Category Archives: Sermons

The Lightsaber of God

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(Isaiah 45:22-25; Romans 13:11-14:12)

The break between chapters 13 and 14 marks the beginning of the last major section of Romans, but we need to be careful not to make the break too sharp.  It seems abrupt, and in a way it is, but chapters 14 and 15 continue to develop points and themes from earlier in the letter.  In particular, chapters 12 and 13 aren’t just abstract teaching about Christian behavior; though they do apply generally to every part of life, they’ve also been intended to lay some specific groundwork for what comes next.
We’ve said all the way along that Paul is particularly concerned for the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the church; that’s why he lays out his argument in a way that stresses the continuity between God’s work in the church and his past work in national Israel.  That’s also why Paul puts so much time and effort into, first, arguing that Jews and Gentiles now come to God on exactly equal footing, in exactly the same way—through Jesus Christ—and, second, showing that this doesn’t contradict anything God said through the Law and the Prophets, but in fact fulfills them.  His concern is theological, but good theology is practical:  bad theology on the part of both Jewish and Gentile Christians has led to quarrels and division in the body of Christ, and needs correcting.
The root of the matter appears to have been, as you would expect, disagreement over keeping the Jewish law.  On the one hand, you have Jewish Christians who do believe that they are saved by Christ alone, but also believe that they need to continue to keep the Old Testament law as law in order to live the kind of holy and pure life God requires.  On the other stand Gentile Christians, many of whom never kept the law before, who see no need whatsoever to do so now, given that their salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.  This wouldn’t need to be a problem, except that each group is convinced that they are right and the other group needs to change, and is bad for refusing to change; as a result you get quarrels, name-calling, accusations, put-downs, and all the other things that make up the political ads I talked about last week.
In this case, the Gentile group despises the Jewish group as weak in faith for continuing to cling to the law of Moses, while the Jewish group is con­demning the Gentile group as unrighteous—as not even caring enough to be righteous—for refusing to keep the law.  Paul is not going to let this continue.  Whatever else either side may have right or wrong, their attitude toward each other is absolutely sinful and inappropriate.
He makes this argument even though he clearly agrees with the Gentile Christians that their Jewish brothers and sisters are indeed showing weakness in their faith.  They couldn’t be sure that the meat was kosher, and both it and the wine might have been offered to idols before being sold, so—just vegetables and water for them, just like Daniel and his friends.  There were many religious days to keep—besides the major feast and fast days, many Jews would set aside a day each week to fast and pray.  Is any of this necessary?  No; but how does that give the Gentiles any right to pass judgment?  Or again, what makes the Jews in the church think theyhave any right to judge?
There are a couple issues here.  One, neither group is sinning.  Both have put their faith in Christ alone; both are accepted by God.  Paul would like to see the Jewish Christians grow stronger in their faith, to the point where they no longer feel the need to keep the law—where they can trust their freedom in Christ—but this is nothing for which they deserve to be berated or treated with disdain.  On the other hand, they don’t have the right to claim their weakness as righteousness, much less to judge anyone else by that standard.
Two, both groups’ focus is wrong.  Was it inappropriate for the strong Christians to recognize the weakness in faith of some of the Jewish Christians?  No.  Was it wrong for the weak to be concerned about the way some of the Gentile Christians were living?  In part, but maybe not in whole.  We’re called to build each other up in faith, not to ignore the issues in one another’s lives.  But.  Remember what Paul’s been talking about—don’t think more of yourself than you ought to, honor one another above yourselves, love one another.  Put aside the works of darkness, including dissension and jealousy; don’t try to make yourself superior to one another.
When we see weakness or sin in the life of a fellow Christian, if we can do anything to encourage and guide them and help them grow, we have a responsibility to do what we can; but even when that means exercising discipline, as parents or as leaders, that doesn’t give us the right to pass judgment.  Judgment comes down from above, and we don’t stand that way before each other; we come from beside one another, down on our knees, humbly seeking to serve.  The right to judge is God’s alone, because only the master has the right to judge his servant, and there is only one master:  God.
It’s no accident that this discussion in chapter 14 comes immediately after the commands in chapter 13 to walk in the day and stop planning out ways to satisfy the desires of the flesh; that’s a lot of what the dispute here is about.  OK, so you don’t need the law to be saved—but isn’t it the best way to make sure you’re living the way God wants you to live?  It seems like the most obvious one; but as Paul has already said, it doesn’t work.  The law doesn’t address what’s really wrong with us, and if we believe we need to keep it in order to be righteous, we tend to end up becoming convinced that we’re righteous because we’re keeping it—and thus that anyone who isn’t keeping it with us, isn’t righteous.  To whatever extent we put our trust in law, we’re putting our trust in ourselves rather than in Christ; that weakens our faith, and it makes us judgmental.
Instead, rather than focusing on controlling our behavior—and thus on controlling the behavior of others—we need to focus on the inputs:  where are we spending our time, physically and mentally?  Where are we turning our attention?  Paul has said this multiple times in various ways:  we need to set our minds on the Spirit of God, and the things of the Spirit, and thus open ourselves up for him to renew our minds, to change us from the inside out.  We need to recognize that we’re in a spiritual battle, which means we can’t fight it with weapons of the world—and law is one of those.
Here, by the way, is where we get to the change in the sermon title.  I didn’t realize this until late in the week, but the translation “armor of light” is an odd one:  the word in verse 12 isn’t the word for armor.  Depending on context, it either means “instruments” or “weapons.”  I guess they get “armor” from the clothing imagery in verse 14.  But this isn’t just a passive thing; it’s not just about protecting ourselves.  We are to take the light to the darkness—to actively go after the darkness with the light.
We should attack the sin in our own lives with the light of God; and we should attack the sin in the lives of those around us, and in our culture, the same way:  not with anger, judgment, condemnation, and bitterness, but with love, grace, joy, hope, and peace.  To be sure, people may not want the light shining into their lives, and they may respond with hostility; but our intent must never be to tear someone else down or to punish them, but only to build them up, to help them grow and heal.

Question Authority?

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(Jeremiah 29:1-9, Daniel 4:19-27; Romans 13:1-7)

As I stand here this morning, we look forward with great interest to a day three and a half weeks from now, when we will finally be free of campaign ads—at least for a year or so.  Honestly, whatever you think of the state of government in this country, I don’t think anyone likes the state of our political advertising, or political conversation more generally—it’s loud, it’s depressing, and it’s exhausting.
You see, our politics these days are powered and poisoned by anxiety; and if you take a look at the roots of that anxiety, it’s troubling.  When I was a kid we used to sing a parody of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”:  “This land is my land; this land ain’t your land.  I got a shotgun, and you don’t got one.”  And so on.  That’s the attitude driving our politics these days:  a frantic insistence that this is my country—and if you disagree with me, not yours.  You see it every election cycle; whichever party’s in power, candidates for the other one stand up and say, “It’s time to take back our country!”
As Christians, we’re supposed to have a broader perspective.  Remember what we said about Romans 8—this is not our home, this is not our final destination; we are in the wilderness, in between the land of slavery and the Promised Land.  That’s why 1 Peter 2 says, “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.”  We are aliens and strangers, we are exiles and transients; we are here for a time on our way to someplace better.  This is not our homeland, but the land of our wandering.  Is this our country?  Yes, but not to own, not to control, not to belong:  this is our country because this is where God has placed us to serve.
Our model is not the Jews in Israel under King David, but the exiles in Babylon under King Nebuchadnezzar.  Nebuchadnezzar was a highly problematic king from a Jewish point of view, since he worshiped false gods; and though he learned a certain respect for the God of Israel through Daniel, his successors lacked even that.  The exiles weren’t in their true country under their true king, and they knew it; but Jeremiah tells them, for as long as God has them there, to settle in and work for the good of Babylon.  Never forget that this is not your home, to be sure; but equally, never forget that you’re here because God put you here, and he put you here to serve.
Which is what Paul is on about.  As we saw last week, these seven verses sit in the middle of a long passage about love; if you took them out, you’d never guess anything was missing.  But they belong here, because loving others as Christ loved us will have political consequences.  In particular, Paul forbids us to take any sort of vengeance or in any way respond in kind when evil is done to us; instead, he says, “Overcome evil with good.”  And yet, evil must be judged and punished.  That, Paul says, is what government is for; and so he spends a few moments considering the purpose of government and how we as Christians should relate to it.
Note carefully how Paul begins his argument.  Everyone, he declares, must submit to the governing authorities—everybody, period, no ifs, ands, buts, or exceptions.  But he says submit rather than obey.  We must acknowledge the general rule that the government has authority over us, because God who is the source of all authority is the one who has instituted all human authorities; and we submit to them under God.  Our ultimate allegiance is to him, and our total obedience is due to him alone; all human authorities are secondary, deriving their legitimacy from him.  We don’t have the right to reject them, but government doesn’t have the right to do anything it wants, either.  When a government is bent on rewarding evil rather than good, then we must obey God rather than government.  That’s part of seeking the welfare of the country to which he has sent us.
In general, however, we are to obey the governing authorities, because God has established them to serve his purposes in the world.  That’s true whether the authority in question is the town council or President Obama; and it will be true next month whether we see a second Obama term or a victory for Governor Romney.  After all, neither one could possibly be as bad as Nebuchadnezzar was.  The government of Rome wasn’t particularly godly either, even at its best; but even ungodly and flawed governments play a necessary part in God’s work in human history, as Rome most certainly did.
Our submission to government, then, isn’t rooted in the assumption that govern­ment always does what is right—or even that it usually does what is right; Paul isn’t that naïve.  Rather, it’s rooted in trust in God.  God is in control, and in everything that happens he is at work to accomplish his purposes.  He has appointed our governments and their leaders, and so they function as his servants.  If they are rebellious, then he will judge them and take his vengeance on them in his due time; and as Joseph said to his brothers, what they mean for evil, God will use for good.  It doesn’t always make sense to us, and often what happens isn’t what we think God’s will is, or ought to be; but however each election turns out, and whatever laws may be passed—even if they are unjust—we can trust that God is still on his throne, and his plan and his will have not failed.
We need to disengage from the “win at all costs” mentality of our politics—which doesn’t serve us well, and really isn’t ultimately about the issues anyway.  That mentality comes from our politicians; for many of them it is “win at all costs,” not for anyone else’s sake, but for the sake of their jobs.  We’re just being used.  If the American church were to stop playing politics and choose to show our country a more excellent way, we would bear witness to the gospel in a way that the world could not ignore, or explain away.
Yes, we should be engaged with the issues, and yes, we should do everything we can to see that what our governments do is just and right; in our system, we have some small power to influence that, and we’re responsible to use it.  But we must do all things humbly, remembering that we are sinners in need of grace, and people of limited wisdom, just as much as those with whom we disagree—and for that matter, that the same is true of those politicians we support.  There are no messiahs in politics, on either side.  There’s only one Messiah, and he flatly refused to work politically even when he could have.
As well, we should remember that our true battle isn’t political but spiritual, and our true enemy is spiritual; even the most evil people we ever see, though they be judged by God for their evil, are ultimately the victims of our great enemy, just as we are.  We shouldn’t see our political opponents as enemies—and the more we do, the more that obliges us to love them and pray for God to bless them.  Yes, we may pray for him to bless them with repentance and wisdom and regret, but even so, we need to recognize that when God told us to love one another, he meant them, too.
And finally, we need to recognize that when Paul tells us to submit to the governing authorities, it’s because it isn’t the church’s job to be the governing authorities.  Our mission is not to win political battles, and our call is not to make people act in godly ways; that’s law, not gospel.  Law is the government’s nature and mission; the gospel is ours.  Yes, the gospel speaks to the issues of our day, because the gospel speaks to every­thing—and yes, if we preach the gospel faithfully, that will mean challenging the world where it doesn’t want to be challenged, just as that has always been part of preaching the gospel.  But we must keep the gospel at the center of everything we do, and our aim must always be to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, not to push the platform of a political party; and when we speak the truth of God into political issues, we must always do so lovingly, our speech seasoned heavily with grace, in a spirit of peace.  There’s enough loud, loveless, graceless speech in our political ads as it is; heaven forbid we should add to it.

Let Love Rule

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(Leviticus 19:17-18, Proverbs 25:21-22; Romans 12:9-21, 13:8-10)

“What the world needs now is love, sweet love”; so Hal David told us.  “All you need is love,” according to John Lennon.  Is it true?  Well, maybe.  It depends.  Define your terms—what do you mean by “love”?  If we’re talking about the love of God revealed in Christ, then yes, without question; but people usually aren’t.  They more often say things like, “if you loved me, you would”—in which the word “love” is wielded as an emotional crowbar, a basis for demands and manipulation.  That’s not real love.

The problem is, we keep trying to define “love” to suit ourselves; but that would derail everything Paul’s talking about in this chapter.  We need to let love rule in our lives, but that love must be genuine.  That word—the NIV translates it “sincere”—is important; we need to distinguish real love, the genuine article, from the counterfeit.  Real love is no mere pretense or outward display, it’s nothing we can use to suit our own agendas; rather, love is defined by God, who is the source of all love.  It’s an expression of his nature and character, and so it shapes our character to make us more like him.

Thus love is not merely about feelings; that’s part of it, but love expresses itself in action, and so changes our behavior.  The love of God in us moves us to want what God wants, and to want to do what he wants; it takes away our taste for evil, teaching us to loathe it instead.  As such, love fulfills the law of God, because it moves us to do the will of God not out of fear or duty or desire for reward, but out of a renewed mind and heart.  We keep the law on the way, as we’re on about something more important; our focus is not on keeping the law, but on loving God, and loving others as he loves us.

The more we seek God, the better we know him and the more we love him, and the more we’re motivated to love those around us.  As with any relationship, our love will tend to cool if we don’t keep seeking him; we need to keep opening ourselves up to the Holy Spirit.  It’s not just praying or reading the Bible—we can easily do both those things with closed hearts; it’s pre­paring ourselves for the Spirit to speak to us, and letting go our efforts to control what he might say or do.  The more we open ourselves up, the more the Spirit fills us with love for God and fires us up to love each other and serve the Lord—to serve the Lord by loving each other.

Part of that is the Spirit’s work in renewing our minds, in giving us the common mindset Paul talked about in verse 3.  Here in verse 16, the NIV renders it “live in harmony with one another,” but we might say “think the same thing toward one another”; the point is not that we never disagree (or never admit we disagree), but that we recognize that we all stand together:  we all share in one salvation, through one faith, by the one grace of God, and we are all absolutely dependent on his grace.  Thus we live in humility toward one another, humbly confessing our own sins and failures and shortcomings, and humbly forgiving our brothers and sisters for their sins and failures and shortcomings, recognizing that we all need grace, and we all need each other.

Thus as well Paul tells us we should seek to bless one another rather than to bless ourselves—and indeed should actively look for opportunities to do so.  We are brothers and sisters in Christ; in a healthy family, we may not always be happy with one another, but we’re always committed to love and care for one another regardless.  We understand that the need of one is the need of all—and we should see our church family in the same way, holding our needs in common and doing what we can to ensure that they’re all met, because that’s what people who love one another and are committed to one another do for each other.  Nor is this just about physical needs.  Paul also calls us to grieve with those who grieve, sharing their burden and letting them know they’re not alone; and, what’s often harder, he tells us to rejoice with those who rejoice, not grudgingly or enviously, but wholeheartedly glad with them and for them.

Our love doesn’t end with those who love us, however; we’re also called to love non-believers, and we’re called to love our enemies and those who persecute us.  Indeed, God loves them as much as he loves us, and so we should love them just as sincerely and single-mindedly as we love our friends within the church.  Not only are we forbidden to avenge ourselves, Paul tells us not to call down God’s vengeance on our enemies; instead, we’re supposed to bless them and serve them, and to ask God to bless them.

Now, that might seem like a wildly unreasonable set of commands, on the surface; but Paul wants us to see deeper, and so he quotes Proverbs 25:  do this for your enemies, “for in so doing you’ll heap burning coals on their heads.”  Blessing those who curse you isn’t giving in to them, or cooperating with them in hurting you; rather, it confounds them, because it’s not in their script.  As Oscar Wilde quipped, “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”  To freely serve your enemies and bless your persecutors in the love of God is to act in defiance of their hatred and opposition, against their expectations, and out of a power which is completely alien to them; for we can only do so sincerely in  the strength of God, by the work of his Holy Spirit.

Apart from God, when we’re attacked, we can’t see past our own egos and our own hurt; we may hit back in anger, freeze in shame, or run in fear, but we cannot act freely or constructively.  God gives us the strength to respond with love, and the ability to trust him that we will not lose by loving our enemies and asking him to bless them.  You see, the greatest blessing God can give them is repentance—a blessing which can only come through the burning coals of shame and guilt.  It is better for us that our enemies should repent than that we should see them destroyed; better that they become our friends, and better that they confess the wrong they’ve done and seek to make it right.  But if they will not, then God will judge them for it in his time.  Either way, in the end, he will vindicate those who love him, who depend on him and call on his name.

You can’t overcome evil with evil, and you can’t beat hatred with hatred.  Either it crushes you, or you become like it and it absorbs you.  You can only overcome evil with good, and you can only defeat hatred with love.  We lose sight of that, because we get focused on the battle we see, and we think that’s the real battle—but it isn’t.  The real battle is to continue to love in the face of hate, and continue to do good in response to evil; when by the grace of God and the power of his Spirit we’re able to do that, then even if we lose, we win.  We win because the love of God is the power of his kingdom, and the powers of this world are doomed to fail, but his kingdom is eternal, and his love will reign forever.  Let’s pray.

We Need Each Other

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(Exodus 19:3-6; Romans 12:3-8, 1 Corinthians 12:4-26)

Humility gets something of a bad rap in our culture.  We confuse it with humiliation; we confuse it with false modesty, which is a very different thing; we use it as an opportunity for insults.  Winston Churchill’s famous putdown of Clement Attlee is a classic case in point:  “He is a humble man, but then, he has much to be humble about!”  There are those who berate the church for teaching that humility is a virtue, on the grounds that doing so is harmful to people’s self-esteem.  They seem to think the idea is that God doesn’t like you very much, and so you shouldn’t like yourself very much either.

This all gets the matter drastically wrong, and badly misreads Scripture.  To help you understand why, let me begin by drawing from two men who helped me understand this.  One is C. S. Lewis.  In Mere Christianity, he commented, “Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays:  he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody.  Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. . . .  He will not be thinking about humility:  he will not be thinking about himself at all.”
Which is to say, humility isn’t self-deprecation, but a type of self-forgetfulness.  In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis captured this beautifully; he had the demon Screwtape write, “The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.  The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.”
Which of course raises the question, where does this mindset come from?  Where do we find its source?  From a Reformed perspective, the best answer to that question I’ve ever found came (ironically enough) from a Catholic priest.  Fr. Ernest Fortin, a French-Canadian philosopher, argued that “the Christian virtue par excellence is humility—a virtue that stands in stark contrast to any classical ideal:  humility first of all of a God who would humble Himself to take on our humanity and give His life as a ransom for the many.  But humility as well for the believer—to understand that all is grace; that we have no right to claim anything as our own—not our life, not our gifts, not even our faith.  We are at every moment God’s creation.”
This all, I think, is what Paul is on about in this part of Romans.  He has said just before this that we are to live our lives as our offering of worship to God, and that this happens not by effort and willpower or tricks and techniques, but by our minds being renewed in the power of the Holy Spirit; that is, if you will, the “law” that’s supposed to govern our lives.  Here, he begins to apply that more specifically, to the question of how we are to live with and behave toward one another:  if our minds are being renewed, how does that change how we see ourselves and the people around us?
Paul uses three different forms of the same word in verse 3, the word translated “think.”  It’s the word used back in chapter 8 when he said, “Those who live by the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live by the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.”  This word isn’t about the act of thinking as such, it’s about the frame within which we think—our mindset, our perspective, our worldview.  It seems safe to say that the renewal of our minds begins with a change of our mindset toward God and our understanding of who he is; but the next thing in line is a change in our mindset toward ourselves and our understanding of who we are, and thus in our perspective on our lives.
The key is that we learn to see ourselves clearly and truly as we are, not in the world’s eyes but in God’s sight.  Paul tells us in Romans 12:3 that God has given us all a common faith in Christ by his grace, and that the faith by which through grace we have been saved should be the only standard by which we measure our lives.  We need to see that all is grace, and that we have no right to claim the credit for our life, our gifts, our salvation.  We need to realize that what matters is whether we live our lives by faith in ourselves, or by faith in God the Father, his Son Jesus Christ, and his Holy Spirit—and whether, out of that, we’re living to glorify him, or to glorify ourselves.
Now, that realization can only grow in us as we draw near to Christ, as the Holy Spirit renews our mind, because it comes out of two things.  One is the understanding, not intellectual but visceral, of just how badly we need the grace of God and how utterly dependent on grace we are—the realization that we really can’t be all that impressive; the other is the visceral understanding of just how great a price God paid to give us his grace, and just how great is his love for us who paid that price—the realization that we don’t need to be all that impressive.  When once we get hold of that—or rather, once that truth gets hold of us, then as Lewis put it, we can “[get] rid of the false self, with all its ‘Look at me’ and ‘Aren’t I a good boy?’ and all its posing and posturing”; we can stop trying to fake it, and stop feeling that we need to fake it, and just rest in God.
The fact is, for all the time we may spend thinking about our lives, our gifts, our accomplishments, and worrying what they say about us, they aren’t really ours anyway, they’re God’s.  In truth, they only say one thing at all about us:  that God loves us with a deep and abiding love.  What we’re no good at, he didn’t create us to be good at.  Whatever worldly standard of achievement we measure ourselves by, he didn’t create us for that.  What matters is that we have the gifts and talents God gave us to do what he calls us to do.  We talked about sheep a bit this summer, and your average sheep is a very stupid animal—but it’s exactly as smart as it needs to be in order to be a good sheep.  It hasn’t been created to be anything else, it’s been created to be what it is, to the glory of God; and so have we, who are the sheep of his pasture, and the flock of his hand.
Yeah, none of us is good at everything; if we’re honest, most of us aren’t really good at all that much.  If anyone tells you they have a whole slew of spiritual gifts, the odds are pretty good they’re either deluding themselves, or trying to sell you something.  Most of us are good at a few things, and really bad at others, and pretty indifferent in a lot of areas—and that’s fine, because that’s how God made us.  Look what Paul says in Romans 12, and 1 Corinthians 12:  God created us to need each other.  He created each of us to be good at this thing to fill a need over here, and to be bad at that thing so that someone else can be good at it.  We’re all specialized players whom God creates and fits together so that the work gets done and Christ is represented on earth.
And if you think about that long enough, eventually the penny will drop, the great mindshift at the heart of this passage in Romans:  what we do, what we can do, what we’re good at, isn’t primarily about us as individuals, it’s about all of us together.  We belong to God, which means we belong to each other; our lives are not our own, they are his, which means they are for his people, for his body, for his work.  We need each other, because God made us that way; we are needed, because he made us for our part.

True Worship

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(Psalm 51:10-17, Micah 6:6-8; Romans 12:1-2)

Therefore.  Structurally, this might be the most important single word in all of Romans, because the whole book pivots here; this is the point at which Paul shifts from talking about what we need to believe to laying out how we need to live.  That means that this is the point where the Bible-believing church tends to get in trouble, because it’s easy to lose the connection between the two; it’s easy to lose this word “therefore.”
The problem is, when we see commands about moral behavior, it’s easy to forget everything Paul has said about grace and faith and revert right back to law.  I told you last time that scholars often label Paul’s arguments in grammatical terms, as “indicative” and “imperative”—indica­tive words tell us what is, while imperatives give commands; one reason they use this language is to remind us that we’re talking about two aspects of the same thing, the gospel.  It also helps us see that in Paul, the imperative is always rooted in the indicative.  He never gives commands for us to try to obey in our own strength, and it’s never about trying to earn God’s favor or avoid punishment; rather, he gives commands so that we will understand and live into the life the Holy Spirit is creating in us, which we can only do as he changes our hearts and gives us the ability.
Therefore, in view of God’s mercy.  Because of everything Paul’s been saying the past eleven chapters, because of all that Christ has done for us and all that God has promised us, because of the salvation we have been given and the mercy we have been shown, this is how we ought to respond.  Because God’s mercy isn’t just something we received in the past, but is an ongoing power in our lives through the work of his Holy Spirit, this is how we’re being enabled to respond.  And you’ll note, this isn’t just about do this and don’t do that; it’s much bigger than just following a set of commands—the change to which God calls us here is global, nothing less than a whole new orientation to life.
That’s key, and that’s one of the differences between living by law and living by grace—law is partial, it demands we do some things and leaves the rest of life to our own discretion, while grace claims every aspect of our lives.  Quite properly so, because in all fairness we owe God our lives, in total.  He bought us back from slavery to sin, he gave us life when all we had was death—there is nothing we have and nothing we are that isn’t already his by right; and so Paul says, live this way.  Offer your whole life as a sacrifice to God.  Every decision you face, lay it down before the Lord as your gift.  Every desire you have, give it up to him as your offering.  Every action you take, every thought that crosses your mind, present it to God as a sacrifice to him.  Our whole bodies, our whole lives, day by day, belong to him, and should be set apart for him.
This, Paul says, is our true and proper worship to God.  This is the worship that honors God by giving him what he truly wants from us.  We want to be the ones to decide what’s appropriate and sufficient for us to give to God, because we assume that we belong to ourselves; we think our bodies and lives are our own.  It’s easy to get into the mindset that if we give God an hour a week to sit in church and however much money we think we can easily spare, that’s worship enough for him and he should be happy with it. 
Except, it isn’t, and he isn’t.  Not that just spending more time and money would change that.  You could spend all day in church every Sunday and give away your entire life savings, and it still wouldn’t be enough, if that’s all you did.  Micah makes that perfectly clear.  God doesn’t just want more stuff, he wants you to give him your mind—all of it—and your heart—your whole heart, down to the core.  He doesn’t just want you to worship him by doing certain things because you think doing those things is enough; he wants you to worship him with all of everything you are, to give over all of yourself to him, so that you are worshiping him all the time—in church, out of church, wherever—and with all your money—both what you give away, and what you use in other ways—because everything you do is the product of a heart and mind wholly dedicated to God.
And thus we have verse 2:  “Do not conform to this world”—in J. B. Phillips’ classic translation, “Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold.”  Don’t go along with what the world values; don’t measure yourself by its expectations; don’t think you can follow Jesus and still make the world happy.  The church in this country lost track of this one for a long time, because for many years Christianity was quite respectable and main­stream, and it was easy for us to fool ourselves into thinking the world had conformed itself to the church.  It hadn’t.  It was just playing chameleon—taking on a Christian appearance as protective coloration, so that it could subvert the church from the inside; but increasingly, its opposition to Christ is coming into the open.
Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of folks in the church who’ve inherited the idea that it ought to be possible to be a good Christian and at the same time an approved and popular member of this culture, and so they’re letting the world squeeze them—and their worship, and their view of God—into its mold, thinking that must be OK.  To that, the inimitable Carl Trueman of Westminster Seminary had a pointed response the other day:  “You really do kid only yourselves if you think you can be an orthodox Christian and be at the same time cool enough and hip enough to cut it in the wider world.”  We cannot make God and our faith fit what the world wants; anyone who says otherwise is not truly worshiping him, but a little god of their own design.
Instead of letting the world’s pattern of life and the world’s way of thinking be the standard for our own lives—instead of letting ourselves be squeezed down so that we never make the world uncomfortable—God calls us to transformation.  By what?  By the power of the Spirit.  What does that look like?  The renewing of our minds.  Back in chapter 1, Paul declared that when humanity rejected God, he gave them over to a “depraved” mind—which is to say, one incapable of recognizing God’s will as good, pleasing, and perfect, much less desiring to follow it; from depraved understanding flowed depraved action.  God’s work in us by his Spirit is to reverse that.
This is a process, and not a quick one; it’s a lifelong work of retraining our hearts and reprogramming our minds.  It’s a process which is powered by the Spirit of God, but everything we do, everything we think, and everything we read or see or hear either contributes to that or hinders it.  We need to be dedicated to the renewing of our minds, seeking to take every thought captive to obedience to Christ, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians; which means we need to take every book, every movie, every song, every conversation, captive to obedience to Christ as well, for those things shape how we think.  We need to make sure that the things we allow to influence us will make us more like Christ, rather than less, and we need to take them seriously as spiritual forces in our lives.
In other words, we become living sacrifices to God when we resist being conformed to this world and allow him to transform us from the inside out by renewing our minds; and our minds are renewed as we become living sacrifices, offering all our choices to God in worship, seeking to make everything we read, everything we watch, everything we listen to, and everything we say an offering to his glory.  It’s a feedback loop, each reinforcing the other; we can’t be halfhearted about it.  It’s all or nothing, and we need to give God our all—all of life our offering to him, that our minds would be renewed day by day, that we might have his mind.  This is our true worship—nothing less.

Mysterious Ways

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(Isaiah 40:12-14, Isaiah 59:15b-21; Romans 11:16-36)

If you’ve spent any great amount of time in the letters of Paul, you’ve probably realized that his letters to churches follow a consistent pattern: the first part of the letter is theology, and the second part is application of that theology to the life of the church and its members. Biblical scholars like to borrow terms from grammar and talk about this as the indicative and the imperative; for those who aren’t grammar geeks, the indicative mood in language is the basic form, telling you what is—this is a chair, that is a window, and so on—while the imperative is the command form: sit down! Shut that window! You get the idea. In these terms, Paul begins by laying out the indicatives of the gospel—what’s true about God and Jesus and us and our salvation—before moving on to the imperatives of the gospel—this being true, how should we then live?

This is important, for reasons we’ll talk about later in this series; for now, the important point is that this passage brings the theological arc of this letter to its close. The story Paul has been telling of the work of God in redeeming a people for himself comes to an end here, as the apostle turns to look forward to the grand conclusion of history; he turns from explaining what God has already done to proclaim what God is going to do. He’s been dealing with the problem of the Exile, with God’s rejection of Israel and his banishment of his people from the land of his presence; but as Paul has argued in the first part of chapter 11, the Exile was never going to be permanent, for God promised even before sending Israel away that he would bring them home.

Now, in hearing this, you need to understand that from the Jewish perspective, the Exile never really ended. Sure, they got back to Jerusalem, but that’s only part of what they expected—God made all sorts of other promises about what would happen when he brough his people back from exile, and most of those remained unfulfilled in Paul’s day, and still in ours. There was no great gathering of the nations to worship God, there was no return of the king of the line of David to the throne in Jerusalem, there was no return to glory for Israel—they weren’t even an independent nation, except for a brief period. Clearly, they had returned physically from exile, but the Exile wasn’t really over, and so many Jews came to believe that when Messiah came, that would be when all these promises would finally come true.

They were right in many ways, except for one major thing: when Messiah came, only a minority in Israel recognized him, and so the nation’s exile did not come to an end. Thus the question returned: was this the end for Israel? Was this the point when God finally gave up on them for good and turned them away forever? And as we saw last week, Paul says definitively: no. The Exile will be longer and worse than anyone expected, but there is still an end in sight. God has promised that in the end, he will come to Israel and take away their sins, he will banish their ungodliness and idolatry and redeem them, and that promise still holds.

As we saw last week, part of Paul’s purpose here is to warn the Gentiles in the church not to make the same mistake Israel had made before them. The Jews as a whole had fallen prey to spiritual pride, coming to believe that they were better than the rest of the world, and that because they were part of the nation of Israel, their salvation was guaranteed. They were wrong. Now Gentiles in the church were being drawn by that same temptation, coming to feel themselves superior to the Jews and to presume that because they were part of a Christian congregation, their salvation was guaranteed; to them Paul says, if God didn’t spare Israel for that, he certainly won’t spare you either. Just going to church won’t save you any more than just being a Jew will. Only Jesus.

Not all who look like Israel are part of the true Israel; not all who look like Christians are part of the true church. We can’t judge by external appearances who truly belongs to God; we can’t know in chapter 4 how anyone’s story will turn out, however great or lousy they may look at that point. Fortunately for us, we don’t need to, because that’s their story, not ours; it’s for us to look to our own story, and our own growth. What we do know is that it’s not about our merit, or anyone else’s: it’s about the grace of God, who freely chooses to save the undeserving—and everyone is undeserving.

This is why Paul can say that when God’s work among the Gentiles is completed, Jesus will come to Israel and they will turn in faith to him whom their ancestors rejected, and they will at last find his salvation. Given Paul’s quotation here from Isaiah 59, it seems clear that this will be when Christ returns—they missed him the first time, but when he comes again they will recognize him as Messiah and Lord. As Zechariah 12-13 says, they will look on him whom they have pierced, and they will grieve in deep repentance; and they will find his grace and forgiveness. At the end, God will bring Israel back to himself, and they will be saved—not every Jew throughout all time, and not by following the Law, but through Christ alone.

The key here is beautifully put by New Testament scholar Thomas R. Schreiner, who writes, “God has designed salvation history in such a way that the extension of his saving grace surprises those who are its recipients. Gentiles were elected to salvation when the Jews were expecting to be the special objects of his favor, and the Jews will be grafted in again at a time in which Gentiles will be tempted to believe that they are superior to ethnic Israel. By constructing history in such a way God makes it evident that he deserves the praise for the inclusion of any into his saving promises. Indeed, this theme matches beautifully with chapter 9, for there Paul argues similarly that God’s election inverts human expectations. He chose Isaac, not Ishmael; Jacob, not Esau; the Gentiles, not the Jews. Similarly, at the end of salvation history, when the Gentiles are in danger of becoming self-assured, confident that they are the special objects of God’s love, he will surprise them again by reinstating the people of his covenant promises.”

That’s the key: God has designed his plan so that his salvation takes us by surprise, so that we clearly see that the praise is to him alone. He doesn’t do what we expect, and he doesn’t call those whom we think worthy; instead—well, let me turn this over for a minute to a bunch of Cornish fishermen:

It’s not exactly the same, but that’s the gospel invitation: “Come all you no-hopers, jokers, and rogues.” Set aside your faith in the world and its ways; give up the idea that you can earn your way to heaven; realize just how much greater God is than you, how unfathomably vast and deep are his wisdom and knowledge and plans, stop trying to bargain with him or put him in your debt, and just worship him. In the end, all we can say is what Paul says here at the end:

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments,
and his paths beyond tracing out!
“Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?”
“Who has ever given to God,
that God should repay him?”
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be the glory forever! Amen.

A Remnant, Not an End

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(Isaiah 6, Isaiah 29:9-16; Romans 11:1-15)

I’ve argued over the course of this sermon series that much of the book of Romans is a theological retelling of the history of Israel, and that in that theological story, chapters 9-11 retell the Exile—God’s judgment of Israel for their unfaithfulness to him. Paul’s insistence that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, even for Jews—and that Jews who reject Christ have no place in the people of God and no share in his salvation—raises the question of whether God’s promises have failed, but the Exile raised that question first, and the prophets grappled with it at some length.

Paul begins his own answer to this question by making the case that God’s choice of Israel as a nation had never guaranteed the salvation of every individual Israelite—and maybe not even close. His salvation was nothing they had earned, and it was nothing they could compel; God had freely chosen Israel, and if he wanted, he had every right to freely choose others. And even if they could have obeyed his law well enough to deserve salvation, they clearly hadn’t; rather, their disobedience and unfaithfulness were more than sufficient to justify God’s rejection of them.

And yet, Paul roundly declares that God has not rejected Israel; Paul himself is living proof of that, since he is an Israelite. God chose Israel as his people, and he chose them with full knowledge of everything that would happen—including their unfaithfulness and their rejection of their Messiah. God has not changed his mind, and there’s no reason he should, since nothing that happened was in any way a surprise to him. He hasn’t saved everyone in the nation, but by his grace, he has preserved a remnant for himself. It might look like nothing more than a twice-burned stump, but out of that stump, new life will come. No matter how great God’s judgment on his people, it will not be the end of them; he will always preserve some through it for himself.

Nor is this all there is to say. Israel rejected Jesus when they should have recognized him as their foundation stone, and so the promised Rock of their salvation was instead a stumbling block for them; but their stumble not only wasn’t the end of them as a people, it wasn’t the end of their place in God’s plan, or of God’s plan for them. Though God hardened most of Israel, saving only a remnant, he didn’t do so permanently; though they stumbled, it wasn’t his purpose for them to fall.

Instead, their stumble served a purpose in God’s plan for the world, and then ultimately for them as well. Their rebellion and rejection of God created the opportunity for the good news of salvation to come to the Gentiles; this in turn is designed to inspire jealousy among the Jews, and thus to provoke them to return to God and be saved. As the New Testament scholar Leon Morris put it, “the salvation of the Gentiles was intended . . . to arouse in Israel a passionate desire for the same good gift.” Out of Israel’s turning away from the Messiah, which was sin and failure and defeat, God brought great blessing for the world—but he isn’t going to stop there. His final purpose is the end of death, the resurrection of the dead and the renewal of the world, and that will involve the salvation of Israel. Their part isn’t over; God isn’t finished with them yet.

So what do we do with this passage? In the first place, obviously, we must recognize that Paul is turning here to address the Gentiles in the church to warn them—and us—against any feeling of superiority to their Jewish brothers and sisters, and indeed against the idea that they can be the people of God, that they can be the church, without the Jews. Christianity has too often down the centuries been used to justify anti-Semitism, and that’s absolutely forbidden here, because it’s absolutely contrary to the gospel, and to the will and character of God. It is, in fact, the same sin Israel committed in refusing to realize that God hadn’t chosen them so they could be better than the rest of the world, but so they could bless the rest of the world. It’s the refusal to understand that what God is doing isn’t all about us, and it isn’t all for us.

When we frame it this way, we see that there’s a deeper concern here—I don’t say a bigger concern than how we are to treat Jews, but a deeper one that underlies the temptation to anti-Jewish arrogance. It’s the temptation to spiritual pride. It may show itself in a conscious attitude of superiority to others, as it evidently was among the Gentile Christians in Rome; but it may not. That’s a symptom, not the disease itself. It’s the desire to make my faith all about me—indeed, to make it my faith; it’s the failure to admit and acknowledge our absolute and utter dependence on grace, both from God and from other people. It’s the belief that God chose me because I deserve it, because I’m good enough to earn my salvation. As Paul will go on to say later in this chapter, this attitude isn’t only sinful, it’s delusional and dangerous.

The bottom line here is the grace of God, and this is our hope. He has preserved a remnant of Israel for himself and his name’s sake, not because anyone or anything required it, but by his gracious choice—it’s all a part of his choice of Abraham, and the promises he made to Abraham beginning in Genesis 12. He has reached out beyond Israel to make us a part of his people, and that too is purely an act of grace, pure gift. And if in our day the church seems to be captured by the surrounding culture, as Israel was, and to demand that God conform to the supposed wisdom of the world, that won’t be the end of us, either, because it isn’t about our deserving, it’s about his choice, his will, his love—and they are all free of us, completely free.

Whatever may come, God’s plan has already included it, and though his people may stumble, we will never entirely fall; he will use it to his purpose, and there will always be a remnant. His choice never fails, for there is nothing that happens that he didn’t already know; his plan never fails, for everything that happens is already a part of it; his promises never fail, for there is nothing in all creation that could make him change his mind; and his love and grace never fail, for they are infinite beyond our ability to comprehend. Whatever may come, he is faithful. Let’s pray.

Consequence

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(Deuteronomy 32:18-21, Isaiah 65:1-3; Romans 10:12-21)

“There is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’” That’s the bottom line for Paul when it comes to defining and understanding the church; that’s the thesis statement for everything he’s going to say later about how Jewish and Gentile Christians should relate to each other. “All” means all, and “everyone” means everyone, and that’s all there is to it; no one gets a special deal, no one gets a free ride, and no one is excluded from consideration.

This being so, then, how do we understand the failure of the Jews to call on the name of the Lord? Paul considers this question methodically, laying out the steps that lead, from a human perspective, to salvation. Verses 14-15 are often taken out of context and used to preach on the importance of evangelism and missions, and that’s entirely appropriate, because Paul is working here on the level of general principles which apply much more broadly than just his argument; but we also need to understand them in this context. This is the chain of human activity through which people come to salvation; where has it broken for Israel? The implied question here is, is it really Israel’s fault?

In verse 16 Paul answers that question—he actually interrupts himself, jumping ahead of his argument to say, “Yes.” Israel has heard the message of Christ, as Paul affirms in verse 18 with a little hyperbole, drawing on Psalm 19; they heard, because they were sent plenty of preachers, beginning with Jesus himself. They didn’t miss the good news: they refused it. The NIV blurs that a little; the Greek word they translate “accept” actually means “obey.” I don’t know why they didn’t use the standard translation, because Paul uses this word deliberately. He’s been linking obedience with faith since the very beginning of the book, so this is nothing new, but it is central to his argument here.

On the one hand, Paul’s understanding of faith is never purely intellectual; it’s never just a matter of agreeing that something is true. Faith is a commitment which produces action. I have faith that this chair will support me, and so I commit my weight to it—I don’t keep my muscles tensed just in case it falls apart. I have faith that this projector will work, and so I keep sending Dan the materials to produce the slides. I have faith that my daughter can run the slides, and as long as I’m smart enough to let her do it, everything goes well. When we have faith, it determines how we act.

On the other hand, Paul knows—and we know—that there are different kinds of unbelief. Unbelief can be a form of apathy: I just don’t care enough to bother thinking about it. It can be a response to a lack of evidence, as for instance my lack of faith in the Tooth Fairy. It can be accompanied by the willingness or even desire to believe, as when we go looking for evidence to prove a theory. But it can also be predetermined, the product of the refusal to believe. We see this, for instance, in the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who declared, “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

In declaring that not all Israelites have obeyed the gospel, Paul is saying that they don’t believe because they don’t want to. Their unbelief doesn’t arise out of skepticism, or confusion, or lack of knowledge; nor indeed are they apathetic—they are zealous for God, as long as he conforms to what they want to believe. The message of Christ does not fit what they want to believe, and it calls them to an obedience they do not want to give; they refuse to obey, and thus they refuse to believe.

And yet, God doesn’t stop loving them, and he doesn’t stop reaching out to them. His love and his grace are relentless, even in the midst of his judgment. The way Paul uses Isaiah 65 here is interesting, because in the prophet, verse 1 also refers to Israel; they are the first ones of whom God says, “I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me; I was found by those who did not seek me.” This is the pattern of God’s dealings with his people from the very beginning: he reveals himself to us, not because we chase him down and find him out, but purely on his own initiative, as an act of his grace. Nor is that merely how our relationship with him begins—it’s all the way along. Our growth in holiness and spiritual maturity isn’t about our effort half so much as it’s about God continuing to reveal himself to us and to call us to himself even when we aren’t seeking him.

When Israel remained obstinate and refused the Messiah God sent them, he reached out beyond them and once again revealed himself to a people who did not seek him, and indeed in many cases didn’t know they should be looking for him. But in doing this, did he turn away from Israel? No, he continues to hold out his hands to them; and indeed, Paul says, when God called a people for himself from among the Gentiles, this was not only for the Gentiles, it was also for the Jews. Part of his purpose in calling the Gentiles was to provoke Israel to jealousy and thus, ultimately, to bring at least some of them back to himself; and as Paul shows, they were told this was going to happen all the way back to the time of Moses.

We see in this the relentless love and faithfulness of God. Paul asks in 9:23, “What if God has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?”—but in truth he hasn’t merely endured Israel in their rejection, he has continued to love them and call them back to himself. We see as well that our actions and decisions matter, that they have consequence—and hear me carefully here. It isn’t just that they have consequences, like my dad always told me just before he spanked me; our actions could have consequences and still be, at a deeper level, inconsequential. Our actions and decisions have consequence—they have weight, meaning, significance. What we choose and what we do matters because we matter.

And note this: they don’t just matter in the way we think, or expect, and they don’t just matter for us. What God is doing in us as individuals and as a congregation is in part about us (though even there, not subject to our expectations), but it isn’t only about us; he’s also doing things through us in the lives of others that are beyond us to know or predict. He adopted Gentiles into his people because his salvation is for the Gentiles—but also for the sake of the Jews.

God works through our choices and our deeds, but never just in one way or on one level; he’s always doing many things through everything we do and everything that happens, and often with very long-term goals in mind. To pull a story from the Catholic blogger Jennifer Fulwiler, if your car breaks down on the way to an important meeting, maybe it’s not about you at all—maybe it’s about the tow-truck driver. Or from my own experience, I ended up in counseling (and on ulcer medication) in seventh grade. I don’t know all the reasons God allowed that, but one of them was so that I would marry Sara.

Remember, this is God’s story—we’re just characters in it; much-loved characters, yes, but it isn’t our story, and it isn’t limited to what we can see. We see in part, but he sees the whole; and the theme of the story, and the power that drives it, is his “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.”

Chasing Faith by Works

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(Isaiah 8:13-15, Isaiah 28:14-18; Romans 9:30-10:13)

As we’ve seen the last two weeks, Paul in Romans 9 strongly insists on the sovereignty of God in salvation—God chooses his people, he chooses whom he wants to choose, and our salvation is his work from first to last; it’s only by his power that we can even desire to be saved, much less turn to him in faith. I noted last week that laying it out as baldly as he does is distressing to us, and I got some of that distress reflected back at me after the service. Does this mean that God could look at someone who wanted to know him and worship him and reject that person, send them to Hell? Does it mean that no matter what you do, you might find yourself chosen for damnation anyway?

No, it doesn’t, for a few reasons I’ve already mentioned, which lead us into our consideration of this morning’s passage from Romans. First, that fear rests on the assumption that God’s choice of his people is irrational, based merely on his whim; it views God as capricious, unreasonable, unfair, and untrustworthy. This isn’t true. Again, just because we can’t know the reasons why God chooses to save this person and not that one, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have reasons; and the Bible is very clear on this point: “No one who believes on him will be put to shame.”

Second, Paul’s point is not, absolutely not, that God chooses people with no regard to whether they want to be his people; the point, rather, is that no one is able truly to choose God unles God has already chosen them first. It isn’t, “Oh, I go seeking God, and then I hope he lets me find him”; no, it’s, “I sought the Lord, and then I realized that the only reason I went seeking him is because he moved me to do so.” His work is always first. The sincere desire for God is always the work of his Holy Spirit in our hearts, and he will never reject his Spirit whom he has placed in us. Anyone who truly desires the salvation of Christ need have no fear, for that desire is itself evidence of his saving work.

And third—though this is deep water, I know—to insist that God saves us entirely by his own choice and his own will is not to say that our own choices are not real, or not important. I wound up going into this a fair bit in each of the last two weeks, so I’m not going to do that again; the key point is that Paul insists on both the absolute nature and importance of God’s choice and on the importance of our own choices and actions. It isn’t obvious how both those things are true together, but it’s clear to Paul that they are, and must be. Lose the first, and the door is wide open to spiritual pride and judgmentalism, as our salvation becomes the product of our own work and thus reason for boasting; lose the second, and our lives become inconsequential, leaving us to drift into despair or dissipation; and lose either of them, and our view of God is diminished.

Thus in this passage, having passionately declared that God will have mercy on whom he will have mercy and will harden whom he will harden, Paul now turns to show that God’s rejection of Israel—not all Israelites, to be sure, but national Israel in general—is the result of their own rejection of him. He doesn’t try to say that one is the cause of the other, he just sets them together and holds them in tension: both are true, and we cannot diminish either one, or explain either one away.

His basic critique of Israel in these verses is that they got righteousness wrong, and then refused to let God put them right; he lays this out in one contrast which he repeats three times. On one hand, there is “a righteousness that is by faith” which is “the righteousness of God,” which he then describes again as “the righteousness that is by faith.” On the other, he says that Israel “pursued a law of righteousness,” seeking to “establish their own righteousness,” and thus to achieve “righteousness based on the law.” They understood that God was righteous—not at every point in their history, to be sure, but they eventually learned—and they wanted to be righteous, but they wanted to be righteous their own way, by their own efforts. When Jesus tried to tell them, and his disciples tried to tell them, that their way wouldn’t work, and that God had ordained a different way for them to be made righteous, they refused to listen.

That phrase “law of righteousness” is particularly telling. Grammatically, it’s more than a little out of whack—it doesn’t make obvious sense—because it’s describing an attitude that’s out of whack; the Jewish understanding of both righteousness and the law had become seriously skewed. To pursue a law of righteousness is to think that one can earn righteousness or make oneself righteous through effort in doing the law. The Old Testament law did indeed promise righteousness, but it didn’t actually guarantee that that promise could be reached purely through our own work; it was always predicated on faith in God. To believe that we can make ourselves righteous by our own work in keeping the law is to substitute faith in God with a different faith: faith in ourselves.

That may sound like a strange thing to say, but think about it. To commit ourselves to become righteous in God’s eyes by keeping the law is to put our faith in our own wits—that we can be smart enough to understand it well enough to do it right—and in our own commitment and endurance—that we can keep doing it right all the time, without ever giving up, backing down, breaking down, or wearing out—and in our own strength—that we can overcome all of our weaknesses and bad habits and temptations by sheer force of effort and will. It’s the faith that we are good enough, smart enough, strong enough, and committed enough to compel God to bless us and save us. That is the pursuit of salvation by a law of righteousness: we keep the law, and by our own efforts we keep it so well that God rewards us with salvation.

And you know, that’s religion; but that’s not God, and that’s not his way. Instead, he calls us to a righteousness that is by faith. He freely makes us right with him by his grace, through the sacrifice of Christ who took all our sin and all our guilt on himself, and paid the penalty for all of it. He gives us faith to receive his gift of salvation, to trust that he truly means it and he has really done it all, and that we truly don’t need to do anything at all to earn it—and indeed, never could. And then, yes, he calls us to live lives that reflect and illustrate his righteousness, not in order to earn anything from him or to make him do anything, but simply out of love for him and gratitude for all he has done for us. The outward behavior may look much the same; but the heart is completely different.

The thing is, this was really nothing new. One of the things Paul keeps pointing out to his opponents is that obedience to the law was never the basis for God’s choice of Israel. God’s choice of his people began with Abraham, and what does the Bible say about Abraham? Paul quoted it back in chapter 4: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” Even from the beginning, what mattered was God’s choice; even from the beginning, the righteousness of God came not by law but by faith. The law came not so that Israel could earn their salvation, but so that they could respond in gratitude to the salvation they had been given by living in a way that pleased God.

The idea of earning salvation by outward obedience to the law was a misuse of the law from the very beginning; but because they’d gotten fixed on that idea, they failed to see that Christ was the end and purpose of the law. Jesus is the cornerstone of God’s work, the foundation of the people God has been building for himself all along; but because they refused to see, because they focused solely on the law, Christ became a stone over which they stumbled, on which they were broken.

In the Potter’s Hands

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(Exodus 33:15-23, Isaiah 45:9-13; Romans 9:14-29)

If you were here last week as we began Romans 9, you remember that Paul is grappling here with the problem of the salvation of the Jews. He’s argued that Jews aren’t guaranteed salvation or exempted from God’s judgment just because they’re Jews; he’s insisted that they cannot be saved through the Law, no matter how hard they try. Salvation is in Christ alone, even for the Jews; if they reject him, they have no part in the kingdom of God. But if God can give their place in his kingdom to someone else, does that mean he’s gone back on his promises?

As I said last time, this is a vast, complicated, and critically important question. To be faithful to Jesus and his gospel, we must affirm both that salvation is indeed in Christ alone, even for the people of Israel, and that this truth doesn’t represent a betrayal of God’s promises to Israel, but their fulfillment. God has not failed to keep his word to his people; in Jesus, he has done exactly what he said he would do.

Now, we saw last week that Paul begins by arguing that this is really nothing new—God’s choice of Israel never meant that just being Jewish, or even being a reasonably good Jew, was a guarantee of salvation. He uses Genesis and Exodus to show that salvation has always been a matter of God’s free choice, not something guaranteed by birth or family; and he draws on the prophets, and particularly Isaiah, who faced the same question he’s facing: if God brings down disaster on his people and drives them away for their unfaithfulness, does that mean the end of his promises? Like them, he says, “No.” God will not save all of national Israel, but those within Israel who are truly faithful to him—the remnant, to use the language of Isaiah—will find his salvation and inherit his promises, in Jesus Christ.

Just in making this case, Paul was guaranteed to provoke his opponents; but he raises the stakes by the way in which he goes about it, because his argument in this chapter isn’t a comfortable one for us. He could have said, “Well, the promises of God were always contingent on Israel’s faith, and so Jews who decide not to put their faith in God naturally aren’t saved”; the Pharisees at least would have agreed with that, except of course for the whole Jesus thing. But he doesn’t do that. Instead he says, “God chooses his people, and he chooses whom he wants to choose, and we don’t get to determine what choices he has to make.” It’s God’s choice, it’s God’s work, it’s all God, it’s only God, and that’s all there is to it.

This sits pretty raw with us. There are a number of reasons for that, but I think the most basic one is pride. If our salvation is all God’s work, that leaves absolutely no credit to us; there’s not even a sop for our egos, nothing to give us any reason at all to boast. We resist that; we feel the pull to find a way to put our own works back into the picture.

To be sure, we don’t put it that way. We say it’s a matter of justice, by which we mean that no one who deserves salvation should be left out, and no one should go to Hell unfairly. Part of that is that we all seem to have at least one person whom we deeply desire to see come to faith, though why we should think that’s more likely to happen if it’s up to them rather than if it’s up to God, I’m not sure; maybe it’s because we don’t really trust God that much. At the same time, ego is also at work here: we want to believe that we’re saved because we deserve it. The truth is, no one does go to Hell unfairly; if it were a matter of justice and what we deserve, we would all be in Hell. The only injustice in God at all is that he shows mercy to anyone at all.

Still, some object that Paul makes us merely God’s puppets—we have no control over whether we’re saved or not, it’s all at God’s whim. If he’s right, they ask, how can we be held responsible for actions and decisions that aren’t really ours? What right does God have to judge anybody, if his judgments are based on things he made us do?

Paul doesn’t cite the book of Job here, but this is a question rather like those which Job hurls at God; and it’s worth noting that Paul’s response is rather like God’s response to Job. He doesn’t really answer the question—instead he says, “Who do you think you are? By what right do you think you can get away with filing charges against God?” He makes no effort at all to explain God’s reasons or justify God’s decisions; he doesn’t even attempt to show that God chooses whom he will save based on criteria that we find appropriate and acceptable. Not his the goal Milton sets out in Paradise Lost, to “justify the ways of God to man.” Instead, he reaches back to Isaiah to say, “God is as much bigger than you as the potter is bigger than the clay; he understands you and everyone else much better than you do; and he has every right to do whatever he knows to be best, and you have no right to say otherwise.”

Now, to our ears, that sounds harsh; Paul isn’t pulling any punches here, nor is he making any effort to soothe our wounded pride. But then, it’s amazingly arrogant of us to presume to judge God for not doing things the way we think best, as if we were somehow qualified to make that judgment; what Paul is going after here is sin, and a particularly insidious and dangerous kind. He doesn’t want to appease it, he wants to kill it. That, I think, is one reason he doesn’t dignify this question with an answer—that, plus the fact that he’s no more qualified to read God’s mind than any of us are. He does, however, say something very important here, in that he gives us the image of God as a rational actor who does what he does for good reason: a potter, who chooses what to make based on what kinds of vessels will serve his purposes.

This is key, not merely because it illustrates the power of God, but because it answers the implicit assumption which underlies the objection of verse 19. We talked about this last week—it’s the assumption that if we can’t know the reasons why God chooses to save this person and not that one, it must mean that he doesn’t have reasons. It’s the idea that if God won’t tell us why he does what he does (and let us tell him he’s wrong), it must mean he’s capricious, unreasonable, unfair, and untrustworthy. Paul’s point is that this isn’t true. God has his reasons, and they’re good reasons, because he knows what he’s doing—but we’re too small and too limited to fully comprehend them. We can’t expect God to explain everything to us, if only because we’d never understand the explanation.

Take that to heart. We aren’t going to be able to get answers to all of our questions that make perfect sense to us; God is far too big and far too great for that to be even conceivable, let alone possible. We should expect our faith to be paradoxical at some points; after all, we worship a God who is three and also one, and one of those three—Jesus Christ—is completely and totally human at the same time as he’s completely and totally God. How all of those things can be true together is beyond me to know; my brain is too small for that. Somehow, they are. God is that big and that marvelous, that in him all those things fit together.

Here, we affirm that at one and the same time, our salvation is entirely God’s choice and his work, and we are free actors who are responsible for our own choices, whether we turn to God or reject him. I can’t explain that; though if you were here last week, you may remember I offered an analogy to human authors to illustrate it. Every writer of fiction I’ve ever heard talk about the writing process speaks of their characters as real people with minds of their own, who sometimes do unexpected things and refuse to cooperate. Obviously, everything that happens in the story is the product of the author’s mind and will—and yet, at the same time, each character speaks and acts according to their own will, according to their own desires and concerns, according to who the author created them to be.

This is, I think, an aspect of the image of God in us; to borrow language from J. R. R. Tolkien, we are subcreators who create secondary worlds in imitation of God who made us and the world within which we live, and in so doing we relate to our creations in somewhat the same way he relates to us. Inside the great story of creation, we act of ourselves and our own will; God is the author of the story who has given us our wills and our characters, whose will sustains them every moment, and who writes every scene as he chooses. We affirm both the absolute authorship and authority of God who created all things and holds all things together, and our own freedom to choose as we will, even on matters of ultimate importance; it’s just a matter of whether you’re looking at the story from the inside or the outside.

But given that, why does God write the story the way he does? Why does he save some people and not others? I don’t know. We all, lost in our sin, begin by rejecting him as our enemy. Some of us, he shows mercy—he doesn’t allow us to reject him, but overwhelms us with his grace. Others, he allows to reject him, and hardens in their rejection—though he shows them great patience and lets them work their own way, so that they may have every chance to do otherwise. Why doesn’t he save them too? Why doesn’t he save everyone? He doesn’t tell us. But really, why does he save anyone? The only answer we get is love—and not just that he loves those whom he saves, but also that he loves those whom he doesn’t save, and is grieved by their death. God doesn’t explain himself to us; again, we probably wouldn’t understand if he did, and it really isn’t our place to demand an explanation. Instead, he points us to his Son, Jesus, who died for those who murdered him, and calls us to trust him: to trust that, as Abraham puts it in Genesis 18, the judge of all the earth will do right.