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.
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