of life in Adam (the old man) and ‘Spirit’ is the nature of life in Christ (the new man).  Again, as with Adam and Christ, we belong to either/or; to be ‘in the Spirit’ means to not be ‘in the flesh’.

Rom 8:9 (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.

These absolute category distinctions are expressed variously in Scripture.  For example, we either belong to darkness or light.

Eph 5:8-10 (ESV)
for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord.

We are either in the Kingdom of darkness or the Kingdom of Christ.

Col 1:13 (ESV)
He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son,

We are either dead to God in sins or alive to God in Christ.

Eph 2:1-6 (ESV)
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins… and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ-by grace you have been saved- and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Equally we either are dead to this world or alive in it.

Col 2:20 (ESV)
If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations-

It should be clear by now that the categories are absolute.  We cannot speak of ourselves as simultaneously a sinner and a saint (or righteous)  any more than we can speak of ourselves as simultaneously an enemy and a friend or a hater of God and lover of God or opposed to God and for God or darkness and light.  These are mutually exclusive categories.  Each is the opposite of the other and opposed to the other (Cf. Gal 5:17).  And so, again and again, Scripture emphasises this change of estate. Christians are: in Christ and not in Adam; in the Spirit and not in the flesh; alive and not dead; righteous (a saint) and not a sinner.  This is not a point about which Scripture is unclear, ambivalent or indifferent rather it is crystal clear and forceful: if any man is in Christ he is a new creation, old things have passed away and everything has become new (2 Cor 5).  Language could scarcely be clearer or more insistent.  Luther’s maxim, however popular, is unhelpful and misleading; we are not simultaneously saints and sinners, we are saints and not sinners.

So, why does it matter?

in me, that is in my flesh, dwells no good thing…

I am no longer in the first flush of youth.  In fact, if truth be told, I have passed the hump (or am passing, depending on your perspective) of middle age; I won’t see my fiftieth birthday again nor some following it.  And you know what dismays me?  I find that the flesh is just as devious and disgraceful and debasing  and demanding as it ever was.  Sinful desires, ugly and vile, readily suggest themselves.  Passions that are viciously self-regarding all too readily raise their pernicious heads.

In some ways the passions change.  They are no longer the passions of youth.  The desire to be heard (though I rarely was) , to be cool (which I never achieved), to impress (so shameful I am reluctant to admit it), to be liked (how pathetically weak)  and other drives common to youth are not so strong.  Or more accurately, they have morphed into other shapes and different forms have gained ascendency.  The desire for reputation takes on a different hue, now I want to be a sage not a spearhead.   I no longer inordinately lust after the buzz of windsurfing but the tranquility of sea kayaking.   Where once I may have held my counsel to protect myself and facilitate wider acceptance now I am inclined to curmudgeonly behaviour impatient at being ignored.  I confess, the flesh is just the same as it always was in John Thomson; it is ever self-important, self-regarding, self-promoting, and hostile to every competing authority – especially God.   I have given you the barest glimpse of the stinking cesspool that is my flesh for I am ashamed of all it contains.  Indeed, I am horrified to look too closely myself.

I say, I am dismayed, but I oughtn’t really be.  Dismay shows just how poorly I ‘hear’ what God clearly says.  Scripture leaves no doubt that the flesh never improves. Flesh’ is always ‘flesh’ and can only produce ‘flesh’ (Jn 3:3).  It is ever and only wicked.  In ‘flesh’ dwells no good thing (Roms 7:18) and  ‘profits nothing’ (Jn 6:63).  You can educate flesh, civilize and manner it, make it sophisticated and even make it religious but you can’t change it.  ‘Flesh’ remains the same: rough or refined, crude or cultured, in casuals or cassock, flesh is always viciously self-regarding and opposed to God.  It does not submit to God nor can it (Roms 8:7).  Flesh is invincibly evil.

Flesh, of course, in the sense I am referring to it and Scripture often speaks of it is simply humanity in a fallen Adam.  Sometimes, in Scripture, ‘flesh’ simply means being human without reference to whether humanity is fallen or not, but most often it refers to fallen humanity, sinful humanity.  It is the heart of which Jesus speaks when he says,

Matt 15:19 (ESV)
For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.

Its works, Paul reminds us are obvious to all.

Gal 5:19-21 (ESV)
Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

These are the murky passions that rage in the human heart.  These are the nature of flesh.  It is human nature controlled and corrupted by sin.  In this humanity, in this nature, says Paul, ‘dwells no good thing’.  And there is nothing more vital than learning this if we are to live  in the full liberty and power of the gospel.  We must first grasp the bankruptcy of self if we are to learn to live by grace in the power of the Spirit.  We must come to an end of self-trust in every shape and form.  There is no good in self.  All good lies in Christ.

And so I say, don’t be surprised at the loathsome eruptions of flesh that swell in your breast yelling to be noticed.  Never look within for a power to live for God and to please him.  If you look within you will only find lusts and sin vying for expression.  Salvation has not improved your old nature and never will.   The flesh cannot be renovated or rehabilitated.  It cannot be remediated.  Flesh is always flesh.  It is a rotten tree and remains a rotten tree until the day you die or Christ returns (Matt 5:17,18).  Flesh is beyond redemption.  All that God can do with flesh is what he warned Adam would happen if he ate of the forbidden fruit.  ‘The day you eat of it you will surely die’.  God was not issuing an idle threat.  He was not exaggerating for effect.  God can do only one thing with recalcitrant flesh – put it to death.  Adam must die.  Flesh is condemned; it is beyond salvage.

And put it to death is precisely what God has done.  In the death of Jesus not only did he punish our sins as sons  of Adam, but he brought to an end Adamic humanity itself.  He finished once and for all the life of ‘flesh’.  Adamic humanity met its terminus at the cross.  Romans 8 puts it like this:

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…

The verdict of condemnation and death passed on ‘sin in the flesh’ was executed at the cross.  The execution of Christ was the execution of humanity in Adam.  It was the end of ‘flesh’, of humanity as we know it.  At the cross, he who knew no sin became sin for us, made in the likeness of sinful flesh, he was treated as sinful flesh.  The death that he died he died to sin once and for all (Roms 6).  In his resurrection, Jesus entered into a new life, a life of a different kind and order.  The man Christ Jesus, lived now by the power of a life that could never end, a life that was indestructible (Hebs 7:6), a life that would never again have to do with sin or death.   In this resurrection life he ascended to heaven as the firstborn of a new creation, no longer like sinful flesh he now had a body of glory.  Christ has become the source,  the archetype, and the heir of this new creation; it is a new creation from him, for him, and like him (Col 1:15-20).

And in this resurrection life of Christ we share.  As he was raised by the Spirit of holiness so we live too in the Spirit in holiness and righteousness.  We are born by the Spirit (Jn 3) and have a life that cannot sin.  Our life is Christ’s resurrection life, through the Spirit.  The Spirit of Christ, of God, now lives within us (Roms 8:9).  As far as God is concerned, our life in Adam, our flesh and all it is, came to an end at the cross.  It is finished.  It is gone.  We are no longer in the flesh but in the Spirit (Roms 8:9).   What does this mean?  It means that when I see the passions of the flesh seething within me I need not be dismayed.  I need not be condemned or despair.  Why?  Because, by faith I recognise  this cauldron of corruption is not the true me.  It once was me but is so no longer.  I will not hate myself because of it.  I will hate it but not myself for it is no longer the true me. A Christian is not ‘in the flesh’.  A Christian’s identity is in the Spirit.  He lives in the realm of the Spirit.  In Paul’s gloriously liberating words:

Rom 8:1-17 (ESV)
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 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. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 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.  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.  So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs-heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. 

The cross has condemned flesh and finished our relationship to it.  We are no longer in the flesh but in the Spirit and by walking in the Spirit we fulfil all righteousness.  What do I do when I observe within me the tug of sin and the surging of the flesh?  I remind myself this is not the true me.  These passions belong to an ‘I’ that died on the cross.  God does not see me in terms of ‘flesh’ and nor will I.  I have begun a new life in the Spirit.  I will not listen to these siren voices of flesh, I will not give them my allegiance or heed them (I will not set my mind on them).  I will treat them as they ought to be treated – as something dead.  I will mortify all inclinations flesh advances.  Flesh is that which is all about ‘self’.  It loves self, believes in self, trusts in self, and exalts self.  I will have nothing to do with it.  I will not look to self for strength or for approval.  I will not feed self or feed from self. For to look to it for one moment is to stumble and fall and lose the joy and power of salvation.   Instead, I will steadfastly, by the Spirit, put self in the place of death and so find life.  I will live in the Spirit, listening to and following his leading as he guides and empowers the inclinations of my new life into righteousness and holiness.

When Satan accuses and points to sinful lusts within I will not be depressed and defeated.  I will agree with all he says but point out that this ‘me’ has ended.  I no longer accept it as the person I am.  I am a new creature in Christ.  As long as I am in this body I know that sin still has a foothold because of indwelling sin.  Thus I must always be vigilant.  But, in confident faith that one day I will have a body like Christ’s  body of glory which will be entirely free of sin, I will presently put to death the temptations that arise from within, and, if in weakness and foolishness, I heed flesh (trust it) and sin, I will repent.  I will humbly confess my sins knowing that forgiveness is mine for Christ died.  I will feel the sorrow of sinning and hate it for all it is.  But  I will not be defeated by it.  I will remind myself that sin has no rights over me.  I am no debtor to it.   In the Spirit I have a new heart that longs for righteousness and not for sin and it is my true centre and being.  I will look to self for nothing and find everything in grace.   I stand in the grace of God.  Grace is the realm of my existence.  It is the power by which I live, my only resource and the only resource I need and it is mine in abundance.  I live in grace.  I live in the Spirit.  I live in Christ.

In Christ, I am free from sin’s condemnation and sin’s control.  Therein, and only therein, is my peace and my victory.  And so daily I will put on the Lord Jesus and make no provision for the flesh to fulfil its lusts (Roms 13:14).

… to live is christ

Christianity is Christ.  The Christ life is life in Christ.  Christ is the source, succour, sufficiency and shape of this life.  He is its fulness – its substance.  The epicentre of Christianity and its circumference and the mass between is Christ.  Christ is the preeminent one – in creation and new creation (Col 1).  God has ordained that he will fill all things (Eph 1:23).  And this resurrected and reigning Christ  is our life (Col 3:3). Every aspect of our spiritual life is simply ‘Christ in us the hope of glory’ (Col 1:27).  Life is to have Christ dwelling in our hearts through faith  (Eph 3:17).  This is deeply and profoundly experiential.  It is to have a heart filled with the love of Christ and love for Christ: that is, a heart rooted and grounded in love (Eph 3:17) and to know the fulness of that love, Christ’s love, which surpasses knowledge  (Eph 3:18), and so to know what it is to be filled with all the fulness of God (Eph 3:18).  And so we walk, rooted and established in Christ (Col 2:6) for of his fulness we have all received (Jn 1:17).  In him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col 2:3).  His peace rules in our hearts (Col 3:15); his love constrains (2 Cor 5:14); his joy is gifted to us (Jn 15:11; 17:13); his power is found in our weakness (2 Cor 12:9); and his grace is sufficient (2 Cor 12:9).  We are filled in him, the one in whom the fulness of the Godhead bodily dwells (Col 2:9).

No wonder Paul exclaims, with the aspiration of the hart that pants for the waterbrook,  ‘that I may know him and  the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death’.  He wants to share in all of Christ and this consuming desire makes everything else worthless, indeed, less than worthless (Phil 3:8).  The ‘surpassing excellence of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord‘ enables him to suffer the loss of all else in life (Phil 3:8).  Paul had discovered the pearl in the field, the treasure of great price and nothing other than Christ could fulfil or satisfy him.  He is totally captivated by Christ.  All that thrilled his soul was Jesus.  Thus he calls on believers to set their affections and minds on things above, and to do so because that is where Christ is (Col 3:1-3).

Christ is the Son in whom God delights.  He has been honoured by God with a seat in the highest place of eminence in the universe (Phil 2) and he fills all in all (Eph 1:23).

Tell me, if God intends that Christ fill the whole universe ought he not to fill our hearts?

Yet, it is here, we can go so wrong. The trouble is we allow so many other things to fill our hearts – even other Christian things.  For example, one of the reasons I get so incensed at the attempts of many to rehabilitate the law and make it our focus and standard for godliness (despite Paul’s warnings that making us obligated to law severs us from Christ) is because it displaces Christ.  It makes Law and not Christ the model of the life of faith.  It is a notion entirely foreign to the NT.  Our calling is to walk as he walked (1 Jn 2:6), to walk in love as Christ loved us (Eph 5:2).   We are to ‘follow him’ and ‘look’ to him as the exponent of the life of faith (Heb 12).  Indeed Law and other ascetic practices ‘have an appearance of wisdom in  promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are a of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh’ (Col 2:23).  Only the emotions and mind set on Christ can accomplish this (Col 3:1-3).

But there are many other examples of deflected affections.  We may be the kind of Christian who has a huge interest in apologetics and this is good as long as our heart is not on the apologetics and the mental sparring of debate but on Christ.  The same can even be said about the gospel.  I hear a lot of people speaking about the priority of the gospel, and I am one.  However, it is possible to love the gospel but lose sight of Christ who is the gospel.  Many champion justification by faith but they speak as if justification were the whole gospel and seem to be more passionate about it than Christ.   Examples of distractions from Christ can be multiplied.  We can love preaching and not love Christ.  We can love Christian music and not love Christ.  We can love order and form and structures and not love Christ.  When our central passion is anything other than Christ then we have lost perspective and abandoned our first love.  We have lost the essence of Christianity.  Christ must fill the heart if we are to know all that God has for us presently.

Jesus’ question to Peter (asked three times) is as searching now as it was then – ‘do you love me?’  Christ wants our love and our hearts.  Only when he is sure he has these will he say ‘feed my sheep’.  It is little wonder that John Calvin is one example of a shepherd of Christ’s.  His pious personal motto was: “My heart I offer you, O Lord, promptly and sincerely.”

Hymns often say it well.  George West Frazer’s hymn expresses the aspirations of a godly heart.

HAVE I an object, Lord, below,
Which would divide my heart from Thee;
Which would divert its even flow
In answer to Thy constancy?
Oh, teach me quickly to return,
And cause my heart afresh to burn!

Have I a hope, however dear,
Which would defer Thy coming, Lord,
Which would detain my spirit here,
Where nought can lasting joy afford?
From it, my Saviour, set me free
To look and long and wait for Thee.

Be Thou the object bright and fair
To fill and satisfy the heart;
My hope to meet Thee in the air,
And nevermore from Thee to part;
That I may undistracted be
To follow, serve, and wait for Thee.

imputed active obedience (IAO), a must or a misdirection? (12)

The intention of the last couple of posts (here and here) on this topic has been to demonstrate that the Bible does not support the reformed construct of IAO.  We have seen that the OT  knows nothing of a law-keeping life lived on behalf of another.  In the OT, when the law is broken only a blood sacrifice can atone (Hebs 9:22).  The gospels tell the same story.  Jesus indeed keeps the Law, but his obedience to Law is not the emphasize of the gospels.  The gospels’ gospel’ is Christ introducing the Kingdom of God (eternal life in John’s gospel) through his saving mission demonstrated in liberating works and words, his ransoming death, and his subsequent resurrection. There is simply no hint in the gospels that integral to the ‘good news’ is a life of law-keeping obedience conferred on others.

What of the rest of the NT?

The emphasis thus far is entirely consistent.  In unison the music of the NT celebrates  the death (not the life) of Christ as the basis of atonement.  Justification, redemption, reconciliation and acceptance with God are always on the basis of death.  Below are most of the NT texts that unpack the basis of acceptance with God.  I ask simply that you scan these verses and with honesty and integrity judge whether what they unpack is acceptance with God based on a law-keeping life imputed to others.  I recommend you read through the whole of the NT with the express purpose of inquiring whether such a theory is evidently one the NT champions.  I submit any such honest inquiry, free of presuppositions, will leave the dogma of IAO dead in the water.  I believe you will find, as the following texts reveal, that acceptance is never based on the merit of Christ’s life  imputed (that is his life lived on earth) and always on the value of his vicarious death and our union with him in his death and his subsequent resurrection.

Acts

What do the early apostles preach?  They did not preach in Acts a developed theology of atonement but they did focus on the mission, death and resurrection of Christ.  Peter’s message is typical:

Acts 2:22-24,28 (ESV)
“Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know- this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it… “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Notice, there is not a hint of vicarious law-keeping obedience, even to a Jewish audience.  The focus is squarely on messianic credentials of mighty works, the  designed death of Christ, his rejection by the people, and his subsequent resurrection.  Essentially the same message repeats itself in the early Acts (3:11-26; 4:7-12, 23-31; 5:29-31; 8:51-53).  In Ch 9 Philip meets a gentile (the Ethiopian eunuch) who is reading Isa 53 (the death of Christ) from which Peter preaches to him ‘the good news about Jesus’.  In Ch 10 the message Peter taught in Acts 2 is substantially repeated to Cornelius a gentile God-fearer (10:34-42).  The same message is taught by Paul (13:26-42).

Acts presents for belief a Messiah who has revealed his credentials in wonders and signs, who has died and risen again.  But what is entirely absent is a gospel of vicarious law-keeping righteousness.  The church of God has been purchased by blood (Acts 20:34-42) not law-works, even law-works by Christ.

Romans

Rom 3:21-26 (ESV)
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it- the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

I intend to consider this text in detail in a future post.  At the moment I want simply to note that God’s saving righteousness (and this is the key text in Romans and indeed the whole of Scripture on the topic) is located firmly in the redemptive and propitiatory death of Christ.  Of all places for Paul to have developed IAO this would be it, but there is not a scent; it is conspicuously absent. Note too, that the ‘righteousness’ discussed is specifically ‘God’s’ and not ‘Christ’s’.

Rom 4:24-25 (ESV)
…. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

Note again the focus on death.  Where justification is concerned in Romans, we are justified by grace (3:24), Christ’s blood (5:9), Christ’s resurrection (4:25), and our faith (5:1).  Never by his law-keeping life.

Rom 5:6-11 (ESV)
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person-though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die- but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

The death of Christ is again the focus of justification.  Notice ‘we shall be saved through his life‘.  On more than one occasion past reformed exegetes have employed this text in support of IAO (John Owen, defending IAO, interpreted it,  ‘we are saved by that perfect Obedience which in his life he yielded to the Law of God’).  It shows something of their desperation (or poor exegetical skills) for the expression clearly refers to Christ’s present life in resurrection not his life on earth.  Notice it is those already reconciled by his death who are saved by his life.  The expression is an evident allusion to ‘raised for our justification’ (4:25) and Christ’s present King-priest intercession at the right hand of God for his own (Roms 8:33,34)

Rom 5:18-19 (ESV)
Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

Perhaps the favourite text used to ‘justify’ IAO.  Again, I hope to consider it more fully in a later post.  Note: a) the text must be considered in the context of all that has gone before and all that has gone before has located the death of Christ as the place of justification b) it is ‘one act of righteousness’ paralleling Adam’s ‘one trespass’.  The whole section parallels two acts not two lives c) one man’s ‘disobedience’ refers back to the ‘one trespass’ and ‘one man’ obedience’ refers back to the ‘one act of obedience’.  Whether your context is immediate or the whole of Romans the conclusion is the same; the propitiatory death of Christ is the place of ‘justification and life’.

Rom 8:3-4 (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.

Condemned sin ‘in the flesh’.  Commentators agree ‘in the flesh’ is a reference to the condemnation of sin (not sins) in the death of Christ.  Christ’s death was the end of sin (as it was the end of Satan, death, and Law).

Rom 8:33-34 (ESV)
Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died-more than that, who was raised-who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.

Notice the key twin focus of death and resurrection in the matter of justification.  Accusation and condemnation cannot stand before these and a God who has determined to justify in the light of these.  But no mention of a law-keeping life.

Corinthians

Paul begins and ends 1 Corinthians with a statement about his gospel.  In neither case is the focus the law-keeping life of Christ but his death and resurrection.

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

1Cor 15:3-6,11 (ESV)
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep… Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.

In the Second letter we read

2Cor 5:18-21 (ESV)
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This text is of course one that some believe teaches Christ’s righteous life is imputed to us.  Now I intend to examine the four or five verses that it is said teach IAO in a later post but I simply point out two things at the moment.  One, the text says nothing about Christ being our righteousness rather it says we are in some sense, through Christ, God’s righteousness.  More of this later.  Two, and this is important, the focus of the text is the clearly the death of Christ.  It is his ‘made sin’ death, nothing more and nothing less that enables us to become ‘the righteousness of God in him’.  There is absolutely nothing here about imputed active law-keeping obedience.  It is a foreign idea that has to be imported into the text.

Galatians

Gal 1:3-5 (ESV)
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

Gal 3:1 (ESV)
O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.

Gal 3:13-14 (ESV)
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us-for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”- so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.

Gal 4:4-5 (ESV)
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

Notice that the redemptive gospel focus is once again the cross and Christ’s death.  Note too how Jews (for Paul’s ‘we’ refers to Jewish believers) under the law are ‘redeemed’.  It is not by Christ’s keeping of the Law but by him bearing the curse of the Law.  Here again, in the very context of redemption from law, was a perfect opportunity for Paul to tell us that Christ lived a law-keeping life for us and it is necessary to our justification.  But there is no suggestion of such a thing; we are redeemed not through him keeping its commands but through him bearing its curse.  It is through cancelling the curse of the law in his sin-bearing death and redeeming us from law that the blessings of justification by faith promised to Abraham may be realized. Language could scarcely be clearer.

Ephesians

Eph 1:7 (ESV)
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace,

Eph 2:12-16 (ESV)
remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.

The comments made about many a text above could equally be said here.  Forgiveness, redemption, acceptance, reconciliation and peace are all through the blood of the cross.

Colossians

Col 1:19-22 (ESV)
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.  And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,

Col 2:13-15 (ESV)
And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.

Reconciliation and forgiveness of trespasses (broken laws) at the cross.  The ‘legal demands’ are met in full at the cross.  There is no life of law-keeping obedience simply a debt cancelled at the cross.

Pastorals

1Tim 2:5-7 (ESV)
For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

Titus 2:13-14 (ESV)
waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

Hebrews

Heb 2:14-15 (ESV)
Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

Heb 9:11-15 (ESV)
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.  Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant.

Purification (cultic image tantamount to legal image of justification) is through blood-sacrifice.  Consciences are completely cleansed by Christ’s blood sacrifice.  Note carefully the final words: since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. Death redeems from all transgressions.  No ‘added’ life of law-keeping is required.

Heb 9:22-28 (ESV)
Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.  Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

Heb 10:10-14 (ESV)
And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.  And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

Heb 10:19-20 (ESV)
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh,

Heb 13:10-12 (ESV)
We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat. For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.

The message of Hebrews is clear purification, definitive sanctification, perfection, acceptance are all accomplished in toto at the cross.

Peter

1Pet 1:18-20 (ESV)
knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you

1Pet 2:24 (ESV)
He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.

1Pet 3:18 (ESV)
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit,

John

1John 1:7 (ESV)
But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

1John 2:1-2 (ESV)
My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

Revelation

Rev 5:9-10 (ESV)
And they sang a new song, saying, ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​“Worthy are you to take the scroll ​​​​​​​and to open its seals, ​​​​​​​for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God ​​​​​​​from every tribe and language and people and nation, ​​​ ​​​​​​​​and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, ​​​​​​​and they shall reign on the earth.”

Rev 7:13-14 (ESV)
Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?” I said to him, “Sir, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

Where are robes washed?  In the blood of the lamb.  What is the eternal song of heaven?  Worthy… for you were slain and by your blood you ransomed.  Of course we will consider eternally every aspect of what God in Christ has accomplished but the emphasis of the song of heaven is the worth of the ‘blood of the lamb’.

Machen’s dying note to John Murray is often lauded. ‘I am so thankful for the active obedience of Christ.  There is no hope without it’.  Formally of course Machen was right.  The obedience of Christ along with his incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, present session, second coming etc are all vital for salvation.  But that was not Machen’s point.  Machen in his dying moments was placing his trust in a life lived more than a death died.  In this light, these words of Machen so saluted are appalling.  He misses completely the thrust of the NT hope.  It is a hope unambiguously centred in the death and resurrection of Christ.

The doxology of Revelation is far more biblically balanced:

Rev 1:5-6 (ESV)

To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood ​​​ and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

living as new creation… in old creation (1)

How do people who are new creation live in an old creation?  Or to put it more popularly, how should Christians relate the world?

What a huge question?  In a sense the whole of the NT is an answer to it.  In a few posts I want to tease out some of the implications of the fundamental point the Bible makes concerning the Christian and the world.  What, you might ask, is that?

The main point the gospel burns into Christian minds regarding the world is – we have died to it.

Let me say it again – we have died to it.

And again – we have died to it.

What is that you just said?

I said – we have died to it.

And just in case the point has slipped your attention, let me repeat it again – we have died to it.

There is nothing that is more significant for us as we think of our relationship to the world than to recognize that we have died to it.  We have died to the whole order of the old creation.  We are no longer ‘alive’ in this world (Col 2:20).  Christians are a new creation.   In the death of Christ we died to the old order or creation and in his resurrection we find ourselves with him raised to live in a new order a new creation.  We no longer belong to (we have died to) the old creation of which Adam was the head but belong to (now live as) the new creation of which Christ is the head.  We live in the present world but are not really part of it.  We are like expats, or, resident aliens (Phil 3:20).  We live and function on foreign soil; in a country but not of a country.

What does this mean?  What are the implications of this for life?

The Bible spells out a number.  We discover that the various destructive forces that control the people of the present world, no longer control us.  The old fallen creation is controlled by various powers:  the world itself (Eph 1:1);  Satan (1 Jn 5:19; Eph 1:1); sin (Roms 6:6); rebellious flesh (Eph 2:3; Gals 2:24); God’s Law (Roms 7:1-6) and so on.  As people dead to this world we are free from them.  They have no rights or authority over us.  We need not listen to them or be intimidated by them.  The world’s allure is broken, Satan’s vice-like grip is unprised, sin is no longer a tyrant to be obeyed, the flesh is no longer the power on the throne of our hearts, the law (Mosaic)  is no longer an authority that accuses and to which we answer, death no longer has holding rights,  and God’s wrath is no longer a reality we need fear.  All are gone.   They are forces that have rights and threaten only in a world to which we are dead.  If we allow any to gain control it is because we choose to not because we must.  To be intimidated by any is a lack of faith.  It means we do not really believe we have died to this world.  As Paul says to the Colossians,

Col 2:16-23 (ESV)
Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.  If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations- “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)-according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

Mere pseudo-spiritual taboos and legalistic ascetic practices for their own sake (such as belong to many man-made religions and even the God-given faith of Judaism) are of no value in promoting spiritual life.  They are all examples of ‘flesh-religion’.  They have not grappled with the one radical truth that truly liberates, the truth that believers have died with Christ and are no longer ‘alive in the world’.  Once we grasp this and see that the source of our life, our joy, our satisfaction our holiness and all else is in heaven the superficiality and futility of these ‘recommended’ routes to holiness are seen for what they are.

It is wonderfully liberating to understand that death broke all debilitating relationships  and new creation means I may live free from them.  If I live for a time in another country they may have all sorts of habits, customs, histories, philosophies and cultural trappings that shape them.  I am shaped by none of these.  I come from another country.  I have been shaped by a different history and a different culture.  I am not a prisoner of the culture of my temporarily adopted country.  I am here only as a short-stay resident. I exist on a visa.   I am  passing through on my way home.  I am a pilgrim. To all that fashions and controls the world in which I live, I am as one dead.

imputed active obedience (IAO), a must or a misdirection? (5)

Advocates of IAO often insist that it is integral to evangelical orthodoxy.  The implication being, to reject it is to forfeit the right to the label evangelical, or at least, orthodox evangelical.  Of course the burden of proof lies with those who so claim to prove their case and it appears an exceptionally hard case to prove.  Indeed,  from what I have read to date, it seems an impossible task.

C1-16

Thus far, Church history from C1-C16 has yielded one letter that may support IAO.  A early letter from Mathetes to Diognetus, an unbeliever around C2/3) is forwarded as proof.  Mathetes (meaning, ‘a disciple’) writes,

But when our unrighteousness was fulfilled, and it had been made perfectly clear that is wages–punishment and death–were to be expected, then the season arrived during which God had decided to reveal at last his goodness and power (oh, the surpassing kindness and love of God!).

He did not hate us,
or reject us,
or bear a grudge against us;
instead he was patient and forbearing;
in his mercy he took upon himself our sins;

he himself gave up his own Son as a ransom for us,
the holy one for the lawless,
the guiltless for the guilty,
the just for the unjust,
the incorruptible for the corruptible,
the immortal for the mortal.

For what else but his righteousness could have covered our sins?  In whom was it possible for us, the lawless and ungodly, to be justified, except in the Son of God alone?

O the sweet exchange,
O the incomprehensible work of God,
O the unexpected blessings,
that the sinfulness of many should be hidden in one righteous person,
while the righteousness of one should justify many sinners!

While at first glance this text may appear to support IAO careful examination shows this is probably asking too much of it.  It supports imputation, that is clear, but that it supports IAO is much less clear.  The letter focuses on the death of Christ as the locus of justification.  In fact, the last two lines are simply a paraphrase of Roms 5:17, 18.  This, however, is the sum of evidence from the first fifteen centuries.  It is scarcely overwhelming.  It would be difficult to make a strong case for IAO as essential to gospel orthodoxy from the first fifteen centuries of western church.

C16

To be fair, those who argue for IAO normally date and define ‘evangelical orthodoxy’ from the Reformation.  The  Reformation was due in large part to differences between the Reformers (Protestants) and the Roman Catholic Church over the nature of justification.  The Catholic Church insisted that in justification righteousness is imparted (our justification is the righteous living God’s grace produces within)  while the Reformers insisted that in justification righteousness is imputed (justification is the verdict God as the righteous judge passes on all who trust in Christ because of the virtue of Christ’s atoning death).  In the former people are ‘made’ righteous and in the latter they are ‘declared’ righteous.  Now all who follow in the tradition of the Reformers view righteousness as imputed.  Both  Evangelical and Reformed orthodoxy (the latter now a subset of the former) insist on imputation.  But do they insist on the particular brand of imputation that is IAO?

What of the C16?  The evidence from the Magisterial Reformers (early reformers supported by the ruling authorities) is mixed.  Martin Luther certainly believed in imputation but what he thought of IAO seems open to some debate.  Brian Vickers, an advocate of IAO, in his book ‘Jesus’ blood and Righteousness’ written to make the case for IAO writes,

There is considerable debate over Luther’s teaching on imputation, or whether he held anything like the later Reformed and Lutheran understanding of the doctrine… it is difficult to see in Luther a developed idea of both the negative and positive elements of imputation, as spelled out so precisely in later Lutheran and Reformed theology.  (Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness:  Crossway 2006 Pg 24)

He believes however that some of the necessary elements that belong to later formulations can be found in Luther’s writings.  Vickers’ concession that Luther, a major Reformer,  is not a clear supporter of IAO is telling.  Indeed he further concedes,

There is no emphasis given to Christ’s fulfilment of the Law which in turn is imputed to the believer. (Pg 25)

and again

[When speaking of imputation] he [Luther] is more apt to emphasize forgiveness… than the imputation of positive righteousness.

Mark Seifrid, who is less convinced about IAO as traditionally expressed, yet conservative and reformed, writes of Luther,

Luther thinks [ of justification] in terms of union with the crucified and risen Lord… The later Protestant formulaic description of justification as the ‘imputation of Christ’s righteousness’ was a development of the Melanchtheonian view…  In many other contexts he [Luther] speaks of the non-imputation of sin.  But he does not speak of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness – or does so only rarely – because he regards Christ himself as present in Faith’. (Justification: What’s at Stake in the Current Debates : Apollos 2004  Pg 144)

The transfer of the law-keeping life of Christ as a necessary part of justification was not, it appears central to Luther’s gospel.

What of Calvin?  A much better case can be made for IAO as part of Calvin’s understanding of justification.  This is true particularly of the Institutes which  seem to suggest not only that Calvin believed that Christ’s righteous life and death are vital for justification but that the righteous life ‘merits’ our righteousness and is transferred to us.  Yet Vickers fairly points out that for Calvin justification is always tied closely to Christ’s death and forgiveness of sins.  He points out that in his commentaries Calvin speaks of justification explicitly in terms of forgiveness of sins.  For example Calvin writes of Roms 4:6

‘that God justifies men by not imputing sin: and by these words we are taught that righteousness, according to Paul, is nothing else than the remission of sins… Safe then does this most glorious declaration remain to us — “That he is justified by faith, who is cleared before God by a gratuitous remission of his sins.”

Calvin in his Geneva Catechism for Children of Geneva in 1545, intended to be used by adults to teach their children and based largely on the Apostles’ Creed, wrote,

Master:   Why do you make the transition from birth to death, omitting the story of his life?

Scholar: Because nothing is dealt with here, except what so pertains to our redemption, as in some degree  to contain the substance of it.

Note, Calvin understands the silence of the Apostles’ Creed on the life of Christ as signalling that the life of Christ is not in any way redemptive.

In the Institutes, which are considered Calvin’s mature systemized reflections, we read in Book 3 Ch 11 on the topic of justification  :

Say, then, if God does not justify us by acquitting and pardoning, what does Paul mean when he says “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them”? “He made him to be sin for us who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him,” (2 Cor. 5:19, 21). Here I learn, first, that those who are reconciled to God are regarded as righteous: then the method is stated, God justifies by pardoning; and hence, in another place, justification is opposed to accusation (Rom. 8:33); Book 3  Ch 11 sec 11

It is evident therefore, that the only way in which those whom God embraces are made righteous, is by having their pollutions wiped away by the remission of sins, so that this justification may be termed in one word the remission of sins. Institutes   Bk 3  Ch 11 Sec 21

Both of these become perfectly clear from the words of Paul: “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and has committed unto us the word of reconciliation.” He then subjoins the sum of his embassy: “He has made him to be sin for us who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him,” (2 Cor. 5:19-21). He here uses righteousness and reconciliation indiscriminately, to make us understand that the one includes the other. The mode of obtaining this righteousness he explains to be, that our sins are not imputed to us. Wherefore, you cannot henceforth doubt how God justifies us when you hear that he reconciles us to himself by not imputing our faults. In the same manner, in the Epistle to the Romans, he proves, by the testimony of David, that righteousness is imputed without works, because he declares the man to be blessed “whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered,” and “unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity,” (Rom. 4:6; Ps. 32:1, 2). There he undoubtedly uses blessedness for righteousness; and as he declares that it consists in forgiveness of sins, there is no reason why we should define it otherwise. Accordingly, Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, sings that the knowledge of salvation consists in the forgiveness of sins (Luke 1:77). The same course 2058was followed by Paul when, in addressing the people of Antioch, he gave them a summary of salvation. Luke states that he concluded in this way: “Through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins, and by him all that believe are justified from all things from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses,” (Acts 13:38, 39). Thus the Apostle connects forgiveness of sins with justification in such a way as to show that they are altogether the same; and hence he properly argues that justification, which we owe to the indulgence of God, is gratuitous.  Sec 22

Now I am not saying that Calvin did not teach IAO, though there are Reformed historians who so claim (C19 R. W. Landis, “What Were the Views Entertained by the Early Reformers, on the Doctrine of Justification, Faith, and the Active Obedience of Christ?”)  What I am saying is he regularly and unequivocally identified justification as forgiveness of sins.  Calvin seems to have understood justification in terms of union with Christ and imputation of righteousness was, for him, integrally involved with this union.  It seems that current wisdom is reluctant to consider Calvin a strong advocate of a developed IAO, though it is evidently present.  The championing happened in later reformers.

Finally, Huldrych Zwingli, the Swiss Reformer, according to A McGrath in Justitia Dei, tended to conflate justification and regeneration, indeed McGrath sees Zwingli as making justification subordinate to regeneration.  Justification did not appear to figure largely in his thinking.  He does not appear to have a clear statement about imputed righteousness, far less IAO.

Conclusion

In summary, Luther taught imputed righteousness but cannot really be clearly aligned with current IAO orthodoxy.  Calvin is much more closely aligned but IAO does not have in him the emphasis it has in later formulations and present orthodoxy.  He often identifies forgiveness of sins through Christ’s righteous death as the sum of justification in a way that few IAO advocates would today.  Zwingli tended to moralism in justification.

Thus three of the seminal reformers have somewhat different emphases on what imputation means.  We should not be surprised at this.  The reality is that the early Reformers did not have agreed confessions.  They differed in many details.  Indeed their theological understanding grew and adapted through life.  James Payton in his recent book ‘Getting the Reformation Wrong’ writes,

“The various Reformers reflected on how the great transaction promised in the gospel ‘worked,’ and they came to somewhat different insights. These sometimes reinforced each other, but at times they were in conflict. Luther emphasized the ‘sweet exchange’ between the sinner and ‘Christ and that sinners are united to Christ by that faith impelled in them by the Holy Spirit. Melanchthon’s regular stress on divine mercy fits closely with this, although bringing a different accent. Zwingli tied justification to the divine decree of election, with faith the temporal manifestation of what God intended from eternity past from his chosen. Bucer stressed that justification includes the reception of the Holy Spirit, who leads believers to live for God: ‘Hence he [St. Paul] never uses the word “justify” in this way without appearing to speak no less of this imparting of true righteousness than of the found and head of our entire salvation, the forgiveness of sins.’ Calvin stepped back from Bucer’s declaration when he asserted that justification by faith precludes ‘the sense … that we receive within any righteousness,’ but Calvin brought another emphasis when he asserted, ‘Christ, therefore, makes us thus participants in himself in order that we, who are in ourselves sinners, may be, through Christ’s righteousness, considered just before the throne of God.’ But these differences were variant modulations within the Reforms’ concerto. The Protestant Reformers agreed in emphasizing justification sola fide.” (See Euangelion blog)

The case for IAO as orthodoxy in the first fifteen centuries is virtually non-existent.  The case for a hard and fast IAO as a uniform part of orthodoxy among the initial reformers it would appear is far from compelling.

(To be continued)