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.
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