Towards the end of Jesus' ministry and at the apex of his popularity Matthew records the following: "When he entered Jerusalem the whole city went wild with excitement. 'Who is this?' people asked, and the crowds replied, 'This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee'" (Matthew 21:10-11; REB used throughout except where noted). John in his abbreviated account of Jesus' startling interruption of commercial proceedings in the Temple records the Jews' challenge: "What sign do you show us, seeing that you do these things?" Jesus' cryptic comment was "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again" (John 2:19). After this encounter Jesus' activity did not escape the eagle eye of the religious watchdogs. The Messiah had nevertheless continued his regular teaching in the Temple although "the chief priests, scribes and principal men sought to destroy him, but they did not find anything they could do for all the people hung on his words" (Luke 19:47, 48).
Those who believe Jesus to be primarily a teacher of ethics with a new religious slant, and a Savior who came mainly to die for our sins, have overlooked the dynamic message with which he challenged the nation of Israel.
It was about a new Kingdom freed from Roman control. The Kingdom of God would eventually gain political supremacy over the world. It was the Kingdom which Israel's ancient prophets had repeatedly predicted (Daniel 2:44; 7:18, 22, 27; Zechariah 14:9, etc.).
Contemporary biblical historians have captured the real essence of Messiah Jesus' message. It announced a spectacular turn of events for the nation of Israel and the creation "of a new world order." Peter Jennings' recent ABC production about the "Irresistible Story of Jesus" featured leading scholars who attested to the obvious fact that "Kingdom of God," the heart of the Gospel, is a thoroughly political term. One of these, Professor N.T. Wright, Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey, had written:
"Jesus was announcing a message, a word from Israel's covenant God.... He was a herald, the bringer of an urgent message that could not wait, could not become the stuff of academic debate. He was issuing a public invitation, like someone setting up a new political party and summoning all and sundry to sign up and help create a new world order.
The old picture of Jesus as the teacher of timeless truths, or even the announcer of an essentially timeless call for decision, will simply have to go. His announcement of the Kingdom was a warning of imminent catastrophe, a summons to an immediate change of heart" (N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, pp. 172, 173).
Until this basic fact about the Christian Gospel is recognized the true picture of Jesus is fatally obscured. For many who are unaware of what Jesus was really about, his actions are largely consigned to irrelevance in this modern age.
"I must give the Good News of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, for that is what I was sent to do" (Luke 4:43). With this formal purpose statement Jesus provided us with a clear description of his Messianic agenda. But how could his explosive action in the Temple benefit his Kingdom mission? This man, with a not uncommon name of Jesus (Yeshua), born into a working class family who felt at ease with the less than elite, was viewed as a potent political threat to the establishment. The sheer dynamism of his personality and the politically-charged content of his message addressed to an occupied nation inevitably caught the imagination of his audience.
There can be no doubt: Jesus was perceived as a threat to the religious and political establishment. Mark 11:18 records the desire of the Temple authorities to kill him: "The Chief priests and the scribes heard of this [the Temple cleansing] and looked for a way to bring about his death; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching." His miracles appeared to authenticate his mission in contrast to the failure of previous would-be Messiahs. But why, at this time, after viewing the abuse of the temple throughout his ministry, should he engage in a provocative act that could only hasten his death? His violent intrusion in the Temple must have had a meaning far beyond that of a frustrated reformer acting in an emotional frenzy. What lay behind his dramatic interference with the heart of Israel's worship, the hub of the nation's service to God?
This article is written to suggest answers to these questions; answers with far-reaching implications for the way we understand Christian faith today. In Jesus' time one problem was obvious. Israel had failed dismally under the existing religious system. A new message going to both Israel and all nations was needed. That new Message involved a definite break with Moses. We invite your careful open-mindedness as you weigh the evidence (Acts 17:11).
Matthew, Mark and Luke place Jesus' temple cleansing near the end of the Messiah's ministry on earth. All four gospel accounts describe his triumphal entry as Messiah as the culminating event of his career. From the complete picture we conclude that these incidents were deliberately planned. They were Jesus' most powerfully symbolic acts, driving home the point of his royal Messianic agenda.
Jesus had gathered a large following from the surrounding countryside. This crowd had earlier wanted to make him king (John 6:40). A mass of Jews were supportive of Jesus' claim to be the long-promised Messiah, though only an inner circle understood how the Messianic program was to be worked out. Jesus' public march to the Temple was at the season of a national Holy Day, insuring maximum exposure. He had taken with him the celebrated, resurrected Lazarus as part of his entourage. Lazarus had also been marked for assassination by the Temple authorities (John 12:9-19).
If Jesus had wanted to commit a public act by which the weakness and vulnerability of the Temple could be established, now was the time. His popular appeal showed he was no longer to be considered a harmless preacher with merely a new slant on established religious principles. Jesus was a charismatic powerhouse whose Message threatened the controlling base of the political and theological "ins." As with any religious shrine, the Vatican of Catholicism, the Mormon Temple of the followers of Joseph Smith, or Mecca, the holy city of Islam, the Temple was the center of all that symbolized the Jewish faith. Those in charge of this shrine were threatened with a loss of control over the minds of the people.
Jesus calculated that something new and dramatic must be introduced. A change of religious heart could not be achieved by the mere sprucing up of the ancient system. Jesus' major point was this: Restoration to personal and national freedom could not be gained in the way Israel had been directing its energies. Militant messiahs had repeatedly failed to remove the Roman boot from their neck. A free Israel would not arise through political intrigue or insurrection.
God had given Israel a brilliant set of laws; a moat of protection against the lure of rampant paganism, the treacherous pull of surrounding nations and their own self-destructive natures. Every segment of Israel's life, agricultural practices, personal hygiene and diet were subject to divine legislation. A priesthood was in place to administer those laws, which set standards as well as penalties for misconduct. To keep them in constant remembrance of the presence of God in their midst a truly magnificent Temple had been erected and a set of annual Holy days enacted to preserve Israel's awareness of her unique national calling to be the light of the world and model state. Despite the divine brilliance of the system, human weakness had undermined its effectiveness to produce the desired result.
With the coming of the Messiah, however, a new program was revealed. Jesus made this quite clear with his classic statement: "The Law and Prophets were until John. Since that time the Kingdom of God has been preached" (Luke 16:16). A new era had dawned with John (Matthew 3:2) and Jesus (Matthew 4:17; Mark 1:14, 15). A message previously hidden from the world at large was to reveal a divine scheme for reshaping the world, "to be put into effect when the time was ripe" (Ephesians 1:10).
The new plan was revolutionary. It meant that both Jew and Gentile could share equally in the promises given to Abraham (Genesis 12:1-4; 13:14; 15:18; 17:7, 8, etc.).
But how was this to be accomplished?
The Mosaic system had failed even with the chosen nation. How could the hostile Gentile world be expected to conform to the will of the God of Israel? It was into a decaying system of flaunted laws, injustice, political intrigue, religious confusion and national captivity that Jesus was born. As the promised Messiah he was the bearer of a new political Message about saving the nation and the world from ruin.
Tragically, as we now know, the Message and the warning to Israel went largely unheeded. The Jewish people as a whole disregarded or resisted the "upstart" Messiah (John 1:11). What followed was the destruction of the Jewish Temple in AD 70 and the dispersion of the people among the nations of the world.
The Temple and the ideals it stood for had been so badly misused that its symbolism was now a hindrance to what God had planned. Jesus, predicting the tragedy about to befall his people, lamented: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, city that murders the prophets and stones the messengers sent to her! How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you would not let me. Look! There is your temple, forsaken by God and laid waste." The time of the temple's usefulness and the Mosaic system which it promoted was at an end! (Matthew 23:37-38).
To further his message of renewal and hope Jesus built a power base away from the population centers and in the area of northern Galilee. He issued a new set of standards to be met by those invited to kingship in his coming kingdom. The old Mosaic system divinely proclaimed at Mt. Sinai, was inappropriate to the new Kingdom agenda.
Aware (like all genuine reformers) that his message would be misunderstood, Jesus reassured his audience with the words: "Do not suppose that I have come to abolish the law but to fulfill it... Truly I tell you, so long as heaven and earth endure, not a letter, not a dot will disappear from the law until all that must happen will happen. Anyone who sets aside even the least of the law's demands and teaches others to do so will have the lowest place in the Kingdom of heaven." Heaven and earth still endure, and the Torah, in its heightened sense as taught by Jesus; as "filled full" of new meaning; is still very much in force. But note that the "law's demands" were of a different order from those given to Moses and interpreted by the leaders of Israel. "I tell you, unless you show yourselves far better than the scribes and Pharisees, you can never enter the Kingdom of heaven." So Jesus warned (Matthew 5:17-20).
Introducing the words of the New Covenant (according to Matthew in five blocks of instruction), Jesus taught his disciples that the "law's demands" would put one in a right relation with God and man. Under the new system mercy, justice and faith would reign. This ideal the Mosaic pattern had not been able to achieve because of human weakness. Consequently there needed to be a change in the priesthood and the law, as well as in the hearts of the people - not the abolition of all law but a change!
Five times early in his ministry in Matthew 5:21ff. Jesus makes a clear case that the Mosaic law was not the ultimate guide.
Jesus was advocating a new direction in view of what was to be a charter for the whole world. He said, "You have heard (from the forefathers)... but I tell you this..." "Moses allowed you to divorce for the hardness of your hearts, but I say…" This was an explicit switching from the Mosaic prescriptions to his own pattern of grace and truth (cp. John 1:17, for the contrast between Moses and Jesus; also Matthew 19:12 for Jesus' non-Mosaic view of eunuchs; Deuteronomy 23:1). Jesus now takes the place of Moses: "I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except by me [not Moses]… If you love me obey my commandments" (John 14:6, 15). This is not to deny that the Mosaic system had been divinely instituted, but if God saw a need for change, He was free to do this. The change agent in this case was the new Mediator, the ultimate "Moses," the man Messiah Jesus (I Timothy 2:5), man as he was divinely intended to be.
The changes were dramatic. Jesus bypassed the established Temple sacrificial system when he declared that he had the power to forgive sin. Not surprisingly this claim caused consternation among the Temple representatives. "This man is blaspheming," they cried, when Jesus said to the paralyzed man, "Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven." Jesus' reply to their charge was simply to tell the man, "Stand up and walk, take your bed, and go home." Addressing the professional theologians, the scribes, he said, "To convince you that the son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins I will heal this man" (Matthew 9:2-7). Recognizing this implied revolution as an intolerable threat to traditional practice, the scribes remained unconvinced and hostile.
Note another of Jesus' changes in the law regarding purification. "On another occasion he called the people and said to them, 'Listen to me, all of you and understand this: nothing that goes into a person from outside can defile him; no, it is the things that come out of a person that defile him.' His disciples didn't understand. He chided them: 'Are you as dull as the rest? Do you not see that nothing that goes into a person from outside can defile him, because it does not go into the heart but into the stomach and goes out into the drain?' By saying this he declared all foods clean" (Mark 7:14-20).
It required a compelling vision in Acts 10, to help Peter erase life-long indoctrination. He had to come to grips with the fact that the Message was now open to the Gentile world, and laws of clean and unclean food were unsuitable for the new conditions. The Gospel message about the Kingdom would be greatly inhibited if the Gentile world were obliged to follow Mosaic food laws. Such restrictions would be impossible in some parts of the world. Paul, facing new believers' reservations about food, wrote in his letter to the church at Rome: "All that I know of the lord Jesus convinces me that nothing [referring to food] in itself is impure; only if anyone considers something impure, then for him it is impure... All things are clean" (Romans 14:14, 20). Paul negates the distinction between the common (koinos) and the clean. He dismisses the impure (akarthatos - "unclean by nature") by maintaining that "all things are now pure (katharos - "pure by nature"). It is a matter not of law but of conscience. To insist that the Apostle was a staunch promoter of Jewish food laws seems a travesty of his plain words here. Paul has taken both words used in the Old Testament to describe the "common" and the "unclean" and negated both. (Here we appeal to our friends in the various Sabbath-keeping groups to reconsider some of their bases, lest they be found muddling two incompatible covenants.)
The writer of Hebrews 13:9; pursues our theme about the replacement of the Mosaic system by the New Covenant introduced by Jesus. He asserts: "It is good that we should gain inner strength from the grace of God and not from rules about food, which have never benefited those who observed them." Old patterns of conduct die hard. Peter had to be reprimanded publicly for slipping back into out-of-date ways of thinking. Paul’s admonition in Galatians 2:14 is clear: "But when I saw that their conduct did not square with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of the whole congregation, ‘If you, a Jew born and bred, live like a Gentile, how can you insist that Gentiles must live like Jews?’" Peter, the Jew, had rightly learned and lived a different life as a Christian, but retrogressed into a Mosaic mode. This is still the habit of some today. It is a fundamental misreading of the New Testament to re-erect the barrier that once separated Jew and Gentile. "Living like a Jew," when this means living under the temporary Mosaic regulations, is an affront to biblical Christianity.
The danger of muddling two Covenants is that we make the Messianic faith of Jesus unattractive or impracticable to the potential convert (just as ascribing belief in the Trinity to Jesus provokes unwarranted hostility from Jews and Muslims).
Mosaic food laws would cause unnecessary hardship in many parts of the world. Should matters of food exclude Gentiles from having a right relationship with God who had legislated specifically for the nation of Israel under the Law?
Jesus chipped away at the Temple authority and the Mosaic system in Matthew 12:6 when he said, "There is something greater than the temple here." Greater than the Temple? This was his answer to the Pharisees when they criticized the disciples for plucking corn on Israel’s official Sabbath. Jesus argued from the Old Testament: "Have you not read what David did when his men were hungry? He went to the house of God and ate the sacred bread, though neither he nor his men had a right to eat it, only the priests. Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and they are not held guilty? If you had known what this text means, ‘It is mercy I require, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath." Attention is thus called to the fact that even under the Law there was a group who were not subject to the restraints of Sabbath-keeping, the fourth commandment. Jesus further observed that the law of circumcision actually took precedence over the Sabbath, if the eighth day of the boy’s life fell on the Sabbath day. With more than a hint of his revolutionary intention Jesus pointed out that even under the Old Testament regime the priests were not bound by the national Sabbath law. They could work in the Temple and remain innocent. How much more, then, are the royal New Testament priests, the Christians (I Peter 2:9), exempt from Sabbath observance? This new priesthood works at promoting and maintaining the new Temple, the body of the Messiah Jesus.
It is quite clear that Jesus intended to show that Sabbath laws were superseded in cases where emergency human needs called for an act of mercy. And by his assertion that he was "lord of the Sabbath" a new view of the whole legal system enters the picture. It is Jesus, not Moses, who is now the interpreter of law. Jesus noted that a troubled cow in a ditch on the Sabbath is worthy of special care. How much more a man whose family is starving in Saudi Arabia because his national laws have decreed Friday as the official day of rest and Saturday as a day of work? Could the dietary economy of the Arctic North be so radicalized that Christians there could avoid the consumption of all "unclean" whales and seals?
National Israel was given the seventh-day Sabbath as part of a unique covenant with their Creator. The Sabbath was never part of the Abrahamic Covenant (Deuteronomy 5:3). Observance of the Sabbath in ancient Israel required no faith on the part of its citizens. As a matter of fact, it would have been awkward not to keep a seventh-day Sabbath as a day of rest. Question: What of the people today, in lands far away from Israel, whose national laws are such that a job, schooling for children and prohibitive religious customs would insure disaster if believers were required to keep the Laws of Moses and the Mosaic Sabbath? It would be a huge sacrifice. Jesus said in reference to the Sabbath, "It is mercy I require, not sacrifice" (Matthew 12:7).
The Sabbath issue was clarified by the Apostle Peter at a conference convened for the purpose of deciding what was required of the Gentile converts. The debate arose when some insisted that "those Gentiles must be circumcised and told to keep the law of Moses." Peter’s response in brief was that God had chosen him to announce that "the Gentiles were to hear and believe the message of the gospel... and God made no difference between them and us. He purified their hearts by faith." Then he asked the august council, "Why do you now try God’s patience by laying on the shoulders of these converts a yoke which neither we nor our forefathers were able to bear? For our belief is that we are saved in the same way as they are: by the grace of our Lord" (Acts 15:5-11). It hardly has to be said that Peter means that the salvation process cannot be facilitated by "keeping the laws of Moses."
All that needed to be said about the new Christian "take" on the legal system was not said by Jesus while he was with the disciples on earth. It was left to the first-century Apostles to develop the Messiah’s instructions and apply them. No true Apostles (despite a temporary lapse by Peter) wandered outside the ongoing guidelines set by the risen Jesus and transmitted by the spirit. Somewhat ironically, it was left to the Apostle Paul, by training a premier legalist, to grant the greatest understanding for the change from the Mosaic system, as well as the reason for new policy. Whole sections of the book of Galatians are devoted to this theme. The lesson of freedom from Mosaic restraints was learned slowly and painfully. So it is today.
Paul spoke to the Gentile world about the now outdated separation between Jew and Gentile. He tried to persuade those opponents who because of Jewish influence wanted to cling to remnants of the Mosaic system: "You [Gentiles] were at one time separate from the Messiah, excluded from the community of Israel, strangers to God’s covenants and the promises that go with them. Yours was a world without hope and without God. Once far off, now you are in union with the Messiah... For he himself is our peace. Gentiles and Jews, he has made one, and has broken down the barrier which separated them." How was this wonderful situation achieved? "For he annulled the law with its rules and regulations, so as to create out of the two a single community in himself, thereby making peace... for through him [Jesus, not Moses or the Law] we both alike have access to the Father in the one spirit" (Ephesians 2:12-18). And the spirit was the spirit received in the reception of Jesus’ Gospel of the Kingdom (Galatians 3:2), just as Jesus had described the reception of the seed of the Gospel of the Kingdom as the indispensable spark of immortality (Matthew 13:19; Luke 8:11, 12).
Could there have been any clearer statement of the fundamental change in the Law than the one given by this brilliant, zealous ex-Mosaic adherent?
Paul battled continuously with the problem which continued to trouble many of the church congregations. To the Galatians he said, "You stupid Galatians!… You before whose eyes Jesus the Messiah was openly displayed on the cross! Answer me one question: did you receive the Spirit by keeping the law or by believing the gospel message?... Look at Abraham; he put his faith in God and that faith was counted to him as righteousness ...On the other hand those who rely on obedience to the Law are under a curse" (Galatians 3:1ff).
Paul’s whole premise in the book of Galatians was that the legalists were preaching a false gospel; not the one preached by the Messiah. Paul summed up in the clearest terms his argument for the change in the Law: "The power we have comes from God; it is He who has empowered us as ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but spiritual; for the letter condemns to death but the spirit gives life. The ministry that brought death, and that was in written form on stone was written with such glory...even though the glory…was soon to fade…Indeed, the glory that once was is no glory at all; it is outshone by a still greater glory... It is not for us to do as Moses did; he put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at the end of what was fading away. In any event their minds had become closed, for that same veil is there to this very day when the lesson is read from the Old Covenant and it is never lifted, because only in the Messiah is it taken away. Indeed to this very day, every time the Law of Moses is read, a veil lies over the mind of the hearer. But as the Scripture says, ‘Whenever he turns to the Lord the veil is removed’" (2 Corinthians 3:5 ff).
The reality of what Jesus taught as minister of the New Covenant is obscured when we are wedded to the Mosaic system. Even a "little leaven leavens the whole lump," according to Paul (Galatians 5:9).
Paul’s occasional concessions to the Mosaic pattern were for expediency only, so that he might not cause offense to those who considered themselves under the Law. And there can be no doubt about which Law was under consideration. Paul’s words should not be dissolved with the claim that he was talking only about being or not being under the penalty of the law. This argument is a specious attempt to avoid the Apostle’s radical teaching.
Paul confesses: "To the Jews I behaved like a Jew, to win Jews; that is, to those under the Law I behaved as if under the Law…though not myself being subject to the Law; not myself outside God’s Law, but subject to the Law of the Messiah" (I Corinthians 9:20, 21). When Paul wrote to Timothy he made it perfectly clear that the Law of Moses was designed for the law-breakers, and in Galatians 3; the now obsolete Law was a provisional schoolmaster to bring people to the Messiah Jesus and the greater Law of the Messiah. That Law of the Messiah amounted to love toward God and love toward neighbor. "Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the Law of the Messiah" (Galatians 6:2). How does one ritualize bearing one another’s burdens? How do you ritualize love or make rules for love? The Mosaic system, allowing for "just wars," even "holy war," aggressive and defensive, an eye for an eye, did not provide that answer. That answer could come only through Jesus and a change of heart through the spirit of the Gospel of the Kingdom. "Would that they may always be of a mind to fear me..." (Deuteronomy 5:29). But as a nation they never did achieve that mind to obey.
A Christian should look for ways to serve with acts of kindness. In practical terms this attitude surpasses the sentiment of the famous musical: "God made man to serve his neighbor but with a little bit of luck he won’t be home." "Pure religion and undefiled is to visit the widow and orphan in distress" (James 1:27) and to make sure they are home!
The change from the Old to the New Testament Scriptures regarding circumcision clearly associates the radical change in the Law with the change in the priesthood. Hebrews 7:11-12: "Now if perfection had been obtainable through the Levitical Priesthood (on the basis of which the people were given the Law), there would be no need for another kind of priest to arise, described as being in the order of Melchizedek …but a change in the priesthood must mean a change in the Law." Physical circumcision was one of Israel’s most deeply embedded laws. The Jews were identified as "the Circumcision." Circumcision was the very sign of the covenant relationship between God and Abraham. The physical work of circumcision took precedence over the law of the Sabbath. Yet the physical form, not the spiritual principle, of circumcision was abandoned. The spiritual equivalent; circumcision of the heart; remained. Circumcision was "spiritualized," and so was Law of the Sabbath(s). There is no justification for reintroducing either requirement.
Christians are now known as "the Israel of God" (Galatians 6:16) as distinct from the Israel of the flesh (see I Corinthians 10:18, KJV). We are "the true Circumcision" (Philippians. 3:3). The whole New Covenant system is a transposition into a new and brilliant key. Why destroy this new melody by mixing it with the outmoded melodies of Moses?
It is true that the sacrificial system was not simply removed. It was replaced by a new system. Hebrews calls for a different type of sacrifice, another change in the Law, not an abolition. "Through Him [the new Temple] let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God... And do not neglect doing good and sharing, for with such sacrifices God is pleased" (Hebrews 13:15, 16). Would anyone insist that this must be accompanied by the physical killing of a turtledove?
Paul made it clear to the Galatians church "that God sent His son, born of a woman, born under Law, to buy freedom for those who were under the Law, that we might attain the status of sons" (Galatians 4:4-5). Then he went on to chide them: "How can you turn back to those feeble and bankrupt elemental spirits? Why do you propose to enter their service all over again? You keep special days and months and seasons and years" (vv. 9-10). But Paul is not finished with his point. Further interaction with this brush with the Mosaic system is needed. "Tell me now, you that are so anxious to be under Law, will you not listen to what the Law says? …Sinai [where the law, including the Ten Commandments, was given as the basis of the Covenant] represents the Jerusalem of today, for she and her children are in slavery" (vv. 21-25).
Slavery is the word for the Old Covenant in stark contrast to the Truth of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God as Jesus preached it, which enables us to be free (John 8:32). Knowing the Truth, the Gospel as Jesus preached it, is the key to freedom.
The writer of Hebrews likewise sees the limitations of the old Mosaic system given at Sinai: "It is not to the tangible, blazing fire of Sinai that you have come, with its darkness, gloom, and whirlwind… No, you have come to Mt. Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem [the Jerusalem of the future]... and to Jesus the mediator of a New Covenant..." (Hebrews 12:18-24). When one has been steeped in the code given to Moses for the nation of Israel, it is most difficult not to want to climb that ladder as a measurable reminder of the success of our own works.
Paul denied that one has a right to the title Jew, if one’s status is merely physical. "The real Jew is one who is inwardly a Jew, and his circumcision is of the heart, spiritual not literal" (Romans 2:29). He tells the church at Colossae: "For you were buried with him in baptism, and in that baptism you were also raised to life with him through your faith in the active power of God …And although you were dead because of your sins ...He has brought you to life with the Messiah… He has canceled the bond against us with its legal demands [not "legal penalties"], He has set it aside, nailing it to the cross… Allow no one, therefore, to take you to task about what you eat or drink, or over the observance of festival, new moons, or Sabbath. These are no more than a shadow of what was to come; the reality is Christ’s" (Colossians 2:12-17). For Paul all three sorts of observance stand or fall together. If one insists on keeping the weekly Sabbath, then Holy Days and the New Moons are equally binding. For Paul the whole system is one; "a shadow." It would be arbitrary to keep one or two forms of observance and not the third.
The Apostles were merely carrying on the work that Jesus had initiated, as he began to build a whole new community around himself; a Messianic community charged with the duty of taking the great prophetic message of hope and freedom for all, news of the coming Kingdom on earth. "Come to me, all who are weary and whose load is heavy; I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me [learn my Gospel of the Kingdom and the Law of the Messiah] and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to wear, my load is light" (Matthew 11:29-30).
This could never be said of the code of Moses. Taking the Good News of the Gospel of the Kingdom to the rest of the world was not governed by the dicta of Sinai. Yet some to this day, all in good conscience, still want to insist that the Sabbath, the Holy Days, the New Moons, the food laws are beautiful practices which must be maintained by all. This code of Moses, brilliant in its proper time for the nation of Israel, would be an intolerable burden incompatible with the light burden promised by the Messiah Jesus. Could the majority celebrate a rest day every New Moon?
We should marvel at the great mercy God provided through His son when He authorized the Gospel hope of the Kingdom of God for the whole world. Those who might be concerned that life without Sinai would be a free-for-all, and that we would now be at liberty to kill, commit adultery, steal, covet and neglect our parents, should be reassured by the Law of the Messiah. It seems obvious that the law of love toward neighbor would preclude any such behavior. So Jesus said in his new instruction, the Sermon on the Mount.
Those who would feel threatened if New Covenant Christians are freed from the obligation of the keeping of a seventh day, sunset to sunset, should find Hebrews 4:4ff, illuminating: "Scripture somewhere says of the seventh day: ‘God rested from all his work on the seventh day’ [note that God, not the Messiah, was the active executive of the creation] and in the passage above we read: ‘They shall never enter my rest.’ This implies that there are some indeed who are to enter that rest, and that those who first heard the Good News failed to enter through unbelief." It was not a matter of stopping work on Friday at sunset but a failure to embrace the spirit and mind of the Messiah, thereby entering into "a Sabbath rest [which] awaits the people of God: anyone who enters God’s rest, rests from his own works as God did from his" (vv. 9, 10). That sort of rest applies to every day of the week.
Joshua led the children of Israel into the promised land. They were given a national law peculiar to Israel. Despite rigorous Sabbath-keeping, Israel’s tumultuous history brought her to the brink of another sad era, the exile; far removed from the rest God had designed for her. In the time of Jeremiah, reliance on the repeated mantra that the Temple could save them showed how far their hearts were removed from true faith. "Thus says the Lord of hosts …‘Amend your ways and your deeds …Do not trust in the deceptive words, saying, ‘This place is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!’ This slogan of yours is a lie; put no trust in it" (Jeremiah 7:3, 4).
Israel nevertheless was still the nation designed by God to hear a life-saving Message involving a completely new focus. Her long-awaited Messiah arrived with his galvanizing Gospel of the Kingdom, a message that was to encompass also the nations of the world (Matthew 24:14). Jesus persistently demonstrated to his people that the time of the Temple and all it stood for was coming to an end. Her cherished Law was inadequate for the period of the announcement of the Kingdom to all the world. By word and deed, he proclaimed that only he had answers to the impossibly difficult problems facing the nation. Peter advocated this teaching by declaring that there was no other Name (i.e. system of faith) given under heaven by which everyone of every nation must be saved (Acts 4:12).
Reflecting on Jesus’ dramatic disturbance of the Temple, "his disciples recalled the words of scripture: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ The Jews challenged Jesus: ‘What sign can you show to justify your action?’ ‘Destroy this temple,’ Jesus replied, ‘and in three days I will raise it up again.’ The Jews said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple. Are you going to raise it up again in three days?’ But the temple he was speaking of was his body. After his resurrection his disciples understood the full force of these words. They believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus spoke" (John 2:17-22).
A whole new mindset does not grow out of rules and rituals. You cannot legislate acts of kindness. They proceed from a way of life in the spirit of the Gospel of the Kingdom. Kindness still perpetuates the divine principle of sacrifice. Unblemished animals had to be offered in sacrifice, not the lame and the dying. God is concerned with people, not animals. Our kindness must be wholehearted. Paul joins the chorus of New Testament teachers calling on us to "Carry one another’s burdens and in this way fulfill the law of the Messiah." Laws have not been "done away with." They have been reinterpreted on a new plain in the spirit. The law did not provide a way to life. It is through the new mediator and his New Covenant teaching, as well as his death and resurrection, that we approach God. With the replacement of the Temple we are launched into the new age of the spirit.
The resurrection on Sunday marks the beginning of a new system: "Having risen on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene" (Mark 16:9). That formerly demonized lady enjoyed the privilege of the first exclusive interview with the risen Messiah. Sunday was indeed the appointed "third day since all these things [the crucifixion] happened" (Luke 24:21).
This arresting theme occupies the writer of Hebrews 7:18, 19: "The earlier rules are repealed as ineffective and useless, since the law brought nothing to perfection, and a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God." The entire Mosaic system was suspended. At the Messiah’s death the Temple veil had been torn asunder, ripped from top to bottom. The separation between Jew and Gentile was no more. At this juncture and the resurrection of Jesus the new Temple became the body of the Messiah, available for membership to all nations through repentance, belief in the Kingdom Gospel of Jesus and baptism (Mark 1:14, 15; Acts 8:12; 28:23, 31), apart from the sacrifices and the legalism of the Temple ordinances.
If the Mosaic dispensation had produced a climate that would bring the world in contact with its Creator, why change it? Why remove this system so solemnly and gloriously promulgated at Sinai? The answer is that the Law at Sinai was not God’s last word.
Never did Paul refer back to Genesis 2:3 to sanction the seventh-day Sabbath as an obligation for Christians. Nor did any of the New Testament writers. Abraham was not commended first for his obedience to the Law of circumcision as a path to right standing before God. That rite came only after Abraham was given God’s stamp of approval because of his belief in the promises of God that he would receive the land/Kingdom and the celebrated seed, the Messiah. "Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." That is the New Testament slogan, but it is not the center of the Mosaic code. Abraham was not obliged to keep the Sabbath. To revert to a semi-Mosaic system, despite the constant protestations of the New Testament against it, risks the introduction of another Gospel, one without the power to save (see the whole argument of Paul in Galatians).
Lest anyone misunderstand, Paul says, "Tell me now, you that are so anxious to be under law, will you not listen to what the Law says?" (Galatians 4:21; that Law which gives a sense of our own righteousness). "Such persuasion did not come from God who called you. A little leaven, remember, ‘leavens all the dough’" (Galatians 5:8, 9). This blend of the Mosaic law with its rules and rituals, God’s grace and the laws of the Messiah is a disastrously confusing mixture. It destroys the simplicity of the universal Gospel of the Messiah which is now the vehicle for taking the Kingdom of God message to the whole of the world.
"Those who rely on obedience to the law are under a curse" (Galatians 3:10). "I impress on you once again, that every man who accepts circumcision is under obligation to keep the entire Law. When you seek to be justified by way of Law you are cut off from the Messiah: you have put yourselves outside of God’s grace" (Galatians 5:3, 4). The point could hardly be clearer. But such freedom from Law is not a freedom to be inactive. It is freedom to enter the service of the Messiah in spreading the Gospel of the Messiah, i.e., the Gospel of the Kingdom, Luke 9:60: "Go and preach the Kingdom everywhere."
"You must understand, my brothers, that it is through the Messiah that forgiveness of sins is now being proclaimed to you. It is through him that everyone who has faith is acquitted of everything for which there was no acquittal under the Law of Moses" (Acts 13:38, 39).
No ritual animal sacrifice, food law, keeping of Sabbaths, New Moons or Holy Days, tithing or special offering can strengthen our position with God. God "loves a cheerful giver," certainly, but this is not just a repeat of the Old Testament tithing regulation, which Paul imposed on no one.
With his ministry devoted entirely to proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom, Jesus began to remove every barrier which would interfere with his life-giving message to the world. The blindness which clings to outmoded Old Testament regulation can be removed only in the Messiah. The commands of the Messiah are simple. They begin with the summary of the faith: "The Kingdom of God is at hand [and now the imperative]: Repent and believe the Gospel of the Kingdom" (Mark 1:14, 15). "Hear, O Israel, YHVH our God is one Lord" (Mark 12:28ff). Jewish monotheism is still the framework of the faith. Jesus knows of no Trinitarian or Binitarian modification of the faith. Belief in the One God of Israel and in Jesus as the promised Messiah, plus the demands of love to neighbor and brother, summarize the faith.
This new system frees us to concentrate on the command to shoulder the task which counted supremely for Jesus: "I must proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom to the other cities also; that is why I was commissioned" (Luke 4:43). That commission passes now to his Church, which, under his supervision from the right hand of God, is to invite men and women of all nations to "repent and believe in the Gospel about the Kingdom," the new way involving the new Hope by which we can approach God (Hebrews 10:20).
Friday, March 16, 2012
Monday, March 12, 2012
Approaching God With Freedom
A Reflective Examination of Ephesians 3:12
by Al Maxey
It was the early 60's A.D. in the city of Rome, and the apostle Paul was again in a forced confinement. Although his liberties were greatly curtailed, his freedom in Christ could not be similarly contained by any human agency. This joyous reality not only enabled him to endure, but emboldened him in his resolve to share that reality with his spiritual siblings. During this confinement in Rome he sent forth four letters (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon) which have come to be known collectively as his "Prison Epistles." It is a statement found in Ephesians (an epistle in which Paul stresses the vital nature of the universal church and the place, purpose and privileges of the individual disciple within it) that I would like for us to especially notice in this issue of Reflections.
In chapter 3, Paul discusses the gospel of God's grace, which was "in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord" (vs. 11, NASB). This plan for man's ultimate redemption was foreordained from the foundation of the creation, and was implemented on the time/space continuum at the cross. With that gracious gift of His Son, our Father forever secured within the Lamb's Book of Life the names of the redeemed [Reflections #523 -- Foreordained to be Slain]. In the verse that follows, Paul provides us with some insight into the blessings this eternal offering of Jesus secured for us. "In Him and through faith in Him we may approach God with freedom and confidence" (vs. 12, NIV). There are a number of items within this statement that we need to examine more closely if we are to correctly ascertain the author's intent.
First, we note one of Paul's favorite concepts: being in Christ Jesus, which he mentions and discusses a great many times throughout his writings. Indeed, this thought appears 35 times in this epistle alone, which far surpasses its usage in any one of his other writings. Being "in Him" is the very basis of our hope; the realization of our redemption; the source of our confidence. "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus," for the "Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death" (Romans 8:1-2, ESV). We are free! Our bondage is at an end. No longer slaves, but sons, we may now boldly and freely come into the very presence of the Father. We "were called to be free" (Gal. 5:13), and "it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery" (Gal. 5:1). "In Him" we are set free from law; rules and regulations no longer serve as our taskmasters. Such law-based legislation and limitation of our lives is now forever cast off "in Christ Jesus." Unchained, unshackled, unfettered we walk confidently into the very presence of the One who dwells within the heavenly Holy of Holies! The veil of separation has been forever removed; we are free to enter and address the Father as sons! "We have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that He has inaugurated for us through the curtain" (Hebrews 10:19-20).
Sin had made a separation between man and God (Isaiah 59:2); that which is unholy can never enter into the presence of perfect holiness. In Christ, however, that brokenness has been bridged; laid low by sin, we are lifted up by the Son, cleansed and made holy, and "in Him" ushered personally back into the very presence of the Holy One. Dr. Gerhard Kittel noted, "He who is in Christ has found again freedom towards God and can approach God with confidence. He can stand before the Ruler and Judge free and erect, not lowering his head, able to bear His presence" [Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 5, p. 883]. "Christ's sacrifice, as it has given infinite satisfaction to God, is fitted to inspire the soul of the believer with perfect confidence. He sees that nothing more is needed to ensure his everlasting acceptance, and is thus led to tread with boldness the entrance into the sanctuary of God's presence" [Pulpit Commentary, vol. 20, p. 116]. At the cross, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom (Mark 15:38), an act signifying that the way into God's presence was now made possible by the shed blood of the Son (as the writer of Hebrews made abundantly clear). Thus, access to God is a gift of grace, as it could never be acquired by any act of man, which allows us to enter His presence boldly and freely "without the inhibitions that might arise from any sort of self-reliance" [The Expositor's Bible Commentary, vol. 11, p. 48]. "We approach, then, with confidence, not with any reliance upon our own works and merits, ... Christ being the ground of our cheerful confidence" [Dr. Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible, The NT, vol. 2, p. 274]. It is courage born of reconciliation, a reconciliation secured by Jesus alone, not by anything man has done (or ever could do). The faith of the Son, therefore, not only acquired this access, but freed us from any need to try and attain it by our own effort. As a result, our confidence is "in Him," not in ourselves! He paid it all, we provided nothing!
This brings us to another point that needs to be made with regard to Eph:3:12 -- translators differ on how to translate a certain phrase within this verse. Some render the phrase in question as "faith IN Christ," while others opt for "faith OF Christ." Obviously, there is quite a difference between the two. One speaks of our faith, while the other speaks of His faith. Which is it, according to this text, that gains us our confident access into the presence of the Father? Before we seek an answer to that question, notice the various versions that opt for one or the other of these two understandings:
Faith IN Christ
New International Version -- In Him and through faith in Him we may approach God with freedom and confidence.
Holman Christian Standard Bible -- ...in whom we have boldness, access, and confidence through faith in Him.
Easy-to-Read Version -- In Christ we can come before God with freedom and without fear. We can do this through faith in Christ.
English Standard Version -- ...in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in Him.
New American Standard Bible -- ...in whom we have boldness and confident access through faith in Him.
The Message -- When we trust in Him, we're free to say whatever needs to be said, bold to go wherever we need to go.
New American Bible, St. Joseph Edition -- In Christ and through faith in Him we can speak freely to God, drawing near Him with confidence.
New English Bible -- In Him we have access to God with freedom, in the confidence born of trust in Him.
Hugo McCord's NT Translation of the Everlasting Gospel -- By faith in Him we have boldness and confident access.
Living Bible -- Now we can come fearlessly right into God's presence, assured of His glad welcome when we come with Christ and trust in Him.
Williams' NT in the Language of the People -- By union with Him and through faith in Him we have a free and confidential introduction to God.
Contemporary English Version -- Christ now gives us courage and confidence, so that we can come to God by faith.
American Standard Version -- ...in whom we have boldness and access in confidence through our faith in Him.
Revised Standard Version -- ...in whom we have boldness and confidence of access through our faith in Him.
New World Translation -- ...by means of whom we have this freeness of speech and an approach with confidence through our faith in Him.
The Amplified Bible -- ...in whom, because of our faith in Him, we dare to have the boldness (courage and confidence) of free access (an unreserved approach to God with freedom and without fear).
New King James Version -- ...in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through faith in Him.
New Living Translation -- Because of Christ and our faith in Him, we can now come boldly and confidently into God's presence.
Lexham English Bible -- ...in whom we have boldness and access in confidence through faith in Him.
Faith OF Christ
King James Version -- ...in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of Him.
Lamsa's Translation from the Aramaic of the Peshitta -- ...in whom we have freedom of access with confidence in His faith.
Darby Translation -- ...in whom we have boldness and access in confidence by the faith of Him.
Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition ...in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of Him.
Wycliffe Bible -- ...in whom we have trust and nigh coming (to), in trusting by the faith of Him.
Young's Literal Translation -- ...in whom we have the freedom and the access in confidence through the faith of Him.
Footnote: Holman Christian Standard Bible -- through His faithfulness.
Footnote: American Standard Version -- the faith of Him.
Footnote: Lexham English Bible -- through His (i.e., Christ's) faithfulness.
Footnote: New Living Translation -- because of Christ's faithfulness.
Footnote: New American Standard Bible -- of Him.
Although it is clear that the majority of the versions prefer "faith IN Christ," the actual phrase in the Greek appears in the genitive case, which signifies that "faith OF Christ" is actually the more grammatically correct translation (which many versions, that opt for the former rendering, will at least acknowledge in a footnote).
So, why do more prefer the former? In a word, because the concept of men having faith IN the Lord is a far more familiar one than the concept of Christ's OWN faith.
Since some are not quite sure what to do with the latter, the grammar is simply ignored in favor of the more familiar phrasing. Yet, by ignoring what Paul actually wrote in this verse, the sense of the verse is compromised.
The Pulpit Commentary is absolutely correct in stating that this particular clause "influences the whole verse" [vol. 20, p. 107]. The noted NT Greek scholar, Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll, stated that "the autou (of Him) is best taken as the objective genitive" [The Expositor's Greek Testament, vol. 3, p. 310]. He goes on to say, "Thus, as the en ho (in Whom) expresses the fact that Christ is the ground of our parresia (boldness to speak freely) and prosagoge (access), and the en pepoithesei (in confidence) the state of mind in which we enjoy these blessings, so this clause, dia tes pistueos autou (through the faith of Him), declares the means by which they become our actual possession" [ibid]. In other words, we have our access to the Father, and may speak freely before Him in full confidence and without any fear, because of (by means of) the faith OF our Lord Jesus Christ. It was HIS faith, displayed in His perfect life and ultimate sacrifice, that forever secured for us this gift of grace!! All we can do is receive this gift with grateful hearts by our faith in who He is and what He has accomplished for us. I have sought to explain this biblical concept, which is such a vital aspect of the new covenant, in far more depth in the 8th section, and also in the conclusion, of Reflections #185 -- From Faith to Faith, which I would strongly urge the reader to take just a few moments to examine. Grasping this truth will assist you greatly in grasping authorial intent in Ephesians 3:12.
It will also serve us well to take note of several of the Greek words Paul chose to employ in this verse. The word that is generally translated "access" or "approach" is prosagoge, which simply conveys here the idea of "approaching the throne" or "coming into the presence" of one who is vastly superior (i.e., God). By our own effort we would certainly have NO such access; it had to be secured for us by another (i.e., Christ). The renowned John Wesley (1703-1791), in his Explanatory Notes on the Whole Bible, wrote that in Christ Jesus "we have free access, such as those petitioners have who are introduced to the royal presence by some distinguished favorite" [e-Sword]. Paul had earlier spoken of this blessed reality, saying that we are all "reconciled in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity ... for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father" (Eph:2:16, 18). "We have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that He has inaugurated for us through the curtain" (Heb:10:19-20). Therefore, "let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith" (Heb:10:22). And where does that confidence and assurance come from? That's right -- from Jesus Christ, not from ourselves! Rom:5:1-2, where this word also appears, affirms this same doctrine: "Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand." Although some would argue that the justification and access both result from our faith, I would suggest a better view is that they both result from His faith, and are thus benefits we acquire by our faith in Him. In this way we truly receive the gift of grace from faith (His) to faith (ours). Thus, in a very real sense, ours is a receptive faith, not a redemptive faith. HIS faith is redemptive; OUR faith appropriates that perfect faith, and its attendant eternal benefits!
The apostle Paul further states in Ephesians 3:12 that we have this access with "confidence." This is the Greek word pepoithesis, which means "trust, confidence." It is "the joyful mood of those reconciled to God" [Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll, The Expositor's Greek Testament, vol. 3, p. 310]. "Our God is indeed a consuming fire, yet the believer can approach Him without servile fear, simply because Christ is the way of access ... and inspires the soul of the believer with perfect confidence" [The Pulpit Commentary, vol. 20, p. 116]. "Christ reconciles us with God, and so removes all ground of reasonable alarm. Christ gives to us the perfect love that casts out fear" [ibid, p. 143]. "It is ungrateful, after being thus blessed, to cherish the old fears. ... Thus, spiritual cowardice is a mark of unbelief. He who trusts most strongly will enjoy the most freedom of access to God" [ibid, p. 144]. The word here translated "confidence" comes "from peitho, 'to persuade.' It comes from the perfect participial form which refers to a past process of being completely persuaded, with the present result that we are in a confirmed and settled state of utter confidence" [Dr. Kenneth S. Wuest, Word Studies from the Greek New Testament, vol. 1, Ephesians, p. 86]. Our faith/trust in His accomplished act of love/faith at the cross has settled our hearts and minds, casting out all fear and doubt, and we come before the Throne with a depth of confidence that we could not otherwise possess by our own effort or merit.
In the first section of this verse (Eph. 3:12), which refers to Christ Jesus, the apostle Paul writes, "...in whom we have parresia and access." This word is variously rendered in the versions above: boldness, freedom, speak freely. The word "denotes primarily 'freedom of speech, unreservedness of utterance.' It is the absence of fear in speaking boldly" [The New Strong's Expanded Dictionary of Bible Words, p. 1299]. Although "this word means 'to speak boldly, or freely,' and primarily had reference to speech," in time it "acquired the meaning of 'being bold, or waxing bold,' without any connection necessarily with speech" [ibid]. John Wesley (in the same source referenced above) characterized it as "unrestrained liberty of speech, such as children use in addressing an indulgent father, when, without fear of offending, they disclose all their wants, and make known all their requests." This same word is used in Heb. 4:16 -- "Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need." This access to the Throne of Mercy is provided by our Lord Jesus Christ, who in perfect faith secured our redemption, which grace we now receive, and in which we stand, by faith in Him.
This concept "is not to be limited to just freedom of speech, freedom in preaching, or boldness in prayer, but is to be taken in the larger sense" of boldness and freedom in our lives and service before God [Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll, The Expositor's Greek Testament, vol. 3, p. 310]. Paul used this word with this larger sense when he wrote, during that same imprisonment in Rome, "I shall not be put to shame in anything, but with all boldness, Christ shall even now, as always, be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death" (Philp. 1:20). The aged apostle John expressed it this way, "Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have boldness before God" (1 John 3:21). "These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, in order that you may know that you have eternal life. And this is the boldness which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us" (1 John 5:13-14). Jesus did not come to earth, suffer and die, and ascend back to the Throne to deliver us out of the hands of an angry, vengeful God, but rather to deliver us into the warm embrace of a loving Father! Because of who He was and what He did, I now have the boldness to stand upright before my God every day of my life, knowing that my speech and my service, my worship and my work, are accepted by Him. It is a confidence and courage conveyed to me by Christ at the cross! Dr. John Gill (1690-1771), in his Exposition of the Entire Bible, observed: "Christ is the way of access; union with Him gives right of access; through His mediation His people have audience with God, and acceptance with Him, both of person and service; and this access is with boldness; which denotes liberty of coming, granted by God, and a liberty in their own souls to speak out their minds plainly and freely; and a holy courage and intrepidity of soul, being free from servile fear, or spirit of bondage" [e-Sword].
Dr. Nicoll, in his classic work The Expositor's Greek Testament, describes this "joyful mood of the reconciled" as a "freedom of spirit, a cheerful boldness" [vol. 3, p. 310]. The boldness before God that Adam lost in the garden (he fearfully hid himself from the presence of God -- Gen. 3:8-10), was graciously restored to man at Golgotha. We have been freed from the curse, and thus, with this newfound liberty, we come boldly into the presence of our God, rather than hiding from Him in fear. This applies not only to prayer, but to our daily walk with Him and our daily worship of Him (whether individual or corporate). We serve not a God of Law, but a Father of Love -- a love that frees us from bondage to rigid religious regulation; that liberates us to express ourselves before Him boldly, being fully assured that we stand approved by Him (even though we may be disapproved by our detractors). "It is Jesus who gives us audience with God, dispelling at the same time from the mind of the worshipper those suggestions which would restrict or narrow the riches of God's love" [The Pulpit Commentary, vol. 20, p. 116]. Our Lord Jesus Christ, and His gospel of grace and freedom, "destroys the gloomy old religions of terror, bringing liberty and courage; it is essentially the manly faith of the world's adult age" [ibid, p. 143]. We come boldly before God "as our Father, who is waiting to be gracious. It is unworthy to fear. Our prayer should not be the cry of the captive for mercy, but the glad request of the child" [ibid]. Thanks be to God for the indescribable gift of His Son! By our faith in His faith we have redemption, as well as boldness and confidence to speak, live and worship in complete spiritual freedom in His very presence. We have been liberated. Now, go and enjoy it.
by Al Maxey
It was the early 60's A.D. in the city of Rome, and the apostle Paul was again in a forced confinement. Although his liberties were greatly curtailed, his freedom in Christ could not be similarly contained by any human agency. This joyous reality not only enabled him to endure, but emboldened him in his resolve to share that reality with his spiritual siblings. During this confinement in Rome he sent forth four letters (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon) which have come to be known collectively as his "Prison Epistles." It is a statement found in Ephesians (an epistle in which Paul stresses the vital nature of the universal church and the place, purpose and privileges of the individual disciple within it) that I would like for us to especially notice in this issue of Reflections.
In chapter 3, Paul discusses the gospel of God's grace, which was "in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord" (vs. 11, NASB). This plan for man's ultimate redemption was foreordained from the foundation of the creation, and was implemented on the time/space continuum at the cross. With that gracious gift of His Son, our Father forever secured within the Lamb's Book of Life the names of the redeemed [Reflections #523 -- Foreordained to be Slain]. In the verse that follows, Paul provides us with some insight into the blessings this eternal offering of Jesus secured for us. "In Him and through faith in Him we may approach God with freedom and confidence" (vs. 12, NIV). There are a number of items within this statement that we need to examine more closely if we are to correctly ascertain the author's intent.
First, we note one of Paul's favorite concepts: being in Christ Jesus, which he mentions and discusses a great many times throughout his writings. Indeed, this thought appears 35 times in this epistle alone, which far surpasses its usage in any one of his other writings. Being "in Him" is the very basis of our hope; the realization of our redemption; the source of our confidence. "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus," for the "Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death" (Romans 8:1-2, ESV). We are free! Our bondage is at an end. No longer slaves, but sons, we may now boldly and freely come into the very presence of the Father. We "were called to be free" (Gal. 5:13), and "it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery" (Gal. 5:1). "In Him" we are set free from law; rules and regulations no longer serve as our taskmasters. Such law-based legislation and limitation of our lives is now forever cast off "in Christ Jesus." Unchained, unshackled, unfettered we walk confidently into the very presence of the One who dwells within the heavenly Holy of Holies! The veil of separation has been forever removed; we are free to enter and address the Father as sons! "We have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that He has inaugurated for us through the curtain" (Hebrews 10:19-20).
Sin had made a separation between man and God (Isaiah 59:2); that which is unholy can never enter into the presence of perfect holiness. In Christ, however, that brokenness has been bridged; laid low by sin, we are lifted up by the Son, cleansed and made holy, and "in Him" ushered personally back into the very presence of the Holy One. Dr. Gerhard Kittel noted, "He who is in Christ has found again freedom towards God and can approach God with confidence. He can stand before the Ruler and Judge free and erect, not lowering his head, able to bear His presence" [Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 5, p. 883]. "Christ's sacrifice, as it has given infinite satisfaction to God, is fitted to inspire the soul of the believer with perfect confidence. He sees that nothing more is needed to ensure his everlasting acceptance, and is thus led to tread with boldness the entrance into the sanctuary of God's presence" [Pulpit Commentary, vol. 20, p. 116]. At the cross, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom (Mark 15:38), an act signifying that the way into God's presence was now made possible by the shed blood of the Son (as the writer of Hebrews made abundantly clear). Thus, access to God is a gift of grace, as it could never be acquired by any act of man, which allows us to enter His presence boldly and freely "without the inhibitions that might arise from any sort of self-reliance" [The Expositor's Bible Commentary, vol. 11, p. 48]. "We approach, then, with confidence, not with any reliance upon our own works and merits, ... Christ being the ground of our cheerful confidence" [Dr. Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible, The NT, vol. 2, p. 274]. It is courage born of reconciliation, a reconciliation secured by Jesus alone, not by anything man has done (or ever could do). The faith of the Son, therefore, not only acquired this access, but freed us from any need to try and attain it by our own effort. As a result, our confidence is "in Him," not in ourselves! He paid it all, we provided nothing!
This brings us to another point that needs to be made with regard to Eph:3:12 -- translators differ on how to translate a certain phrase within this verse. Some render the phrase in question as "faith IN Christ," while others opt for "faith OF Christ." Obviously, there is quite a difference between the two. One speaks of our faith, while the other speaks of His faith. Which is it, according to this text, that gains us our confident access into the presence of the Father? Before we seek an answer to that question, notice the various versions that opt for one or the other of these two understandings:
Faith IN Christ
New International Version -- In Him and through faith in Him we may approach God with freedom and confidence.
Holman Christian Standard Bible -- ...in whom we have boldness, access, and confidence through faith in Him.
Easy-to-Read Version -- In Christ we can come before God with freedom and without fear. We can do this through faith in Christ.
English Standard Version -- ...in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in Him.
New American Standard Bible -- ...in whom we have boldness and confident access through faith in Him.
The Message -- When we trust in Him, we're free to say whatever needs to be said, bold to go wherever we need to go.
New American Bible, St. Joseph Edition -- In Christ and through faith in Him we can speak freely to God, drawing near Him with confidence.
New English Bible -- In Him we have access to God with freedom, in the confidence born of trust in Him.
Hugo McCord's NT Translation of the Everlasting Gospel -- By faith in Him we have boldness and confident access.
Living Bible -- Now we can come fearlessly right into God's presence, assured of His glad welcome when we come with Christ and trust in Him.
Williams' NT in the Language of the People -- By union with Him and through faith in Him we have a free and confidential introduction to God.
Contemporary English Version -- Christ now gives us courage and confidence, so that we can come to God by faith.
American Standard Version -- ...in whom we have boldness and access in confidence through our faith in Him.
Revised Standard Version -- ...in whom we have boldness and confidence of access through our faith in Him.
New World Translation -- ...by means of whom we have this freeness of speech and an approach with confidence through our faith in Him.
The Amplified Bible -- ...in whom, because of our faith in Him, we dare to have the boldness (courage and confidence) of free access (an unreserved approach to God with freedom and without fear).
New King James Version -- ...in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through faith in Him.
New Living Translation -- Because of Christ and our faith in Him, we can now come boldly and confidently into God's presence.
Lexham English Bible -- ...in whom we have boldness and access in confidence through faith in Him.
Faith OF Christ
King James Version -- ...in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of Him.
Lamsa's Translation from the Aramaic of the Peshitta -- ...in whom we have freedom of access with confidence in His faith.
Darby Translation -- ...in whom we have boldness and access in confidence by the faith of Him.
Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition ...in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of Him.
Wycliffe Bible -- ...in whom we have trust and nigh coming (to), in trusting by the faith of Him.
Young's Literal Translation -- ...in whom we have the freedom and the access in confidence through the faith of Him.
Footnote: Holman Christian Standard Bible -- through His faithfulness.
Footnote: American Standard Version -- the faith of Him.
Footnote: Lexham English Bible -- through His (i.e., Christ's) faithfulness.
Footnote: New Living Translation -- because of Christ's faithfulness.
Footnote: New American Standard Bible -- of Him.
Although it is clear that the majority of the versions prefer "faith IN Christ," the actual phrase in the Greek appears in the genitive case, which signifies that "faith OF Christ" is actually the more grammatically correct translation (which many versions, that opt for the former rendering, will at least acknowledge in a footnote).
So, why do more prefer the former? In a word, because the concept of men having faith IN the Lord is a far more familiar one than the concept of Christ's OWN faith.
Since some are not quite sure what to do with the latter, the grammar is simply ignored in favor of the more familiar phrasing. Yet, by ignoring what Paul actually wrote in this verse, the sense of the verse is compromised.
The Pulpit Commentary is absolutely correct in stating that this particular clause "influences the whole verse" [vol. 20, p. 107]. The noted NT Greek scholar, Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll, stated that "the autou (of Him) is best taken as the objective genitive" [The Expositor's Greek Testament, vol. 3, p. 310]. He goes on to say, "Thus, as the en ho (in Whom) expresses the fact that Christ is the ground of our parresia (boldness to speak freely) and prosagoge (access), and the en pepoithesei (in confidence) the state of mind in which we enjoy these blessings, so this clause, dia tes pistueos autou (through the faith of Him), declares the means by which they become our actual possession" [ibid]. In other words, we have our access to the Father, and may speak freely before Him in full confidence and without any fear, because of (by means of) the faith OF our Lord Jesus Christ. It was HIS faith, displayed in His perfect life and ultimate sacrifice, that forever secured for us this gift of grace!! All we can do is receive this gift with grateful hearts by our faith in who He is and what He has accomplished for us. I have sought to explain this biblical concept, which is such a vital aspect of the new covenant, in far more depth in the 8th section, and also in the conclusion, of Reflections #185 -- From Faith to Faith, which I would strongly urge the reader to take just a few moments to examine. Grasping this truth will assist you greatly in grasping authorial intent in Ephesians 3:12.
It will also serve us well to take note of several of the Greek words Paul chose to employ in this verse. The word that is generally translated "access" or "approach" is prosagoge, which simply conveys here the idea of "approaching the throne" or "coming into the presence" of one who is vastly superior (i.e., God). By our own effort we would certainly have NO such access; it had to be secured for us by another (i.e., Christ). The renowned John Wesley (1703-1791), in his Explanatory Notes on the Whole Bible, wrote that in Christ Jesus "we have free access, such as those petitioners have who are introduced to the royal presence by some distinguished favorite" [e-Sword]. Paul had earlier spoken of this blessed reality, saying that we are all "reconciled in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity ... for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father" (Eph:2:16, 18). "We have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that He has inaugurated for us through the curtain" (Heb:10:19-20). Therefore, "let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith" (Heb:10:22). And where does that confidence and assurance come from? That's right -- from Jesus Christ, not from ourselves! Rom:5:1-2, where this word also appears, affirms this same doctrine: "Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand." Although some would argue that the justification and access both result from our faith, I would suggest a better view is that they both result from His faith, and are thus benefits we acquire by our faith in Him. In this way we truly receive the gift of grace from faith (His) to faith (ours). Thus, in a very real sense, ours is a receptive faith, not a redemptive faith. HIS faith is redemptive; OUR faith appropriates that perfect faith, and its attendant eternal benefits!
The apostle Paul further states in Ephesians 3:12 that we have this access with "confidence." This is the Greek word pepoithesis, which means "trust, confidence." It is "the joyful mood of those reconciled to God" [Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll, The Expositor's Greek Testament, vol. 3, p. 310]. "Our God is indeed a consuming fire, yet the believer can approach Him without servile fear, simply because Christ is the way of access ... and inspires the soul of the believer with perfect confidence" [The Pulpit Commentary, vol. 20, p. 116]. "Christ reconciles us with God, and so removes all ground of reasonable alarm. Christ gives to us the perfect love that casts out fear" [ibid, p. 143]. "It is ungrateful, after being thus blessed, to cherish the old fears. ... Thus, spiritual cowardice is a mark of unbelief. He who trusts most strongly will enjoy the most freedom of access to God" [ibid, p. 144]. The word here translated "confidence" comes "from peitho, 'to persuade.' It comes from the perfect participial form which refers to a past process of being completely persuaded, with the present result that we are in a confirmed and settled state of utter confidence" [Dr. Kenneth S. Wuest, Word Studies from the Greek New Testament, vol. 1, Ephesians, p. 86]. Our faith/trust in His accomplished act of love/faith at the cross has settled our hearts and minds, casting out all fear and doubt, and we come before the Throne with a depth of confidence that we could not otherwise possess by our own effort or merit.
In the first section of this verse (Eph. 3:12), which refers to Christ Jesus, the apostle Paul writes, "...in whom we have parresia and access." This word is variously rendered in the versions above: boldness, freedom, speak freely. The word "denotes primarily 'freedom of speech, unreservedness of utterance.' It is the absence of fear in speaking boldly" [The New Strong's Expanded Dictionary of Bible Words, p. 1299]. Although "this word means 'to speak boldly, or freely,' and primarily had reference to speech," in time it "acquired the meaning of 'being bold, or waxing bold,' without any connection necessarily with speech" [ibid]. John Wesley (in the same source referenced above) characterized it as "unrestrained liberty of speech, such as children use in addressing an indulgent father, when, without fear of offending, they disclose all their wants, and make known all their requests." This same word is used in Heb. 4:16 -- "Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need." This access to the Throne of Mercy is provided by our Lord Jesus Christ, who in perfect faith secured our redemption, which grace we now receive, and in which we stand, by faith in Him.
This concept "is not to be limited to just freedom of speech, freedom in preaching, or boldness in prayer, but is to be taken in the larger sense" of boldness and freedom in our lives and service before God [Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll, The Expositor's Greek Testament, vol. 3, p. 310]. Paul used this word with this larger sense when he wrote, during that same imprisonment in Rome, "I shall not be put to shame in anything, but with all boldness, Christ shall even now, as always, be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death" (Philp. 1:20). The aged apostle John expressed it this way, "Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have boldness before God" (1 John 3:21). "These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, in order that you may know that you have eternal life. And this is the boldness which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us" (1 John 5:13-14). Jesus did not come to earth, suffer and die, and ascend back to the Throne to deliver us out of the hands of an angry, vengeful God, but rather to deliver us into the warm embrace of a loving Father! Because of who He was and what He did, I now have the boldness to stand upright before my God every day of my life, knowing that my speech and my service, my worship and my work, are accepted by Him. It is a confidence and courage conveyed to me by Christ at the cross! Dr. John Gill (1690-1771), in his Exposition of the Entire Bible, observed: "Christ is the way of access; union with Him gives right of access; through His mediation His people have audience with God, and acceptance with Him, both of person and service; and this access is with boldness; which denotes liberty of coming, granted by God, and a liberty in their own souls to speak out their minds plainly and freely; and a holy courage and intrepidity of soul, being free from servile fear, or spirit of bondage" [e-Sword].
Dr. Nicoll, in his classic work The Expositor's Greek Testament, describes this "joyful mood of the reconciled" as a "freedom of spirit, a cheerful boldness" [vol. 3, p. 310]. The boldness before God that Adam lost in the garden (he fearfully hid himself from the presence of God -- Gen. 3:8-10), was graciously restored to man at Golgotha. We have been freed from the curse, and thus, with this newfound liberty, we come boldly into the presence of our God, rather than hiding from Him in fear. This applies not only to prayer, but to our daily walk with Him and our daily worship of Him (whether individual or corporate). We serve not a God of Law, but a Father of Love -- a love that frees us from bondage to rigid religious regulation; that liberates us to express ourselves before Him boldly, being fully assured that we stand approved by Him (even though we may be disapproved by our detractors). "It is Jesus who gives us audience with God, dispelling at the same time from the mind of the worshipper those suggestions which would restrict or narrow the riches of God's love" [The Pulpit Commentary, vol. 20, p. 116]. Our Lord Jesus Christ, and His gospel of grace and freedom, "destroys the gloomy old religions of terror, bringing liberty and courage; it is essentially the manly faith of the world's adult age" [ibid, p. 143]. We come boldly before God "as our Father, who is waiting to be gracious. It is unworthy to fear. Our prayer should not be the cry of the captive for mercy, but the glad request of the child" [ibid]. Thanks be to God for the indescribable gift of His Son! By our faith in His faith we have redemption, as well as boldness and confidence to speak, live and worship in complete spiritual freedom in His very presence. We have been liberated. Now, go and enjoy it.
Friday, January 27, 2012
The Explicit Gospel
by Matt Chandler: “Response” (Excerpt, Chapter 4)
We have seen tons of people at The Village who sat here for years just hearing but not hearing, seeing but not perceiving, and then all of a sudden, at some random worship service or Bible study, the Lord just hijacked them.
Jesus puts it simply: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Matt. 12:30). The gospel is such power that it necessitates reaction. Jesus Christ has worked such an outrageous wonder that he demands response, whether hatred or passion. Anyone ambivalent about what Christ has actually done just isn’t clear on the facts. To present the gospel, then, is to place a hearer in an untenable position. The heart of the hearer of the gospel must move, either toward Christ or away from him. Pastor Chan Kilgore puts it this way: “True gospel preaching always changes the heart. It either awakens it or hardens it.”
We certainly see this alternating affection and aversion in the four Gospels, as Jesus and his disciples persevere in their itinerant ministry, declaring forgiveness of sins and the inbreaking of the kingdom of God. Some are drawn; others are repulsed. But nobody hears Jesus and just says, “Eh.” In some cases, as in the feeding of the five thousand in John 6, they are drawn by his miracles, then repulsed when he connects the miraculous deeds to the miraculous words of the good news.
Knowing this, we don’t need all thirty-six verses of “Just As I Am,” a plaintive pleading from the altar, heads bowed, eyes closed, and shaky hands raised to issue a gospel invitation. No, the invitation is bound up in the gospel message itself. The explicit gospel, by virtue of its own gravity, invites belief by demanding it.
We each stand from birth on the precipice between life and death. Because we are stained with sin from conception, we are rushing headlong into the fires of hell before we can even walk.
Jesus lays his body across the path; there is no ignoring him. If it’s headlong into hell we want to go, we have to step over Jesus to get there.
Many Christians desire to say yes to the gospel, but one of our biggest problems is mistaking the gospel for law.
Faith Versus Works
Here’s the funny thing about the Old Testament: 85 percent of it is God saying, “I’m going to have to kill all of you if you don’t quit this.” Seriously, 85 percent of it is “I am destroying you” or “I am going to destroy you.” Because of this, there’s a lot of attempted appeasement going on. A lot of scared Israelites need a lot of sacrificial animals. I have no idea how they stocked that many animals. But in all their scurrying around from slaughter to slaughter, God is not just frustrated with their unrepentance, but with their approach to the sacrificial system that they’re trying to leverage. Let me show you what I mean:
Hear the word of the Lord,
you rulers of Sodom!
Give ear to the teaching of our God,
you people of Gomorrah!
“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the Lord;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of well-fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats.
“When you come to appear before me,
who has required of you
this trampling of my courts?” (Isa. 1:10–12)
This selection from Isaiah highlights the problem with the sacrificial system, both then and now. God doesn’t need sacrifices. God is saying, “I don’t need your bulls. I don’t want your goats. You’re missing the point. I’m trying to communicate to you how disgusting and how horrible and how costly your sin is before me. And instead of feeling the weight of that and actually repenting, you just keep doing what you’re doing, all the while bringing me goats and bulls like that’s what I really want.” They’re like the wife beater who brings his wife flowers. She doesn’t want his stupid flowers. She wants him to repent; she wants to be honored.
The same thing plays out even to this day. Christ’s work demands the response of faith, but we want to make donations. It is astounding how many evangelicals are not doing Christianity at all; they’re doing the Levitical priesthood. They’re trying to offer God good behavior so he’ll like them.
We continue living with unrepentant, faithless hearts, making religious pit stops along the way, even frequently, to keep laying things on the altar, and in the end, the altar’s closed. When someone dares to insert the unadulterated gospel into this religious mess, we get discombobulated. We get confused. I’m sure the Israelites were confused over prophecies such as that in Isaiah 1. God commands them to come into his temple courts and make these sacrifices, and then he says, “Who has required of you this trampling my courts?”
They’re thinking, “Um, you did. You told us to do this.”
Their heartless obedience—and our heartless obedience—demonstrates the bankruptcy of the sacrificial currency.
I’m a fixer, a type-A personality. I like problem solving. Give me a dry-erase board and some markers and throw the problem out there, and I think, “Let’s go; let’s fix it!” But I learned early on in my marriage that my wife doesn’t really appreciate that. She would be telling me about her day, about some problem or frustration she encountered, and say something like, “And this happened and this happened and this happened,” and my response was typically, “Let me show you what your problem is.”
Husbands, you know this does not go well. I’m a slow learner, but after all these years of marriage, when she tells me something now, I always say, “Are you saying these things because you want me to hear and empathize or are you asking me for help?” I’m so confident in all kinds of areas in my life, but while listening to my wife, all of a sudden, I’m thinking, “Is this a trap?” And I’m realizing something now. I’m realizing that after years of my asking, “Do you want me to empathize or do you want me to help?” I don’t think she’s ever said, “I’m asking for your help.”
The hard-won lesson I’ve learned in marriage, something I’m very grateful for knowing now, is that there are some things in my wife’s heart and some struggles she faces in life that I cannot fix. It doesn’t matter how romantic I am; it doesn’t matter how loving I am; it doesn’t matter how many flowers I send, or if I write her poetry, or if I clean the kitchen, or if I take the kids and let her go have girl time—I am powerless to fix Lauren. (And she’s powerless to fix me.) Doing all those things to minister to her are right and good, but there are things in my girl that I can’t fix, things that are between her and the Lord. Just like there are things in me that she can’t love me enough to overcome.
But the only way I would ever have learned this is to try, try, try—try to fix her, let her try to fix me, and then watch the escalating conflict that takes place when we try to do that.
What if the sacrificial system was given so that we would learn, no matter how much we gave and how much we worked and how many pricey things we sacrificed, that we still can’t fix what is broken?
By this the Holy Spirit indicates that the way into the holy places is not yet opened as long as the first section is still standing (which is symbolic for the present age). According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper, but deal only with food and drink and various washings, regulations for the body imposed until the time of reformation. (Heb. 9:8–10)
The author of Hebrews is saying that we can sacrifice all we want, and that we can obey all the regulations we can get our hands on, but in the end, if our heart isn’t changed, we’re no better off. Answer me this: Is the alcoholic free if he doesn’t drink on Monday but everything in him wants to and needs to, and he’s in agony because he wants to do something he knows he can’t? Is that freedom? Of course not.
This is what Jesus emphasizes when he says, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” (Matt. 5:21–22); and, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (vv. 27–28).
You may be able to control yourself against sleeping with somebody you’re not married to, and you may be able to avoid taking someone’s life, but if you are a slave to lust and anger, you are not any more free than somebody who can’t control his urge to murder.
Acts of sacrifice, in the end, don’t do anything. They do not cleanse your conscience, and they do not set your heart on the things of God. The routine sacrificial system, then, was not empowered to or designed to cleanse the Israelites’ hearts any more than good works are empowered to or designed to cleanse our own. Even our most rigorous of attempts reveals the hardness of our hearts and the insurmountable brokenness inside them. This whole enterprise is a blessed exercise in frustration, but it is one that points beyond itself. Hebrews 10:1 tells us the law is just the shadow of the good things to come.
Similarly, the shadow of good works ought to proceed from the light of the good news. Our endless, bloody religious sacrifices ought to push us to look to the one sacrifice to rule them all. The gospel of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, then, is not an invitation to moralism; it is an invitation to real transformation. Our works don’t work. “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law,” Paul writes in Romans 3:28. The only acceptable response to the gospel is nothing less than a heart of faith.
Clay and Ice, Cuts and Scars
The Puritans had a saying: “The same sun that hardens the clay melts the ice.”
I was converted to belief in Jesus Christ as savior and Lord over a period of time, so I don’t have the testimony of those who say, “I was at a Billy Graham Crusade; I heard the gospel for the first time, and I was all in.” Although my justification was secured in a moment, the process of my understanding and acceptance took place over a year-long time of some guys being patient with me and loving me and walking with me. They invited me to church gatherings and spiritual events, and they even allowed me to mock those things. They just patiently explained them to me more fully. I asked a lot of questions that I now know won’t be answered this side of heaven, but they let me ask them anyway, and they tried to answer. Sometimes they’d give me books to read. Through that whole year, God began to gather kindling around my life.
You start a fire with small pieces of grass and wood, and once that’s caught, you put on bigger sticks, and then you put on bigger sticks, and then you put on even bigger sticks. In those early conversations with my friends Jeff and Jerry and others, God was laying kindling around my heart, and then, three days before my eighteenth birthday, he lit it up. What’s funny is that in that moment I no longer needed all my questions answered. It took me a while to catch, but when I did, that’s when I was all in.
Before that, though, I needed to know how it all worked; I needed to know how everything fit; I needed to know why God would say such-and-such. But when the Holy Spirit opened up my heart to Christ my savior and God my Father and reconciled me to God, I didn’t need those questions answered. Even after my conversion, the residual contention I held out, that some specific complexity has to be solved for this whole thing to be credible, melted away in the light of God’s grace and mercy in my life. In May of that decisive year, I was an aggressive agnostic. In June I was converted and began to share the gospel.
I should explain what I mean when I say I shared the gospel. At that time, I knew that if you don’t love Jesus, you are going to hell, and therefore you shouldn’t drink beer and try to sleep with girls. That was the sum total of my frame of reference; I wasn’t theologically built out. But I had an insatiable thirst for the Word of God, so I studied the Bible constantly. Even so, I knew nothing of deep books, deep thinking, and the deep realities of the good news. I just knew that I loved Jesus, that I wanted other people to love Jesus, and that if you didn’t love Jesus the way I did, you were going to hell. That was my evangelistic strategy, so I told almost everyone I knew about this fantastic news: “This is what has happened to me. This is what God has done. This is what Jesus has done for you!”
In God’s mercy, he covered my naivete and honored my sincerity with the powerful gospel in spite of me, and I actually won people to Christ. I began to see a great deal of openness to the good news among my friends. Several came to know the Lord right after I did and began to follow him, love him, and serve him, and they continue to do so to this day. What I learned in those early days is that the proclamation of the glory of God, the might of God, and the majesty of God brought to bear on the sinfulness of man in the atoning work of Jesus Christ actually stirs the hearts of men. And men respond to that stirring. Some are stirred to belief; some are not.
I remember some friends who were stirred not to belief but to interest. “Explain this to me,” they’d say. “Help me understand this.” But, in the end, those guys were hardened to the gospel, and as time went on, and as they asked more questions, they didn’t become more and more open to Christ but more and more closed to him.
This is what the gospel does. This is why the gospel of Jesus is dangerous. When we hear the gospel word, we are opened up to the Word of God. We’re subjected to God’s Word reading us. We sit underneath it, and for the moment of our hearing, it rules us. It does not save all, but all who hear it are put in their place. This is dangerous, because the proclamation of God’s Word goes only one way or another in the soul of a man, and one of those ways is the hardening of a man toward the grace of God.
This means, for instance, that nobody can really attend church as though it’s a hobby; to do so does not reveal partial belief but hardness. The religious, moralistic, churchgoing evangelical who has no real intention of seeking God and following him has not found some sweet spot between radical devotion and wanton sin; he’s found devastation. The moralism that passes for Christian faith today is a devastating hobby if you have no intention of submitting your life fully to God and chasing him in Christ.
It is an amazing thing, but this one message can reach both those who are near and those who are far (Eph. 2:17) and bring one person near and push another farther away. The same sun that hardens the clay melts the ice.
Jesus gives us some insight into this phenomenon in his parable of the sower in Matthew 13:1–8. The sower does not offer a different seed in all his scattering; he apparently doesn’t even adjust the way he scatters. He has one seed, and evidently he distributes it indiscriminately. He knows every soil needs this one seed to grow what only this one seed produces. The different responses to the seed are contingent upon the receptivity of the soil. The seed finds purchase in soft soil but does not in hard soil.
I think of the way the Word of God, which is “sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12), cuts into the soul of every man and woman. The Word is sharp; there’s no doubting that. But some souls it cuts to the quick, breaking open like freshly tilled soil; others it bruises, leaving marks scarred over. This is not because the sword is not sharp enough, or that God cannot cut to the quick any soul he wants. Our softness or hardness is subject to the good pleasure of God (Rom. 9:18). Nevertheless, the effect is such that the sharp word of the gospel cuts some open, and others it scars, further callousing them against its promise of life. There is no one in between.
Response and Responsibility
A lot of Christians love Isaiah 6, and this is because they stop reading before the story is over. Let me show you what I mean:
In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphim few to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.” (vv. 1–7)
Evangelicals love this text. It radiates the exaltation of God. It conveys a thrilling bigness. Then you have verse 8, which is a definite coffee-cup verse: “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I! Send me.’” We absolutely love Isaiah 6:8. We romanticize it. So when we hear a sermon on missions, and the preacher has moved into leading a “Let’s do something good for the Lord” cheer, we feel the gravitational pull toward Isaiah 6:8: “Here am I! Send me.” It sounds gutsy, masculine. We can hear Braveheart’s guttural yawp in there. “Let’s do it! Let’s take it! Let’s go get ’em!”
We are as zealous about Isaiah 6:8 as we are oblivious of Isaiah 6:9. There is a roadblock waiting for us there: “And he said, ‘Go, and say to this people: “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’” Do you see what is happening here? God says, “Here’s your ministry, Isaiah. Go tell them, ‘Keep on hearing but do not hear.’”
Experientially, we know exactly what this means. We have all at some point said the right words to people who simply are not hearing them. The phrase “It’s like talking to a brick wall” is common for a reason. One of my frustrations living in the Bible Belt is that the gospel and its ancillary truths have been so divorced from actual living that a lot of beautiful theology has become cliché. There is a sentimentalization of the faith that occurs when you sanitize the gospel of Christ crucified or sift it from the substance of the Christian religion. The result is a malleable Jesus, a tame Jesus. The result is, as Michael Spencer says, “a spirituality that has Jesus on the cover but not in the book.” When we dilute or ditch the gospel, we end up with an evangelicalism featuring special appearances by Jesus but the denial of his power (2 Tim. 3:5).
I meet a lot of people swimming neck deep in Christian culture who have been inoculated to Jesus Christ. They have just enough of him not to want all of him. When that happens, what you have are people who have been conformed to a pattern of religious behavior but not transformed by the Holy Spirit of God. This explains why we see a lot of people who know objective spiritual truths but in the end have failed to apply them in such a way that their lives demonstrate real change. They’re hearing, but they’re not hearing.
A really vivid way we see this occur at The Village is in response to what the staff jokingly calls my “State of the Union” addresses, in which I say to the congregation, “Hey, quit coming here. If you’re not serious, if you don’t want to plug in, if you don’t want to do life here, if you don’t want to belong, if you’re an ecclesiological buffet kind of guy, eat somewhere else.” And then people who are doing all of those things will sit there in the crowd and say, “Yeah! Get ’em. It’s about time someone said this.” I’m thinking, “I’m talking to you! You’re who I’m talking to.” It makes me want to pull my hair out. They hear the words coming out of my mouth, but they’re not listening.
God commands Isaiah, “Tell them to keep on seeing, but not to perceive.”
Have you ever come across someone who absolutely knows his life is a mess but cannot put the dots together to see that he’s a part of the issue? If you run into someone with a victim’s mentality, someone who is constantly leaving carnage in her wake, someone who has a new group of friends every twelve to fifteen months, someone who has story after story after story about how this person betrayed him and another person did him wrong, but he has no ability to see or comprehend that he is the common denominator, you’ve run into someone who can see but can’t perceive. Such people know their life is a mess, but they can’t figure out, “Hmm, I seem to be the major malfunction here.” As it relates to spiritual matters, this seems to apply to all mankind.
God continues in Isaiah 6:10:
Make the heart of this people dull,
and their ears heavy,
and blind their eyes;
lest they see with their eyes,
and hear with their ears,
and understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed.
Now, nobody wants this ministry. Can you imagine this want ad?
“Now hiring: Pastor. Must make hearts dull. Those seeking fruitful ministry need not apply.”
For all the ambition that I’ve seen in young preachers, not a single one of them has said, “I want to be faithful to the Word of God and have no one respond to it.” So Isaiah does what any of us would do, and he asks about it:
“How long, O Lord?”
And he said:
“Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
and the land is a desolate waste,
and the Lord removes people far away,
and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.
And though a tenth remain in it,
it will be burned again,
like a terebinth or an oak,
whose stump remains
when it is felled.”
The holy seed is its stump. (vv. 11–13)
God’s response to Isaiah is simply this: “I’m going to gather the remnant. I’m going to gather the genuine believers. I’m going to work this thing over until all that is left are those who really love me, trust me, and seek me.” Isaiah, then, is not called to be fruitful but simply to be faithful. And, in fact, he’s told he will not be fruitful. The priority God charges him with is not success but integrity. He is sent to proclaim a word to people who in the end can see but not perceive, who can hear but can’t hear.
Let us allow the implications of this for Christian ministry settle into our minds. Let’s steep in this text; let’s wrestle with it. Let all of us Christians do this, but we in church leadership especially need to come to terms with what exactly happened there in the temple.
God’s commissioning of Isaiah is a torpedo into the way ministry is appraised in the church today. God is saying, “Isaiah, you’re going to proclaim faithfully, but they’re going to reject continually. And I’m at work in that.” Now, if Isaiah was a minister within today’s evangelicalism, he’d be considered an utter failure. Jeremiah would be an utter failure. Moses didn’t get to enter the Promised Land. John the Baptist didn’t get to see the ministry of Jesus. On and on we could go. We would not view the ministry of these men as successful.
One of the things we don’t preach well is that ministry that looks fruitless is constantly happening in the Scriptures. We don’t do conferences on that. There aren’t too many books written about how you can toil away all your life and be unbelievably faithful to God and see little fruit this side of heaven. And yet God sees things differently. We always have to be a little bit wary of the idea that numeric growth and enthusiastic response are always signs of success. The Bible isn’t going to support that. Faithfulness is success; obedience is success.
What we learn about God’s call to Isaiah provides a strange sense of freedom. A hearer’s response is not our responsibility; our responsibility is to be faithful to God’s call and the message of the gospel. No, a hearer’s response is his or her responsibility. But one of the mistakes we can make in our focusing on individual response in the gospel on the ground is to lose sight of God’s sovereign working behind our words and actions and our hearer’s response. Receptivity and rejection are ultimately dependent upon God’s will, not ours. Paul reminds us, “[God] says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Rom. 9:15–16). From the ground, we say what we choose to say and hear what we choose to hear. From the air, our saying is clearly empowered—“No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3)—and our hearing is clearly God-contingent—“having the eyes of your hearts enlightened” (Eph. 1:18).
You can find a whole bunch of verses about God’s moving and gathering large groups of people, which means if there’s numeric growth and much enthusiasm, we can’t say that it’s not a work of God or that God isn’t moving. I’m just saying that I guarantee you there’s some old dude in some town that most of us have never heard of faithfully preaching to nine people every week, and when we get to glory, we’ll be awed at his house. We’ll be awed at the reward God has for him. In the end, we have this idea being uncovered in Isaiah that God hardens hearts, that people hear the gospel successfully proclaimed and end up not loving God but hardened toward the things of God.
I know some people think, “Well that’s Old Testament, and God was really angry then. But Jesus is a lot nicer than God.” (Should we set aside the fact that Jesus is God?) But God’s sovereignty over the hardened response of hearers is well laid out in the New Testament too. Let’s return to the parable of the sower. In Matthew 13 Jesus tells us about the guy who casts the seeds. Some seeds land on the path, some land among the thorns, some land on shallow ground, and some land on good soil. After Jesus tells the parable, his disciples approach him confused because nobody can understand it. They ask him, “Why do you do this? Why do you tell these stories? Nobody knows what you’re talking about.” Here is Jesus’s response: “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given” (Matt. 13:11).
Now if we just stopped there and stared at this verse, we could find real joy for a long time. Right now, there are millions and millions of people who have no idea about the kingdom of heaven. But not you. You know the secret. They have no idea about the kingdom, no idea about God’s grace, no idea of God’s mercy. But not you. You know. You get to worship him, you get to walk with him, and you get to hear from him. Jesus tells his disciples, “It hasn’t been given to them. It has been given to you.” And he continues:
For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says:
“You will indeed hear but never understand,
and you will indeed see but never perceive.
For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and with their ears they can barely hear,
and their eyes they have closed,
lest they should see with their eyes
and hear with their ears
and understand with their heart
and turn, and I would heal them.”
But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it. (Matt. 13:12–17)
So on both sides of the covenant—old and new—we see that God is in control. His sovereignty is not diminished or thwarted. The hearer of the gospel is responsible for his response, but God is responsible for his ability to do so. The preacher of the gospel is responsible for his proclamation, but God is responsible for the transforming power.
The gospel message goes out, and while some hearers respond with faith in Christ, some people simply can’t hear.
The Unadjusted Gospel Is the Empowered Gospel
It is all of grace that some do hear. At the close of chapter 3 we asked, “What will we do with Christ’s substitutionary work?” The answer is, “Whatever the Spirit allows us to.” Blessed are the eyes that see and the ears that hear because the Spirit of God has opened them to do so. The power in the gospel is not the dynamic presentation of the preacher or the winsomeness of the witness, although the Spirit does empower and use those things too. The power in the gospel is the Spirit’s applying the saving work of Jesus Christ to the heart of a hearer. Charles Spurgeon puts it this way:
“You cannot induce them to come; you cannot force them to come by all your thunders, nor can you entice them to come by all your invitations. They will not come unto Christ, that they may have life. Until the Spirit draw them, come they neither will, nor can.”
In Acts 2 we find the first post-ascension sermon of the Christian church. The apostle Peter addresses the crowd that has witnessed the response of many to the outpouring of the Spirit:
Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and give ear to my words. For these people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day. But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel:
“And in the last days it shall be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams;
even on my male servants and female servants
in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.
And I will show wonders in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke;
the sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day.
And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of
the Lord shall be saved.” (Acts 2:14–21)
Peter begins the very first Christian sermon with the majesty of God. If there is prophecy, if there is utterance, if there is the miraculous, if there is power, if the sun is darkened, if there is vapor, if there is blood and fire, where does it all start? With God.
God prophesied; God said this would happen, and he brought it about. Peter is basically saying, “All that you understand about the prophets, all that you understand about the miraculous works of God, and all that you understand about how God moves is wrapped up in the Godhead, who saves all who call on him.” Look what he says next:
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. For David says concerning him,
“I saw the Lord always before me,
for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken;
therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced;
my flesh also will dwell in hope.
For you will not abandon my soul to Hades,
or let your Holy One see corruption.
You have made known to me the paths of life;
you will make me full of gladness with your presence.”
Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says,
“The Lord said to my Lord,
‘sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool.’”
Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. (vv. 22–36)
So we have this incredible sermon exulting in the majesty of God, tying God’s work in the incarnation of Jesus Christ back to the promises of the Old Testament, specifically to David’s promise of an eternal king. But the refrain echoing in this text is, “You crucified him, you killed him, you did this.”
This is not a seeker-sensitive sermon. Peter does not shrink back, fearing, “Oh man, this is going to be offensive.” He is not thinking, “How can I make this sound cool to the young Jerusalemites that are here? How can I soften this?” He knows that if he tells them they killed Jesus, they’re going to get really angry. But he says anyway, “You killed Jesus.” Then he says it again. “Oh yeah, this majesty? You killed it.”
We are never, ever, ever going to make Christianity so cool that everybody wants it. That is a fool’s errand. It is chasing the wind. We can’t repaint the faith. It doesn’t need our help anyway.
Every effort to remake the Christian faith leads to wickedness. Every effort to adjust the gospel so it appears more appealing, more palatable, is foolishness. This is liberal theology’s only play in the playbook. “Let’s get rid of the atoning work of Jesus Christ because it’s harsh. Let’s get rid of hell because it’s offensive. Let’s save Christianity by changing Christianity.” But in the urban context of Acts 2, with people all over the ancient world gathered in Jerusalem, Peter announces, “You killed him. This majestic one true God of the universe—you crucified him.” And what happens?
Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” And Peter said to them, “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. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. (vv. 37–41)
All they did was preach the gospel, and men were cut to the core. They wanted to know, “What do we do in response to this news?” Peter tells them, “You repent and get baptized.”
What saved them? Their faith. No action brought about their salvation. They hadn’t fed any poor people. Apart from what Peter is saying here, they hadn’t been sitting under teaching or going to church each week. They hadn’t, in the end, done anything but heard, “God is majestic, and you have sinned, but in Christ you can be reconciled to him,” and they were so cut to the heart that they responded with saving faith.
Acts 2 takes us back to the truth that we simply have to tell. God does the opening of hearts. God opens minds. There is such freedom in this! Do you see how that takes weight off the perfection of our presentation? We don’t have to be able to explain it absolutely or completely or be able to apologetically defend creationism or argue the falsity of materialism or whatever. I’m not saying we shouldn’t pursue those things. I’m saying that in the end it is God who opens up eyes and ears. Our responsibility is to tell them. It is as simple as that.
Some people won’t like hearing it. What else is new? This has been true as far back as Genesis. It has always been true that some people do not want to hear this message. But some are going to hear it and be saved. So, relational evangelism? Go for it, as long as it turns into actual evangelism. You hanging out having a beer with your buddy so he can see that Christians are cool is not what we’re called to do. You’re eventually going to have to open up your mouth and share the gospel. When the pure gospel is shared, people respond.
The spiritual power in the gospel is denied when we augment or adjust the gospel into no gospel at all. When we doubt the message alone is the power of God for salvation, we start adding or subtracting, trusting our own powers of persuasion or presentation. We end up agreeing with God that preaching is foolishness (1 Cor. 1:21) but disagree that it is required anyway. This is a colossal fail. Only the unadjusted gospel is the empowered gospel. And this message of the finished work of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection for the forgiveness of sins and the securing of eternal life is carried by the Spirit like a smart bomb into the hearts of those the Spirit has given eyes to see and ears to hear.
Response to the Gospel Is Not the Gospel
One crucial thing that viewing the gospel on the ground helps us do is distinguish between the gospel’s content and the gospel’s implications. One danger of viewing the gospel in the air is the conflating of the good news with its entailments. As we rightly see the gospel as encompassing God’s work, through the culmination of Christ, of restoring all things, we can be tempted to see our good works, whether preaching Scripture or serving meals at a homeless shelter, as God’s good news. This is a temptation that honing in on the ground gospel can help us identify and mark out. We need to rightly divide between gospel and response, or we compromise both. D. A. Carson writes:
“The kingdom of God advances by the power of the Spirit through the ministry of the Word. Not for a moment does that mitigate the importance of good deeds and understanding the social entailments of the gospel, but they are entailments of the gospel. It is the gospel that is preached.”
We can exercise this delineation by continuing in Acts 2:
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. (Acts 2:42–47)
All the things that prompt people to mistakenly say, “This is the gospel,” can be found in this passage. What we actually see in Acts 2:42–47 is the beautiful fallout of the proclamation that precedes it. This list tells us the hearers’ response to the gospel. Why did they start living in community? Because the gospel had made them a people. Why did they begin to share their goods with one another? Because the gospel had made them a people. Why are they now on mission? Because the gospel had made them a people. Why are they seeing signs and wonders? Because the gospel had made them a people. All of these workings are outworkings of the gospel.
If we piggyback the work of the church onto the message of the gospel, we don’t enhance the gospel. It is just fine without us; it doesn’t need us. Furthermore, doing that results in preaching the church rather than preaching Christ. “For what we proclaim is not ourselves,” Paul writes, “but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor. 4:5).
Believing the news that God is holy, that you are a sinner, and that Christ has reconciled you to God by his life, death, and resurrection is what justifies you. This is our foundation, our root. The things that we read in Acts 2:42–47 are the fruit. They show the building of the home, but they are not the foundation.
If we confuse the gospel with response to the gospel, we will drift from what keeps the gospel on the ground, what makes it clear and personal, and the next thing you know, we will be doing a bunch of different things that actually obscure the gospel, not reveal it. At the end of the day, our hope is not that all the poor on earth will be fed. That’s simply not going to happen. I’m not saying we shouldn’t feed and rescue the poor; I’m saying that salvation isn’t having a full belly or a college education or whatever. Making people comfortable on earth before an eternity in hell is wasteful.
The Response of Faith
Everybody comes out of the womb in rebellion. David says, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps. 51:5). David doesn’t even get himself out of the birth canal before he thinks, “Sinner!” What are we like apart from Christ? What is our default position from conception? Ephesians 2:1–3 says that we’re: (1) dead; (2) world followers; (3) devil worshipers; (4) appetite driven; and (5) children of wrath.
I am not sure it is possible to be worse than this. But the good news is that upon the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, God raises, rescues, ransoms, reforms, and reconciles. God saves sinners. Does he save all? No, but he saves.
People are going to respond to the gospel every time it is presented. They’re going to respond in belief, or their heart is going to become more and more hardened toward God. But no heart can ever be too hard for God. Some hearts will grow harder and harder each day until the day God’s mercy blows them up like dynamite. We have seen tons of people at The Village who sat here for years just hearing but not hearing, seeing but not perceiving, and then all of a sudden, at some random worship service or Bible study, the Lord just hijacked them, the way that Paul was apprehended (Phil. 3:12). In that moment of rebirth, all those steps toward hardening get evaporated in fire from heaven.
The gospel is news, not advice or instruction, but it nevertheless demands response. So, if we look at our lives today, a question I think we have to ask ourselves is this: “How am I responding to the good news of Jesus Christ? Am I stirred up toward obedience, or is Jesus becoming cliché to me? Am I becoming inoculated to Jesus, or do I find myself being more and more stirred up to worship him, to let other people know him, to submit my life fully to him?” We have to ask these questions, because everybody responds to the gospel. We must test ourselves to see if we are in the faith (2 Cor. 13:5), because it is faith by which salvation comes. Faith is the only saving response to the gospel.
Every good gift the Father gives—every richness from Christ, every blessing from the Spirit—flows from the gospel and is received through faith.
• We receive righteousness through faith (Rom. 3:22).
• We are justified through faith (Rom. 3:30; Gal. 2:16).
• We stand fast through faith (Rom. 11:20).
• We are sons of God through faith (Gal. 3:26).
• We are indwelled by Christ through faith (Eph. 3:17).
• We are raised with Christ through faith (Col. 2:12).
• We inherit the promises through faith (Heb. 6:12).
• We conquer kingdoms, enforce justice, and stop the mouths of lions through faith (Heb. 11:33).
• We are guarded through faith (1 Pet. 1:5).
We live through faith, and we die through faith. Everything else is garbage. Even works of righteousness, if not done through faith, are works of self-righteousness and therefore filthy rags. Be very careful about going to church, reading your Bible, saying prayers, doing good deeds, and reading books like this through anything but faith in the living Lord. Because the result of all that is belief in a phony Jesus and inoculation to the gospel. You can end up knowing the jargon and playing pretend. Be very careful. Watch your life and your doctrine closely (1 Tim. 4:16). Some of you are so good that you’ve deceived yourselves. God help you.
On the ground, the gospel comes to us as individuals, as the crowns of God’s creation, as people made in his image, and puts before us the prospect of joining the forefront of his restoring of the cosmos. It says something personal about us: “We are rebels.” It says something specific about this rebellion: “Christ has made atonement.” It holds out a promise requiring individual response: “If you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9).
The gospel on the ground, then, reveals the integral narrative we can outline this way: God, sin, Christ, response. But this is not the only gospel narrative in the Author’s revelation.
We have seen tons of people at The Village who sat here for years just hearing but not hearing, seeing but not perceiving, and then all of a sudden, at some random worship service or Bible study, the Lord just hijacked them.
Jesus puts it simply: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Matt. 12:30). The gospel is such power that it necessitates reaction. Jesus Christ has worked such an outrageous wonder that he demands response, whether hatred or passion. Anyone ambivalent about what Christ has actually done just isn’t clear on the facts. To present the gospel, then, is to place a hearer in an untenable position. The heart of the hearer of the gospel must move, either toward Christ or away from him. Pastor Chan Kilgore puts it this way: “True gospel preaching always changes the heart. It either awakens it or hardens it.”
We certainly see this alternating affection and aversion in the four Gospels, as Jesus and his disciples persevere in their itinerant ministry, declaring forgiveness of sins and the inbreaking of the kingdom of God. Some are drawn; others are repulsed. But nobody hears Jesus and just says, “Eh.” In some cases, as in the feeding of the five thousand in John 6, they are drawn by his miracles, then repulsed when he connects the miraculous deeds to the miraculous words of the good news.
Knowing this, we don’t need all thirty-six verses of “Just As I Am,” a plaintive pleading from the altar, heads bowed, eyes closed, and shaky hands raised to issue a gospel invitation. No, the invitation is bound up in the gospel message itself. The explicit gospel, by virtue of its own gravity, invites belief by demanding it.
We each stand from birth on the precipice between life and death. Because we are stained with sin from conception, we are rushing headlong into the fires of hell before we can even walk.
Jesus lays his body across the path; there is no ignoring him. If it’s headlong into hell we want to go, we have to step over Jesus to get there.
Many Christians desire to say yes to the gospel, but one of our biggest problems is mistaking the gospel for law.
Faith Versus Works
Here’s the funny thing about the Old Testament: 85 percent of it is God saying, “I’m going to have to kill all of you if you don’t quit this.” Seriously, 85 percent of it is “I am destroying you” or “I am going to destroy you.” Because of this, there’s a lot of attempted appeasement going on. A lot of scared Israelites need a lot of sacrificial animals. I have no idea how they stocked that many animals. But in all their scurrying around from slaughter to slaughter, God is not just frustrated with their unrepentance, but with their approach to the sacrificial system that they’re trying to leverage. Let me show you what I mean:
Hear the word of the Lord,
you rulers of Sodom!
Give ear to the teaching of our God,
you people of Gomorrah!
“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the Lord;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of well-fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats.
“When you come to appear before me,
who has required of you
this trampling of my courts?” (Isa. 1:10–12)
This selection from Isaiah highlights the problem with the sacrificial system, both then and now. God doesn’t need sacrifices. God is saying, “I don’t need your bulls. I don’t want your goats. You’re missing the point. I’m trying to communicate to you how disgusting and how horrible and how costly your sin is before me. And instead of feeling the weight of that and actually repenting, you just keep doing what you’re doing, all the while bringing me goats and bulls like that’s what I really want.” They’re like the wife beater who brings his wife flowers. She doesn’t want his stupid flowers. She wants him to repent; she wants to be honored.
The same thing plays out even to this day. Christ’s work demands the response of faith, but we want to make donations. It is astounding how many evangelicals are not doing Christianity at all; they’re doing the Levitical priesthood. They’re trying to offer God good behavior so he’ll like them.
We continue living with unrepentant, faithless hearts, making religious pit stops along the way, even frequently, to keep laying things on the altar, and in the end, the altar’s closed. When someone dares to insert the unadulterated gospel into this religious mess, we get discombobulated. We get confused. I’m sure the Israelites were confused over prophecies such as that in Isaiah 1. God commands them to come into his temple courts and make these sacrifices, and then he says, “Who has required of you this trampling my courts?”
They’re thinking, “Um, you did. You told us to do this.”
Their heartless obedience—and our heartless obedience—demonstrates the bankruptcy of the sacrificial currency.
I’m a fixer, a type-A personality. I like problem solving. Give me a dry-erase board and some markers and throw the problem out there, and I think, “Let’s go; let’s fix it!” But I learned early on in my marriage that my wife doesn’t really appreciate that. She would be telling me about her day, about some problem or frustration she encountered, and say something like, “And this happened and this happened and this happened,” and my response was typically, “Let me show you what your problem is.”
Husbands, you know this does not go well. I’m a slow learner, but after all these years of marriage, when she tells me something now, I always say, “Are you saying these things because you want me to hear and empathize or are you asking me for help?” I’m so confident in all kinds of areas in my life, but while listening to my wife, all of a sudden, I’m thinking, “Is this a trap?” And I’m realizing something now. I’m realizing that after years of my asking, “Do you want me to empathize or do you want me to help?” I don’t think she’s ever said, “I’m asking for your help.”
The hard-won lesson I’ve learned in marriage, something I’m very grateful for knowing now, is that there are some things in my wife’s heart and some struggles she faces in life that I cannot fix. It doesn’t matter how romantic I am; it doesn’t matter how loving I am; it doesn’t matter how many flowers I send, or if I write her poetry, or if I clean the kitchen, or if I take the kids and let her go have girl time—I am powerless to fix Lauren. (And she’s powerless to fix me.) Doing all those things to minister to her are right and good, but there are things in my girl that I can’t fix, things that are between her and the Lord. Just like there are things in me that she can’t love me enough to overcome.
But the only way I would ever have learned this is to try, try, try—try to fix her, let her try to fix me, and then watch the escalating conflict that takes place when we try to do that.
What if the sacrificial system was given so that we would learn, no matter how much we gave and how much we worked and how many pricey things we sacrificed, that we still can’t fix what is broken?
By this the Holy Spirit indicates that the way into the holy places is not yet opened as long as the first section is still standing (which is symbolic for the present age). According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper, but deal only with food and drink and various washings, regulations for the body imposed until the time of reformation. (Heb. 9:8–10)
The author of Hebrews is saying that we can sacrifice all we want, and that we can obey all the regulations we can get our hands on, but in the end, if our heart isn’t changed, we’re no better off. Answer me this: Is the alcoholic free if he doesn’t drink on Monday but everything in him wants to and needs to, and he’s in agony because he wants to do something he knows he can’t? Is that freedom? Of course not.
This is what Jesus emphasizes when he says, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” (Matt. 5:21–22); and, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (vv. 27–28).
You may be able to control yourself against sleeping with somebody you’re not married to, and you may be able to avoid taking someone’s life, but if you are a slave to lust and anger, you are not any more free than somebody who can’t control his urge to murder.
Acts of sacrifice, in the end, don’t do anything. They do not cleanse your conscience, and they do not set your heart on the things of God. The routine sacrificial system, then, was not empowered to or designed to cleanse the Israelites’ hearts any more than good works are empowered to or designed to cleanse our own. Even our most rigorous of attempts reveals the hardness of our hearts and the insurmountable brokenness inside them. This whole enterprise is a blessed exercise in frustration, but it is one that points beyond itself. Hebrews 10:1 tells us the law is just the shadow of the good things to come.
Similarly, the shadow of good works ought to proceed from the light of the good news. Our endless, bloody religious sacrifices ought to push us to look to the one sacrifice to rule them all. The gospel of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, then, is not an invitation to moralism; it is an invitation to real transformation. Our works don’t work. “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law,” Paul writes in Romans 3:28. The only acceptable response to the gospel is nothing less than a heart of faith.
Clay and Ice, Cuts and Scars
The Puritans had a saying: “The same sun that hardens the clay melts the ice.”
I was converted to belief in Jesus Christ as savior and Lord over a period of time, so I don’t have the testimony of those who say, “I was at a Billy Graham Crusade; I heard the gospel for the first time, and I was all in.” Although my justification was secured in a moment, the process of my understanding and acceptance took place over a year-long time of some guys being patient with me and loving me and walking with me. They invited me to church gatherings and spiritual events, and they even allowed me to mock those things. They just patiently explained them to me more fully. I asked a lot of questions that I now know won’t be answered this side of heaven, but they let me ask them anyway, and they tried to answer. Sometimes they’d give me books to read. Through that whole year, God began to gather kindling around my life.
You start a fire with small pieces of grass and wood, and once that’s caught, you put on bigger sticks, and then you put on bigger sticks, and then you put on even bigger sticks. In those early conversations with my friends Jeff and Jerry and others, God was laying kindling around my heart, and then, three days before my eighteenth birthday, he lit it up. What’s funny is that in that moment I no longer needed all my questions answered. It took me a while to catch, but when I did, that’s when I was all in.
Before that, though, I needed to know how it all worked; I needed to know how everything fit; I needed to know why God would say such-and-such. But when the Holy Spirit opened up my heart to Christ my savior and God my Father and reconciled me to God, I didn’t need those questions answered. Even after my conversion, the residual contention I held out, that some specific complexity has to be solved for this whole thing to be credible, melted away in the light of God’s grace and mercy in my life. In May of that decisive year, I was an aggressive agnostic. In June I was converted and began to share the gospel.
I should explain what I mean when I say I shared the gospel. At that time, I knew that if you don’t love Jesus, you are going to hell, and therefore you shouldn’t drink beer and try to sleep with girls. That was the sum total of my frame of reference; I wasn’t theologically built out. But I had an insatiable thirst for the Word of God, so I studied the Bible constantly. Even so, I knew nothing of deep books, deep thinking, and the deep realities of the good news. I just knew that I loved Jesus, that I wanted other people to love Jesus, and that if you didn’t love Jesus the way I did, you were going to hell. That was my evangelistic strategy, so I told almost everyone I knew about this fantastic news: “This is what has happened to me. This is what God has done. This is what Jesus has done for you!”
In God’s mercy, he covered my naivete and honored my sincerity with the powerful gospel in spite of me, and I actually won people to Christ. I began to see a great deal of openness to the good news among my friends. Several came to know the Lord right after I did and began to follow him, love him, and serve him, and they continue to do so to this day. What I learned in those early days is that the proclamation of the glory of God, the might of God, and the majesty of God brought to bear on the sinfulness of man in the atoning work of Jesus Christ actually stirs the hearts of men. And men respond to that stirring. Some are stirred to belief; some are not.
I remember some friends who were stirred not to belief but to interest. “Explain this to me,” they’d say. “Help me understand this.” But, in the end, those guys were hardened to the gospel, and as time went on, and as they asked more questions, they didn’t become more and more open to Christ but more and more closed to him.
This is what the gospel does. This is why the gospel of Jesus is dangerous. When we hear the gospel word, we are opened up to the Word of God. We’re subjected to God’s Word reading us. We sit underneath it, and for the moment of our hearing, it rules us. It does not save all, but all who hear it are put in their place. This is dangerous, because the proclamation of God’s Word goes only one way or another in the soul of a man, and one of those ways is the hardening of a man toward the grace of God.
This means, for instance, that nobody can really attend church as though it’s a hobby; to do so does not reveal partial belief but hardness. The religious, moralistic, churchgoing evangelical who has no real intention of seeking God and following him has not found some sweet spot between radical devotion and wanton sin; he’s found devastation. The moralism that passes for Christian faith today is a devastating hobby if you have no intention of submitting your life fully to God and chasing him in Christ.
It is an amazing thing, but this one message can reach both those who are near and those who are far (Eph. 2:17) and bring one person near and push another farther away. The same sun that hardens the clay melts the ice.
Jesus gives us some insight into this phenomenon in his parable of the sower in Matthew 13:1–8. The sower does not offer a different seed in all his scattering; he apparently doesn’t even adjust the way he scatters. He has one seed, and evidently he distributes it indiscriminately. He knows every soil needs this one seed to grow what only this one seed produces. The different responses to the seed are contingent upon the receptivity of the soil. The seed finds purchase in soft soil but does not in hard soil.
I think of the way the Word of God, which is “sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12), cuts into the soul of every man and woman. The Word is sharp; there’s no doubting that. But some souls it cuts to the quick, breaking open like freshly tilled soil; others it bruises, leaving marks scarred over. This is not because the sword is not sharp enough, or that God cannot cut to the quick any soul he wants. Our softness or hardness is subject to the good pleasure of God (Rom. 9:18). Nevertheless, the effect is such that the sharp word of the gospel cuts some open, and others it scars, further callousing them against its promise of life. There is no one in between.
Response and Responsibility
A lot of Christians love Isaiah 6, and this is because they stop reading before the story is over. Let me show you what I mean:
In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphim few to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.” (vv. 1–7)
Evangelicals love this text. It radiates the exaltation of God. It conveys a thrilling bigness. Then you have verse 8, which is a definite coffee-cup verse: “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I! Send me.’” We absolutely love Isaiah 6:8. We romanticize it. So when we hear a sermon on missions, and the preacher has moved into leading a “Let’s do something good for the Lord” cheer, we feel the gravitational pull toward Isaiah 6:8: “Here am I! Send me.” It sounds gutsy, masculine. We can hear Braveheart’s guttural yawp in there. “Let’s do it! Let’s take it! Let’s go get ’em!”
We are as zealous about Isaiah 6:8 as we are oblivious of Isaiah 6:9. There is a roadblock waiting for us there: “And he said, ‘Go, and say to this people: “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’” Do you see what is happening here? God says, “Here’s your ministry, Isaiah. Go tell them, ‘Keep on hearing but do not hear.’”
Experientially, we know exactly what this means. We have all at some point said the right words to people who simply are not hearing them. The phrase “It’s like talking to a brick wall” is common for a reason. One of my frustrations living in the Bible Belt is that the gospel and its ancillary truths have been so divorced from actual living that a lot of beautiful theology has become cliché. There is a sentimentalization of the faith that occurs when you sanitize the gospel of Christ crucified or sift it from the substance of the Christian religion. The result is a malleable Jesus, a tame Jesus. The result is, as Michael Spencer says, “a spirituality that has Jesus on the cover but not in the book.” When we dilute or ditch the gospel, we end up with an evangelicalism featuring special appearances by Jesus but the denial of his power (2 Tim. 3:5).
I meet a lot of people swimming neck deep in Christian culture who have been inoculated to Jesus Christ. They have just enough of him not to want all of him. When that happens, what you have are people who have been conformed to a pattern of religious behavior but not transformed by the Holy Spirit of God. This explains why we see a lot of people who know objective spiritual truths but in the end have failed to apply them in such a way that their lives demonstrate real change. They’re hearing, but they’re not hearing.
A really vivid way we see this occur at The Village is in response to what the staff jokingly calls my “State of the Union” addresses, in which I say to the congregation, “Hey, quit coming here. If you’re not serious, if you don’t want to plug in, if you don’t want to do life here, if you don’t want to belong, if you’re an ecclesiological buffet kind of guy, eat somewhere else.” And then people who are doing all of those things will sit there in the crowd and say, “Yeah! Get ’em. It’s about time someone said this.” I’m thinking, “I’m talking to you! You’re who I’m talking to.” It makes me want to pull my hair out. They hear the words coming out of my mouth, but they’re not listening.
God commands Isaiah, “Tell them to keep on seeing, but not to perceive.”
Have you ever come across someone who absolutely knows his life is a mess but cannot put the dots together to see that he’s a part of the issue? If you run into someone with a victim’s mentality, someone who is constantly leaving carnage in her wake, someone who has a new group of friends every twelve to fifteen months, someone who has story after story after story about how this person betrayed him and another person did him wrong, but he has no ability to see or comprehend that he is the common denominator, you’ve run into someone who can see but can’t perceive. Such people know their life is a mess, but they can’t figure out, “Hmm, I seem to be the major malfunction here.” As it relates to spiritual matters, this seems to apply to all mankind.
God continues in Isaiah 6:10:
Make the heart of this people dull,
and their ears heavy,
and blind their eyes;
lest they see with their eyes,
and hear with their ears,
and understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed.
Now, nobody wants this ministry. Can you imagine this want ad?
“Now hiring: Pastor. Must make hearts dull. Those seeking fruitful ministry need not apply.”
For all the ambition that I’ve seen in young preachers, not a single one of them has said, “I want to be faithful to the Word of God and have no one respond to it.” So Isaiah does what any of us would do, and he asks about it:
“How long, O Lord?”
And he said:
“Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
and the land is a desolate waste,
and the Lord removes people far away,
and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.
And though a tenth remain in it,
it will be burned again,
like a terebinth or an oak,
whose stump remains
when it is felled.”
The holy seed is its stump. (vv. 11–13)
God’s response to Isaiah is simply this: “I’m going to gather the remnant. I’m going to gather the genuine believers. I’m going to work this thing over until all that is left are those who really love me, trust me, and seek me.” Isaiah, then, is not called to be fruitful but simply to be faithful. And, in fact, he’s told he will not be fruitful. The priority God charges him with is not success but integrity. He is sent to proclaim a word to people who in the end can see but not perceive, who can hear but can’t hear.
Let us allow the implications of this for Christian ministry settle into our minds. Let’s steep in this text; let’s wrestle with it. Let all of us Christians do this, but we in church leadership especially need to come to terms with what exactly happened there in the temple.
God’s commissioning of Isaiah is a torpedo into the way ministry is appraised in the church today. God is saying, “Isaiah, you’re going to proclaim faithfully, but they’re going to reject continually. And I’m at work in that.” Now, if Isaiah was a minister within today’s evangelicalism, he’d be considered an utter failure. Jeremiah would be an utter failure. Moses didn’t get to enter the Promised Land. John the Baptist didn’t get to see the ministry of Jesus. On and on we could go. We would not view the ministry of these men as successful.
One of the things we don’t preach well is that ministry that looks fruitless is constantly happening in the Scriptures. We don’t do conferences on that. There aren’t too many books written about how you can toil away all your life and be unbelievably faithful to God and see little fruit this side of heaven. And yet God sees things differently. We always have to be a little bit wary of the idea that numeric growth and enthusiastic response are always signs of success. The Bible isn’t going to support that. Faithfulness is success; obedience is success.
What we learn about God’s call to Isaiah provides a strange sense of freedom. A hearer’s response is not our responsibility; our responsibility is to be faithful to God’s call and the message of the gospel. No, a hearer’s response is his or her responsibility. But one of the mistakes we can make in our focusing on individual response in the gospel on the ground is to lose sight of God’s sovereign working behind our words and actions and our hearer’s response. Receptivity and rejection are ultimately dependent upon God’s will, not ours. Paul reminds us, “[God] says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Rom. 9:15–16). From the ground, we say what we choose to say and hear what we choose to hear. From the air, our saying is clearly empowered—“No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3)—and our hearing is clearly God-contingent—“having the eyes of your hearts enlightened” (Eph. 1:18).
You can find a whole bunch of verses about God’s moving and gathering large groups of people, which means if there’s numeric growth and much enthusiasm, we can’t say that it’s not a work of God or that God isn’t moving. I’m just saying that I guarantee you there’s some old dude in some town that most of us have never heard of faithfully preaching to nine people every week, and when we get to glory, we’ll be awed at his house. We’ll be awed at the reward God has for him. In the end, we have this idea being uncovered in Isaiah that God hardens hearts, that people hear the gospel successfully proclaimed and end up not loving God but hardened toward the things of God.
I know some people think, “Well that’s Old Testament, and God was really angry then. But Jesus is a lot nicer than God.” (Should we set aside the fact that Jesus is God?) But God’s sovereignty over the hardened response of hearers is well laid out in the New Testament too. Let’s return to the parable of the sower. In Matthew 13 Jesus tells us about the guy who casts the seeds. Some seeds land on the path, some land among the thorns, some land on shallow ground, and some land on good soil. After Jesus tells the parable, his disciples approach him confused because nobody can understand it. They ask him, “Why do you do this? Why do you tell these stories? Nobody knows what you’re talking about.” Here is Jesus’s response: “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given” (Matt. 13:11).
Now if we just stopped there and stared at this verse, we could find real joy for a long time. Right now, there are millions and millions of people who have no idea about the kingdom of heaven. But not you. You know the secret. They have no idea about the kingdom, no idea about God’s grace, no idea of God’s mercy. But not you. You know. You get to worship him, you get to walk with him, and you get to hear from him. Jesus tells his disciples, “It hasn’t been given to them. It has been given to you.” And he continues:
For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says:
“You will indeed hear but never understand,
and you will indeed see but never perceive.
For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and with their ears they can barely hear,
and their eyes they have closed,
lest they should see with their eyes
and hear with their ears
and understand with their heart
and turn, and I would heal them.”
But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it. (Matt. 13:12–17)
So on both sides of the covenant—old and new—we see that God is in control. His sovereignty is not diminished or thwarted. The hearer of the gospel is responsible for his response, but God is responsible for his ability to do so. The preacher of the gospel is responsible for his proclamation, but God is responsible for the transforming power.
The gospel message goes out, and while some hearers respond with faith in Christ, some people simply can’t hear.
The Unadjusted Gospel Is the Empowered Gospel
It is all of grace that some do hear. At the close of chapter 3 we asked, “What will we do with Christ’s substitutionary work?” The answer is, “Whatever the Spirit allows us to.” Blessed are the eyes that see and the ears that hear because the Spirit of God has opened them to do so. The power in the gospel is not the dynamic presentation of the preacher or the winsomeness of the witness, although the Spirit does empower and use those things too. The power in the gospel is the Spirit’s applying the saving work of Jesus Christ to the heart of a hearer. Charles Spurgeon puts it this way:
“You cannot induce them to come; you cannot force them to come by all your thunders, nor can you entice them to come by all your invitations. They will not come unto Christ, that they may have life. Until the Spirit draw them, come they neither will, nor can.”
In Acts 2 we find the first post-ascension sermon of the Christian church. The apostle Peter addresses the crowd that has witnessed the response of many to the outpouring of the Spirit:
Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and give ear to my words. For these people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day. But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel:
“And in the last days it shall be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams;
even on my male servants and female servants
in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.
And I will show wonders in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke;
the sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day.
And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of
the Lord shall be saved.” (Acts 2:14–21)
Peter begins the very first Christian sermon with the majesty of God. If there is prophecy, if there is utterance, if there is the miraculous, if there is power, if the sun is darkened, if there is vapor, if there is blood and fire, where does it all start? With God.
God prophesied; God said this would happen, and he brought it about. Peter is basically saying, “All that you understand about the prophets, all that you understand about the miraculous works of God, and all that you understand about how God moves is wrapped up in the Godhead, who saves all who call on him.” Look what he says next:
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. For David says concerning him,
“I saw the Lord always before me,
for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken;
therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced;
my flesh also will dwell in hope.
For you will not abandon my soul to Hades,
or let your Holy One see corruption.
You have made known to me the paths of life;
you will make me full of gladness with your presence.”
Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says,
“The Lord said to my Lord,
‘sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool.’”
Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. (vv. 22–36)
So we have this incredible sermon exulting in the majesty of God, tying God’s work in the incarnation of Jesus Christ back to the promises of the Old Testament, specifically to David’s promise of an eternal king. But the refrain echoing in this text is, “You crucified him, you killed him, you did this.”
This is not a seeker-sensitive sermon. Peter does not shrink back, fearing, “Oh man, this is going to be offensive.” He is not thinking, “How can I make this sound cool to the young Jerusalemites that are here? How can I soften this?” He knows that if he tells them they killed Jesus, they’re going to get really angry. But he says anyway, “You killed Jesus.” Then he says it again. “Oh yeah, this majesty? You killed it.”
We are never, ever, ever going to make Christianity so cool that everybody wants it. That is a fool’s errand. It is chasing the wind. We can’t repaint the faith. It doesn’t need our help anyway.
Every effort to remake the Christian faith leads to wickedness. Every effort to adjust the gospel so it appears more appealing, more palatable, is foolishness. This is liberal theology’s only play in the playbook. “Let’s get rid of the atoning work of Jesus Christ because it’s harsh. Let’s get rid of hell because it’s offensive. Let’s save Christianity by changing Christianity.” But in the urban context of Acts 2, with people all over the ancient world gathered in Jerusalem, Peter announces, “You killed him. This majestic one true God of the universe—you crucified him.” And what happens?
Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” And Peter said to them, “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. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. (vv. 37–41)
All they did was preach the gospel, and men were cut to the core. They wanted to know, “What do we do in response to this news?” Peter tells them, “You repent and get baptized.”
What saved them? Their faith. No action brought about their salvation. They hadn’t fed any poor people. Apart from what Peter is saying here, they hadn’t been sitting under teaching or going to church each week. They hadn’t, in the end, done anything but heard, “God is majestic, and you have sinned, but in Christ you can be reconciled to him,” and they were so cut to the heart that they responded with saving faith.
Acts 2 takes us back to the truth that we simply have to tell. God does the opening of hearts. God opens minds. There is such freedom in this! Do you see how that takes weight off the perfection of our presentation? We don’t have to be able to explain it absolutely or completely or be able to apologetically defend creationism or argue the falsity of materialism or whatever. I’m not saying we shouldn’t pursue those things. I’m saying that in the end it is God who opens up eyes and ears. Our responsibility is to tell them. It is as simple as that.
Some people won’t like hearing it. What else is new? This has been true as far back as Genesis. It has always been true that some people do not want to hear this message. But some are going to hear it and be saved. So, relational evangelism? Go for it, as long as it turns into actual evangelism. You hanging out having a beer with your buddy so he can see that Christians are cool is not what we’re called to do. You’re eventually going to have to open up your mouth and share the gospel. When the pure gospel is shared, people respond.
The spiritual power in the gospel is denied when we augment or adjust the gospel into no gospel at all. When we doubt the message alone is the power of God for salvation, we start adding or subtracting, trusting our own powers of persuasion or presentation. We end up agreeing with God that preaching is foolishness (1 Cor. 1:21) but disagree that it is required anyway. This is a colossal fail. Only the unadjusted gospel is the empowered gospel. And this message of the finished work of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection for the forgiveness of sins and the securing of eternal life is carried by the Spirit like a smart bomb into the hearts of those the Spirit has given eyes to see and ears to hear.
Response to the Gospel Is Not the Gospel
One crucial thing that viewing the gospel on the ground helps us do is distinguish between the gospel’s content and the gospel’s implications. One danger of viewing the gospel in the air is the conflating of the good news with its entailments. As we rightly see the gospel as encompassing God’s work, through the culmination of Christ, of restoring all things, we can be tempted to see our good works, whether preaching Scripture or serving meals at a homeless shelter, as God’s good news. This is a temptation that honing in on the ground gospel can help us identify and mark out. We need to rightly divide between gospel and response, or we compromise both. D. A. Carson writes:
“The kingdom of God advances by the power of the Spirit through the ministry of the Word. Not for a moment does that mitigate the importance of good deeds and understanding the social entailments of the gospel, but they are entailments of the gospel. It is the gospel that is preached.”
We can exercise this delineation by continuing in Acts 2:
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. (Acts 2:42–47)
All the things that prompt people to mistakenly say, “This is the gospel,” can be found in this passage. What we actually see in Acts 2:42–47 is the beautiful fallout of the proclamation that precedes it. This list tells us the hearers’ response to the gospel. Why did they start living in community? Because the gospel had made them a people. Why did they begin to share their goods with one another? Because the gospel had made them a people. Why are they now on mission? Because the gospel had made them a people. Why are they seeing signs and wonders? Because the gospel had made them a people. All of these workings are outworkings of the gospel.
If we piggyback the work of the church onto the message of the gospel, we don’t enhance the gospel. It is just fine without us; it doesn’t need us. Furthermore, doing that results in preaching the church rather than preaching Christ. “For what we proclaim is not ourselves,” Paul writes, “but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor. 4:5).
Believing the news that God is holy, that you are a sinner, and that Christ has reconciled you to God by his life, death, and resurrection is what justifies you. This is our foundation, our root. The things that we read in Acts 2:42–47 are the fruit. They show the building of the home, but they are not the foundation.
If we confuse the gospel with response to the gospel, we will drift from what keeps the gospel on the ground, what makes it clear and personal, and the next thing you know, we will be doing a bunch of different things that actually obscure the gospel, not reveal it. At the end of the day, our hope is not that all the poor on earth will be fed. That’s simply not going to happen. I’m not saying we shouldn’t feed and rescue the poor; I’m saying that salvation isn’t having a full belly or a college education or whatever. Making people comfortable on earth before an eternity in hell is wasteful.
The Response of Faith
Everybody comes out of the womb in rebellion. David says, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps. 51:5). David doesn’t even get himself out of the birth canal before he thinks, “Sinner!” What are we like apart from Christ? What is our default position from conception? Ephesians 2:1–3 says that we’re: (1) dead; (2) world followers; (3) devil worshipers; (4) appetite driven; and (5) children of wrath.
I am not sure it is possible to be worse than this. But the good news is that upon the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, God raises, rescues, ransoms, reforms, and reconciles. God saves sinners. Does he save all? No, but he saves.
People are going to respond to the gospel every time it is presented. They’re going to respond in belief, or their heart is going to become more and more hardened toward God. But no heart can ever be too hard for God. Some hearts will grow harder and harder each day until the day God’s mercy blows them up like dynamite. We have seen tons of people at The Village who sat here for years just hearing but not hearing, seeing but not perceiving, and then all of a sudden, at some random worship service or Bible study, the Lord just hijacked them, the way that Paul was apprehended (Phil. 3:12). In that moment of rebirth, all those steps toward hardening get evaporated in fire from heaven.
The gospel is news, not advice or instruction, but it nevertheless demands response. So, if we look at our lives today, a question I think we have to ask ourselves is this: “How am I responding to the good news of Jesus Christ? Am I stirred up toward obedience, or is Jesus becoming cliché to me? Am I becoming inoculated to Jesus, or do I find myself being more and more stirred up to worship him, to let other people know him, to submit my life fully to him?” We have to ask these questions, because everybody responds to the gospel. We must test ourselves to see if we are in the faith (2 Cor. 13:5), because it is faith by which salvation comes. Faith is the only saving response to the gospel.
Every good gift the Father gives—every richness from Christ, every blessing from the Spirit—flows from the gospel and is received through faith.
• We receive righteousness through faith (Rom. 3:22).
• We are justified through faith (Rom. 3:30; Gal. 2:16).
• We stand fast through faith (Rom. 11:20).
• We are sons of God through faith (Gal. 3:26).
• We are indwelled by Christ through faith (Eph. 3:17).
• We are raised with Christ through faith (Col. 2:12).
• We inherit the promises through faith (Heb. 6:12).
• We conquer kingdoms, enforce justice, and stop the mouths of lions through faith (Heb. 11:33).
• We are guarded through faith (1 Pet. 1:5).
We live through faith, and we die through faith. Everything else is garbage. Even works of righteousness, if not done through faith, are works of self-righteousness and therefore filthy rags. Be very careful about going to church, reading your Bible, saying prayers, doing good deeds, and reading books like this through anything but faith in the living Lord. Because the result of all that is belief in a phony Jesus and inoculation to the gospel. You can end up knowing the jargon and playing pretend. Be very careful. Watch your life and your doctrine closely (1 Tim. 4:16). Some of you are so good that you’ve deceived yourselves. God help you.
On the ground, the gospel comes to us as individuals, as the crowns of God’s creation, as people made in his image, and puts before us the prospect of joining the forefront of his restoring of the cosmos. It says something personal about us: “We are rebels.” It says something specific about this rebellion: “Christ has made atonement.” It holds out a promise requiring individual response: “If you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9).
The gospel on the ground, then, reveals the integral narrative we can outline this way: God, sin, Christ, response. But this is not the only gospel narrative in the Author’s revelation.
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