Holiness is Not Attainable

One of the primary characteristics of the people of God is that they will be holy as the Lord is holy (Lev 20:26; 1 Pet 1:16).  But this identification is something affirmed, something declared by God to define His chosen people.  God places the badge of holiness upon His people, holiness.  But it is essential to recognize that this distinction is not earned or attained by the chosen people; it is given by God's grace.

This is important.  There has always been a large swatch of the Christian experience that has thought of personal piety as a status, some state of being to be attained through personal discipline or strength of will.  But this does not conform to the narrative of Scripture.  Holiness is an attribute that only God possesses and the only way for a human being to possess holiness is for God to bestow it.

The key is this: no man can achieve holiness, God gives it by virtue of His choosing.  There is no effort to exert aside from obedience to the covenant obligations, but God, because of who He is, bestows the status of holiness to whomever He pleases as expressing His love and faithfulness.  Only in Christ are we made holy.  This cannot be stated any more firmly.  What it means, though, needs to be carried throughout its ripples in the pool of theology.

He Purchased a People

God does not choose a person, but a people.  He works with the individuals within that people.  But Scripture confirms that God does not choose individuals, rather, He chooses a people to be His own.  Certainly, God does chose specific individuals in history as representatives for His redeemed peoples: Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus.  But God chooses people not persons.

This is to say that election and predestination is not a personal ordeal, it is a community one.  It is a covenant matter.  God chooses to initiate a covenant relationship with a certain people.  This is the very essence of how God relates to man.

It's like a giant box of crayons owned by God.  Each crayon has a unique color and hue but apart from the rest of the colors it is useless, only capable of coloring monochromatically.  Understanding that we are a 'people' not autonomous individuals of faith will go a far way to reconciling this broken world and repairing broken churches.

Saving Faith for the Rugged Individualist

I am currently in a long-running discussion with a family member [dad] about the place of personal effort in the Christian experience.  To be sure, this has become a 'lively' but loving dialogue at the dinner table.  But in the quest to crystalize my own theology, I thought it a useful exercise to lay down in type my own view on this very important topic, partly for you and partly for myself.  The issue at hand, from my perspective, is the idea of 'rugged individualism' as it pertains [if at all] to Christianity.

The Christian experience, it turns out, begins with Christ Jesus Himself.  This may seem rudimentary but it deserves to be stated and restated again.  Jesus the Nazarene, the prophesied Son of God who lived a perfect, sinless life in Palestine in the first century and was betrayed to a crucifixion at the hands of the Romans only to be found risen from the grave three days later.  This alone is the foundation, the cornerstone of the Christian experience in the highest sense.

Every Christian worth the grace implanted with them would exclaim the previous paragraph with shouts of praise and exuberant exaltation.  But this information, the very salvific content of the gospel that transforms hearts and lives in its proclamation, needs to be applied to the unrepentant sinner unto salvation.  But how?  Now we must look to that application of redemption which is a matter faith.

This is not meant to be derogatory in the slightest, but at this point, the 'rugged individualist' would like to smuggle personal effort into the equation.  This emphasis on effort comes in the form of a 'choice' for faith in Christ, this is to say that Christ's work is applied by the individual's enacted belief.  Get the covert intricacy of this: grace is applied not by God Himself but by man's personal faith.

In other words, this conception gives man the power of salvation by virtue of his personal control over whether or not he will be saved.  Think about that, then think about it again.

"We are saved by grace through faith."  The next question tends to be: where does this faith come from and why doesn't everyone have it?  But I submit that this is not the right question.  There is another more fundamental one: what is faith that saves?

There is, obviously, not enough time to give a complete definition of saving faith but one thing needs to be stated clearly: faith is not the same as saving faith.  Every human being has faith: faith in tomorrow, faith in family, faith in friendship, faith in the car starting, et al.  But saving faith is something else altogether.

Saving faith is faith that saves.  In this way, saving faith is not just a means unto salvation, it is an  end of salvation too!  Saving faith is as much a matter of depending on God's grace as is the life and resurrection of Christ.  Only in Christ can a person possess saving faith at all.  This is to say that saving faith is God's grace. Only by an act of God convicting a hardened heart can a person cast themselves in faith upon Christ Jesus at all!

Needless to say, there is so much more to say on this but let us leave it on this point: God saves and He causes saving faith to transform the unrepentant heart unto repentance.

Adam Gained only the Loss of Everything

Whether film or theology, the beginning is always a good place to start.  The Bible starts with the story of creation: God speaking creation and the created order into existence merely by the power of His spoken word.  Then comes the apex of God's creation: man.  Made in the image of God, man is purposed to reflect God's image and glory not only back at God but also throughout creation.

It is important to note that there is a change of name in Genesis 2.  In Genesis 1 it is God creating, but in Genesis 2 there is a transition to the Lord God.  This is a significant change, for the Lord God refers to the covenant name of God, Yahweh.  Although space is not permitting for an exhaustive look at this point, suffice to say that Moses is making a clear point to ensure the original Israelite readers (and us too) that the same Lord God who brought them out of Egypt is the One who created Adam, the original man.  Moving on...

Think about the scenario: the Lord God creates Adam and gives him everything, even a wife.  The emphasis is that the Lord provides everything for Adam.  Adam lacks nothing.  Again, Adam already had everything in God.  There was not a single thing in all creation that Adam lacked.

However, Adam willfully disobeyed God by eating of the fruit of that one tree that God forbade.  Adam did not believe that God actually had provided everything.  Instead, in the most powerful act of volition he challenged God's goodness and His promises by eating of the fruit.  This is the very essence of sin.

But it is important to note: because Adam already possessed everything, there was no thing, nothing he could do or say to merit more because he already had it all.  Therefore, when Adam ate of the fruit, he did not gain anything, it turns out he lost everything.  The willful act of disbelief in the provision of God caused a separation from the source and giver of life that Adam could not bear in life; he had to die.  This needs to be said again: by willfully not believing what God had promised, Adam gained nothing but the loss of everything.  Let us not forget this when we see the traps and snares of temptation trying to woo us away from the glory of God.

Has Faith Become Meritorious?

Do we become saved by grace? or through faith?  Which comes first?  Does faith earn grace?  Or is faith how we receive God's grace?  Is it that man does nothing to merit the grace of God but only by faith is grace paid to the believer?

The proof text for Christianity in this debate is Ephesians 2:8-10:

"For by grace you have been saved through faith.  And this is not of your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast.  For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which were created beforehand, that we should walk in them."

This text is often used to define the nature of salvation.  Clearly Paul has in mind here that grace is unmerited and that faith is merely the reception, the application of God's grace.  And while this may seem unequivocal, modern Christianity has taken this and distorted it to a dangerous degree.  Traditional theology would term this distortion as some form of Arminianism.

Basically, Arminianism would say that God has offered His grace to everyone and that man has it within Himself to choose that grace and to have faith for Jesus.  Essentially, under this concept faith initiates the reception of God's grace to the believer.  This seemingly obvious affirmation about the nature of salvation, however, smuggles in merit in the form of faith.

God bestows grace.  God alone initiates salvation.  In fact, God transforms the heart of unrepentant humans so that they can have faith at all.  Only God can compel the natural man to faith.  This means that faith, though apparently a 'work' of man is as much a gracious gift as is Jesus death!

Let us not, then, ever think of faith as something we are capable of in and of ourselves.  God is the Creator of faith as much as He is the Author of salvation.

The Law is Not Burdensome

For the past few centuries, since the Reformation of the the 16th century, the predominate theological understanding of the Bible as it pertains to the Old and New Testaments has been a distinction between law and grace.  Law begin the duty of the Old Covenant and grace being the joy of the New.

Essentially, this system of theology comes to dominate our interpretive lens and renders law, thought of as the commands of God, to be primarily an Old covenant thing but that it is no longer in effect because 'we are under grace.'  To be sure, this amputates the reality of the New covenant from its history and tragically severs the Scripture, cutting it up into law and grace.  But the text does not support this understanding of the history of redemption.

Consider this:

Israel had been enslaved for some 400 years at the hands of the Egyptians.  God hears the cries of the Israelites, whose forefather Abraham He had promised a land and a nation to, and determines to save the people.  He calls Moses to be the representative.  Some plagues ensue until finally the Egyptians release the Israelites to leave, giving them treasures and riches fro their journey away.  However, as the people approach the Red Sea, Pharaoh decides that this arrangement is unacceptable and sets out with his forces to kill Moses and claim Israel back for Egypt.

God tells Moses to strike the sea.  As Moses does, the sea parts and the Israelites walk through the sea floor on harmed.  Once on the other side, God tells them to turn back to watch as God releases His power over the waters and they come down upon the Egyptians.  God leads the people to valley below the Mount of Sinai, where He gives Moses the Law, the commandments for how the people of God are to live.

The Law does not redeem the people of Israel from the Israelites: God does.  The Law is not meritorious, as in, if a person is obedient they can merit God's grace.  No.  The Israelites understood that God had chosen them (Deut 7:7-11), and it was only by His grace that they had been saved.  The Law was the further expression of that grace.  God chose them and then He gave them His Law to teach them who He was and how they were to live as His chosen people.

The Law was never burdensome, because the Law was further evidence of God's hand of grace.  The commandments of God were the merciful commands of a gracious God revealing both His very character as well as what His choosing of the Israelites meant for how they were then to live.   This is to say that all of God's grace has encompassed within it God's commandments.  They run parallel.

As Christians, we speak a lot about the grace of God, but we often forget that God's grace has commandments to it.  Christians are to live a certain way with a particular ethic.  We should not forget that we are under covenant.  This means that God has chosen Christians and bestowed grace upon them.  But in that grace are promises, both of blessing and of curse.

If we are not obedient to the covenant commandments, we will receive the promised blessings.  And if we are disobedient to the covenant commandments, we will receive the promised curses.  This is covenant.  It is not meritorious blessings.  Rather, it is the way that God has chosen to relate to mankind.  If we forget that this situation is His idea, we will naturally neglect all of the parts that we would rather not do.

Remember, we are not saved from the Law, we are saved from the curse of the Law.  There is a new law for the New Covenant in Christ.  Christians need to learn what these commandments are and we need to consider that we are the chosen people of God, under His promises and in His covenant.  This means that we need to meet Him on His terms.

In Him we Live and Move and Have our Being

Paul, on his second missionary journey, came to the city of Athens.  A city heralded for its sophistry and its intellect, Athens was also an influential city in the mediterranean world.  In many ways, outside of Rome itself, Athens may have been the port of ideas that spread philosophy and education across the known world.  It proved to be a good place for Paul to preach a message to the Aeropogus on Mars Hill.

And while Paul's gospel message was met with varied apathy and sneering flippancy, there was a minority of listeners that were touched by God.  This message is recorded for us in Acts 17.  The message in its entirety is certainly worth reading and thinking through, however, it is the final words of the message that strike me to the heart today: "In Him we live and move and have our being." (Acts 17:28).

Perhaps no statement in Scripture outside of Deut 7:7-11 or John 3:16 rings more clearly about the nature of God and His relationship to man.  He made us, knitting us together with every strand of DNA and fiber of marrow or joint in the womb (Psa 139:13).  This fact alone is the fundamental truth of reality, the truth of humanity, and the primary description of the human life.

He made us.  He owns us.  Every breath we breathe is a gift from His sovereign hand of grace.  There is nothing, not one thing about humanity that cannot be boiled down to this: we are His.  He has it in His full rights to terminate our lives at any moment.  And we deserve that termination because of our disobedience and lovelessness (please read that sentence again).

But yet He shows us mercy.  He does give us breath, He does give us reason and intellect, He does give us relationships, and He does give us the ability to not choose to recognize those gifts of grace at all.  In fact, He loves humanity so much that He allows to spurn Him for our very beings!  And He still loves us!

Today, do not let this day pass without considering the graciousness of God.  I implore you to think about Him.  Dwell on His mercy, linger on His forgiveness as it relates to our faithlessness.  And when you feel that you have tired of that, think, at last, of what God Himself has done by sending His Son to be crushed and murdered for all our sin so that we would not have to meet that fate.  Think about that.  Pray about that.  Above all else: praise God!  For "In Him we live and move and have our being."