Since the years of the Reformation, Protestants have claimed that they are justified by faith alone. But whose faith are we talking about? Is it our faith? Is it Jesus' faith? Or is it both?
Leithart points to three different texts to help us work through this. First, we look at Galatians 3:22:
"But Scripture has locked up everything under the control of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe."
The NIV translates this phrase in such a way that the promise given to Abraham comes through our believing in Jesus Christ. In other words, our faith is the source of this gift. But the word translated "in" is the Greek word ek which can also mean "of". There is not an easy way to decide this, as numerous biblical scholars line up on either side. Some claim Paul means, "in". This would be the objective genitive - it's our's, our faith placed objectively in one outside of ourselves - Jesus. Others claim Paul means, "of" - the faith of Jesus Christ. This would be the subjective genitive - it's Jesus' own faith as a subject. Leithart points out that if we take it to refer to our own faith in Jesus, we have a redundancy in the text. Believers' faith is the source of the promise. Believers' also receive the promise. This begins to unravel when we think of Abraham: if Abraham believed God, why couldn't he have realized the promise himself? Translated this way, we lose the significance of who Christ is and what he has done. If we use the subjective genitive, it makes more sense. Instead of describing two functions of human faith, the text describes two different events: Jesus' act of faith, and the faith of those who respond to it. In that case, we have the "faith of Jesus Christ," or Christ's completed work, and the faith of those who trust in that work.
The problem of repetition comes up in our second text: Galatians 2:16:
"(We who are Jews) know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified."
Again, the word translated "in" could also mean "of." As the NIV translates it, there is a similar redundancy as we just saw, and we find Paul basically repeating himself three times: "We are justified by believing in Jesus, so we have believed in Jesus, so we can be justified by believing in Jesus. On the contrary, if we are attentive to the difference between Christ's work and our response, we see that the passage is organized chiastically:
a Knowing that a man does not receive the delivering verdict by what the law does
b but through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ
c we have have believed in Christ Jesus
b' so that we may receive the delivering verdict by the faithfulness of Christ
a' and not by what the law does, since by what the law does no flesh shall receive the verdict. (Delivered, 189)
In other words, Paul uses repetition about Christ's faithful work to show us more clearly the meaning about our faithful response to his work. Christ's faith is the source of our faith, and our faith is also the way we participate in Christ's faith.
Human believers' response to Jesus is not undermined by this approach. Rather, our faith is more established because we are reminded of what we are responding to. Jesus' faith funds our faith, just as Jesus' justification funds ours. Jesus' justification occurs in his resurrection. Leithart writes:
"It happens to Jesus in his death and resurrection: he is the first justified man, the only man justified because of his obedience. Every other deliverdict depends entirely on his vindication in the Spirit. Justification happens to the whole human race as God condemns sinful flesh and enables humans in flesh to live, as Jesus did, by the Spirit. Sin, death, flesh used to reign over the human race, but now there is a new regime of the Spirit. It happens to the church, and it happens to individuals in the church as they are justified from sin in baptism and raised to live lives of justice..." (Delivered, 188)
In that case, what is faith?
Finally, we come to our third Scripture text: Galatians 2:19-20.
"For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me."
Jesus' death puts an end to Torah, so Paul's trust in Torah is also put to death. His whole identity, as a Jew by nature, is ended and has no further validity. It is a death. And although he still lives in flesh, he does not regard, measure, or judge himself by fleshly achievements, but by something outside himself.
So does Paul live by faith in the Son of God, or by the faith of the Son of God? Leithart writes:
"That it is difficult to decide is no accident. It is supposed to be difficult, even impossible, to decide. Paul lives a life in the flesh, but that life is no longer his own. Whatever life Paul lives, it is Christ's life lived out in Paul." (Delivered, 192)
Faith ultimately is a grasping of what was promised to Abraham - that the curse would be broken by Christ's resurrection from the dead. Living by faith now would mean two things: 1) not regarding, measuring, judging ourselves by what we have up to now (fleshly standards and achievements) and 2) our on-going lives display Christ's life. His life in ours. Christ recapitulates his life in mine - his faithfulness unto death, the life he lives by the Spirit. In other words, living by faith means trusting that in Christ's death and resurrection, we have also died and been risen.
It is only by showing what the Scripture says that we can come to a definition of faith that reflects this whole story. So often in our society, people talk about 'faith' in such a way that it means little more than the person's own self-assertiveness. Os Guinness describes eight pitfalls of American religion, all of which start with 'p,' all of which have to do with an erroneous notion of faith:
There is polarization between the heart and the mind so that we depend on what we feel, rather than careful thought.
Pietism encourages us to focus on our experiences.
Primitivism encourages us to find a simple obedience to Scriptures like the early church did and to delude ourselves into thinking we don't need to bother at all with 2,000 years of church history.
Populism discourages us from trusting those who have thought long and carefully about these things. After all, they're just elitist.
In a pluralist society, different Christians believe different things, but that doesn't matter compared to how we live. Thus, beliefs are erroneously divided from action. We get deeds without creeds.
In a pragmatic society, faith becomes less about doing what is right, then it is about doing whatever works. Faith becomes more about our own comfort and prosperity than it is about Jesus.
Philistinism makes all the rest of these reactionary. We become proud of our simple faith, equating it entirely with a type of common sense, discouraging us from considering faith as something which we should think about and maybe even question.
Pessimistic interpretations of Scripture encourage us to think of faith as primarily an escape pod from a condemned earth, rather than a way to live a new kind of existence in this earth. (Fit Bodies, Fat Minds, pp. 38-64)
Guinness' list is extremely helpful in diagnosing types of 'faith' that are not very biblical at all, but primarily about ourselves. On the contrary, the faith that saves is Jesus' faith. Through his death and resurrection, he breaks the curse of Eden and Babel. Our faith responds to his. Our faith matches his, and takes on the same pattern. As he dies and rises, so we consider ourselves dead to sin and alive in him. As he condemns the regime of death in his own death, and is delivered to a new life in the Spirit, so we consider ourselves to have left the regime of death, and are now participants in the new regime of the Spirit. Our faith is so important not because it accomplishes salvation, but because in light of Christ's salvation, it allows us to regard, measure, and judge ourselves in a new way.
What would evangelism look like that placed more emphasis on Christ's faith than on our own? Fleming Rutledge suggested that perhaps many evangelistic formulas emphasize repentance in a way that stays human-centered: sin-repentance-grace-forgiveness. We are sinners. We ought to repent of our sin. When we do this, God will be gracious and forgive us. It's hard to see what Christ has definitely done in a process like this. On the contrary, she proposes this sort of process: grace-sin-deliverance-repentance-grace. (192) It forms a chiasm:
a grace
b sin
c deliverance
b' repentance
a' grace
God graciously gives us life. But in sin, all creation came under the power of death in exile. In Christ, God judges sin in the flesh. Raising him from the dead, God delivers the world from the power of death. As such, baptism tells us we are no longer under the power of death, but under the Spirit who brings us to life. We consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to Christ. And God will graciously turn more and more of the world into church, a new creation reconciled to him.
In this process, the individual's faithful response to this story would not be some sort of heroic leap, but a response to Jesus' own faithful work.
This account of evangelism coincides very well with what we've said here - that justification primarily comes through Jesus' faith, and that it is only as he is justified that we can experience this ourselves. This gospel of Jesus' faithfulness, of condemnation and justification as two different realms, and of re-entry into Eden gets us beyond mere behavior modification, and faith as self-assertiveness. This is more along the lines of good news, proclaiming a new reality that gladdens the heart, eliciting the saving faith of believers by the prior and more foundational saving faith of the faithful one himself - Jesus, and uniting us to the death-and-resurrection pattern of Jesus' own life so that we truly become like him. Our following him is a taking up of the cross, a dying and rising, a life of 'living sacrifice' by virtue of Jesus' sacrifice. With Christ living in us, we become 'little Christs,' to use C.S. Lewis' phrase.
We come back to our original question. Whose faith is this? It's both. We are justified by faith alone - Christ's and ours. It becomes increasingly hard to tell which is which. Is this Christ's faith, or is it mine? As Paul found out and articulated in Galatians 2:20, Christ's faith is not just something outside himself, but has become something Paul actually participates in. So it is for us. The more we look at Christ's faithfulness, the more we see that the Spirit's work brings Christ to life in us. What started as something we viewed objectively as outside us increasingly becomes something we experience subjectively within us. Collectively too, we see the church not only as a people Christ brought together, but a people Christ is alive in.
Friday, May 10, 2019
Monday, May 6, 2019
Lent 2019: Monday, April 8 - God's Seal of Justice
In 1 Timothy 3:16, Paul gives a poem about Christ:
"He was revealed in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, beheld by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory."
Given that 'taken up in glory' refers to the ascension of Christ, and revealed in Christ refers to the Incarnation, there would need to be an event in Jesus' life that can be called 'justification.' Leithart writes:
"...at some point between Jesus' appearance and his disappearance, someone, presumably God, rendered a favorable verdict on his behalf through the agency of the Spirit. Justification is at the heart of the mystery of godliness, but, perhaps surprisingly, the justification at the heart of the mystery of godliness is the justification of Jesus. What event is it? It has to be an event that occurred between the incarnation and the ascension, an event that involved the work of the Spirit, and an event that is justly described as a judicial act, an act of vindication or justification. The only event that fulfills all of these criteria is the resurrection of Jesus." (184-185)
As Leithart writes, it isn't customary to speak of the resurrection as a judicial event. Unlike the trials leading up to Jesus' death, the resurrection is not explicitly described this way. However, we could see that God's raising Jesus is a display of authority that is more clearly discerned precisely because it has judicial ramifications. Leithart writes:
"Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin argued that authority ultimately rests on the state of exception, the ability to act sovereignly, embodied in the power to kill. After state and religious authorities had exerted their most extreme authority against Jesus, after they had done all that they could do - which is to kill - the Father displays his strange judicial authority, reversing the verdicts of Jew and Gentile by raising Jesus from the dead. Resurrection is the state of divine exception that establishes his authority as Lord of the living and the dead." (Delivered, 185)
In John 2, Jesus overturns tables in the temple. When asked for a sign that he has authority to do this, Jesus says: "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days." (John 2:19) The temple is God's house on earth. It's where he sustains a community who will be his witness to the world, and through whom he will reunite the world under his governance. When the veil is torn in Jesus' cross, it shows that the temple's atonement and sacrificial structure has been superseded by a greater atonement and a greater sacrifice. As Jesus himself says in John 2, his resurrection establishes a new and better temple with a better system. As one teacher put it in a recorded message, the tabernacle and, later, the temple were the center of the earth. Now, in Jesus' resurrection, the center of the earth is with God at his right hand where Jesus has been raised and has ascended. When Christians meet to worship, sharing in the Lord's Supper, this is our new geography. He are with him in heaven.
Without resurrection, we are left with a travesty of justice as flesh seems to achieve victory over God. Far from overturning the curse of Eden, the curse has extended to claim even God's life. Far from overturning the curse of Babel, the world becomes even more entrenched in division and confusion as God's chosen witness, Israel, has rejected its calling. Resurrection shows Jesus' death to be that of a true Israelite, a true Abraham who lays down his fleshly glory, as one who suffers in the place of his tormentors, as one whose death achieves a new access into Eden beyond the cherubim, and whose witness as Israel to the true God opens the floodgates of spiritual blessing to fall on the nations to break the curse of Babel. In all these things, Jesus establishes a just new community of people who live by a new nature, not by Torah or by sinful flesh, but who live as those delivered into a new union with God, as those who have already died and been raised.
Resurrection breaks the chain of evil which degrades the goodness and integrity of creation. In Genesis 1, we see God creating - giving form to vulnerable, dependent things who receive the gift of an ecology, an environment in which they derive all things from God. Death un-threads this tapestry. Resurrection establishes a new creation, ennobling and dignifying the created frame all things had from the beginning.
Israel's sacrifices always pointed them to this. They were trained to hope in resurrection from the sacrifices they offered. Represented by animals, sinners themselves died and were 'burned,' transforming them into Spirit-life, or smoke, which would mingle with God's glory cloud beyond the veil. In celebration of this new union, the priests would eat a meal with God.
In the same way, Jesus dies the sinner's death. But in his resurrection, Jesus has been transformed into Spirit-life. He lives by the Spirit in the flesh. From the perspective of the resurrection, Jesus is not only a man who has come from Eden into enemy territory. He is a man who has dismantled all the obstacles to Eden so the world can be transformed from enemy territory into Eden again. So that the world can become church. In his ascension, he enters as a human into union with the Father on our behalf. For Christians, to be baptized into Jesus is to ascend with Jesus into this fellowship with God. Our communion meal is a celebration of the union we have with God through Christ.
Paul says: "And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you." (Romans 8:4) The Holy Spirit has power then to work within our lives so that we live a resurrected life now. We still await this, of course, but we are to consider ourselves as those who have truly entered into Eden again. We are not outside anymore. Stunningly, we aren't 'sinners', at least not in the sense that this truly defines us. Now of course we still sin. And yet... Jesus' resurrection is a deliverance for the entire world because the curse of Eden was on the whole world. And now it's gone. Do we still sense the effects of it? Sure. But the veil is torn. The cherubim and their flaming swords are gone. Jesus is the temple. He is Eden. And as animals served as representatives for the Israelites, and as the Israelites saw in the mingling of the sacrificial smoke with God's glory cloud the hopeful sign of their own future mingling - so, in the same way, Jesus serves as representative for all humanity so that we know we will share in the glorious resurrection God has given him.
"He was revealed in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, beheld by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory."
Given that 'taken up in glory' refers to the ascension of Christ, and revealed in Christ refers to the Incarnation, there would need to be an event in Jesus' life that can be called 'justification.' Leithart writes:
"...at some point between Jesus' appearance and his disappearance, someone, presumably God, rendered a favorable verdict on his behalf through the agency of the Spirit. Justification is at the heart of the mystery of godliness, but, perhaps surprisingly, the justification at the heart of the mystery of godliness is the justification of Jesus. What event is it? It has to be an event that occurred between the incarnation and the ascension, an event that involved the work of the Spirit, and an event that is justly described as a judicial act, an act of vindication or justification. The only event that fulfills all of these criteria is the resurrection of Jesus." (184-185)
As Leithart writes, it isn't customary to speak of the resurrection as a judicial event. Unlike the trials leading up to Jesus' death, the resurrection is not explicitly described this way. However, we could see that God's raising Jesus is a display of authority that is more clearly discerned precisely because it has judicial ramifications. Leithart writes:
"Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin argued that authority ultimately rests on the state of exception, the ability to act sovereignly, embodied in the power to kill. After state and religious authorities had exerted their most extreme authority against Jesus, after they had done all that they could do - which is to kill - the Father displays his strange judicial authority, reversing the verdicts of Jew and Gentile by raising Jesus from the dead. Resurrection is the state of divine exception that establishes his authority as Lord of the living and the dead." (Delivered, 185)
In John 2, Jesus overturns tables in the temple. When asked for a sign that he has authority to do this, Jesus says: "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days." (John 2:19) The temple is God's house on earth. It's where he sustains a community who will be his witness to the world, and through whom he will reunite the world under his governance. When the veil is torn in Jesus' cross, it shows that the temple's atonement and sacrificial structure has been superseded by a greater atonement and a greater sacrifice. As Jesus himself says in John 2, his resurrection establishes a new and better temple with a better system. As one teacher put it in a recorded message, the tabernacle and, later, the temple were the center of the earth. Now, in Jesus' resurrection, the center of the earth is with God at his right hand where Jesus has been raised and has ascended. When Christians meet to worship, sharing in the Lord's Supper, this is our new geography. He are with him in heaven.
Without resurrection, we are left with a travesty of justice as flesh seems to achieve victory over God. Far from overturning the curse of Eden, the curse has extended to claim even God's life. Far from overturning the curse of Babel, the world becomes even more entrenched in division and confusion as God's chosen witness, Israel, has rejected its calling. Resurrection shows Jesus' death to be that of a true Israelite, a true Abraham who lays down his fleshly glory, as one who suffers in the place of his tormentors, as one whose death achieves a new access into Eden beyond the cherubim, and whose witness as Israel to the true God opens the floodgates of spiritual blessing to fall on the nations to break the curse of Babel. In all these things, Jesus establishes a just new community of people who live by a new nature, not by Torah or by sinful flesh, but who live as those delivered into a new union with God, as those who have already died and been raised.
Resurrection breaks the chain of evil which degrades the goodness and integrity of creation. In Genesis 1, we see God creating - giving form to vulnerable, dependent things who receive the gift of an ecology, an environment in which they derive all things from God. Death un-threads this tapestry. Resurrection establishes a new creation, ennobling and dignifying the created frame all things had from the beginning.
Israel's sacrifices always pointed them to this. They were trained to hope in resurrection from the sacrifices they offered. Represented by animals, sinners themselves died and were 'burned,' transforming them into Spirit-life, or smoke, which would mingle with God's glory cloud beyond the veil. In celebration of this new union, the priests would eat a meal with God.
In the same way, Jesus dies the sinner's death. But in his resurrection, Jesus has been transformed into Spirit-life. He lives by the Spirit in the flesh. From the perspective of the resurrection, Jesus is not only a man who has come from Eden into enemy territory. He is a man who has dismantled all the obstacles to Eden so the world can be transformed from enemy territory into Eden again. So that the world can become church. In his ascension, he enters as a human into union with the Father on our behalf. For Christians, to be baptized into Jesus is to ascend with Jesus into this fellowship with God. Our communion meal is a celebration of the union we have with God through Christ.
Paul says: "And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you." (Romans 8:4) The Holy Spirit has power then to work within our lives so that we live a resurrected life now. We still await this, of course, but we are to consider ourselves as those who have truly entered into Eden again. We are not outside anymore. Stunningly, we aren't 'sinners', at least not in the sense that this truly defines us. Now of course we still sin. And yet... Jesus' resurrection is a deliverance for the entire world because the curse of Eden was on the whole world. And now it's gone. Do we still sense the effects of it? Sure. But the veil is torn. The cherubim and their flaming swords are gone. Jesus is the temple. He is Eden. And as animals served as representatives for the Israelites, and as the Israelites saw in the mingling of the sacrificial smoke with God's glory cloud the hopeful sign of their own future mingling - so, in the same way, Jesus serves as representative for all humanity so that we know we will share in the glorious resurrection God has given him.
Lent 2019: Saturday, April 6 - Final Piece of Evidence
In the Garden of Eden, the serpent presumes to speak for God when he tempts Eve. The power of sin, death, and the devil is directly opposed to God but simultaneously very subtle. Their intentions for the world are masked to be like God's, but actually undermine them completely. God is a creator. Satan's intention is to un-create. For God, all things are good and have an integrity of their own. For Satan, all things are merely a means to an end to gratify self.
God's judgment on sin must deliver the world from sin but this is very difficult. When he judges sin in the flood during the time of Noah, the world again embraces sinful flesh. The dilemma is raised again - how can sinful flesh be put to death without people being put to death?
Beginning with Abraham, God's war against flesh takes on a new strategy. God's warriors are a circumcised people. Birthed by promises, they are simultaneously marked by death. They will be God's bridge and witness to the world by denying flesh. This is what the tabernacle structure of Torah is all about. Through this one people, God will battle against flesh, and through this people, God will re-open the gates of Eden.
Yet, what we have found is that Torah has been powerless to withstand sinful flesh. On the one hand, we see continually that evil does not make its stand by coming out in the open to oppose God, but by disguises, sleight of hand, diversion. Satan does not make his stand like a handsome, articulate rebel to the throne. Satan is not interesting. P.T. Forsyth writes:
"There is sin which a Universal Redeemer cannot leave unslain, which yet does not so much break the sword of the Spirit as corrode it, like Grendel's blood, in Beowulf. It uses the dagger instead of the sword, so to say. It poisons the wells, but does not take the field. It poisons the murky air, obscures the issue, and unnverves the arm. It is mephitic, the prince of the power of the air. It does not encounter, it envelopes. Its hideousness, like the monster, couches in the blinding cloud it makes. Satan himself, if he be still the arch-foe, is a sorry Satan, a demoralized, vulgarized Satan, a Satan of the latter days, whether Christ's or ours, the Satan of the sneer and the everlasting No." (Forsyth, The Taste of Death and the Life of Grace, 53-55)
A quote like this gives us a feel for how evil is most apparent in the evil uses to which it puts God's things. This prepares us to see the way Torah is bent to serve the devil's whims or, to use the verbiage customary of these posts, Torah has been given under conditions of flesh and can't kill it. As such, it becomes vulnerable to mis-use by flesh.
Why am I describing this? It's because the devil knows how to beat the system precisely by making the system serve his own interests. How do you make the case and set the course for prosecution when the law court itself has been compromised? This captures some of the dilemma of exposing sinful flesh.
As we've seen, the Lord comes to Israel as Jesus. During the last week of his life, he provoked Israel's leaders in the temple. Starting in Matthew 21, Jesus enters the temple courts and begins teaching. He tells a parable of two sons, one who obeys while the other disobeys. He tells a parable of tenants renting land who conspire to kill the landowner's son. He tells a parable of people invited to a wedding banquet who refuse to go. He warns against the hypocrisy of the Jewish leaders. He proclaims seven woes on the teachers of the law and Pharisees. He prophecies the destruction of the temple. Finally, he tells a parable of those who do not recognize their Lord.
We're told that after all this teaching in the temple, the chief priests and elders of the people assembled in the palace of the high priest, and they schemed to arrest Jesus and kill him.
The God of Torah has come, taught in the temple, warned of the fate of those opposing him. Instead of repenting, Israel's leaders conspire to use God's own Torah, his own levitical law, to put God to death. According to Leithart:
"this was the climactic moment of that trial because in first-century Judaism flesh had co-opted God's good Torah and God's elect people. This was the last plank in Yahweh's case against flesh: if flesh could turn the Torah he gave for Israel's life into an instrument of death, then the sinfulness of sinful flesh was proved. Yahweh's judicial case was sealed, and flesh was ready for the verdict of condemnation and the sentence of death." (152-153)
Leithart uses a vivid phrase to describe this crime: "boiling the Torah-Giver in the milk of Torah." (153) Flesh's highest, most idolatrous ambitions are laid bare here in Jesus' death.
The more that Jews and Romans brought in evidence against Jesus, the more they were bringing evidence against themselves. By what sort of law can you put the Lord of all creation to death? Only a law that has been twisted beyond recognition. The prosecution of flesh reaches its climax in the prosecution of Jesus.
God's judgment on sin must deliver the world from sin but this is very difficult. When he judges sin in the flood during the time of Noah, the world again embraces sinful flesh. The dilemma is raised again - how can sinful flesh be put to death without people being put to death?
Beginning with Abraham, God's war against flesh takes on a new strategy. God's warriors are a circumcised people. Birthed by promises, they are simultaneously marked by death. They will be God's bridge and witness to the world by denying flesh. This is what the tabernacle structure of Torah is all about. Through this one people, God will battle against flesh, and through this people, God will re-open the gates of Eden.
Yet, what we have found is that Torah has been powerless to withstand sinful flesh. On the one hand, we see continually that evil does not make its stand by coming out in the open to oppose God, but by disguises, sleight of hand, diversion. Satan does not make his stand like a handsome, articulate rebel to the throne. Satan is not interesting. P.T. Forsyth writes:
"There is sin which a Universal Redeemer cannot leave unslain, which yet does not so much break the sword of the Spirit as corrode it, like Grendel's blood, in Beowulf. It uses the dagger instead of the sword, so to say. It poisons the wells, but does not take the field. It poisons the murky air, obscures the issue, and unnverves the arm. It is mephitic, the prince of the power of the air. It does not encounter, it envelopes. Its hideousness, like the monster, couches in the blinding cloud it makes. Satan himself, if he be still the arch-foe, is a sorry Satan, a demoralized, vulgarized Satan, a Satan of the latter days, whether Christ's or ours, the Satan of the sneer and the everlasting No." (Forsyth, The Taste of Death and the Life of Grace, 53-55)
A quote like this gives us a feel for how evil is most apparent in the evil uses to which it puts God's things. This prepares us to see the way Torah is bent to serve the devil's whims or, to use the verbiage customary of these posts, Torah has been given under conditions of flesh and can't kill it. As such, it becomes vulnerable to mis-use by flesh.
Why am I describing this? It's because the devil knows how to beat the system precisely by making the system serve his own interests. How do you make the case and set the course for prosecution when the law court itself has been compromised? This captures some of the dilemma of exposing sinful flesh.
As we've seen, the Lord comes to Israel as Jesus. During the last week of his life, he provoked Israel's leaders in the temple. Starting in Matthew 21, Jesus enters the temple courts and begins teaching. He tells a parable of two sons, one who obeys while the other disobeys. He tells a parable of tenants renting land who conspire to kill the landowner's son. He tells a parable of people invited to a wedding banquet who refuse to go. He warns against the hypocrisy of the Jewish leaders. He proclaims seven woes on the teachers of the law and Pharisees. He prophecies the destruction of the temple. Finally, he tells a parable of those who do not recognize their Lord.
We're told that after all this teaching in the temple, the chief priests and elders of the people assembled in the palace of the high priest, and they schemed to arrest Jesus and kill him.
The God of Torah has come, taught in the temple, warned of the fate of those opposing him. Instead of repenting, Israel's leaders conspire to use God's own Torah, his own levitical law, to put God to death. According to Leithart:
"this was the climactic moment of that trial because in first-century Judaism flesh had co-opted God's good Torah and God's elect people. This was the last plank in Yahweh's case against flesh: if flesh could turn the Torah he gave for Israel's life into an instrument of death, then the sinfulness of sinful flesh was proved. Yahweh's judicial case was sealed, and flesh was ready for the verdict of condemnation and the sentence of death." (152-153)
Leithart uses a vivid phrase to describe this crime: "boiling the Torah-Giver in the milk of Torah." (153) Flesh's highest, most idolatrous ambitions are laid bare here in Jesus' death.
The more that Jews and Romans brought in evidence against Jesus, the more they were bringing evidence against themselves. By what sort of law can you put the Lord of all creation to death? Only a law that has been twisted beyond recognition. The prosecution of flesh reaches its climax in the prosecution of Jesus.
Friday, April 26, 2019
Lent 2019: Friday, April 5 - Israel's Penal Substitute
Do we want justice or forgiveness? Do we want sin to be passed over, or do we want it to be decisively dealt with? Do we want God to just look away from it, or do we want him to act upon it?
In an earlier post, we talked about the 'lex talionis', which refers to the principle of justice as 'eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.' The cost of a misdeed is that it be visited upon the mis-doer. We also noted how this system is flawed because it is instituted in Torah under the conditions of flesh. The 'lex talionis' cannot put flesh to death, so it cannot bring full justice.
But it also does not suffice to say that the 'lex talionis' is only an 'Old Testament law' and that the New Testament brings a new law of love. As we saw in the most recent post, "Supreme Act of Injustice," the oppressed and impoverished of the world are a sign to us and a reminder that the hope is for God to bring full restorative justice, including punishment for wrongdoing. In other words, we don't have to choose between justice and forgiveness because even forgiveness always requires a cost to be paid. As Tim Keller once put it, if you take a light bulb from my lamp, I can choose not to replace it, but in doing so, I'm choosing to bear the cost of having less light. There's always a cost.
Jesus himself takes the 'lex talionis' upon himself. As God, he pays the cost that he demands. He takes on the punishment that Israel deserves and that the world deserves so that there is no more punishment.
Peter Leithart notes that Jesus is the penal substitute for his friends, for Israel, and for the world. For his friends, Jesus alone took the fall. It was common for Roman authorities to suppress Jewish rebellions by killing the leader and his followers. (Wright, quoted in Leithart, 160) But the Gospel of John shows Jesus saying, "If you are looking for me, then let these men go." (John 18:8) The disciples flee, with Jesus alone dying the death they probably would have died with him. He dies for Israel in that the verdict Israel places on Jesus is in fact the truth about Israel. A rebellious, blaspheming, Torah-breaking son of Israel is killed on the cross that day. Israel thought this is what Jesus was. But in killing Jesus, this is actually what Israel had become. In putting Jesus to death, they put themselves to death, for Jesus was condemned for the exact penalty that they were actually guilty of in killing God's Son.
Jesus' identification with Israel is the only way this can be redemptive. "The Last of the Mohicans," originally a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, became a movie in 1992 which starred Daniel Day-Lewis. Although I haven't read the book, the movie vividly captures the ways various Native American tribes responded to the colonial powers of Great Britain and France. The British-hating Mohawks capture the two daughters of the British colonel. As the Mohawks prepare to sacrifice one of the daughters, the Mohican tribe, who have assiduously avoided becoming involved with the conflict, arrive with a British major. The major offers himself in place of one of the daughters, and she goes free with the Mohicans while he is burned at the stake. His sacrifice truly sets her free. She proceeds into life, while he takes the penalty. Who goes free in Jesus' death? Jesus' death and resurrection liberates Israel because he represents Israel. As we said in the post on "Nucleus of a Just Human Society," the Davidic King was a "son" of God in the way that previously was reserved for the whole nation. As such, the character of the Davidic kings in the Old Testament determined the way of the nation. As the king went, so went the people. The king represented them. As Jesus is a true son of David, the same is true for him. His death is a penal substitution for his people because he represents them.
Finally, Jesus dies for the nations as well, because Israel served a priestly function as representative of the nations. The Israelites' Feast of Booths included an offering of seventy bulls for the seventy nations, offering up the world to God. (Leithart 103) In bearing Israel's punishment, Jesus also bears the punishment due to the nations. Furthermore, the Romans commit HIGH treason against God by killing Jesus for his treason against Caesar. The treasonous subject is put to death, with Jesus taking Rome's punishment with him.
We conclude by asking who administers this punishment. Does God punish Jesus on the cross? No. As Leithart writes, the Father never makes common cause with Jesus' accusers because Jesus is not guilty. He hands Jesus over to be charged so that he can then vindicate him in resurrection. The powers of darkness rise up against Jesus to put him to death. This is their hour. But God is in control of it all, and uses this rebellion to end the rebellion. In the death of Jesus, God puts death to death. As Lancelot Andrewes once put it, "An hour of that day was the hour of the 'power of darkness'; but the whole day itself, it is said here plainly, was the day of the wrath of God." The hour is the devil's as God himself is put to death. But the day belongs to God as Jesus is raised from the dead with the powers of sin broken. The hour of the devil's murderous, treasonous evil is a moment within the larger day of God's overarching plan. (Rutledge, 527) Jesus bears sin and punishment. But he is never for a moment held guilty by the Father.
We come back to the original question. Do we want God to look away from our sin, or to be just and condemn it? Do we want the 'lex talionis?' We do want justice. We want the 'lex talionis' because God himself pays the cost of sin. He takes the punishment. Because of Jesus, justice becomes a gift God gives, not a debt God exacts. Penal substitution becomes very good news for the whole world.
In an earlier post, we talked about the 'lex talionis', which refers to the principle of justice as 'eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.' The cost of a misdeed is that it be visited upon the mis-doer. We also noted how this system is flawed because it is instituted in Torah under the conditions of flesh. The 'lex talionis' cannot put flesh to death, so it cannot bring full justice.
But it also does not suffice to say that the 'lex talionis' is only an 'Old Testament law' and that the New Testament brings a new law of love. As we saw in the most recent post, "Supreme Act of Injustice," the oppressed and impoverished of the world are a sign to us and a reminder that the hope is for God to bring full restorative justice, including punishment for wrongdoing. In other words, we don't have to choose between justice and forgiveness because even forgiveness always requires a cost to be paid. As Tim Keller once put it, if you take a light bulb from my lamp, I can choose not to replace it, but in doing so, I'm choosing to bear the cost of having less light. There's always a cost.
Jesus himself takes the 'lex talionis' upon himself. As God, he pays the cost that he demands. He takes on the punishment that Israel deserves and that the world deserves so that there is no more punishment.
Peter Leithart notes that Jesus is the penal substitute for his friends, for Israel, and for the world. For his friends, Jesus alone took the fall. It was common for Roman authorities to suppress Jewish rebellions by killing the leader and his followers. (Wright, quoted in Leithart, 160) But the Gospel of John shows Jesus saying, "If you are looking for me, then let these men go." (John 18:8) The disciples flee, with Jesus alone dying the death they probably would have died with him. He dies for Israel in that the verdict Israel places on Jesus is in fact the truth about Israel. A rebellious, blaspheming, Torah-breaking son of Israel is killed on the cross that day. Israel thought this is what Jesus was. But in killing Jesus, this is actually what Israel had become. In putting Jesus to death, they put themselves to death, for Jesus was condemned for the exact penalty that they were actually guilty of in killing God's Son.
Jesus' identification with Israel is the only way this can be redemptive. "The Last of the Mohicans," originally a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, became a movie in 1992 which starred Daniel Day-Lewis. Although I haven't read the book, the movie vividly captures the ways various Native American tribes responded to the colonial powers of Great Britain and France. The British-hating Mohawks capture the two daughters of the British colonel. As the Mohawks prepare to sacrifice one of the daughters, the Mohican tribe, who have assiduously avoided becoming involved with the conflict, arrive with a British major. The major offers himself in place of one of the daughters, and she goes free with the Mohicans while he is burned at the stake. His sacrifice truly sets her free. She proceeds into life, while he takes the penalty. Who goes free in Jesus' death? Jesus' death and resurrection liberates Israel because he represents Israel. As we said in the post on "Nucleus of a Just Human Society," the Davidic King was a "son" of God in the way that previously was reserved for the whole nation. As such, the character of the Davidic kings in the Old Testament determined the way of the nation. As the king went, so went the people. The king represented them. As Jesus is a true son of David, the same is true for him. His death is a penal substitution for his people because he represents them.
Finally, Jesus dies for the nations as well, because Israel served a priestly function as representative of the nations. The Israelites' Feast of Booths included an offering of seventy bulls for the seventy nations, offering up the world to God. (Leithart 103) In bearing Israel's punishment, Jesus also bears the punishment due to the nations. Furthermore, the Romans commit HIGH treason against God by killing Jesus for his treason against Caesar. The treasonous subject is put to death, with Jesus taking Rome's punishment with him.
We conclude by asking who administers this punishment. Does God punish Jesus on the cross? No. As Leithart writes, the Father never makes common cause with Jesus' accusers because Jesus is not guilty. He hands Jesus over to be charged so that he can then vindicate him in resurrection. The powers of darkness rise up against Jesus to put him to death. This is their hour. But God is in control of it all, and uses this rebellion to end the rebellion. In the death of Jesus, God puts death to death. As Lancelot Andrewes once put it, "An hour of that day was the hour of the 'power of darkness'; but the whole day itself, it is said here plainly, was the day of the wrath of God." The hour is the devil's as God himself is put to death. But the day belongs to God as Jesus is raised from the dead with the powers of sin broken. The hour of the devil's murderous, treasonous evil is a moment within the larger day of God's overarching plan. (Rutledge, 527) Jesus bears sin and punishment. But he is never for a moment held guilty by the Father.
We come back to the original question. Do we want God to look away from our sin, or to be just and condemn it? Do we want the 'lex talionis?' We do want justice. We want the 'lex talionis' because God himself pays the cost of sin. He takes the punishment. Because of Jesus, justice becomes a gift God gives, not a debt God exacts. Penal substitution becomes very good news for the whole world.
Tuesday, April 16, 2019
Lent 2019: Thursday, April 4 - Supreme Act of Injustice
One of my favorite images of discipleship comes from George MacDonald's book The Princess and the Goblin. In it, Curdie holds onto a thread that leads him into trouble where he can be of assistance. Holding onto to the thread of Christ can lead us into trouble as well.
We've spent a lot of time lately with the way that the cross and resurrection of Christ discloses a verdict and also delivers humanity to a new realm of life. The cross and resurrection also exposes sin, evil, and injustice for what it is. We see injustice at the cross. And as we live lives taking up our own cross, we'll keep finding it.
The cross exposes the injustice of both the Jews and the Romans. For the Jews:
"Jesus was an offender, a leper and a pollutant, a transgressor. He was not cleansing the polluted but confusing the categories of pure and impure, and if he was successful Israel's order would collapse into a chaotic mash. When they saw Jesus' flesh flayed and his face disfigured by torture, when they saw him suffocating on the cross, they concluded that they had been right all along: he must be stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. They concluded they had been right to expel the dangerous poison that might have killed the body of Israel." (Delivered, 150)
Of course, as we've said before and will say again, they were the transgressors in reasoning thus.
For the Romans:
"Jesus was a more dangerous irritant than most. He announced the arrival of a basileia (kingdom) within a Roman world that already had a basileus, and that political challenge became a crucial point in Jesus' trial. Pilate in particular was faced with the dilemma of condemning an innocent man to maintain order and remaining on good terms with Caesar, or freeing Jesus and risking his post or his life. Naturally, he acted on fear rather than in the interests of justice. He condemned the man of Spirit in order to cover his butt of flesh." (Delivered, 150)
Jews and Romans alike cloaked their unjust reasons for putting Jesus to death behind a just, orderly facade. We are struck by the pragmatism of putting Jesus to death. We see a picture of the whole world looking to push the inconvenient Jesus to the side.
This is a good place to consider the cruelty of crucifixion. Joel Green has written:
"Executed publicly, situated at a major crossroads or on a well-trafficked artery, devoid of clothing, left to be eaten by birds and beasts, victims of crucifixion were subject to optimal, unmitigated, vicious ridicule." (quoted in Rutledge, 78)
Furthermore, the death of Jesus is of a piece with countless deaths throughout history in which peoples' identities have been all but swallowed, in which it was thought by all concerned that this person was best to be completely forgotten. Rutledge writes:
"We might think of all the slaves in the American colonies who were killed at the whim of an overseer or owner, not to mention those who died on the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic. No one remembers their names or individual histories; their stories were thrown away with their bodies. This was the destiny chosen by the Creator and Lord of the universe: the death of a nobody." (76)
Rutledge invokes Susan Sontag to capture a key point in Jesus' death - it wasn't merely that he died, or that he died as a nobody, but that he died a degrading death:
"Susan Sontag, who suffered for years from the cancer that eventually killed her, wrote this: "It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades." Here in a few words is a fundamental insight with which to view the crucifixion. If Jesus' demise is construed merely as a death - even as a painful, tortured death - the crucial point will be lost. Crucifixion was specifically designed to be the ultimate insult to personal dignity, the last word in humiliating and dehumanizing treatment. Degradation was the whole point." (78) Rutledge writes, "In the context of a faith that proclaims "amazing grace," the cross would seem to be the ultimately dis-grace-ful event, utterly lacking in anything appealing, winning, or redemptive." (79)
It is this exposing part which makes us want to look away. It makes us prefer uplifting stories to hearing about the cross. We do this because it exposes something in us as well. It has the power to bring to light all the structures of our society, which seem so reasonable on the surface, and expose the way they subvert truth about God. Because there is nothing 'reasonable' about what Jesus was subjected to.
James Cone has written a book called The Cross and the Lynching Tree, in which he insightfully reflects upon the thematic similarity between the crucifixion of Jesus and the lynchings that took place in the United States after the Civil War. In particular, he captures Emmett Till's role at the fountainhead of the civil rights movement.
Emmett Till was a 14 year old black boy who was lynched on August 26, 1955. He had whistled at a white woman and reportedly said "bye baby" as he left a store two days earlier. Picked up at 2:00am, he was beaten beyond recognition, shot in the head and thrown in the Tallahatchie River, weighed down with a heavy gin fan. (Cone 66) The two men most responsible for this act, J.W. Milan and Roy Bryant, were acquitted by an all-white jury after an hour of deliberation. This lynching (like most lynchings) was meant to do two things: make Emmett Till go away, and put fear into the heart of the black community. Though such tactics might have worked in the past, they did not this time. First, though Emmett Till died, he did not go away. James Cone writes:
"(Mamie Till Bradley, Emmett's mother) refused to allow this heinous act, like so many similar cases, to remain in the shadows or to fade from public memory. When Emmett's body was brought back to Chicago, she insisted that the sealed casket be opened for a three-day viewing, exposing "his battered and bloated corpse" so that "everybody can see what they did to my boy." She exposed white brutality and black faith to the world..." (Cone, 66-67)
Exposing her battered child, she exposed white brutality. He was 14, not from the south, not used to the complicated etiquette of Jim Crow society. He did nothing. His perpetrators were released. It became a trial of the whole Jim Crow system. The not-guilty verdict on Emmett Till's killers became a guilty verdict on the whole sub-structure. It took another victim, but this victim turned out to be more like a sacrificial victim:
"...(Mamie Till Bradley's) spirit of resistance caught fire in black communities throughout the nation, justifying the claim of author Clenora Hudson-Weems that Emmett Till was "the sacrificial lamb of the civil rights movement." Only three months after the Till lynching, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, and a "New Negro" was born. Rather than ride segregated buses in humiliation, blacks decided to walk the streets with pride until the walls of segregation, like the Jericho walls, "come tumblin' down." (Cone, 69)
From here, the non-violent movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. takes on a redemptive theme: he isn't only trying to set black people free from segregation. He's also trying to set the segregators free from their chains:
"While King never thought he achieved the messianic standard of love found in Jesus' cross, he did believe that his suffering and that of African Americans and their supporters would in some mysterious way redeem America from the sin of white supremacy, and thereby make this nation a just place for all." (Cone 89)
We see here that Emmett Till's death ignites a movement that stays pretty true to what launches it: innocent suffering exposes structures of injustice. Emmett Till's death catches powers of evil in the act. A verdict is disclosed that those who presume to administer justice are themselves not in the right, and this verdict delivers people from slavery to fear to be a "new" people, including perpetrators who have had their 'eyes opened.' That this movement was driven by a special preoccupation with Christ's cross is no accident, as James Cone uncovers again and again. It is precisely Christ's cross which funds movements like these. God exposes the way that flesh has co-opted Torah in Jesus' cross. God discloses the verdict that Jesus was in the right, and that the perpetrators were in the wrong. God delivers Jesus and all humanity into a new reality where Eden is here, and those who crucified him are just as free as anybody to enter in. Think of the centurion, who at the end of the Gospel of Mark, is the first to proclaim Christ as Lord. That Emmett Till isn't as much of a spotless lamb as Jesus is not the point. The point is that God's great wars are won with soldiers like Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. This is circumcised warfare, like Gideon, like David, like Jesus. They lay their lives down, trusting in resurrection. The point is that you could be like Jesus in this way. I could be like Jesus in this way. All it takes is to read patiently into the Word, see what it really says about the world, and hold to that no matter what.
Hold onto that thread. You may not like where it is taking you, but don't let go.
We've spent a lot of time lately with the way that the cross and resurrection of Christ discloses a verdict and also delivers humanity to a new realm of life. The cross and resurrection also exposes sin, evil, and injustice for what it is. We see injustice at the cross. And as we live lives taking up our own cross, we'll keep finding it.
The cross exposes the injustice of both the Jews and the Romans. For the Jews:
"Jesus was an offender, a leper and a pollutant, a transgressor. He was not cleansing the polluted but confusing the categories of pure and impure, and if he was successful Israel's order would collapse into a chaotic mash. When they saw Jesus' flesh flayed and his face disfigured by torture, when they saw him suffocating on the cross, they concluded that they had been right all along: he must be stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. They concluded they had been right to expel the dangerous poison that might have killed the body of Israel." (Delivered, 150)
Of course, as we've said before and will say again, they were the transgressors in reasoning thus.
For the Romans:
"Jesus was a more dangerous irritant than most. He announced the arrival of a basileia (kingdom) within a Roman world that already had a basileus, and that political challenge became a crucial point in Jesus' trial. Pilate in particular was faced with the dilemma of condemning an innocent man to maintain order and remaining on good terms with Caesar, or freeing Jesus and risking his post or his life. Naturally, he acted on fear rather than in the interests of justice. He condemned the man of Spirit in order to cover his butt of flesh." (Delivered, 150)
Jews and Romans alike cloaked their unjust reasons for putting Jesus to death behind a just, orderly facade. We are struck by the pragmatism of putting Jesus to death. We see a picture of the whole world looking to push the inconvenient Jesus to the side.
This is a good place to consider the cruelty of crucifixion. Joel Green has written:
"Executed publicly, situated at a major crossroads or on a well-trafficked artery, devoid of clothing, left to be eaten by birds and beasts, victims of crucifixion were subject to optimal, unmitigated, vicious ridicule." (quoted in Rutledge, 78)
Furthermore, the death of Jesus is of a piece with countless deaths throughout history in which peoples' identities have been all but swallowed, in which it was thought by all concerned that this person was best to be completely forgotten. Rutledge writes:
"We might think of all the slaves in the American colonies who were killed at the whim of an overseer or owner, not to mention those who died on the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic. No one remembers their names or individual histories; their stories were thrown away with their bodies. This was the destiny chosen by the Creator and Lord of the universe: the death of a nobody." (76)
Rutledge invokes Susan Sontag to capture a key point in Jesus' death - it wasn't merely that he died, or that he died as a nobody, but that he died a degrading death:
"Susan Sontag, who suffered for years from the cancer that eventually killed her, wrote this: "It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades." Here in a few words is a fundamental insight with which to view the crucifixion. If Jesus' demise is construed merely as a death - even as a painful, tortured death - the crucial point will be lost. Crucifixion was specifically designed to be the ultimate insult to personal dignity, the last word in humiliating and dehumanizing treatment. Degradation was the whole point." (78) Rutledge writes, "In the context of a faith that proclaims "amazing grace," the cross would seem to be the ultimately dis-grace-ful event, utterly lacking in anything appealing, winning, or redemptive." (79)
It is this exposing part which makes us want to look away. It makes us prefer uplifting stories to hearing about the cross. We do this because it exposes something in us as well. It has the power to bring to light all the structures of our society, which seem so reasonable on the surface, and expose the way they subvert truth about God. Because there is nothing 'reasonable' about what Jesus was subjected to.
James Cone has written a book called The Cross and the Lynching Tree, in which he insightfully reflects upon the thematic similarity between the crucifixion of Jesus and the lynchings that took place in the United States after the Civil War. In particular, he captures Emmett Till's role at the fountainhead of the civil rights movement.
Emmett Till was a 14 year old black boy who was lynched on August 26, 1955. He had whistled at a white woman and reportedly said "bye baby" as he left a store two days earlier. Picked up at 2:00am, he was beaten beyond recognition, shot in the head and thrown in the Tallahatchie River, weighed down with a heavy gin fan. (Cone 66) The two men most responsible for this act, J.W. Milan and Roy Bryant, were acquitted by an all-white jury after an hour of deliberation. This lynching (like most lynchings) was meant to do two things: make Emmett Till go away, and put fear into the heart of the black community. Though such tactics might have worked in the past, they did not this time. First, though Emmett Till died, he did not go away. James Cone writes:
"(Mamie Till Bradley, Emmett's mother) refused to allow this heinous act, like so many similar cases, to remain in the shadows or to fade from public memory. When Emmett's body was brought back to Chicago, she insisted that the sealed casket be opened for a three-day viewing, exposing "his battered and bloated corpse" so that "everybody can see what they did to my boy." She exposed white brutality and black faith to the world..." (Cone, 66-67)
Exposing her battered child, she exposed white brutality. He was 14, not from the south, not used to the complicated etiquette of Jim Crow society. He did nothing. His perpetrators were released. It became a trial of the whole Jim Crow system. The not-guilty verdict on Emmett Till's killers became a guilty verdict on the whole sub-structure. It took another victim, but this victim turned out to be more like a sacrificial victim:
"...(Mamie Till Bradley's) spirit of resistance caught fire in black communities throughout the nation, justifying the claim of author Clenora Hudson-Weems that Emmett Till was "the sacrificial lamb of the civil rights movement." Only three months after the Till lynching, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, and a "New Negro" was born. Rather than ride segregated buses in humiliation, blacks decided to walk the streets with pride until the walls of segregation, like the Jericho walls, "come tumblin' down." (Cone, 69)
From here, the non-violent movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. takes on a redemptive theme: he isn't only trying to set black people free from segregation. He's also trying to set the segregators free from their chains:
"While King never thought he achieved the messianic standard of love found in Jesus' cross, he did believe that his suffering and that of African Americans and their supporters would in some mysterious way redeem America from the sin of white supremacy, and thereby make this nation a just place for all." (Cone 89)
We see here that Emmett Till's death ignites a movement that stays pretty true to what launches it: innocent suffering exposes structures of injustice. Emmett Till's death catches powers of evil in the act. A verdict is disclosed that those who presume to administer justice are themselves not in the right, and this verdict delivers people from slavery to fear to be a "new" people, including perpetrators who have had their 'eyes opened.' That this movement was driven by a special preoccupation with Christ's cross is no accident, as James Cone uncovers again and again. It is precisely Christ's cross which funds movements like these. God exposes the way that flesh has co-opted Torah in Jesus' cross. God discloses the verdict that Jesus was in the right, and that the perpetrators were in the wrong. God delivers Jesus and all humanity into a new reality where Eden is here, and those who crucified him are just as free as anybody to enter in. Think of the centurion, who at the end of the Gospel of Mark, is the first to proclaim Christ as Lord. That Emmett Till isn't as much of a spotless lamb as Jesus is not the point. The point is that God's great wars are won with soldiers like Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. This is circumcised warfare, like Gideon, like David, like Jesus. They lay their lives down, trusting in resurrection. The point is that you could be like Jesus in this way. I could be like Jesus in this way. All it takes is to read patiently into the Word, see what it really says about the world, and hold to that no matter what.
Hold onto that thread. You may not like where it is taking you, but don't let go.
Monday, April 15, 2019
Lent 2019: Wednesday, April 3 - The Fifth Element
In Romans 7, Paul is trying to articulate to his readers what their relationship to Torah is like now that Christ has been raised from the dead. He describes a husband and wife's relationship. If the wife marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But she can marry another man if her husband has died because death has released her from that arrangement. Paul is basically saying that although it may feel like his readers are 'cheating' on Torah by being Christians, its not true. Torah is gone. Torah isn't anywhere anymore. This arrangement no longer exists anymore. We will explore in this post how transformative this is for how the world works.
We have seen that any attempt to change the world that didn't put flesh to death would inevitably share Torah's fate. Torah, though enlisted to be God's ally in the war against flesh, was given under condition of flesh, and so eventually became flesh's not-so-secret weapon. Our most basic sense of why Jesus had to die is because of this. Without it, we could compare it to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. There is something about Jesus' sacrifice that changes the very nature of existence in this way. If the power of death and flesh at all affect the physical arrangement of things in this world, then this same arrangement would have to be completely different now, because Jesus' sacrifice has undone this power structure.
Early on in his letter to the Galatians, Paul wants to say that Christ's sacrifice has brought nothing short of regime change to the world. Part of what this entails is a changed nature. He is no longer part of the world order of death, but is part of the world order of resurrected life. By the time he gets to Galatians 3:23-4:11, Paul is telling both Jews and Gentiles that they are a new nature which takes hold through new practices. They are not to divide themselves as they used to. No more Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. They are all one in Christ. (Gal. 3:28) To go back from this to their "slavery" under the "elemental spiritual forces of this world" would be to leave the faith because they are not slaves anymore, but heirs. This is his word for Jews: Torah is a reversion to an old creation that doesn't reflect a new reality.
But then he says something similar to Gentiles. He tells them not to turn "back to those weak and miserable forces" which "enslaved them." (Gal. 4:9) Both Jews and Gentiles alike have been given a new nature and new practices. Instead of two divided humanities, God has made one new humanity in Jesus.
Compared with the ancient world, it isn't clear to us that nature and practice are linked. Nature consisted of four elements primarily - earth, water, wind, and fire - and practices constituted something like a fifth element, a circular quality in which the extremes of each of the four elements were brought into a great harmony. Because the elements were untamed and unsafe, and also because the elements gathered up mythological and spiritual qualities, sacrificial practices related to policing various boundaries of pure and impure became central to understanding what the world is and who people are. We aren't like this anymore. We don't equate nature and practices. But Paul did. To be Jewish, for Paul, was to be "by nature," a Jew. This is not because the person was born a Jew. A Gentile who converts wouldn't be any less 'natural' a Jew. Rather, it is because the social practice of Torah functioned as a fifth element to harmonize and work out the four elements that make up physical reality for Jews. It protects societal order. It keeps chaos at bay. Other ancient societies worked similarly.
Why does this matter? It matters because the transformed humanity around Christ doesn't consist in something magical. Introverts haven't become extroverts. We aren't able to make corpses come back to life. The new humanity has to do with re-arranged elements, new lines drawn, which reflect a changed nature. Peter Leithart writes:
"Jesus threw the world into crisis: How can the human race continue after Jesus and the Spirit have tampered with the physics of religion and society? If earth is no longer earthy, fire no longer fiery, air no longer aerial, water no longer wet and heavy, then the world as we know it no longer exists. If you destroy the elements of the socioreligious cosmos, then can there be a cosmos at all? If you rearrange the elements, how will the world stay together? Will not things fall apart? Will not chaos engulf us all?" (Delivered, 218)
In Colossians, Paul describes the orienting role that Christ now holds with regard to all things - whether natural or cultural:
"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the first-born over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." (Col. 1:15-17)
Christ's authority here is depicted as the source and center for all things. He is the best place to look for wisdom not only about the religious side of one's life, but also wisdom about what things are - what money is, what a government is, what trees and soil are. He is the core element beneath the entire periodic table. He is also the true fifth element which brings harmony to all creation.
As I write this, the spire of Notre Dame in Paris is in flames. This goes to the heart of this topic, as the elements are often in conflict with one another. One ancient nightmare scenario consisted of all the other elements being devoured by fire. Where will we go to find order when we fear that earth, water, and wind will be engulfed by fire and all turn to chaos? Paul would tell us the same thing he told the Galatians: Jesus himself sustains earth, water, wind, and fire when they appear to be chaotically devouring one another. When the social order of the world breaks down, Jesus is the ground of a new humanity that lives a different way because it has a different nature. Peter Leithart writes:
"By the cross, Jesus takes the two (natures) of Jew and Gentile, mixes the elements and comes out with a new chemical combination: Christian (nature), a spiritual community made up of those born by Spirit." (Delivered, 287)
We have seen that any attempt to change the world that didn't put flesh to death would inevitably share Torah's fate. Torah, though enlisted to be God's ally in the war against flesh, was given under condition of flesh, and so eventually became flesh's not-so-secret weapon. Our most basic sense of why Jesus had to die is because of this. Without it, we could compare it to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. There is something about Jesus' sacrifice that changes the very nature of existence in this way. If the power of death and flesh at all affect the physical arrangement of things in this world, then this same arrangement would have to be completely different now, because Jesus' sacrifice has undone this power structure.
Early on in his letter to the Galatians, Paul wants to say that Christ's sacrifice has brought nothing short of regime change to the world. Part of what this entails is a changed nature. He is no longer part of the world order of death, but is part of the world order of resurrected life. By the time he gets to Galatians 3:23-4:11, Paul is telling both Jews and Gentiles that they are a new nature which takes hold through new practices. They are not to divide themselves as they used to. No more Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. They are all one in Christ. (Gal. 3:28) To go back from this to their "slavery" under the "elemental spiritual forces of this world" would be to leave the faith because they are not slaves anymore, but heirs. This is his word for Jews: Torah is a reversion to an old creation that doesn't reflect a new reality.
But then he says something similar to Gentiles. He tells them not to turn "back to those weak and miserable forces" which "enslaved them." (Gal. 4:9) Both Jews and Gentiles alike have been given a new nature and new practices. Instead of two divided humanities, God has made one new humanity in Jesus.
Compared with the ancient world, it isn't clear to us that nature and practice are linked. Nature consisted of four elements primarily - earth, water, wind, and fire - and practices constituted something like a fifth element, a circular quality in which the extremes of each of the four elements were brought into a great harmony. Because the elements were untamed and unsafe, and also because the elements gathered up mythological and spiritual qualities, sacrificial practices related to policing various boundaries of pure and impure became central to understanding what the world is and who people are. We aren't like this anymore. We don't equate nature and practices. But Paul did. To be Jewish, for Paul, was to be "by nature," a Jew. This is not because the person was born a Jew. A Gentile who converts wouldn't be any less 'natural' a Jew. Rather, it is because the social practice of Torah functioned as a fifth element to harmonize and work out the four elements that make up physical reality for Jews. It protects societal order. It keeps chaos at bay. Other ancient societies worked similarly.
Why does this matter? It matters because the transformed humanity around Christ doesn't consist in something magical. Introverts haven't become extroverts. We aren't able to make corpses come back to life. The new humanity has to do with re-arranged elements, new lines drawn, which reflect a changed nature. Peter Leithart writes:
"Jesus threw the world into crisis: How can the human race continue after Jesus and the Spirit have tampered with the physics of religion and society? If earth is no longer earthy, fire no longer fiery, air no longer aerial, water no longer wet and heavy, then the world as we know it no longer exists. If you destroy the elements of the socioreligious cosmos, then can there be a cosmos at all? If you rearrange the elements, how will the world stay together? Will not things fall apart? Will not chaos engulf us all?" (Delivered, 218)
In Colossians, Paul describes the orienting role that Christ now holds with regard to all things - whether natural or cultural:
"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the first-born over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." (Col. 1:15-17)
Christ's authority here is depicted as the source and center for all things. He is the best place to look for wisdom not only about the religious side of one's life, but also wisdom about what things are - what money is, what a government is, what trees and soil are. He is the core element beneath the entire periodic table. He is also the true fifth element which brings harmony to all creation.
As I write this, the spire of Notre Dame in Paris is in flames. This goes to the heart of this topic, as the elements are often in conflict with one another. One ancient nightmare scenario consisted of all the other elements being devoured by fire. Where will we go to find order when we fear that earth, water, and wind will be engulfed by fire and all turn to chaos? Paul would tell us the same thing he told the Galatians: Jesus himself sustains earth, water, wind, and fire when they appear to be chaotically devouring one another. When the social order of the world breaks down, Jesus is the ground of a new humanity that lives a different way because it has a different nature. Peter Leithart writes:
"By the cross, Jesus takes the two (natures) of Jew and Gentile, mixes the elements and comes out with a new chemical combination: Christian (nature), a spiritual community made up of those born by Spirit." (Delivered, 287)
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Lent 2019: Tuesday, April 2 - Torah
We've talked in past posts about how Torah, or God's levitical law, was given to put flesh to death. It was meant to divide God's people away from flesh.
As we've also seen, Torah becomes captive to sinful flesh. Even so, however, it still divides, only now it divides in a way that causes futility and spiritual erosion. In Romans 7, Paul vividly describes this unfortunate division:
"So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?" (Rom. 7:21-24)
As we said in the post on "Circumcision," Torah was always meant to divide. It was meant to divide flesh from Spirit. All Torah practices had to do with cutting off flesh. Torah was given to put flesh to death.
But because Torah was given under the conditions of flesh, flesh is not killed so much as it is aroused. Somehow, when Torah tells Paul not to covet, he ends up coveting even more! Torah re-invigorates flesh, and flesh "seizes the opportunity." It rears up. It becomes supercharged. So instead of putting flesh to death and dividing it from the community, Torah arouses flesh. This is all a description of what Torah does under the realm of death. Torah is sin's "not-so-secret weapon." (Rutledge) Though governing from outside Israel, it gives the impression of coming from within under the guise of conflicting desires - a people who simultaneously love their law and hate their law. It is a schizophrenic reality, in which the greater the divide, the greater the agency and strength given to each side. As Paul writes, "Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me." As his desire for good grows, so does his desire for evil. As Jesus writes, the wheat and weeds are all bound up with each other. Only when they are fully grown, can they be separated, in part because they divide on their own. The Pharisees are a vivid picture of this. As their 'love' for Torah grows, it increasingly shields their own injustices from themselves. Paul, at least is aware that he both loves and hates the law. The Pharisees aren't. As flesh gains more control, the greater the division within Israel's inner being. Flesh turns Torah into a torture instrument. Torah creates a divided Israel, an Israel that "knows not what they do."
At the cross, Jesus asks God to forgive his accusers, for "they know not what they do." Which Israel puts Jesus to death? They think its the part that loves Torah. But they are wrong! What they don't realize is that flesh has taken over. Jesus is living Torah. As we've said in previous posts, Jesus embodies the access that Torah always pointed to. He is God come out from behind the cherubim's swords of Eden. But they don't see that. The Israel that puts Jesus to death is the part that hates Torah. Flesh blinds them to Jesus and they don't recognize him at all. They think they are crucifying someone God-forsaken. They think they are putting flesh to death. They think this is Torah's crowning achievement. But of course it's Torah's greatest betrayal.
They also don't realize that what they think is an execution is actually a sin offering for themselves. (Rom. 8:3) Jesus is an alternative Torah, an alternative Temple and Holy Place. God has used Israel's captivity to flesh as a way to flush flesh out in the open. Flesh acts at Calvary. Flesh dominates. Flesh exerts itself and makes every move. Flesh drags Jesus' corpse outside the city gates without realizing that, by a divine judo move, God is dragging sinful flesh into the sanctuary to put it to death once and for all. The deeper into Jesus the whips of sinful flesh go, the deeper they are brought into the holy of holies to be cleansed. The more sinful flesh puts Jesus to death, the more God ends up putting sinful flesh to death in Jesus. Sinful flesh tells Jesus, "I'm going to kill you." Jesus says, "You're coming with me." In other words, "He became sin who knew no sin." (2 Cor. 5:21) In Jesus, finally, Torah is putting flesh to death. In himself. And sparing the perpetrators. When God's verdict comes on Easter that Jesus was in the right, they can honestly repent: they didn't know what they did. They had no idea. Leithart writes:
"When the Father then reverses their verdict, when he completes the condemnation of flesh by raising Jesus in the Spirit, they can be brought to recognition and repentance. What looked to them like a pariah, an outcast and leper, barely human, is revealed in the resurrection to have been, all along, the Lord of glory, showing the glory of his covenant love in giving himself for his people." (Delivered, 352-353)
Paul writes in Romans 8:3-4:
"And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit."
What this means is that the mission back to Eden has been accomplished. Condemnation implies that God has delivered the world beyond this. Before Jesus' sin offering, before the veil was torn, before the resurrection and ascension, all civilization, all the world toiled under the power of death as it expressed itself in sinful flesh. Against this world order, God created Torah to subvert it. Now the world order has been condemned. And Torah has been exceeded by living Torah - Jesus. God made him a new sanctuary to bear the blood of sinful flesh. God made him a new holy of holies, no longer hidden deep within the temple, but outside the gates of Jerusalem, out in the open. Jesus is Torah that actually has killed flesh and his resurrection is a re-entry into Eden.
Throughout these posts, I've been calling the levitical law 'Torah', following Leithart's usage. And now I think I see why. Because Torah is not the same as law. In Jesus' death, Torah is finished. All the rituals and liturgies of Torah are designed for a world under the power of death and sinful flesh. But that is not the case anymore. There is a new world order. Flesh is finished. And so is the Torah that is designed to kill it. Much of the New Testament, as we've seen, is alive with this precise drama. The destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. is the final dismantling of the old world order.
All of Torah is like scaffolding for a temple made in Jesus' new Eden. When all is ready, it just needs to come down.
We say farewell to Torah. But 'law' remains. What is the new law that governs the world, if sinful flesh is condemned? Paul describes this as living "according to the Spirit." (Rom. 8:4). The Spirit becomes a law for the new people who have entered into Eden. Leithart writes:
"Once the gate of Eden is opened again, there is no need for sacrifice; the cherubim lay down their flaming swords and let those who are in Christ enter freely. Once Jesus has borne the curse for Israel and opened up the flood of the Spirit to the Gentiles, thus creating "the one" that Moses did not mediate, the structures that distinguish Jew from Gentile are pointless. Maintaining such structures is, by Paul's lights, worse than pointless. Anyone who sets up barriers at Eden's gate is trying to reverse the work of Jesus." (Delivered, 213)
We will go on to see that everything is different now for the whole world because of the one new humanity that Jesus has created.
As we've also seen, Torah becomes captive to sinful flesh. Even so, however, it still divides, only now it divides in a way that causes futility and spiritual erosion. In Romans 7, Paul vividly describes this unfortunate division:
"So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?" (Rom. 7:21-24)
As we said in the post on "Circumcision," Torah was always meant to divide. It was meant to divide flesh from Spirit. All Torah practices had to do with cutting off flesh. Torah was given to put flesh to death.
But because Torah was given under the conditions of flesh, flesh is not killed so much as it is aroused. Somehow, when Torah tells Paul not to covet, he ends up coveting even more! Torah re-invigorates flesh, and flesh "seizes the opportunity." It rears up. It becomes supercharged. So instead of putting flesh to death and dividing it from the community, Torah arouses flesh. This is all a description of what Torah does under the realm of death. Torah is sin's "not-so-secret weapon." (Rutledge) Though governing from outside Israel, it gives the impression of coming from within under the guise of conflicting desires - a people who simultaneously love their law and hate their law. It is a schizophrenic reality, in which the greater the divide, the greater the agency and strength given to each side. As Paul writes, "Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me." As his desire for good grows, so does his desire for evil. As Jesus writes, the wheat and weeds are all bound up with each other. Only when they are fully grown, can they be separated, in part because they divide on their own. The Pharisees are a vivid picture of this. As their 'love' for Torah grows, it increasingly shields their own injustices from themselves. Paul, at least is aware that he both loves and hates the law. The Pharisees aren't. As flesh gains more control, the greater the division within Israel's inner being. Flesh turns Torah into a torture instrument. Torah creates a divided Israel, an Israel that "knows not what they do."
At the cross, Jesus asks God to forgive his accusers, for "they know not what they do." Which Israel puts Jesus to death? They think its the part that loves Torah. But they are wrong! What they don't realize is that flesh has taken over. Jesus is living Torah. As we've said in previous posts, Jesus embodies the access that Torah always pointed to. He is God come out from behind the cherubim's swords of Eden. But they don't see that. The Israel that puts Jesus to death is the part that hates Torah. Flesh blinds them to Jesus and they don't recognize him at all. They think they are crucifying someone God-forsaken. They think they are putting flesh to death. They think this is Torah's crowning achievement. But of course it's Torah's greatest betrayal.
They also don't realize that what they think is an execution is actually a sin offering for themselves. (Rom. 8:3) Jesus is an alternative Torah, an alternative Temple and Holy Place. God has used Israel's captivity to flesh as a way to flush flesh out in the open. Flesh acts at Calvary. Flesh dominates. Flesh exerts itself and makes every move. Flesh drags Jesus' corpse outside the city gates without realizing that, by a divine judo move, God is dragging sinful flesh into the sanctuary to put it to death once and for all. The deeper into Jesus the whips of sinful flesh go, the deeper they are brought into the holy of holies to be cleansed. The more sinful flesh puts Jesus to death, the more God ends up putting sinful flesh to death in Jesus. Sinful flesh tells Jesus, "I'm going to kill you." Jesus says, "You're coming with me." In other words, "He became sin who knew no sin." (2 Cor. 5:21) In Jesus, finally, Torah is putting flesh to death. In himself. And sparing the perpetrators. When God's verdict comes on Easter that Jesus was in the right, they can honestly repent: they didn't know what they did. They had no idea. Leithart writes:
"When the Father then reverses their verdict, when he completes the condemnation of flesh by raising Jesus in the Spirit, they can be brought to recognition and repentance. What looked to them like a pariah, an outcast and leper, barely human, is revealed in the resurrection to have been, all along, the Lord of glory, showing the glory of his covenant love in giving himself for his people." (Delivered, 352-353)
Paul writes in Romans 8:3-4:
"And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit."
What this means is that the mission back to Eden has been accomplished. Condemnation implies that God has delivered the world beyond this. Before Jesus' sin offering, before the veil was torn, before the resurrection and ascension, all civilization, all the world toiled under the power of death as it expressed itself in sinful flesh. Against this world order, God created Torah to subvert it. Now the world order has been condemned. And Torah has been exceeded by living Torah - Jesus. God made him a new sanctuary to bear the blood of sinful flesh. God made him a new holy of holies, no longer hidden deep within the temple, but outside the gates of Jerusalem, out in the open. Jesus is Torah that actually has killed flesh and his resurrection is a re-entry into Eden.
Throughout these posts, I've been calling the levitical law 'Torah', following Leithart's usage. And now I think I see why. Because Torah is not the same as law. In Jesus' death, Torah is finished. All the rituals and liturgies of Torah are designed for a world under the power of death and sinful flesh. But that is not the case anymore. There is a new world order. Flesh is finished. And so is the Torah that is designed to kill it. Much of the New Testament, as we've seen, is alive with this precise drama. The destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. is the final dismantling of the old world order.
All of Torah is like scaffolding for a temple made in Jesus' new Eden. When all is ready, it just needs to come down.
We say farewell to Torah. But 'law' remains. What is the new law that governs the world, if sinful flesh is condemned? Paul describes this as living "according to the Spirit." (Rom. 8:4). The Spirit becomes a law for the new people who have entered into Eden. Leithart writes:
"Once the gate of Eden is opened again, there is no need for sacrifice; the cherubim lay down their flaming swords and let those who are in Christ enter freely. Once Jesus has borne the curse for Israel and opened up the flood of the Spirit to the Gentiles, thus creating "the one" that Moses did not mediate, the structures that distinguish Jew from Gentile are pointless. Maintaining such structures is, by Paul's lights, worse than pointless. Anyone who sets up barriers at Eden's gate is trying to reverse the work of Jesus." (Delivered, 213)
We will go on to see that everything is different now for the whole world because of the one new humanity that Jesus has created.
Friday, April 12, 2019
Lent 2019: Monday, April 1 - Baptism
The Israelites were enslaved by the Egyptians. Eventually, they crossed over the Red Sea, and once they were on the other side, the sea fell back upon their pursuers. They were no longer enslaved. This was a true liberation and deliverance.
Romans 5 describes the condemnation of death as an 'Egypt.' Paul writes: "The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation." (Rom. 5:16) The word 'condemnation' expresses a verdict, a stable expression of identity. Later, Paul writes, "...by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man..." (Rom. 5:17) Death 'reigns' in a type of kingdom of death. Later, Paul writes: "...just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Rom. 5:21). This is all the description of two different kingdoms, spheres, dominions, domains, world orders, orbits. Fleming Rutledge writes:
"The New Testament cosmology, most clearly displayed in Paul's letters but present to a greater or lesser degree in the Gospels and the other epistles as well, presents us not with two ways of life, but with two kingdoms - two spheres of power." (Rutledge, 546)
'Egypt' is a world order that gathers up a lot of symbolism in the Bible. 'Egypt' does not let Israel worship. 'Egypt' subverts the God of Israel and boasts against his power. Israel's identity is stomped out and systematically removed. Benjamin Skinner describes a tragic structural dynamic of slavery in Haiti in which rural families give their children to people from the city who, under the guise of benevolence, say they will give the children a better education, but instead turn them into slaves. He describes the enslaving process as becoming "zombified," assumed to have no will of their own, and entirely under the control of the malevolence of the slavemaster who has given the child a "second life." (A Crime So Monstrous, 38) 'Egypt' describes the world of the First Adam, a world under the power of death. We are 'zombified,' slaves to its whims and powers. Under it, we are dead.
When Paul moves from talking about the reign of death in Romans 5 to talking about baptism in Romans 6, he is telling us that baptism is a new crossing of the Red Sea. It is our exodus from the old regime of "zombified" death to the new regime of life in Christ. Christ's new kingdom is a new world. Leithart describes this:
"...Jesus died to form a people, the church, his body and bride. He died to preserve his new temple movement; his death was a day of atonement where he bore the liabilities and punishments of Israel to give them a new past and a new future. His own sacrifice was part of his ordination, and he rose again to preside as an immortal high priest qualified not by flesh but by the power of indestructible resurrection life. Jesus brought forgiveness because his death founded a forgiven people-temple where forgiveness continues to be freely offered: a temple where the single bath of baptism purifies and consecrates; where confession of sins without sacrifice cleanses from all unrighteousness; where the word of absolution is spoken with all the authority of the Son of God; where Jews and Gentiles, male and female, slave and free are invited to share a common sacrificial meal, eating Jesus' body and drinking his blood for the remission of sins. Salvation breaks into the world because God removes the veil, takes his gifts of word, bread and rod out of the treasure chest of the ark and hands them over to everyone everywhere who will receive them. Forgiveness comes to historical reality because by his death and resurrection Jesus establishes these simpler, fewer and above all more effective rites to unite us to God and one another." (Delivered, 173)
This is all a picture of what we would call the kingdom, sphere, dominion, domain, world order, orbit of the reign of life. Its foundation, as Leithart articulates, is that Jesus himself is the realm. He is the sanctuary, the temple, the new Eden, the high priest. Jesus' death is the great crossing of the Red Sea, the justifying death whose resurrection brings God's great verdict. Our baptisms are our participation in this great exodus. They are streams, tributaries that wash us into the great cleansing flood of Jesus' death and resurrection. Jesus' death operates through baptism. We are baptized into Jesus' death. (Rom. 6:3)
Baptism is a death to the former reign of sin and death. It is a 'death' to death. Paul makes an obscure reference in 1 Corinthians 15:29 about the "baptism of the dead." If Paul is talking about baptizing corpses or people being baptized on behalf of corpses, we don't have much to say about it. Perhaps this was just a strange first century practice in the Corinthian church. But if all people are dead in sins and trespasses, aren't all baptisms for the dead? The early church father John Chrysostom had a rite of baptism which included a confession of faith in the resurrection:
"I believe in the resurrection of the dead."
In response, the one pursuing baptism is told:
"...with a view to this art thou baptized, the resurrection of thy dead body, believing that it no longer remains dead." (quoted in Leithart, The Baptized Body, 43)
We all come to baptism dead because we hope there to participate in Jesus' resurrection. Paul writes:
"For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin - because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace." (Rom. 6:5-10)
Can we lean into what is said here? Leithart writes:
"Though it is clear from the rest of the New Testament that believers continue to commit sins (e.g., 1 John 1), the life of the justified is not properly summed up as simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously righteous and a sinner). The justified are dead to sin, justified from sin in their baptismal death, and are to conform their self-conception to what baptism declares about them." (Delivered, 349)
In other words, we are not 'sinners' anymore. What can this possibly mean, as great saints like Teresa of Avila become even more aware of their sin the closer they get to divine majesty?
We have several options here. One is P.T. Forsyth's. He writes about the question that will be put to us at the last:
"It will not be, How many are your sins and how many your sacrifices? but, On which side have you stood and striven, under which King have you served or died? A man may abide in the many-mansioned, myriad-minded Christ, even if the robber sometimes break into his room, or if he go out and lose his way in a fog. You stay in a house, or in a town, which all the same you occasionally leave for good or for ill. The question is, What is your home to which your heart returns, either in repentance or in joy? Where is your heart? What is the bent of your will on the whole, the direction and service of your total life? It is not a question settled in a quantitative way by inquiry as to the occupation of every moment. God judges by totals, by unities not units, by wholes and souls, not sections. What is the dominant and advancing spirit of your life, the total allegiance of your person? Beethoven was not troubled when a performer struck a wrong note, but he was angry when he failed with the spirit and idea of the piece. So with the Great Judge and Artist of life. He is not a schoolmaster but a critic; and a critic of the great sort, who works by sympathy, insight, large ranges, and results on the whole. Perfection is not sinlessness, but the loyalty of the soul by faith to Christ when all is said and done. The final judgment is not whether we have at every moment stood, but whether having done all we stand - stand at the end, stand as a whole. Perfection is wholeness. In our perfection there is a permanent element of repentance. The final symphony of praise has a deep bass of penitence. God may forgive us, but we do not forgive ourselves. It is always a Saviour, and not merely an Ideal, that we confess. Repentance belongs to our abiding in Christ, and so to any true holiness." (Forsyth, Christian Perfection, 34-36)
Another option is what Paul himself describes in Romans 6:13, that we ought to "offer" ourselves to God as those brought from death to life. "Offering" is a word that speaks to a continual pattern of death and resurrection in Christ. As Christ died and rose, in the same way, his body, the church, doesn't just strive for improvement on its own strength, but grows by continuous dying and rising. And baptism can continually speak to us about this as well. Baptism reminds us that we are no longer in the kingdom of death. We are no longer slaves. We have crossed over.
Romans 5 describes the condemnation of death as an 'Egypt.' Paul writes: "The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation." (Rom. 5:16) The word 'condemnation' expresses a verdict, a stable expression of identity. Later, Paul writes, "...by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man..." (Rom. 5:17) Death 'reigns' in a type of kingdom of death. Later, Paul writes: "...just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Rom. 5:21). This is all the description of two different kingdoms, spheres, dominions, domains, world orders, orbits. Fleming Rutledge writes:
"The New Testament cosmology, most clearly displayed in Paul's letters but present to a greater or lesser degree in the Gospels and the other epistles as well, presents us not with two ways of life, but with two kingdoms - two spheres of power." (Rutledge, 546)
'Egypt' is a world order that gathers up a lot of symbolism in the Bible. 'Egypt' does not let Israel worship. 'Egypt' subverts the God of Israel and boasts against his power. Israel's identity is stomped out and systematically removed. Benjamin Skinner describes a tragic structural dynamic of slavery in Haiti in which rural families give their children to people from the city who, under the guise of benevolence, say they will give the children a better education, but instead turn them into slaves. He describes the enslaving process as becoming "zombified," assumed to have no will of their own, and entirely under the control of the malevolence of the slavemaster who has given the child a "second life." (A Crime So Monstrous, 38) 'Egypt' describes the world of the First Adam, a world under the power of death. We are 'zombified,' slaves to its whims and powers. Under it, we are dead.
When Paul moves from talking about the reign of death in Romans 5 to talking about baptism in Romans 6, he is telling us that baptism is a new crossing of the Red Sea. It is our exodus from the old regime of "zombified" death to the new regime of life in Christ. Christ's new kingdom is a new world. Leithart describes this:
"...Jesus died to form a people, the church, his body and bride. He died to preserve his new temple movement; his death was a day of atonement where he bore the liabilities and punishments of Israel to give them a new past and a new future. His own sacrifice was part of his ordination, and he rose again to preside as an immortal high priest qualified not by flesh but by the power of indestructible resurrection life. Jesus brought forgiveness because his death founded a forgiven people-temple where forgiveness continues to be freely offered: a temple where the single bath of baptism purifies and consecrates; where confession of sins without sacrifice cleanses from all unrighteousness; where the word of absolution is spoken with all the authority of the Son of God; where Jews and Gentiles, male and female, slave and free are invited to share a common sacrificial meal, eating Jesus' body and drinking his blood for the remission of sins. Salvation breaks into the world because God removes the veil, takes his gifts of word, bread and rod out of the treasure chest of the ark and hands them over to everyone everywhere who will receive them. Forgiveness comes to historical reality because by his death and resurrection Jesus establishes these simpler, fewer and above all more effective rites to unite us to God and one another." (Delivered, 173)
This is all a picture of what we would call the kingdom, sphere, dominion, domain, world order, orbit of the reign of life. Its foundation, as Leithart articulates, is that Jesus himself is the realm. He is the sanctuary, the temple, the new Eden, the high priest. Jesus' death is the great crossing of the Red Sea, the justifying death whose resurrection brings God's great verdict. Our baptisms are our participation in this great exodus. They are streams, tributaries that wash us into the great cleansing flood of Jesus' death and resurrection. Jesus' death operates through baptism. We are baptized into Jesus' death. (Rom. 6:3)
Baptism is a death to the former reign of sin and death. It is a 'death' to death. Paul makes an obscure reference in 1 Corinthians 15:29 about the "baptism of the dead." If Paul is talking about baptizing corpses or people being baptized on behalf of corpses, we don't have much to say about it. Perhaps this was just a strange first century practice in the Corinthian church. But if all people are dead in sins and trespasses, aren't all baptisms for the dead? The early church father John Chrysostom had a rite of baptism which included a confession of faith in the resurrection:
"I believe in the resurrection of the dead."
In response, the one pursuing baptism is told:
"...with a view to this art thou baptized, the resurrection of thy dead body, believing that it no longer remains dead." (quoted in Leithart, The Baptized Body, 43)
We all come to baptism dead because we hope there to participate in Jesus' resurrection. Paul writes:
"For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin - because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace." (Rom. 6:5-10)
Can we lean into what is said here? Leithart writes:
"Though it is clear from the rest of the New Testament that believers continue to commit sins (e.g., 1 John 1), the life of the justified is not properly summed up as simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously righteous and a sinner). The justified are dead to sin, justified from sin in their baptismal death, and are to conform their self-conception to what baptism declares about them." (Delivered, 349)
In other words, we are not 'sinners' anymore. What can this possibly mean, as great saints like Teresa of Avila become even more aware of their sin the closer they get to divine majesty?
We have several options here. One is P.T. Forsyth's. He writes about the question that will be put to us at the last:
"It will not be, How many are your sins and how many your sacrifices? but, On which side have you stood and striven, under which King have you served or died? A man may abide in the many-mansioned, myriad-minded Christ, even if the robber sometimes break into his room, or if he go out and lose his way in a fog. You stay in a house, or in a town, which all the same you occasionally leave for good or for ill. The question is, What is your home to which your heart returns, either in repentance or in joy? Where is your heart? What is the bent of your will on the whole, the direction and service of your total life? It is not a question settled in a quantitative way by inquiry as to the occupation of every moment. God judges by totals, by unities not units, by wholes and souls, not sections. What is the dominant and advancing spirit of your life, the total allegiance of your person? Beethoven was not troubled when a performer struck a wrong note, but he was angry when he failed with the spirit and idea of the piece. So with the Great Judge and Artist of life. He is not a schoolmaster but a critic; and a critic of the great sort, who works by sympathy, insight, large ranges, and results on the whole. Perfection is not sinlessness, but the loyalty of the soul by faith to Christ when all is said and done. The final judgment is not whether we have at every moment stood, but whether having done all we stand - stand at the end, stand as a whole. Perfection is wholeness. In our perfection there is a permanent element of repentance. The final symphony of praise has a deep bass of penitence. God may forgive us, but we do not forgive ourselves. It is always a Saviour, and not merely an Ideal, that we confess. Repentance belongs to our abiding in Christ, and so to any true holiness." (Forsyth, Christian Perfection, 34-36)
Another option is what Paul himself describes in Romans 6:13, that we ought to "offer" ourselves to God as those brought from death to life. "Offering" is a word that speaks to a continual pattern of death and resurrection in Christ. As Christ died and rose, in the same way, his body, the church, doesn't just strive for improvement on its own strength, but grows by continuous dying and rising. And baptism can continually speak to us about this as well. Baptism reminds us that we are no longer in the kingdom of death. We are no longer slaves. We have crossed over.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
Lent 2019: Saturday, March 30 - The New Adam
When Adam and Eve sin, they are sent into exile away from the Garden of Eden. As they exit, cherubim with flaming swords guard the land of Eden so that no one will be able to enter and eat from the tree of life. Over-arching the whole story of the Bible, we see that this is an expression of God's wrath which will ultimately serve the purpose of his love. He sends Adam and Eve away the same way that he sends Israel into exile in Babylon - return in resurrection to their land can happen once they have died the death of exile.
The curse of disobedience is death. Adam and Eve will die. Death marks the punishment. Death also marks the terms of re-entry into God's presence and Eden. Leithart writes:
"Yahweh stationed cherubim at the gate of the garden to guard against every attempt at reentry. From Adam on, if anyone wanted to enter the presence of God, he would have to pass through the sword and fire of the cherubim. No man could return to feast in the presence of God unless he first died. Yahweh performed the first sacrifice by providing animal skins for Adam and Eve, and from that point on no one could approach God's presence unless he were clothed in an animal. He could return to life, feasting and the presence of God only by passing through death." (Delivered, 77)
Adam journeys from Eden outside, and the entrance back in is barred. The difference expressed in this geography is great. Adam was under rules of "taste not touch not" to prepare him for mature kingship. His destiny, along with Eve, is a priestly rule in creation, offering the inherent, latent, and as-yet-uncovered goodness of creation back to God. (Gen. 1:27-30) When he prematurely eats the fruit, he is expressing impatience with his own vulnerability. The serpent, in lifting up the truth that eating the fruit makes one like God, (Gen. 3:22), downplays (and outright denies) the other truth that Adam will die. Adam, in fleeing his created vulnerability, falls into an even worse vulnerability to death. Outside the gates of Eden, everything is subject to this vulnerability. Adam is no longer a ruler-in-training, but a slave.
Paul describes how the judgment and verdict on Adam is death and how the power of death then delivers all creation to a slavery under the dominion of death. This is what Paul means by 'condemnation' in Romans 5.
Whereas Adam's journey is from Eden out, Jesus' journey is from outside Eden back in. He crosses over from the world of death back into Eden. He is uniquely able to do this because he is God's Son. He always lives by the Spirit. Jesus' flesh is created by the Spirit, and in the flesh he lives by the Spirit. He is a heavenly man who has entered fully into a humanity that is in opposition to God, but he does not make common cause with humanity in its opposition to God. Come from Eden, he creates Eden everywhere he goes. But unless he dies, this is no different than Torah, because the world is still under the power of death, and still lives by flesh. His crucifixion is a submitting of his own flesh to the fiery swords of the cherubim guarding Eden. Presenting himself as the representative of a humanity enslaved to sin and death, Jesus breaks the curse on all humanity. The veil is torn. Resurrection is a re-presentation of the new humanity that undoes the former order. In Jesus, Adam is no longer a slave, but is a ruler again.
Paul goes on to describe how the judgment and verdict on Jesus is resurrected life and how the power of life then delivers all creation to a new dominion of life in the Spirit. This is what Paul means by 'justification' in Romans 5.
Debates about what justification means reflect some of the same difficulties I talked about in my post about "Recapitulation: a (Lengthy) Interlude." The atonement motifs all need each other. Motifs like 'substitution' specialize in the forgiven guilt of the individual sinner, but when abstracted from its natural soil in the Scripture, it can over-emphasize God's justice without adequately accounting for his love. Likewise, justification can be seen to reflect a forensic cleaning of the individual through that individual's own faith but which then consistently reduces Scriptural motifs about the corporate 'body' of Christ back to the looming, solitary individual. Motifs like 'apocalyptic war' specialize in God's victory over powers of evil in the world quite apart from the individual's thoughts and feelings, but when abstracted away from the Scripture, it can over-emphasize God's love (universal salvation) without adequately accounting for his justice. Likewise, justification is seen as universal, but it reduces this to say that 'everyone is saved' without adequately accounting for the biblical themes of baptism, faith, and entrance into the church. I think the way forward is in seeing that the Scripture accounts for both motifs and accounts equally for God's love and justice. Becoming more biblical will entail seeing justification as what happens to Jesus primarily, and secondarily to sinners and to the world. Trying to grasp the universality of justification as something for "all people" (Rom. 5:18) will be like trying to grasp a cloud of smoke when we don't stay rooted in the particularity of Jesus' completed work.
We will see more in future posts about how the 'universal' quality of justification is rooted in the 'particularity' of Jesus. We'll find that the objective, world-changing quality of what Jesus has done will entail looking at church a different way - not as merely a collection of 'saved' people, but as a completely new way of living in the world. When church is presented primarily as just a collection of people, we are falling into too much of a religious/secular divide: you have your grocery store for your food, your gym for staying in shape, your school for training in your chosen career field, and your church for salvation and knowing God. But church isn't just a time and a place to think about religious things. Church is a new people who think differently about everything. We should look at church not merely sociologically - the way we see it, but theologically - the way Jesus sees it. Church is new creation - new Adams and Eves who have re-entered Eden, living by the Spirit because they are gathered out of the fleshly dynamics of the world, offering the inherent, latent, and as-yet-uncovered goodness of creation back to God. It can only be this as we see the world gathered around Jesus. He is the key, start to finish, the Alpha and the Omega (Rev. 1:8). To put it another way, the world needs to become church.
The curse of disobedience is death. Adam and Eve will die. Death marks the punishment. Death also marks the terms of re-entry into God's presence and Eden. Leithart writes:
"Yahweh stationed cherubim at the gate of the garden to guard against every attempt at reentry. From Adam on, if anyone wanted to enter the presence of God, he would have to pass through the sword and fire of the cherubim. No man could return to feast in the presence of God unless he first died. Yahweh performed the first sacrifice by providing animal skins for Adam and Eve, and from that point on no one could approach God's presence unless he were clothed in an animal. He could return to life, feasting and the presence of God only by passing through death." (Delivered, 77)
Adam journeys from Eden outside, and the entrance back in is barred. The difference expressed in this geography is great. Adam was under rules of "taste not touch not" to prepare him for mature kingship. His destiny, along with Eve, is a priestly rule in creation, offering the inherent, latent, and as-yet-uncovered goodness of creation back to God. (Gen. 1:27-30) When he prematurely eats the fruit, he is expressing impatience with his own vulnerability. The serpent, in lifting up the truth that eating the fruit makes one like God, (Gen. 3:22), downplays (and outright denies) the other truth that Adam will die. Adam, in fleeing his created vulnerability, falls into an even worse vulnerability to death. Outside the gates of Eden, everything is subject to this vulnerability. Adam is no longer a ruler-in-training, but a slave.
Paul describes how the judgment and verdict on Adam is death and how the power of death then delivers all creation to a slavery under the dominion of death. This is what Paul means by 'condemnation' in Romans 5.
Whereas Adam's journey is from Eden out, Jesus' journey is from outside Eden back in. He crosses over from the world of death back into Eden. He is uniquely able to do this because he is God's Son. He always lives by the Spirit. Jesus' flesh is created by the Spirit, and in the flesh he lives by the Spirit. He is a heavenly man who has entered fully into a humanity that is in opposition to God, but he does not make common cause with humanity in its opposition to God. Come from Eden, he creates Eden everywhere he goes. But unless he dies, this is no different than Torah, because the world is still under the power of death, and still lives by flesh. His crucifixion is a submitting of his own flesh to the fiery swords of the cherubim guarding Eden. Presenting himself as the representative of a humanity enslaved to sin and death, Jesus breaks the curse on all humanity. The veil is torn. Resurrection is a re-presentation of the new humanity that undoes the former order. In Jesus, Adam is no longer a slave, but is a ruler again.
Paul goes on to describe how the judgment and verdict on Jesus is resurrected life and how the power of life then delivers all creation to a new dominion of life in the Spirit. This is what Paul means by 'justification' in Romans 5.
Debates about what justification means reflect some of the same difficulties I talked about in my post about "Recapitulation: a (Lengthy) Interlude." The atonement motifs all need each other. Motifs like 'substitution' specialize in the forgiven guilt of the individual sinner, but when abstracted from its natural soil in the Scripture, it can over-emphasize God's justice without adequately accounting for his love. Likewise, justification can be seen to reflect a forensic cleaning of the individual through that individual's own faith but which then consistently reduces Scriptural motifs about the corporate 'body' of Christ back to the looming, solitary individual. Motifs like 'apocalyptic war' specialize in God's victory over powers of evil in the world quite apart from the individual's thoughts and feelings, but when abstracted away from the Scripture, it can over-emphasize God's love (universal salvation) without adequately accounting for his justice. Likewise, justification is seen as universal, but it reduces this to say that 'everyone is saved' without adequately accounting for the biblical themes of baptism, faith, and entrance into the church. I think the way forward is in seeing that the Scripture accounts for both motifs and accounts equally for God's love and justice. Becoming more biblical will entail seeing justification as what happens to Jesus primarily, and secondarily to sinners and to the world. Trying to grasp the universality of justification as something for "all people" (Rom. 5:18) will be like trying to grasp a cloud of smoke when we don't stay rooted in the particularity of Jesus' completed work.
We will see more in future posts about how the 'universal' quality of justification is rooted in the 'particularity' of Jesus. We'll find that the objective, world-changing quality of what Jesus has done will entail looking at church a different way - not as merely a collection of 'saved' people, but as a completely new way of living in the world. When church is presented primarily as just a collection of people, we are falling into too much of a religious/secular divide: you have your grocery store for your food, your gym for staying in shape, your school for training in your chosen career field, and your church for salvation and knowing God. But church isn't just a time and a place to think about religious things. Church is a new people who think differently about everything. We should look at church not merely sociologically - the way we see it, but theologically - the way Jesus sees it. Church is new creation - new Adams and Eves who have re-entered Eden, living by the Spirit because they are gathered out of the fleshly dynamics of the world, offering the inherent, latent, and as-yet-uncovered goodness of creation back to God. It can only be this as we see the world gathered around Jesus. He is the key, start to finish, the Alpha and the Omega (Rev. 1:8). To put it another way, the world needs to become church.
Lent 2019: Friday, March 29 - Abraham's Righteousness
In Romans 4:13-14, Paul writes:
"It was not through the law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith. For if those who depend on the law are heirs, faith means nothing and the promise is worthless, because the law brings wrath. And where there is no law there is no transgression."
Paul is trying to clarify for his Roman readers the proper role that Torah plays in God's divine economy. For Paul, Torah's role has been supplanted by Christ. Torah could never put flesh to death. As Leithart writes: "(Torah) enables communion with Yahweh and promotes peace among nations under the conditions of flesh." (Delivered, 104) Ultimately, the promise given to Abram about nations being blessed can't be fulfilled by Torah. It can't break the curse of Babel which has divided the nations. Many Jews in Paul's day, intimidated by Rome, wanted to lean harder into differentiating themselves from the Gentile nations. Paul's reaction to this is similar to Jesus': flesh has overwhelmed the law and kept the promise from being fulfilled. Torah had become an obstacle.
Furthermore, the justice Torah aimed at all along has now been accomplished in Christ. Paul doesn't really talk about Christ until the end of Romans 4. For the most part, he talks about Abraham. Paul introduces Abraham here to reorient his readers: the promise to Abraham, and God's Torah, though flowing in the same direction, hit a road block because Torah got caught in the weeds of sinful flesh. Jesus has broken through so that blessing can flow to Israel and to the nations. Jesus fulfills the promise to Abraham.
Early in the chapter, Paul references Genesis 15:6 where we're told that Abraham believed God's promise. Because he believed God, he was credited with righteousness. (Rom. 4:9) Paul's main point is that Abraham was credited with righteousness and given promises before he was ever circumcised. This order is significant for Paul. Because circumcision comes later, the promise must stay primary. Circumcision, or on any of the Torah rituals that came after the promise can't become the boundary-markers for who is in the people of God. Abraham's righteousness precedes Torah.
We need to look into the idea of being "credited" with righteousness. Many people have a credit card. Credit cards are certainly different than what is being described here. Money is expected to be paid back. It's hard to image how this could be the case with righteousness. But they are similar in one sense. Even if all my money runs out and my bank account is zero, I still have a credited account. Furthermore, (leaving aside for a moment the question of whether it would be wise or not) my bank might give me opportunities to increase that line of credit at a future point. This is our question: Is Abraham's righteousness for that moment in time, or is it something being held over for later? It all depends on what righteousness is. What is this righteousness?
If Abraham's credited righteousness is forgiveness of sins, it would be something given to him in the moment. But any look back at Genesis 12-25 would suggest that forgiveness of sins is not primarily what Abraham is worried about. Of course he is a sinner, but his primary worry is how God's promise will go forward if he and Sarah cannot have children. He is worried, but he believes. He believes, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that God can do it. What is the evidence? As we've recounted in the "Circumcision" post, the evidence to the contrary is Abraham and Sarah's advanced age, and apart from her age, Sarah's barrenness. Despite this evidence, Abraham believes. Paul writes: "(Abraham) did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. This is why "it was credited to him as righteousness." (Rom. 4:20-22). This 'righteousness' still could certainly still include forgiveness of sins, but primarily it has to do with God's promise of descendants.
But Paul goes on to say this:
"The words "it was credited to him" were written not for him alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness - for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification." (Rom. 4:23-25)
We see now what Paul has been building up toward. "Righteousness" for both Abraham and for us has to do with believing God can bring life from the dead. And of course, this is Abraham's predicament. Paul writes: "Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead - since he was about a hundred years old - and that Sarah's womb was also dead." (Rom. 4:19). His body, Sarah's womb - both are dead with regard to what they needed for God's promise. They need to hope for life from the dead.
That Abraham's righteousness is 'credited' to him may not mean that it was given to him in the moment, but it served as more of a promissory note when what he hopes for finally comes. In a sense that is Isaac because Isaac is the promised child. As Leithart writes, "Isaac's birth is a type of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead womb of the earth, from the dead womb of humanity and the dead womb of Sarah-Israel." (Delivered, 344). But of course this is not only what Abraham hopes for. The promise can't go forth without Isaac. But Isaac is not where it ends. The promise is that Abram will be the father of many nations. And when Jesus rises, he fulfills Israel's blessing to the nations. He brings justice by creating a new just people. This is ultimately what Abraham looks to. Believing ultimately that God would bring life from the dead curses - this is Abraham's righteousness. It is ours as well.
We can find more reinforcement for this in what Paul says in Romans 4:6:
"However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness."
If 'ungodly' refers to Abraham, we are puzzled, because the Abraham narrative is not primarily about his sin. But if the 'ungodly' refers to Gentile nations, it makes more sense. God makes promises to Abraham about Gentile nations. Abraham believes the promises. Peter Leithart writes:
"It is plausible, if not unquestionable, that Abraham's faith in the "justification of the ungodly" is not confidence in his own standing before God but confidence in the promise that Yahweh would issue a verdict at some point in the future to deliver ungodly Gentiles from the curses of Eden and Babel...The specific promise in Genesis 15 is that Abraham's seed will be like the stars, and that is extended to Genesis 17:5 with the promise that Paul quotes in Romans 4:17: that Abraham would be the "father of many nations." This is what Abraham believed when he trusted "him who justifies the ungodly," and that means that "justification of the ungodly" is equivalent to "God extending the Abrahamic promise to the nations." (Delivered, 342)
Abraham is a model for us in this way. Abraham is credited with righteousness not because he believed God would credit him with righteousness, but because Abraham believed in a promise about future resurrection. The content of the righteous, justified person's faith is resurrection. Jesus' resurrection justifies because it is a verdict that Jesus is in the right and because it delivers Jesus from the powers of sin, death, and the devil. (Leithart calls it a 'deliverdict') And as Paul writes in verse 25, this has ramifications for us too: "(Jesus) was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification." Justification then is a good verdict about our sinful flesh being put to death, and also the hopeful expectation that we have been delivered into resurrected life in the Spirit. Justified people believe that dead things will come to life because Jesus came back to life. As we trust that God has issued the delivering verdict in Jesus, that same delivering verdict comes to us.
Abram trusted that a son would rise from his and Sarah's 'dead' bodies and that this would lead to the "justification of the ungodly," the fulfillment of God's promise to bring blessing to the nations through him. From our vantage point, we trust that Jesus' resurrection brings blessing to Israel, and from Israel to the nations, as one new people live in constant fellowship with their risen Lord. Our vantage points are different. Abram looked forward to Jesus, while we look back. Abram had very dim hints of what was to come while we have four separate gospel accounts of Jesus' life. A lot is different. Yet we still look out at this world, and we look within ourselves, and we wonder how on earth God will set everything right. Despite the perceived obstacles, we trust God. And in this regard, we have so much to learn from Abraham's faith, because he did the same thing.
"It was not through the law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith. For if those who depend on the law are heirs, faith means nothing and the promise is worthless, because the law brings wrath. And where there is no law there is no transgression."
Paul is trying to clarify for his Roman readers the proper role that Torah plays in God's divine economy. For Paul, Torah's role has been supplanted by Christ. Torah could never put flesh to death. As Leithart writes: "(Torah) enables communion with Yahweh and promotes peace among nations under the conditions of flesh." (Delivered, 104) Ultimately, the promise given to Abram about nations being blessed can't be fulfilled by Torah. It can't break the curse of Babel which has divided the nations. Many Jews in Paul's day, intimidated by Rome, wanted to lean harder into differentiating themselves from the Gentile nations. Paul's reaction to this is similar to Jesus': flesh has overwhelmed the law and kept the promise from being fulfilled. Torah had become an obstacle.
Furthermore, the justice Torah aimed at all along has now been accomplished in Christ. Paul doesn't really talk about Christ until the end of Romans 4. For the most part, he talks about Abraham. Paul introduces Abraham here to reorient his readers: the promise to Abraham, and God's Torah, though flowing in the same direction, hit a road block because Torah got caught in the weeds of sinful flesh. Jesus has broken through so that blessing can flow to Israel and to the nations. Jesus fulfills the promise to Abraham.
Early in the chapter, Paul references Genesis 15:6 where we're told that Abraham believed God's promise. Because he believed God, he was credited with righteousness. (Rom. 4:9) Paul's main point is that Abraham was credited with righteousness and given promises before he was ever circumcised. This order is significant for Paul. Because circumcision comes later, the promise must stay primary. Circumcision, or on any of the Torah rituals that came after the promise can't become the boundary-markers for who is in the people of God. Abraham's righteousness precedes Torah.
We need to look into the idea of being "credited" with righteousness. Many people have a credit card. Credit cards are certainly different than what is being described here. Money is expected to be paid back. It's hard to image how this could be the case with righteousness. But they are similar in one sense. Even if all my money runs out and my bank account is zero, I still have a credited account. Furthermore, (leaving aside for a moment the question of whether it would be wise or not) my bank might give me opportunities to increase that line of credit at a future point. This is our question: Is Abraham's righteousness for that moment in time, or is it something being held over for later? It all depends on what righteousness is. What is this righteousness?
If Abraham's credited righteousness is forgiveness of sins, it would be something given to him in the moment. But any look back at Genesis 12-25 would suggest that forgiveness of sins is not primarily what Abraham is worried about. Of course he is a sinner, but his primary worry is how God's promise will go forward if he and Sarah cannot have children. He is worried, but he believes. He believes, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that God can do it. What is the evidence? As we've recounted in the "Circumcision" post, the evidence to the contrary is Abraham and Sarah's advanced age, and apart from her age, Sarah's barrenness. Despite this evidence, Abraham believes. Paul writes: "(Abraham) did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. This is why "it was credited to him as righteousness." (Rom. 4:20-22). This 'righteousness' still could certainly still include forgiveness of sins, but primarily it has to do with God's promise of descendants.
But Paul goes on to say this:
"The words "it was credited to him" were written not for him alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness - for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification." (Rom. 4:23-25)
We see now what Paul has been building up toward. "Righteousness" for both Abraham and for us has to do with believing God can bring life from the dead. And of course, this is Abraham's predicament. Paul writes: "Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead - since he was about a hundred years old - and that Sarah's womb was also dead." (Rom. 4:19). His body, Sarah's womb - both are dead with regard to what they needed for God's promise. They need to hope for life from the dead.
That Abraham's righteousness is 'credited' to him may not mean that it was given to him in the moment, but it served as more of a promissory note when what he hopes for finally comes. In a sense that is Isaac because Isaac is the promised child. As Leithart writes, "Isaac's birth is a type of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead womb of the earth, from the dead womb of humanity and the dead womb of Sarah-Israel." (Delivered, 344). But of course this is not only what Abraham hopes for. The promise can't go forth without Isaac. But Isaac is not where it ends. The promise is that Abram will be the father of many nations. And when Jesus rises, he fulfills Israel's blessing to the nations. He brings justice by creating a new just people. This is ultimately what Abraham looks to. Believing ultimately that God would bring life from the dead curses - this is Abraham's righteousness. It is ours as well.
We can find more reinforcement for this in what Paul says in Romans 4:6:
"However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness."
If 'ungodly' refers to Abraham, we are puzzled, because the Abraham narrative is not primarily about his sin. But if the 'ungodly' refers to Gentile nations, it makes more sense. God makes promises to Abraham about Gentile nations. Abraham believes the promises. Peter Leithart writes:
"It is plausible, if not unquestionable, that Abraham's faith in the "justification of the ungodly" is not confidence in his own standing before God but confidence in the promise that Yahweh would issue a verdict at some point in the future to deliver ungodly Gentiles from the curses of Eden and Babel...The specific promise in Genesis 15 is that Abraham's seed will be like the stars, and that is extended to Genesis 17:5 with the promise that Paul quotes in Romans 4:17: that Abraham would be the "father of many nations." This is what Abraham believed when he trusted "him who justifies the ungodly," and that means that "justification of the ungodly" is equivalent to "God extending the Abrahamic promise to the nations." (Delivered, 342)
Abraham is a model for us in this way. Abraham is credited with righteousness not because he believed God would credit him with righteousness, but because Abraham believed in a promise about future resurrection. The content of the righteous, justified person's faith is resurrection. Jesus' resurrection justifies because it is a verdict that Jesus is in the right and because it delivers Jesus from the powers of sin, death, and the devil. (Leithart calls it a 'deliverdict') And as Paul writes in verse 25, this has ramifications for us too: "(Jesus) was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification." Justification then is a good verdict about our sinful flesh being put to death, and also the hopeful expectation that we have been delivered into resurrected life in the Spirit. Justified people believe that dead things will come to life because Jesus came back to life. As we trust that God has issued the delivering verdict in Jesus, that same delivering verdict comes to us.
Abram trusted that a son would rise from his and Sarah's 'dead' bodies and that this would lead to the "justification of the ungodly," the fulfillment of God's promise to bring blessing to the nations through him. From our vantage point, we trust that Jesus' resurrection brings blessing to Israel, and from Israel to the nations, as one new people live in constant fellowship with their risen Lord. Our vantage points are different. Abram looked forward to Jesus, while we look back. Abram had very dim hints of what was to come while we have four separate gospel accounts of Jesus' life. A lot is different. Yet we still look out at this world, and we look within ourselves, and we wonder how on earth God will set everything right. Despite the perceived obstacles, we trust God. And in this regard, we have so much to learn from Abraham's faith, because he did the same thing.
Saturday, April 6, 2019
Lent 2019: Thursday, March 28 - Coverings
The holy of holies is the throne room for the Lord. There is only one piece of furniture in this room: the ark of the covenant. Exodus 25:17-22 describes the cover for the ark:
"Make an atonement cover of pure gold - two and a half cubits long and a cubit and a half wide. And make two cherubim out of hammered gold at the ends of the cover. Make one cherub on one end and the second cherub on the other; make the cherubim of one piece with the cover, at the two ends. The cherubim are to have their wings spread upward, overshadowing the cover with them. The cherubim are to face each other, looking toward the cover. Place the cover on top of the ark and put in the ark the tablets of the covenant law that I will give you. There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of the covenant law, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites."
As we've noted in the post, "Slip Past the Cherubim," the cherubim remind us of Eden. Cherubim guarding the holy of holies reminds the priest that God will one day open Eden again. The furniture is also a picture of the whole cosmos. (A House for My Name, 83) The ark is God's footstool. It corresponds to the earth. The cherubim throne is heaven. The cover is the firmament, the "vault" or "sky" of Genesis 1:8, stretching over the earth.
This covering already seems to take on more weight than being merely the cap for the ark of the covenant. Once a year, God did away with all Israel's sins on the Day of Atonement, or the Day of Coverings. The atonement cover plays a significant role in the events of this day. Aaron is to slaughter a bull to make atonement for himself and his own family. He sprinkles the blood on the atonement cover. He then slaughters a goat, sprinkling its blood on the atonement cover as well. It is an atonement made for the Most Holy Place itself, a type of reinvestiture, but it is also an atonement for "himself, his household, and the whole community of Israel." (Lev. 16:17) The priest dies and rises. The whole community dies and rises. It is judgment day. It is also resurrection day.
God shows that he is not lenient on the Day of Atonement. Throughout the centuries with Israel, he is accused of being lenient. Habakkuk complains: "Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?" (Habakkuk 1:3) Paul mentions the Lord's "forbearance" in which he had left sins unpunished. (Rom. 3:25) Peter Leithart writes:
"Some crimes make the land unclean (Deuteronomy 21:1-9), and the defiled land cries out for the death of the criminal, as Abel's blood cries out against Cain (Genesis 4:10). So also, the defiled altar, which is made of earth, cries out for the death of the sinner and has to be sprinkled with blood." (A House for My Name, 91)
There are impurities that can only be dealt with on the Day of Atonement, when they are brought all the way into God's presence, all the way into his throne room. This is where God shows that he is just. And this is quite hidden. Only the high priest gets to see it. And even he is instructed to light up such a cloud of incense that he can't see the atonement cover, lest he die. (Lev. 16:13)
We don't see what is truly going on here until Jesus dies on the cross. Paul describes Jesus' cross as a "sacrifice of atonement" in Romans 3:25. Paul seems to be describing the place of atonement, the atonement cover. Jesus is the covering where the blood is sprinkled and displayed before the Lord's throne and atones for the "whole community." The death of the goat on all those Days of Atonement was only prefiguring the ultimate Day of Atonement when all of Israel's sins are dragged out and placed upon Jesus.
This does not mean God is mad at Jesus. God is in Jesus bearing this sin. In fact, God has been bearing Israel's sin all along. In Exodus 34, God says: "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin." (Ex. 34:6-7) The word expressed here as 'forgiving' can also be rendered 'lifting', 'carrying,' 'taking,' or 'bearing.' In many sin offerings, priests would bear the guilt of the people. But let's face it: as Habakkuk knew very well, sin remained. On the Day of Atonement, the sanctuary itself bore the guilt. God bears sin, and has been bearing it all along. On the Day of Atonement, God atones. On judgment day, God is judged.
In the last post I mentioned that from one perspective, the story of Jesus is a story of a criminal who is tried and executed. But what Paul is saying in 3:25 is that a cross on Golgotha is the new place of atonement. It is the new holy of holies. The change of geography signifies everything. The temple was a picture of the whole world: the Lord in his throne room, the priests in the holy place, Israel in the courtyards, and outside, all the mass of fleshly humanity - the Gentile nations. The cross completes God's journey out of his house. He stepped out from the holy of holies, walked amongst humanity in the flesh, and re-established his temple and his new most holy place outside the walls of the temple. Leithart calls this a "seismic shift." The sanctuary is now inside out. Not only all of Israel's sin, but all the world's sins are dragged out and placed on Jesus on this day of Atonement.
In the Letter to the Hebrews, the author writes that it used to be that the high priest would bring the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place, and would reserve their unclean carcasses for someplace outside the camp. (Hebrews 13:11-12). Now that the world's atonement has been made in the unclean nether-regions, what use is there for a holy of holies anymore? What was so holy that Aaron couldn't even look at it is now completely public, on a cross at Golgotha, before the eyes of Jew and Gentile alike. The dividing walls are down. What use is there left for priest, temple veil, and all the rituals? In Jesus, justice is achieved in the form of a new community of Jews and Gentiles, a new humanity who come charging into Eden. As Leithart puts it, "what has been whispered in secret has been shouted from the hilltop of Calvary." (Delivered, 201)
If the hidden atonement deep within the sanctuary was for the "whole community of Israel," how much more is the public atonement of Christ at the inside-out sanctuary - a cross "outside the city gate" - for the whole world?
We mentioned at the start that the most holy place has one piece of furniture: an ark at the base with cherubim up above, and in the middle, the atonement cover. We also mentioned that this is a picture of the cosmos, with the cherubim representing the heavens above, the ark representing the earth beneath, and the atonement cover representing the "sky" wrapped around the earth. Since Jesus is the true atonement cover, Jesus is the true firmament stretching over the earth, "the one mediator between heaven and earth." (Delivered, 340) Jesus' work has a universal scope and a cosmic significance. Nothing is the same.
In Romans 3:21-26, Paul writes:
"But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in (or, 'through the faithfulness of') Jesus to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood - to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished - he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus."
Ultimately, we see here that Jesus establishes justice, and that it is a good thing. Flesh has been forbidden from Eden under the punishment of death. Now a death has happened, and Eden is here. Jesus, the representative of Israel and also of the world, becomes the sacrifice of the Day of Atonement, and enters into Eden on our behalf. Eden is with him. Justice is with him. He is the breaker of curses, who founds a new community beyond the scope of sinful flesh and death. He is just and the new community he forms is itself justice.
If I think only individually about my own sin, justice is a bad thing, and I want God to either dismiss it or take all the costs of it. But if I think about justice the way Habakkuk did, as something to yearn for, then we can see the way Jesus' ministry perfectly sums up the Day of Atonement. God showed he was just and he dealt with sin there once and for all for the whole people. And so it is with Jesus and the sin of the whole world. It was all exposed and punished. But Jesus also sums up the veiled secret of the Day of Atonement and it's been hard to keep it quiet ever since:
God bears the sin. All of it.
"Make an atonement cover of pure gold - two and a half cubits long and a cubit and a half wide. And make two cherubim out of hammered gold at the ends of the cover. Make one cherub on one end and the second cherub on the other; make the cherubim of one piece with the cover, at the two ends. The cherubim are to have their wings spread upward, overshadowing the cover with them. The cherubim are to face each other, looking toward the cover. Place the cover on top of the ark and put in the ark the tablets of the covenant law that I will give you. There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of the covenant law, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites."
As we've noted in the post, "Slip Past the Cherubim," the cherubim remind us of Eden. Cherubim guarding the holy of holies reminds the priest that God will one day open Eden again. The furniture is also a picture of the whole cosmos. (A House for My Name, 83) The ark is God's footstool. It corresponds to the earth. The cherubim throne is heaven. The cover is the firmament, the "vault" or "sky" of Genesis 1:8, stretching over the earth.
This covering already seems to take on more weight than being merely the cap for the ark of the covenant. Once a year, God did away with all Israel's sins on the Day of Atonement, or the Day of Coverings. The atonement cover plays a significant role in the events of this day. Aaron is to slaughter a bull to make atonement for himself and his own family. He sprinkles the blood on the atonement cover. He then slaughters a goat, sprinkling its blood on the atonement cover as well. It is an atonement made for the Most Holy Place itself, a type of reinvestiture, but it is also an atonement for "himself, his household, and the whole community of Israel." (Lev. 16:17) The priest dies and rises. The whole community dies and rises. It is judgment day. It is also resurrection day.
God shows that he is not lenient on the Day of Atonement. Throughout the centuries with Israel, he is accused of being lenient. Habakkuk complains: "Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?" (Habakkuk 1:3) Paul mentions the Lord's "forbearance" in which he had left sins unpunished. (Rom. 3:25) Peter Leithart writes:
"Some crimes make the land unclean (Deuteronomy 21:1-9), and the defiled land cries out for the death of the criminal, as Abel's blood cries out against Cain (Genesis 4:10). So also, the defiled altar, which is made of earth, cries out for the death of the sinner and has to be sprinkled with blood." (A House for My Name, 91)
There are impurities that can only be dealt with on the Day of Atonement, when they are brought all the way into God's presence, all the way into his throne room. This is where God shows that he is just. And this is quite hidden. Only the high priest gets to see it. And even he is instructed to light up such a cloud of incense that he can't see the atonement cover, lest he die. (Lev. 16:13)
We don't see what is truly going on here until Jesus dies on the cross. Paul describes Jesus' cross as a "sacrifice of atonement" in Romans 3:25. Paul seems to be describing the place of atonement, the atonement cover. Jesus is the covering where the blood is sprinkled and displayed before the Lord's throne and atones for the "whole community." The death of the goat on all those Days of Atonement was only prefiguring the ultimate Day of Atonement when all of Israel's sins are dragged out and placed upon Jesus.
This does not mean God is mad at Jesus. God is in Jesus bearing this sin. In fact, God has been bearing Israel's sin all along. In Exodus 34, God says: "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin." (Ex. 34:6-7) The word expressed here as 'forgiving' can also be rendered 'lifting', 'carrying,' 'taking,' or 'bearing.' In many sin offerings, priests would bear the guilt of the people. But let's face it: as Habakkuk knew very well, sin remained. On the Day of Atonement, the sanctuary itself bore the guilt. God bears sin, and has been bearing it all along. On the Day of Atonement, God atones. On judgment day, God is judged.
In the last post I mentioned that from one perspective, the story of Jesus is a story of a criminal who is tried and executed. But what Paul is saying in 3:25 is that a cross on Golgotha is the new place of atonement. It is the new holy of holies. The change of geography signifies everything. The temple was a picture of the whole world: the Lord in his throne room, the priests in the holy place, Israel in the courtyards, and outside, all the mass of fleshly humanity - the Gentile nations. The cross completes God's journey out of his house. He stepped out from the holy of holies, walked amongst humanity in the flesh, and re-established his temple and his new most holy place outside the walls of the temple. Leithart calls this a "seismic shift." The sanctuary is now inside out. Not only all of Israel's sin, but all the world's sins are dragged out and placed on Jesus on this day of Atonement.
In the Letter to the Hebrews, the author writes that it used to be that the high priest would bring the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place, and would reserve their unclean carcasses for someplace outside the camp. (Hebrews 13:11-12). Now that the world's atonement has been made in the unclean nether-regions, what use is there for a holy of holies anymore? What was so holy that Aaron couldn't even look at it is now completely public, on a cross at Golgotha, before the eyes of Jew and Gentile alike. The dividing walls are down. What use is there left for priest, temple veil, and all the rituals? In Jesus, justice is achieved in the form of a new community of Jews and Gentiles, a new humanity who come charging into Eden. As Leithart puts it, "what has been whispered in secret has been shouted from the hilltop of Calvary." (Delivered, 201)
If the hidden atonement deep within the sanctuary was for the "whole community of Israel," how much more is the public atonement of Christ at the inside-out sanctuary - a cross "outside the city gate" - for the whole world?
We mentioned at the start that the most holy place has one piece of furniture: an ark at the base with cherubim up above, and in the middle, the atonement cover. We also mentioned that this is a picture of the cosmos, with the cherubim representing the heavens above, the ark representing the earth beneath, and the atonement cover representing the "sky" wrapped around the earth. Since Jesus is the true atonement cover, Jesus is the true firmament stretching over the earth, "the one mediator between heaven and earth." (Delivered, 340) Jesus' work has a universal scope and a cosmic significance. Nothing is the same.
In Romans 3:21-26, Paul writes:
"But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in (or, 'through the faithfulness of') Jesus to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood - to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished - he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus."
Ultimately, we see here that Jesus establishes justice, and that it is a good thing. Flesh has been forbidden from Eden under the punishment of death. Now a death has happened, and Eden is here. Jesus, the representative of Israel and also of the world, becomes the sacrifice of the Day of Atonement, and enters into Eden on our behalf. Eden is with him. Justice is with him. He is the breaker of curses, who founds a new community beyond the scope of sinful flesh and death. He is just and the new community he forms is itself justice.
If I think only individually about my own sin, justice is a bad thing, and I want God to either dismiss it or take all the costs of it. But if I think about justice the way Habakkuk did, as something to yearn for, then we can see the way Jesus' ministry perfectly sums up the Day of Atonement. God showed he was just and he dealt with sin there once and for all for the whole people. And so it is with Jesus and the sin of the whole world. It was all exposed and punished. But Jesus also sums up the veiled secret of the Day of Atonement and it's been hard to keep it quiet ever since:
God bears the sin. All of it.
Friday, April 5, 2019
Lent 2019: Wednesday, March 27 - Why Wasn't That Enough?
If we recap the first eight posts, we can say this: when Adam and Eve sin, they exhibit a fleshly impatience for maturity. They are cut off from Eden, and the cost of re-entry is death. Death functions in the world as a power. Fear of death and the need to set up boundaries against it leads humanity to live by flesh - creating unjust structures of clean and unclean, pure and impure. In order to destroy flesh without bringing death, God enrolls Abraham in a project in flesh warfare. They are marked in the flesh by circumcision, and their tabernacles under Moses are a parody of the fleshly sacrifices of other societies. Where their sacrifices policed distance between gods and people and between have's and have-not's, God's sacrifices followed a logic of access. It wasn't "you aren't allowed in here," but rather, "you aren't allowed in here...until you've had your bath." It's about making a way for flesh to enter into the presence of God, and re-entering Eden. Ultimately, instead of being a parody, the project of Israel became more of a way of separating themselves from God than actually drawing near. In other words, they became just like what they were intended to parody.
We saw this in the first eight posts. After our (lengthy) interlude in post nine about atonement theories (how God makes us "at-one" through Jesus), we spent nine posts asking what it would look like if God came out from his throne room in the holy of holies in the temple and walked around among his people. In looking at Matthew's gospel, we found that Jesus recapitulates the whole story of Israel, all its leaders, all its prophets, all its sacrificial structure. He gathers it all up and brings it to fulfillment.
Now we ask why that wasn't enough? If Jesus' life so thoroughly followed the logic of being a new temple, such that religious habits of how hands were washed, how the sabbath was honored, who were acceptable dining companions were now being redefined around Jesus, why did it have to end in tragedy? Why did he have to die?
Peter Leithart depicts a process of increasing direct engagement between Jesus and his opposition:
"Jesus died because his purposes and program for Israel clashed with the agenda of the Jewish leaders at every crucial point. The Jewish leaders considered Jesus a transgressor of Torah, who not only failed to keep Torah here and there but who overturned Torah altogether. To Jewish eyes, Jesus was a Sabbath-breaker. He flouted purity regulations, eating at defiled tables. He went freely among compromised Jews and prostitutes. He distributed bread in the wilderness as if he were Yahweh leading a new exodus, but the multitude who ate together was a mixed multitude packed with polluted Gentiles. He spoke with Samaritans, even Samaritan women." (Delivered, 146)
Leithart goes on to say that Jesus did not only accidentally offend Pharisees but transgressed their boundaries on purpose:
"Jesus knew just where the pressure points were, and he courageously acted and spoke to provoke repentance, with the full realization that he would in fact provoke nothing but fury." (148)
These weren't just "breaches of etiquette." Jesus wasn't just being rude. His enacting of Torah and all that the levitical laws and the tabernacle and temple were for - all this went directly against the Pharisaical program such that only one could emerge victorious. Ben Meyer writes:
"The distinctions of clean and unclean and of righteous and sinners shaped and permeated the self-understanding of Judaism. To subvert these distinctions was...a challenge to the social order." (Meyer, quoted in Leithart, 149)
Leithart writes:
"If Jesus' way became the way of Israel, then all the hopes and plans of the Pharisees and scribes were doomed, because their plans and hopes depended on maintaining and tightening the taste-not-touch-nots of their (life)...If Jesus' way became Israel's way, then Israel as the Jewish leaders and teachers knew it would cease to exist. If Jesus was right, then the teachers and leaders of Israel must themselves have been transgressors of Torah. There was a stark choice: Torah or Jesus. For the Jewish leaders, it could not be both." (149)
My putting it this way may seem like only a historical incident and that I'm only retracing what led up to the scene of the crime. But who is at fault? Whose crime is it? Who is on trial? This is where the historical lead-up is so significant. The history is precisely where the divine plan is illuminated. People put a common criminal on trial and execute him. The gospels disclose that God was at work in the trial of this one man, and put the whole world on trial. Everything becomes very dense here as Jesus recapitulates the full sacrificial sequence that Torah prescribed and dies as Israel's representative substitute, even as he has lived as Israel's representative substitute. And in dying for Israel, he also dies for the world. For Israel is the representative of the world, and God's means for delivering it, as he had promised to Abraham so long before.
The last thing we'll say here is that unless Jesus dies, there will be no way back into Eden. True, the God of Eden, the very Word that created it has stepped out into his fleshly world, but that very flesh of the world must be put to death to pass through the gates of Eden. Just as Israel had to be turned from flesh into smoke through unblemished animal sacrifices and fire to slip through the tabernacle veil, just so, there can be no actual access to Eden unless flesh is put to death. Peter Leithart writes:
"Eden could be reentered only by passing through the cherubic sword and fire, only through death and transfiguration. If Jesus had been nothing but a teacher, if he had died a peaceful death in bed, he would not have fulfilled the sacrifices of Israel. Without death and resurrection, he could not have made a way into the presence of the God who is a consuming fire. Apart from his death and resurrection there is no transfiguration of human nature from flesh to Spirit." (Delivered, 286)
We saw this in the first eight posts. After our (lengthy) interlude in post nine about atonement theories (how God makes us "at-one" through Jesus), we spent nine posts asking what it would look like if God came out from his throne room in the holy of holies in the temple and walked around among his people. In looking at Matthew's gospel, we found that Jesus recapitulates the whole story of Israel, all its leaders, all its prophets, all its sacrificial structure. He gathers it all up and brings it to fulfillment.
Now we ask why that wasn't enough? If Jesus' life so thoroughly followed the logic of being a new temple, such that religious habits of how hands were washed, how the sabbath was honored, who were acceptable dining companions were now being redefined around Jesus, why did it have to end in tragedy? Why did he have to die?
Peter Leithart depicts a process of increasing direct engagement between Jesus and his opposition:
"Jesus died because his purposes and program for Israel clashed with the agenda of the Jewish leaders at every crucial point. The Jewish leaders considered Jesus a transgressor of Torah, who not only failed to keep Torah here and there but who overturned Torah altogether. To Jewish eyes, Jesus was a Sabbath-breaker. He flouted purity regulations, eating at defiled tables. He went freely among compromised Jews and prostitutes. He distributed bread in the wilderness as if he were Yahweh leading a new exodus, but the multitude who ate together was a mixed multitude packed with polluted Gentiles. He spoke with Samaritans, even Samaritan women." (Delivered, 146)
Leithart goes on to say that Jesus did not only accidentally offend Pharisees but transgressed their boundaries on purpose:
"Jesus knew just where the pressure points were, and he courageously acted and spoke to provoke repentance, with the full realization that he would in fact provoke nothing but fury." (148)
These weren't just "breaches of etiquette." Jesus wasn't just being rude. His enacting of Torah and all that the levitical laws and the tabernacle and temple were for - all this went directly against the Pharisaical program such that only one could emerge victorious. Ben Meyer writes:
"The distinctions of clean and unclean and of righteous and sinners shaped and permeated the self-understanding of Judaism. To subvert these distinctions was...a challenge to the social order." (Meyer, quoted in Leithart, 149)
Leithart writes:
"If Jesus' way became the way of Israel, then all the hopes and plans of the Pharisees and scribes were doomed, because their plans and hopes depended on maintaining and tightening the taste-not-touch-nots of their (life)...If Jesus' way became Israel's way, then Israel as the Jewish leaders and teachers knew it would cease to exist. If Jesus was right, then the teachers and leaders of Israel must themselves have been transgressors of Torah. There was a stark choice: Torah or Jesus. For the Jewish leaders, it could not be both." (149)
My putting it this way may seem like only a historical incident and that I'm only retracing what led up to the scene of the crime. But who is at fault? Whose crime is it? Who is on trial? This is where the historical lead-up is so significant. The history is precisely where the divine plan is illuminated. People put a common criminal on trial and execute him. The gospels disclose that God was at work in the trial of this one man, and put the whole world on trial. Everything becomes very dense here as Jesus recapitulates the full sacrificial sequence that Torah prescribed and dies as Israel's representative substitute, even as he has lived as Israel's representative substitute. And in dying for Israel, he also dies for the world. For Israel is the representative of the world, and God's means for delivering it, as he had promised to Abraham so long before.
The last thing we'll say here is that unless Jesus dies, there will be no way back into Eden. True, the God of Eden, the very Word that created it has stepped out into his fleshly world, but that very flesh of the world must be put to death to pass through the gates of Eden. Just as Israel had to be turned from flesh into smoke through unblemished animal sacrifices and fire to slip through the tabernacle veil, just so, there can be no actual access to Eden unless flesh is put to death. Peter Leithart writes:
"Eden could be reentered only by passing through the cherubic sword and fire, only through death and transfiguration. If Jesus had been nothing but a teacher, if he had died a peaceful death in bed, he would not have fulfilled the sacrifices of Israel. Without death and resurrection, he could not have made a way into the presence of the God who is a consuming fire. Apart from his death and resurrection there is no transfiguration of human nature from flesh to Spirit." (Delivered, 286)
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