faith for faith

This piece was originally titled “On the Scope of Adam’s Universal Condemnation and Its Implications on the Doctrine of “The Age of Accountability” and can be found here. I believe its content is pertinent to the subject at hand.

Though Romans 7:14-25 does not deal directly with original sin and the imputation of Adam’s guilt to his offspring, it does offer clarification as to the scope of Adam’s sin and its punishment. Romans 5:12-21, like our present text, is a very difficult passage of Scripture with regard to its subject and its complexity. In it, the Apostle deals with the very difficult subject of original sin and the universal condemnation afforded by that sin. The Apostle complicates the passage exponentially by introducing Jesus Christ as the Second Adam and by comparing and contrasting the two God-ordained heads of the human race. The passage is complicated further by the Apostle’s seemingly free use of universal and particular language, making it seem at one point that Christ is the universal head of the human race and at another, the head of a particular race. Thus the passage reads:

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When we think upon the declaration of Romans 8:28, namely that, “For those who love God, all things work together for good,” its implications are staggering. “All things work together for good, you say? Do you mean all things?”

Well, when we think upon the all things in Romans 8:28, we must understand it in its context. The apostle Paul is speaking there particularly of the suffering of the saints, manifesting itself in tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, danger, nakedness, and death (v. 35). These things seem to come to the saint from external sources, such as from those whom the apostle labels, “Life and death, angels and rulers, things present and things to come, powers, height and depth, and everything else in all of creation (vv. 38, 39). None of these things, the apostle says, “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (v. 39).

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After it was dark one evening, a Pharisee named Nicodemus came to Jesus. He was a ruler and a teacher of the Jews, and his coming by night to speak to Jesus reveals a bit of the sincerity of his heart behind his coming. For while the rest of the Pharisees were notorious for conspiring together and then questioning Jesus during the day so as to attempt to trap him in blasphemy, Nicodemus came at night to Christ so that he would not to be seen by the other Pharisees and associated with their trickery.

Upon coming to Jesus, Nicodemus said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him” (Jn. 3:2). Nicodemus’s confession to Christ is an astounding one, and it places him in direct opposition to his Pharisee brothers. Yet, despite the greatness of Nicodemus’s confession, Christ does not respond to his confession with a “Thank you,” or a “You are right,” or even the response he gave to Peter upon his confession, “Blessed are you!” Christ does none of these things but seems to ignore the Nicodemus’s statement altogether.

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No man can work his way to God, for, “No one does good, not even one,” and no one can will his way to God, for, “No one understands, no one seeks for God.” It is for this reason that the apostle writes later in the Epistle to the Romans, “So then, [salvation] depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy” (v. 9:16), and why he quotes the prophet Isaiah later in that same chapter concerning Israel, “If the Lord of hosts had not left us offspring, we would have been like Sodom, and become like Gomorrah” (v. 9:29).

The Good News is that God has not left us to ourselves. For Paul declares in Romans 5 that that same Offspring that preserved the life and the holiness of ancient Israel has come into the world as the Second Adam–the second head of the human race–and where the first Adam failed, the Second Adam, Jesus Christ, succeeded. Where the first Adam brought judgment into the world, the Second Adam–Jesus Christ brought justification into the world. Where the first Adam brought the reign of death, the Second Adam–Jesus Christ brought the reign of righteousness unto eternal life. Where the first Adam was disobedient, the Second Adam–Jesus Christ was obedient. Where the first Adam brought the condemnation of the law, the Second Adam–Jesus Christ brought the abundance of grace.

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I am not really much of a handyman, so when, after my dad had helped me throw up a wall for a closet in my house and given me a crash course on finishing a wall and a doorway, I really did not know what I was in for. I was instructed that the key to finishing a wall and doorway well is to apply a little bit of sheetrock mud at a time and to let that dry and then apply additional coats, since it easier to add more mud later than it is to sand off an overage.

So that is what I did. Looking at the battered wall covered with dents and nails and the hideous doorway with metal strips nailed on its corners, I began applying sheetrock mud. The first coat did not seem to do much more than add a white border around all the tape and metal, and after the first day, the wall and doorway was almost as battered and hideous as it was before I began.

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As for [the seed that] was sown among the thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful (Mt. 13:22).

In the parable of the sower, Christ intimates that there are four responses to the hearing of the Word of the Kingdom, three negative and one positive. Three of the responses to the Word are responses that are rooted in the heart of man and therefore bear no fruit, and one response in rooted in the work of God and therefore bears much fruit. In each of the negative responses there is the proclamation of the Word (i.e. the sowing of the seed), and in each there is a different enemy that destroys the effectiveness of the Word.

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When it comes to fate of those who die apart from hearing the Gospel, according to some theologues, there is some ambiguity in the Scriptures that arises from a philosophical problem. That supposed problem essentially is this: “If men are saved only through the preaching of the Gospel, and some men have died apart from hearing the Gospel, their fate then is uncertain for they cannot be held accountable for that which they have not heard.” And such a statement is not found merely among those who would call themselves liberal in the faith, but I have personally heard it from the mouths of those who call themselves conservative, Bible-believing evangelicals.

The problem with such a belief is clear when seen in light of the salvific exclusivity claimed of faith in Christ by the Scriptures, but its root is a much deeper issue, namely a fundamental misunderstanding of the Gospel itself.

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“Lord kill me if I don’t preach the Gospel.” It is the first line of Lecrae’s song, “Go Hard,” and it is a prayer that most of us are terrified to utter. For if we pray such a prayer, we know that if the Lord grants us our request that one of two things will happen: either our lives will be radically changed so that everything we think, say, and do revolves around the Gospel, or we will be killed. And more often than not, neither of those two options appeal to us. For if we must live for the Gospel, we would forfeit the lives we desire to live, and if we do not and are killed, we would lose our life so that we could not live the lives we desire to live. Either option produced by such a prayer requires that our lives in this life become forfeit for the sake of the Gospel.

For the apostle Paul, this prayer was the prayer of his life. For, instead of regarding this life as worth living for and indulging in, he regarded it as rubbish, and it was for this reason that he was able to say, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Ph. 1:21). For his heart’s desire was his Lord Jesus Christ and to glorify his name, and he knew that whether he lived or died, his Lord ruled both the living and the dead.

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What is baptism? Having grown up a Baptist, I have been taught and have held the typical Baptist view that baptism is merely a symbol and an ordinance, administered rightly by immersion and done as an “outward expression of an inward reality.” And in my many years as a Baptist, I have heard countless preachers and seminary professors give a thousand explanations and arguments concerning the mode of the “outward expression” of baptism from Scripture and from Church history, but I have yet to hear one sermon or lecture on the inward reality that the outward expression represents. For this reason, I am convinced that we who call ourselves Baptists have focused so much on the proper mode and administration of baptism that we have lost what baptism truly is. In this way we are much like the Jews of old who properly administered circumcision on the eighth day of a child’s life (even if that eighth day fell on the Sabbath), who yet forgot and neglected the reality that that practice represented, namely the circumcision of the heart by the Spirit of God to love God and to obey his law (cf. Deut. 10:16; 30:6; Jer. 4:4; Ezek. 44:7; Acts 7:51; Rm. 2:29).

And because of our focus on the physical ordinance of baptism and our neglect of the reality of baptism, we as Baptists are terribly confused by such declarations as that of the apostle Peter, who wrote, “Baptism now saves you” (1Pet. 3:21). For we have so ritualized and despiritualized the practice of baptism that we have become unbiblical in our understanding of it despite our denomination’s title. And instead of doing as we ought and running to the Scriptures to discover what true baptism is, we do as many have done with other doctrines by forming our doctrines and then explaining away passages that do not fit our doctrinal understanding rather than explaining them.

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Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law (Rm. 13:8).

While the interpretations of the apostle’s command to the church at Rome, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another,” are many, his purpose can be surmised in the verses that follow his exhortation. And though it is wise not to owe any man anything at all, e.g. lent money, etc., and to pursue such lack of indebtedness is a godly pursuit, that particular debt is not what the apostle is speaking about chiefly, though it cannot be discounted totally.

The debt about which the apostle is speaking particularly is the debt of sin or transgression. For the apostle’s command, “Owe no one anything,” is fulfilled by the command, “Love one another.” This is the same debt that Christ speaks about in his model prayer where he says, “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Mt. 6:12). The idea is the same as that which the apostle presented in the previous section of his discourse, namely that we as Christians have an obligation to our fellow men to obey the law, be it God’s law or a government’s law, and we are to pay our debts according to the law, be it taxes or honor (cf. Rm. 13:7). Therefore, the Christian is a debtor in this life to the laws under which he finds himself.

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