Tuesday, December 20, 2016

500, Part 8: The Gospel, A Summary

I want this to be a hopeful post, but it will not begin that way.

Paul Washer once said, "No one can bear the preaching of the true gospel; he will either turn against it with the fierceness of an animal or be converted." That is where this post is going.

The problem most people have with understanding the gospel today is that they don't understand the nature of human sin. If human beings are merely bent, then all they require is straightening. If a man's only disease is headache, then the solution is cheap. In the end, a low view of sin necessarily involves a low view of the gospel. It is not good news; it is only helpful news.

So what is the problem? The problem, stated bluntly, is that we are far worse than we think we are. The first effect of the fall upon the psychology of mankind is a false appraisal of our fallenness. We came to believe that we are not really all that bad, even with the long ignominious history of our race to challenge that assumption. We even came to believe that we are getting better, "evolving." If a savior is required, it is only someone like those found on youtube or via podcast, someone to unlock our personal power, someone like Joel Osteen or Tony Robbins or Jen Hatmaker. Jesus is merely the best therapist and life coach out there, and that is how he saves. Everything is inverted from the true gospel. Jesus and Jen and Joel and Tony all give us tools to save ourselves, and salvation means crushing it in business, relationships and cross fit. This is both idolatry of the first order and a works system of salvation that effectively destroys anything unique about the Christian religion.

The Scriptures proclaim that we really are dreadful beings, capable of staggering wickedness. Sorry, that statement is too abstract. I am a dreadful being, capable of staggering wickedness. Do you believe that about yourself? If you don't, then the gospel simply cannot speak to you. It will never break through.

The single greatest proto-evangelium (first appearing of the gospel) in the Old Testament is Isaiah 6. There Isaiah is confronted with the blazing inferno of God's holiness, and he knows he is undone. He can no longer play the silly game of comparing himself to others. He cries out to God, "Damned am I, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips."

And notice this is the first step in true conversion. Terror! Not cool and detached respect. Isaiah experiences soul shattering horror. Think of the moment of greatest, most paralyzing fear in your life. Now increase it by a factor of a million. Isaiah cannot move. He cannot make himself okay to be in the presence of God. He cannot seek refuge in the pathetic claim of comparative excellence. He is ruined, and so is everyone else! Every unclean thing is kindling before the raging cauldron of God's just wrath.

It is while Isaiah is in this helpless condition that God moves. A burning coal is taken from the altar and it is used to touch his lips. He is made whole. Instead of destroying Isaiah in the fire of His holiness, God assures Isaiah that instead the holy fire will purge him of what makes him unholy.

This is an elegant picture of the gospel, but it is not particularly clear as to how Isaiah is saved. For that, the world had a wait until the "mystery hidden in ages past" became fully revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

And so what are the core ideas of the true gospel?

1a. Regeneration

This I place as 1a because of the Arminian and Calvinist controversy. But I need to say it firmly that the Reformers believed that "new spiritual life" was granted logically prior to faith and repentance. Calvinists place regeneration first in the ordo salutis (the order of salvation). Another way of seeing this is that an individual is given new life so that he might believe. The Calvinist would say that no man can even take his sin all that seriously until he has been regenerated.  It is not a question that this post will pursue further.

1. Human sin

As we have already seen, it is not enough to suggest that human beings have a minor problem. They are enemies of God. They are in wholesale rebellion. They have accumulated a ledger of crimes against the high king of heaven, and have ignited His righteous fury against them as a result.

In what ways are we sinners? We all sinned "in Adam" due to his poor representation of us. This is known as the "federal theory" of sin. Many balk at this because they think that perhaps they would have represented the human race better. But surely Plantinga is correct in suggesting that it is at least logically possible that in no possible world, and with no human representatives, would there be a totally faithful representative. Adam failed us, and God did not compel his failure.

But we are also Adam's seed. Adam was spiritually changed in the fall, and he transmits this change whenever he reproduces. If he had not fallen, he would have produced unfallen children. Because he fell, he produces fallen children; children who carry within them the same spiritual death that exists in Adam.

Finally, we are sinners actually. There is not one of us who is not amassing a long ledger of sins that God must in righteousness punish.

In these ways our problem is literally damning, and we can do absolutely nothing about it! We have every cause to fear God as Isaiah did!

2. Justification

This term is a legal term. It carries with it the idea in modern juris prudence of "acquittal." In the Christian doctrine of salvation, it means that God has proclaimed the sinner righteous, or guiltless, in the legal sense.

Perhaps the best way to capture the idea is a courtroom scene. God holds the long ledger of my sins before me, and pronounces his judgement. It is a sure and binding judgment. There will be no lawyering my way out of this sentence, no complex arguments as justification for my crimes. I did them, and no one in the whole of the universe is to blame except me! There I stand, guilty, stripped bare of any words, any excuses, any elaborate rationalizations. And then the judge says, "I proclaim you guiltless." "You are free."

3. Substitution

Why did the judge not give me the punishment I deserved? Because Jesus, who volunteered for this work before time began, was willing to take on human flesh, live a perfect human life and then take my place before the judgment bar of God. He was willing to give me his legal perfection and take upon himself the accumulated guilt and punishments associated with my sins. As Fred Sanders puts it, this was a communal work of the Trinity from before the foundation of the world. God was not surprised by the fall, but it requires the whole counsel and infinite resources of the Trinity to effect the salvation of any man.

The reason God can proclaim us guiltless is because Jesus was willing to accept the full conditions of absorbing our guilt. The demands of God's own character for just retribution for sins are fully met by Jesus at the cross.

4. Imputation

When Jesus volunteered to take my place at the cross, and when I by faith receive that gift, a great transference occurs. Imputation is a term more closely associated with economics than with the law. The idea is that Jesus' righteousness was credited to me while my sins were credited to him. This is what it means when the Scriptures refer to him "becoming sin for us." He was sinless, and so the only sins he can carry are the imputed sins of others.

5. Propitiation

Propitiation carries with it the idea that Jesus endured the full thermo-nuclear blast of the accumulated anger of God at humanity for their sins. Please note that this is another reason Jesus had to become a man. God is not mad at the abstract concept of sin rather than sinners! One answer to the idea that "God loves the sinner and hates the sin" is the cross. Sin didn't die at the cross; Jesus, the sin-bearer, did. Apparently even God cannot simply disentangle sin from sinners and kill it as a doctor would remove a tumor and kill it. Human beings face the wrath of God for human sin! That will either be the sinner or the Substitute.

The Scriptural phrase here is, "it pleased God to crush him." I always found that phrase difficult to understand. Why does God the Father take pleasure in crushing the Son? There are at least two good responses to this question. The first is that God surely takes pleasure in justice. C.S. Lewis' Great Divorce paints a picture of hell that is utterly fascinating, but one of the most fascinating things is that there is pleasure in God's judgment. Even the people of heaven know that God's good character is being wholly expressed in the punishment of the wicked, and they take pleasure therefore in that punishment. Perhaps that is one way to look at the cross. Jesus willingly accepted this position because in the end it glorifies God! The full justice and mercy of God are opened up in all their sublime glory to the watching universe at the cross.

It also pleased God because of the prize. In the merciful counsel of God, He has chosen to save a corrupted enemy race for Himself. This also displays His glory to the universe because no other being   can do what is required to save mankind. Indeed only God can so love as to soften the malicious and rancorous heart of man through salvation.

6. Faith

The best simple definition is "trusting God." We look at these things revealed in the Scriptures and in our spirit we trust Him. There is no need for a "sinners prayer." No need for a few choruses of "Just as I Am." No need for a series of emotional manipulations at church camp. It is a simple and singular matter of subjective trust. When an individual trusts in Christ alone for his salvation, all the benefits of heaven are lavishly conferred. (Or, for my Calvinist friends, because the benefits of heaven have been lavishly conferred, one believes.)

And when the broken man, humiliated in his shameful sin, aware of his unworthiness, keenly aware that he should be banished and punished, reaches out the beggarly empty hand of faith, he finds that what he grasps is nothing less than everything good and glorious in the universe in Christ. He knows he deserves nothing, and yet he is given everything.

When I say that "I stand in a new position before God," it means the astounding truth that a worthless enemy of God is now accepted as a son! I am given everything that belongs to The Son, including all of His righteousness and all of His eternal merit. That is who I am! Please hear this! I did not accept Jesus, as though I merely broadened my peer circle graciously to include Jesus. I am accepted by God in and through Jesus Christ! I am regenerated, justified, standing forever in imputed righteousness as the process of my sanctification is worked out in time.

7. Sanctification

Christian perfection is simply this: Christ has given me both legal and actual perfection. Legally, I am justified. But the acquitted sinner is still the same man he was before. He is still capable of leaving the court room and doing the same things he did before. Organically, his justification does nothing to change him.

Christian sanctification is the answer to this, and it begins in regeneration (see above). The sinner is given a new heart. In short, he is brought back to life spiritually. By faith there is a union with Christ that is invasive, destructive, transformative. Violence is being done quite literally to our old fallen humanity. Romans 6 is perhaps the best description of this process. We are dying, but after the likeness of Christ's death. He is destroying the old that he might rebuild. Sanctification is the process of this death and restoration, and it culminates in our literal death and resurrection.

So, let us state it again. Let it sink in and reorient everything! You are (assuming you are in Christ by faith) legally and actually perfect. You stand utterly forgiven for all sins from the time of your birth to the time of your death. God can find no cause to move against you in justice. Jesus has already endured that punishment for you. And the work God has begun in you He will complete. He has pledged not just any resource to guarantee this end. He has brought you into union with His own Son, so that in Christ your sanctification is secure.

The word that captures this staggering truth was uttered by Jesus at the cross. Tetelestai! It is finished. Everything that needed to be done to finally and completely conquer evil in your heart was done at Calvary. Christian sanctification is merely this reality unfolding into your speech, your treatment of others, your joy, your everything.

8. Redemption ethics

Christian ethics is totally inverted from the normal pattern of ethics in other religions and in general secularism. We do right not to climb arduously towards perfection, but because we are already perfect in Christ. It is a becoming of what we are. The analogy I like to use is that of children of genius. When they are inarticulate, incontinent babies, they certainly don't act like geniuses, but that genius is nevertheless latent within them and only awaits maturation and its fullest expression. In the same way, Christ has already granted to us moral perfection in and through Him. We are merely growing into the perfection that is already ours!

Every other system of ethics the world over is precisely the opposite of this. There is a threshold of reward or blessing that must be crossed by hard performance. One labors under a burden of fear of failure indefinitely until that magical threshold is reached and then one is worthy of the blessings that come. The Christian is set truly free from such a burden.

And so things come full circle. We now no longer need to fear God. In fact, we need fear nothing at all in the whole of the universe. God has told us that we need not fear Him, and so we need fear nothing else. Yet the Scriptures proclaim, "work out your salvation in fear and trembling." What can it mean? Our salvation must always be worked out in the context of where we would be without Christ's work on our behalf. There must always be the lively impression of that initial fear, from which we have been set free. Perfect love has driven out all fear.

And our fear is converted from terror to the practical fear of what God is doing to us, to our old sinful selves. The answer is perfectly clear. We will not survive this. He loves us too much to let us survive.