New Thoughts (9/23/03-9/24/03)
It all comes down to this issue of life. We thought we had life before, but have come to realize that the life we had could only end in death, indeed carried death within it all along. Every breath we took brought us closer to the inevitable moment. But now has come the promise of something infinitely better. If we will but embrace the death which must come to our former life in any event, there is given us the offer of rebirth, rebirth into the life of the Logos, the life of the living Word Who was and is and is to come. Here, we are handed the promise that, though our body may experience physical death (rare indeed will be those who do not have this experience), yet the life of the spirit, the soul shall continue. Not only this, but it shall continue freed once and for all from all that cheapened the life we once knew. No more sin, no more shame, no more falling short of the purpose of God in our lives.
This matter of real life is the culmination of all that Paul has been saying since the beginning of this chapter. Real life is the gift we have received in spite of our sinful past. He has forced us to look honestly at what we were, how actively we were rebelling against our Creator and King. He then focused our eyes on that same King of kings, that we might more fully appreciate the contrast between what we were and what He is. He has forced us to look at those still ignorant of what God has revealed to mankind, those still trapped, without this promise we have been given. In showing us all this, Paul is training our minds to hold to a Kingdom focus.
Eternal life: real, genuine life, not the shabby living death we were born into. Genuine life: life worthy of being called life, a life actively and vigorously devoted to God. This is what will be ours. This is the promise our hope looks towards. This is the thing that grabs our attention and holds it fast upon the Kingdom of God, for that is where our life is laid up for us. This is the thing for which we hope, and that hope being ours by eternal promise, our hope is a certainty within us. If we continue back up the thread of Paul's argument here, we will move from the object of hope, through the fact of hope, to the reason of hope. Wherefore such assurance for the believer? How arrogant can they get!
No, there is no arrogance in this blessed assurance. Far from it! Move back along the path of Paul's thoughts. All possible place for personal merit, for self-aggrandizing assessments, are mercilessly cut away from us. You are justified, most certainly, but not because you deserved it. You are justified because God graciously decided to be merciful to you. You are saved, but again it's nothing to do with you. It's all about God. He gratuitously chose to bless you with this salvation, He decided for reasons known only to Him to pull you out of your miserable choices and habits, clean you off, pay for your crimes against Himself, and place you on the path towards true life and happiness. No, no arrogance, only truest humility to recognize what we have deserved and what we have received instead. We, who deserved no better than the bitterest of deaths have been given a reprieve, an irrevocable reprieve to which no power may make an appeal. Where can pride find a place in this truth? There is only room for thankfulness, and a compassion towards those still in the place we have been taken from.
This is where the Cretan church was stumbling, and it is a place that the Church still stands in danger of stumbling. It is quite easy for us to become satisfied in our own salvation, and to simply give up on those who have not tasted of God's grace, who seem intent on rejecting all offers of such a taste. If we have become thus satisfied, then we have lost our focus, we have lost our purpose, we have forgotten our own story! Not many, I suspect, were looking to be saved when salvation came to them. Not many were casting about blindly looking for Jesus, but He hid Himself away. Seek, and you will find, but who seeks? Jesus seeks us out, He comes to His enemies, and blesses them as only He can, and lo! They are enemies no more.
I know that in my experience I have seen this play out on a smaller scale. Doubtless, others have as well. There are those we come across in the church who are an abrasion upon our nerves. We will do our utmost to avoid them so as to preserve the Christian peace, but they will nevertheless be forever in our paths. Those who know us will comfort us with words about iron sharpening iron, which will be cold comfort indeed at that point. Yet they have spoken words of truth to us. For myself, I know that quite often it has been those who were so abrasive to my senses who have become my greatest joy. I have to laugh, looking back on my initial assessments when I come to recognize what fast friends God has made of us.
As we learn to walk with a Kingdom focus, this understanding must expand. We have, perhaps, learned how to accept our brothers in the Church, how to tolerate the foibles of our fellow Christians, however they might irritate our sensibilities; but what of the unbeliever? Have we figured out how this lesson God keeps teaching us applies to such as them? When we see the sinner in his sin, are we so offended by his sinful ways that we simply decide that this one must surely be beyond hope?
There's a long standing, though wholly unfounded, complaint lodged against Calvinistic beliefs which finds in those teachings that all reason to evangelize is taken away. If God has chosen from all eternity who shall and who shall not be saved, what reason is left for us to deliver the news? It won't make a difference anyway. Thus goes the argument. Yet there is sufficient cause to evangelize even though this great and awesome truth be accepted. First, God commands it. If we love Him, will we not obey His commands? Secondly, just as He long since determined who, He also determined how, and in His plan and purpose, He established the ministries of preaching, teaching, and discipleship. We are blessed with the joyous opportunity to be part of His plan of salvation, though He need not have involved us. With all thanks, then, we should be participating!
The reason I bring this up is that this complaint of failure to evangelize, while so poorly targeted at sound doctrine, is not a wholly empty complaint. There is, indeed, a great problem plaguing efforts to evangelize. There is, indeed, something in the Church which saps the believers' interest in spreading the Gospel. It is not, however, a question of how one perceives the work of grace. It is that one no longer perceives grace as grace at all. We happily let go of all memory of what we used to be like before Christ, and in doing so, forget how we became what we are. Because we have chosen to forget our own past, we no longer recognize ourselves in those around us. We look upon the lost and see only the distastefulness of their ways. We don't see them as potential candidates for salvation. We have allowed ourselves to become like the Pharisees, so caught up and fascinated with our own holiness, that all who are not already like us are beneath our notice.
Paul has been fighting just this issue. He points the Cretans back to themselves, he identifies himself right alongside them. We used to be just like that! Have you forgotten this? Have you forgotten what you were doing when Christ came to your rescue? If grace has been shown to such as us, then why not these others? Are they any worse than we were? Shoot, I was actively persecuting those who showed signs of faith in Christ, yet He has shown His grace to me. He has not only forgiven me for what I did, He has made me a laborer in the effort I once opposed with every ounce of my strength! What, then, prevents these, whose crimes are so slight compared to my own, from being saved? With what presumptuousness do we claim to be wise enough to decide that they can't be?
There is another complaint lodged against the doctrines of grace, that they leave us to pursue our sins unhampered, for we know (or think we know) everything will be forgiven anyway. It's an inevitable connection, the argument goes, from belief in permanent election to a life of unrestrained hedonism. Stuff and nonsense! If grace has truly come, there is bound to be understanding of truth right alongside. The Spirit has been poured out upon us, and He will guide us into all truth. It is only a poor grasp on truth that could allow such misunderstanding of salvation. Where justification has come, assuredly, righteousness must follow, and not solely the righteousness credited to our account by our Christ, but a true self-righteousness. Self-righteousness carries a strong negative connotation for us, because it has been associated with the falsehood of salvation by merit, or works-based salvation.
Even where this doctrine is strongly decried, you will often find its traces. Though there will be loud denouncements of salvation by works, yet there will remain an insistence that without some act on our part, salvation will not come. Though Christ is given a high place in this view of salvation, He is not given sole place, as ought surely to be done. Man insists on his own piece of the glory, "I decided, I willed, I chose." Stuff and nonsense! Truth be told, you weren't even looking, weren't even interested, but God moved sovereignly upon you, upon your will, that you could even be willing to choose. We love Him because He first loved us. That's the reality.
However, that reality doesn't leave us free to do anything we please. All things are indeed lawful, but not all are profitable. All things are permissible, but if our attention is upon the kingdom, then only such things as contribute to our preparation for glory will occupy us. If justification has come, it must certainly bear fruit in us, and the fruit of justification is righteousness. Holiness and godliness in life must flow from justification. Where this is not the case, we must doubt the reality of the justification we thought was present. If acts of righteousness are not the stuff of our lives, let us then be constant in prayer to our Savior that He would truly come and save us, for it becomes clear that He hasn't yet done so.
If we have this hope in us, surely our attention will be upon His kingdom. If we have this hope in us, is it even possible that we should neglect His words? After all, it was the promise found in His words that gave us such a lively hope! It was the word of promise, given by a holy God that brought hope to our hopeless lives. Now, if our attention has truly been captivated by our Lord and King, we must hold fast. He has delivered us from a myriad lies into His own clear truth. Hold fast to that truth. That is the thing that will define the reality of hope in us, that we hold fast to the truth we have heard from God through those He has appointed as teachers. We have done more than hear, we have heard and understood, understood in the deepest sense. We have understood and it has changed our very being. We have grasped His truth, and knowing the freedom into which His truth has brought us, we have pursued the course of truth in our daily lives.
This is why I see this verse as speaking of a Kingdom focus in our lives. This section was difficult to outline, as Paul's thoughts seem pretty heavily intertwined. The line between humility and compassion, for instance is quite blurry. Indeed, coming through these verses on this final pass, it seemed to me that the end of verse 2, which I had included under the idea of compassion, really belonged back with the topic of humility. Considering the present verse, the idea of Kingdom focus is not immediately apparent. What does our having been justified by grace have to do with our present focus? I would submit that it has everything to do with our present focus. Salvation, the regeneration of which previous verses speak, brings about a radical change of life.
Health experts speak of the impact of these 'life changing events.' They point to the physical and emotional stresses brought on by such things as moving, deaths or births in the family, career changes, and the like. Consider this regeneration! We have both died and been reborn in one fell swoop! We have moved from the slave pits of sin to the hallways of heaven, and switched our line of work from slave to ambassador! There can be no more radical change of life. Everything we were was cast off in that moment, although we still sense so much of it upon us.
With that change of life has come a new perspective. Where once we wandered without purpose, we now live with divine purpose. Where once we considered ourselves no more than accidents in an accidental universe, now we understand how fully and perfectly planned our days have been. We have been part of a divine plan for longer than we have drawn breath! All accident is gone, there is only the working out of His good and perfect will. This is hope in the wastelands of hopelessness! All is not meaningless, all is infinitely meaningful. There are no coincidences, there is no 'just because' in the events of our lives. There is God - God on the move with purpose, God working out the details of His plan of salvation in, around, and through us.
When we were still in our sins, we did not understand this. Our focus was on the seeming pleasures around us. We did not see the bonds of our servitude. Like the Jews faced by Jesus' teaching, we declared angrily that we had never been enslaved, shaking our chains in the face of our accusers as we spoke. Blind! But the Healer came and restored our vision. He lifted our eyes above the mountains, to the throne of God Almighty. Our true condition became clear to us, and in that very moment of recognition, He came with the keys to unbind us, lest we be overwhelmed. He has come to us with tender love, caring for the wounds we inflicted upon ourselves in our confusion. He has come to heal every injury, every emotional scar, every spiritual debilitation; and were this not enough, He has even declared us co-heirs in His own household!
If we have grasped the truth of this, how shall we not hold it fast! If it has truly grabbed hold in our thoughts, where else will our attention be, but upon the workings of this King who has called us His own? What heir, if there be any wisdom in him at all, will not seek to secure his own inheritance, will not give all his labor to seeing that inheritance increase? Isn't this the very idea that corporations use when they promote ideas of profit sharing? In the economy of the world, it's a matter of self-interest. They will call it 'enlightened self-interest.' In the heavenly economy, it's simply being enlightened. As we no longer serve sin, self, or salary, these are not the great motivators. The motivator is the Kingdom itself, the desire to see the Kingdom grow, to see the King's glory increased, and the number of His family reaching its full measure.
I originally wrote that 'a mind set on His promise of hope will hold fast to His truth.' Perhaps it should be reworded slightly: "A mind held fast by the truth of His promise of hope will pursue that truth and not be deterred." With the Kingdom set before His eyes, Jesus endured the cross. With the Kingdom set before our own eyes, what shall we not do for our beloved King? It is but the proper fruit of the seed of righteousness He has planted within us. It is no more, nor is it any less, than our reasonable act of worship.
