Those who know me know that I could go on about faith, doctrine and theology all day. I actually get a little giddy about it. Growing up, I was grounded in the biblical truth that all of life is impacted by Christ and that the physical world in all its brokenness is still good and still reflects Truth because it reflects our Creator. The physical parallels the spiritual, and not only parallels but they penetrate one another. In the perfect world--the world prior to sin and the world redeemed--there was no notion of that dualistic idea of division between spiritual and physical. Shalom reigned. God dwelt among man and talked to man. Then sin enters and shatters the beautiful peace and harmony. Now creation frustrates man, work becomes laborious, thorns and thistles bite back, the lion devours the lamb...Shalom is broken. A few years back I read Cornelius Plantinga’s book, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin in which he examines this breaking of Shalom and this thing called sin. Just when you think the author might ease up a little he cuts you off at the knees and you realize just how bound to sin we are. Throughout the book you feel parched to the point of craving even the smallest drop of hope to quench the despair. But it is in that parched state that the beauty of the Gospel shines. Jesus in not a small drop of Hope. Jesus came to right this world. He came to bring back Shalom. He came to pluck us out of our sin and despair and redeem us fully.
Sadly, most American Christianity has a perverted and truncated viewed of salvation. Many times it is seen as an insurance policy to get us out of hell and get us into heaven. However, the reality is that redemption is so much more than a ticket out of hell and into heaven. In fact, to even write of it that way gives me distressing chills. Christ came into this world to redeem His people and restore Shalom. I’m sure I’ve said it in another post but that line of Joy to the World gets me every time....”He comes to make his blessings known far as the curse is found!” If it is true that Christ has come to reverse that curse put on creation by sinful man, then redemption impacts everything. It isn’t a Jesus-and-me religion. It isn’t just about me and my relationship to Christ or you and your relationship to Christ (as important as that is); it is about Truth permeating all of life--truth in biology, truth in art, truth in business, truth in government, truth in parenting, truth in education, truth in engineering, truth, truth, truth truth!
The sad reality is that in American culture the very thing under the greatest attack is truth. Postmodernism has tried to redefine truth to be what one wants it to be. The problem is that truth really does have a meaning...it actually means something factual. It is not relative. It is not determined by you, me or any other sinful human. It is determined by the Creator of this world. It is reflected in all of creation. This is indeed part of how God’s glory is declared throughout the heavens and earth. Truth has its root and being in God alone. All truth is God’s truth. And it is God who decides to whom He will reveal His truth. There are times I look at a clear night sky and wonder, “How does anyone think there is no God?” And then the reminder of sinful depraved hearts slaps me in the face. Left to ourselves we flee from truth. We deny truth. We hate truth. The only way to see it and to understand it is for God to reveal it. I think it was R. C. Sproul who illustrated the Gospel by saying it isn’t that we are in a sea of violent waters trying to swim when someone throws us a life safer (the Gospel). It is that we are dead corpses on the bottom of the ocean floor, and Christ comes down to us, breathes into us and makes us new creatures. It is so true. We want to take too much credit for our salvation when in reality it was completely a work of God. However, we also want to take too much credit with every other piece of knowledge and truth we understand. The fact that I can sit here and type English words is because God revealed language to me. It isn’t because some teacher taught it (not to degrade teaching or teachers!). God uses teachers and teaching, but the knowledge, the ability, the revelation--all of it comes from Him. He is sovereign over every aspect of my being, every aspect of your being, and every aspect of His creation.
His sovereignty, however, does not mean we are passive. He gives us the privilege to participate. He uses teachers. He uses engineers. He uses biologists. And He brings glory to Himself doing it. He brings glory to Himself even through evil doers. Those who use all their power to mock Him and smite Him, He turns it around for His glory. The Old Testament has beautiful examples of God using evil doers to bring about His will and bring glory to Himself. The Gospel itself is a perfect picture of this: Mankind spat in the face of Christ. He was stricken, smitten and afflicted. And before we throw stones at the evil people who did this to Him we must remember, we are the ones who put Him on that Cross. He bore our sin and our shame.
He did not bear our sin and shame just to get us out of hell and into heaven. The redemption might begin with us but that curse he bore was also the curse of creation. His good creation was put in chains and goes about groaning and moaning for the day it can break free. It longs for the day when Shalom returns when His blessings 'flow far as the curse is found'. The Prince of Peace came to bring peace...or Shalom. When we look at the unrest in nations of this world, we are reminded once again just how broken Shalom is. The answer to sin and brokenness is Christ. He is Truth. He is life. And he is the only way. We live in a country who at its conception understood the value of truth. How often do we pray that God would reveal His Truth to us? And when he does reveal Truth how do we respond? A Bible study leader once reminded those of us in the study that we may not like everything in the Bible, but it is still God’s Word and God calls us to obedience and will hold us accountable for how we respond to His Word. How often do we study books of the Bible that might not be our ‘favorite’ sections?
Really the question is how much do we really yearn for Truth? We can talk all day about wanting to know Jesus, but the Jesus of the Bible is Truth, and sometimes I think we go about creating our own Jesus by looking at Scripture as a buffet where we pick and choose sections to pay attention to. That Jesus is not the Jesus of the Bible; any Jesus constructed by bits and pieces of Bible passages is an idol. We can't take bits and pieces of God's Word, we must understand it as a whole. John Calvin once said that our hearts are idol factories. It is so painfully true. All of us want to embrace those biblical concepts we like while tossing the more difficult to swallow passages out the window. When we do that we have essentially denied truth and created a god that we like, rather than embracing the true God. We love to look at the Israelites and gasp at their golden calves and idolatry, yet we do the exact same thing over and over and over...whether it is chopping us Scripture to make it palatable for us or whether we rely on the material blessings God has given us. We are those Israelites. Our hearts are just like theirs...full of our ready made idols.
Just as God loved the Israelites, and plucked them out of slavery, He does the same with us. He plucks us out of slavery, adopts us, redeems us, and sanctifies us. We desperately need Truth to squelch the idol factories of our minds. Part of the problem is that not only have we divided this world into spiritual and physical, we have divided our Bibles too. The Old Testament, which points entirely to Christ as our Savior has been pushed to the side in most churches. We have forgotten that all Scripture is God-breathed. You cannot divide God’s Word against God’s Word. God is the same yesterday, today and forever. He does not contradict Himself. He is not an inconsistent or conflicted God and hence, His Word is not.
The first mention of the Messiah wasn’t in the New Testament or in Isaiah...the first mention was immediately following the fall of man in Genesis 3, one of my all time favorite passages. It is the most beautiful picture of the Gospel. Man plunges into sin (He destroys Shalom and sinks to the bottom of the ocean). God seeks after man (descending into the depth of the sea to breathe new life into mean). Man is found trying to wear his own covering just like we today try to make our salvation and Christianity about deeds, works or our importance--what we do and say and wear, etc. That clothing did not work--our righteousness is as filthy rags. God had to prepare the clothing for them. He clothed Adam and Eve because their clothing could not cover them. In the same way, Jesus Christ follows the Law without any flaw, He is slaughtered. He is clothed in our filthy rags, our sin, our shame. He is clothed in us. And vice versa His righteousness, His perfect following of the Law is given to us as a covering. We are clothed in Him. It is a doctrine referred to as the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. As a result God looks at us and sees the Law perfectly obeyed and kept in every way, because He sees Jesus’ obedience as ours. Christ became us first...so that we, united to Him, can be seen as just and righteous before God. But God does not stop with justification (His declaring us just). He also sanctifies us. In the sanctification process we actually become more and more just. We are able to obey God’s Law and become more and more like the Savior we love. And we can only do this because Christ has already obeyed and as we are united to Him we become more like Him--holy and obedient. We become who we already are in Him...obedient servants of God.
All of salvation, all of redemption, all of truth and freedom is initiated by God. And it all begins in Genesis 3. We cannot fully understand Christ without understanding the Old Testament. Without the OT all of our understanding is warped, and Christ becomes a piece of our life rather than life, in much the same way that redemption becomes a part of Scripture rather than the whole point of Scripture. The OT stories are not just about men being swallowed by whales, wars erupting between countries, people wandering in wilderness...Those stories all point to how God works His plan of redemption. He works through Pharaohs and governments; He works through sea creatures; He works through wars; He works through natural disasters; He works through all of it. All of it brings about His plan of redemption. All of it glorifies Him and shows His sovereignty and power. He uses His people to speak up to the leaders and Pharaohs of this world. He uses us-- stubborn Jonahs and stiff necked Israelites--to spread His Gospel. He uses the Daniels and Josephs of the world to be influential in their arenas and speak Truth. He uses the Jubals to play their musical instruments to show God’s glory. The whole OT recounts God’s relationship with His people and His beautiful unfolding story of redemption which climaxes when we get to Jesus. It all points to Him. We can’t understand the climax without the back story of the OT. Spreading Truth becomes about influencing every area: jobs, education, science, government, economy, art, music, warfare, medicine, industry, because God uses all of life to glorify Himself and reveal Himself. It’s not just about church and ministry. Jesus is Lord of all creation and therefore His Word has truth and principles that impact all of it. Nothing is outside of the reach of Truth. And Truth makes every area of life better because it reflects God. I pray that God would reveal Truth to me. I pray that He would not just reveal it, but that He would impress it upon my heart and make my heart receptive so that I will embrace Truth and live by it. I pray that He would also reveal how Truth applies to every area of life, so that I would be very conscience of that fact that there is no such thing as an unreligious decision. Truth impacts every decision and every thought. We are to take every thought captive. When I think about how many thoughts pass through my mind in a given hour, it is terrifying to think God requires that I take every thought captive. And yet, how exciting and freeing to think that when I finally reach that day when redemption is complete, when I am glorified and sinfulness will no longer tug my mind and heart, on that day my every single thought will be God glorifying. Every thought will be sinless. Every thought will have purpose. I mean have you ever thought about what it will be like to have sinless thoughts? God’s redemption is so great. It is so much bigger than an insurance policy. I pray God would make His Truth known to me, to you, to His Church, to our nation and ultimately to the world.
