faith for faith

In my short life I have been a part of a few accountability groups and have witnessed a few in action, and I also have witnessed others confess things before the church seeking help with particular sins and weaknesses. And unfortunately, the way that confessed sin is oftentimes addressed is not with disgust and loving rebuke, but it is with an impotent sympathy that does more to ease the conscience of the confessor than it does to address the problem which he confessed. And I am not guiltless of this. I have had brothers confide struggles with me, and I have neglected their sin by assuring them that we all struggle with similar sins. What I should have done (and what we should do) is, even if we can sympathize with their struggle, address their sin in such a way that they would want to be rid of it, not so that they would feel better about themselves in their sinning.

For in addressing sin in this way, we are actually doing more harm than good, for instead of nurturing a public sort of conviction for the confessor so that he would be all the more diligent in the mortification of his sin, we downplay the seriousness of his sin and weaken the conviction that he has by our supposed sympathy. And while we might understand certain struggles and while we might share the same struggles, we should be wholeheartedly committed to the destruction of those sins rather than edifying a brother or sister with false edification.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Eph. 2:8-10).

To a particular extent, it is easy for most of us to grasp that our salvation is not to be credited to us. We understand it was Christ Jesus who died and who lived righteously that we might be righteous before a Judge who is holy and just and therefore demands perfection. And whether we credit our faith to God or to our own free volition, most of us recognize that apart from Christ and faith in him there is no salvation, and therefore we have no cause boast, except, as the apostle Paul declared, in the cross of Christ (cf. Gal. 6:14).

But what of our religious and righteous deeds after our salvation? Do we have reason to credit our own personal volition or to glory in our own sanctification? No, not at all. For Scripture declares that it is the Holy Spirit who not only began in us the good work of salvation, but it is he who finishes it (cf. Ph. 1:6). Furthermore the apostle declares elsewhere that in the Church–in those who are called by God, among them there are appointments of different measures of faith so that no one should “think of himself more highly than he ought to think” (Rm. 12:3). And it is by the Spirit, not by our selves, that we are commanded to put to death the deeds of the body (cf. Rm. 8:13), and it is God who has prepared beforehand good works for us to walk in. Therefore our question and our answer must be just as the apostle’s: “What then becomes of our boasting? It is excluded” (Rm. 3:27).

Etymologically, it is quite easy to understand ancient thoughts on procreation. The two common words that we use today for the male contribution to procreation, spermatozoa and semen, coming from Greek and Latin respectively, both mean seed. In other words, it was thought that a child was conceived in a way similar to that of crops being planted–as seed scattered on fertile soil. Taking this into consideration, the promise given in Genesis 3 is quite an astounding one. There God declares, “I will put enmity between you [the serpent] and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” It is from the seed of woman that the Christ was promised, a saying that does not seem so odd to our scientifically enlightened minds but was surely odd to its hearers granting their understanding of procreation. Yet in this, Scripture demonstrates its divine authority in this passage and also foreshadows the virgin birth of the Christ and its necessity, where he who is not of the seed of Adam shall come forth as the Second Adam to redeem the elect of Adam’s race thereby creating a new humanity through himself.

In some evangelical circles, there has been a sort of recoiling from the love of God that has come from a response to liberal movements that have distorted the love of God. These have expressed that liberal Christians have overemphasized the love of God above his other attributes, e.g. his wrath, justice, etc. and therefore have neglected the full revelation of God. However, I believe that the love of God in liberal circles has not been overemphasized, but it has rather been twisted and mangled, for how can we overemphasize the love of God? Even in the light of his other attributes—his mercy, his goodness, his wrath, his justice–there are none that are so wonderful as his love. To us God’s revelation of himself always comes through his love, whether it is seen in his mercy and justice as was demonstrated on the Cross or whether it is demonstrated in the judgment of sinners and his wrath against evil. For this reason, the apostle is able to write without apology, “God is love” (1Jn. 4:16), for all things are loving and work to the good of those upon whom God has placed his love and predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son (cf. Rm. 8:28, 29).

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.

O love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure
The saints’ and angels’ song (Frederick Lehmen, The Love of God)

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all, despite their connection with Jesus Christ, continue to sin and to fall short of the glory of God. This is not surprising to us, for we who are in Christ are continually commanded to forsake our flesh and to turn away from our sinful passions and to turn to our Advocate and our Righteousness for forgiveness when we do fall into various sins. We know full well that our salvation is not of ourselves and that our righteousness is not our own, yet at times when we do sin, the Adversary swoops in and attempts to place on us again a burden we were never meant to bear. It is in times such as these that we, instead of falling and immediately running back into our Father’s arms, are convinced that our shame is too great, and we sulk in our sin for days and weeks. We feel that are communion with God is severed, and we feel more like sons of the devil than like sons of God. In these times, we must be all the more vigilant to place upon our heads the Helmet of the Gospel that declares to us afresh that we are clothed with an alien Righteousness and have unbroken communion with the Father through our perfect Mediator, Jesus Christ. The Adversary wishes us to think that we are cut off from God because our failings; we should not give him the pleasure of such a victory.

Being from North Carolina, it is difficult not to love the sight of snow. It is a sight that is seldom seen, and when it sticks it transforms everything on which it falls. Regardless of where the snow lands, be it on the lawns of the wealthy or on the trash heaps of the landfills, everything is made beautiful. It is, in some ways, a perfect picture of the Gospel. For the Gospel, like the snow on divers landscapes, is not a respecter of social class, race, nationality, or political position, and it falls upon God’s dispersed elect and covers them beautifully with the righteousness of Jesus Christ. God’s people, called forth from every tongue and every tribe, from paupers to kings, who are as muddy and filthy as the natural landscape, find themselves fully blanketed with the whiteness of Jesus Christ and, when the clouds give way to clear skies, reflect with blinding radiance the glory of their Father. They who were once dirty are now clean; they who were once dull are now radiant–not by any merit of their own, but because God came near and gave to them his cleanness and his radiance and thereby made them beautiful.

Living the Christian life is a particularly daunting task when one looks back upon the history of the church and examines the lives of others who loved and devoted their lives to the Lord. Of course, one looks to (or ought to look to) Christ and how every breath he breathed he breathed to the glory of his Father. Then one can look upon the countless and unnamed martyrs who confessed Christ as Lord and denounced heresy and were thus burned at the stake, drowned, shot five times in the stomach and left for dead on the street, sawed and hacked into pieces, and on and on. Then one could look at those such as John Calvin, John Gill, and Jonathan Edwards who wrote tens of thousands of pages a piece, two of whom, Calvin and Gill, both wrote systematic theologies and commentaries on the whole Bible, and Edwards who still wrote more. These wrote all that they contributed to the Faith, with two of them, Calvin and Edwards, dying at age fifty-five. All of these, from Christ to Edwards, were not idle men and were busy about the glory of the Father.

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Upon even the most casual of readings of the New Testament, it is impossible to miss the clear reality that those who follow Christ are promised that they will suffer and be despised for following him. These things simply come with the territory. Jesus declares that we who follow him should not to be alarmed at this, for he says, “A servant is not greater than his master; if they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (Jn. 15:20a). Paul also declares that our suffering is of Providential and salvific necessity, writing, “The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if we are children, we are heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided that we suffer with him so that we might also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:17, variation mine). Our suffering and revilement is made to be necessary by our association with Christ and is ordained to be necessary by the nature of the Gospel.

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We as Christians rightly recognize that the Trinity—God being three Persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and yet One, is a great mystery, but is the notion of multiplicity and oneness a concept that is foreign from our experience? Take for example human beings who are made in the image of God. All will concede that man is at least a dichotomy, i.e. consisting of two parts—soul and body and yet is one. Some, like myself, believe that man is a trichotomy. Take for instance the Shema that is recorded in Deuteronomy 6:4, 5: “Hear, O Israel: Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one. You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” It is almost as if Moses is writing, “Just as Yahweh is three and yet one, you who are also three must be one by loving God with all your being.” Also consider the Creation account in Genesis 1. Each act of Creation by Yahweh begins with “And God said,” and it happened. The only deviance from this pattern is when God creates man. There he says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). Thus, it is quite clear that man is created in the image of the Triune God. Just some quick thoughts.

Does Scripture give us the answers to all of life’s questions? No, of course it does not. But on the other hand, Scripture is sufficient for our lives. Its sufficiency lies not in that it is a handbook for buying homes or an apology to the charges of atheists, but it lies in that it is the Wellspring of Salvation and of True and Transforming Knowledge. It is only through the Word and through his Name that men are saved, and it is only through the Word that men have seen the Father. Therefore, if we are to look upon the Father, he must be revealed specially to us. All attempts to know the Father apart from the Word are futile and wicked, for, by such attempts, attempters declare that they in their finitude can comprehend the Infinite, that they who are feeble can comprehend the Almighty, and that they who are stupid can comprehend the Omniscient. It is not by piety that men seek to know God apart from and beyond his Holy Scriptures, but it is by feigned ability and gross arrogance. It is in the end the idolatry of intellect–the forbidden fruit and the golden calf of the curious. It is philosophy beyond Special Revelation that perhaps cast the great minds of C. S. Lewis and John Stott into heterodoxy; we therefore would be wise to be diligent in our intellectual pursuits.¹

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