(Romans 8)
I grew up in the Reformed Church in America. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s the Dutch version of Scottish Presbyterianism. It’s a lot smaller in this country because there were far more Scottish immigrants than Dutch, but historically they’ve been different versions of the same basic thing: Reformed theology and church government by elders. Pastors are elders who take the primary responsibility for preaching and teaching.
Problem is, that word “Reformed” isn’t clear to many people nowadays. What many don’t get—even in Reformed churches—is that the nub of Calvinism is very simple: God is bigger. Luther was driven to stand against the Roman church when he discovered the meaning of grace; Calvin’s great inspiration was a vision of the unimaginable sovereignty, glory, and goodness of God. However much bigger and more wonderful you might stretch your understanding of God to be, he’s far, far bigger and more wonderful than you realize. Everything else in Calvin’s thought flows from that.
This includes his understanding that our sin is also much bigger than we realize—so big that in our own strength, we can never be good enough to be acceptable to God. Apart from God’s work, no good motive is ever wholly unmixed, no good deed ever completely untainted, no good thought ever perfectly pure. This insight, unfortunately, is usually called the doctrine of total depravity, which is badly misleading. We know what we would mean if we called somebody “totally depraved,” but that’s not what this doctrine means. “Total inability” captures the point much better.
From these insights flows the Reformed understanding of salvation: our sin is unimaginably huge and horrible and evil, but—if I may adapt a line from my fellow Dutch Reformed believer Corrie ten Boom—there is no sin so big but God is bigger still. None. The way that works out is usually explained in five parts. Total inability is the first. The second is unconditional election. If nothing we can do can earn God’s favor, he must give us his favor unearned, without conditions, no strings attached. Third is irresistible grace: the prisoner chained to the wall is in no position to stop his rescuer from unlocking his shackles.
Fourth is effectual atonement, usually unhelpfully called limited atonement, as if Jesus only wanted to save a certain number of people. The point is rather that atonement isn’t put out like a buffet for people to choose or ignore. Our atonement was effectively accomplished in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whenever each of us first experienced our salvation, we were all saved on a Friday afternoon under a black sky on a hill outside Jerusalem, and the following Sunday when light blazed and a tomb was left empty.
And fifth and last: the perseverance of the saints. I have been saved, I am being saved, I will be saved: it’s an ongoing work of God the Father through the grace of Jesus Christ the Son which is being done in me by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. It was decisively accomplished when Jesus declared it finished, it is being carried out day by day and in each passing moment, and it will only be fully realized when the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time shall be no more. And here’s the kicker: nothing I can do can unwork what God has worked.
This is the logical conclusion of everything that goes before it; it’s where you get if you understand that our salvation is God’s work from first to last. It’s also, I believe, the teaching of Scripture. Look what Paul says in Romans: “We know—we know—that for those who love God and are called according to his purpose, God is at work in everything for good. For those whom he foreknew, he predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son . . . And those whom he predestined, he called, and those whom he called, he justified, and those whom he justified, he glorified.” Notice anything about those last five verbs? They’re all past tense. Done, finished, completed. Do you also notice the lack of weasel words? No maybes or caveats: what God started, he has already finished, without exception. We don’t experience that completion yet, but it’s as certain as yesterday’s sunrise.
That’s why Paul says in Philippians, “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” Why? He’s already completed it. We just haven’t gotten there yet. It’s also why Paul goes on to say in Romans, “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He didn’t even spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all . . . Who can possibly bring a charge against God’s chosen people? God justifies—who is to condemn? Jesus Christ who died for us and was raised for us is now standing at the right hand of God interceding for us. . . . I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.”
At this point someone may say, “Sorry, no, you forgot about Hebrews.” I think that misreads Hebrews, which actually ties in closely with what Paul says in Romans 8. For Paul, it’s a one-liner: “Jesus Christ who died for us and was raised for us is now standing at the right hand of God interceding for us.” For Hebrews, it’s three-and-a-half dense chapters, with the really dire warnings on either side of it.
Let’s look at those warnings. First, from Hebrews 6:4-6: “For those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, it is impossible to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt.”
Second, from Hebrews 10:27-29: “If we defiantly refuse to stop sinning after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the Law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?”
If Hebrews teaches that it’s possible to lose your salvation by sinning, it also teaches that once you lose it you can never be saved again—which I think we can all agree is unbiblical. There’s something else going on here. The author isn’t talking about sin in general, but one specific sin: apostasy. Hebrews describes someone who has seen the reality and character of God in the church—and note, it never uses the language of salvation, just that of outward involvement—who chooses to get up, spit in God’s face, and go join the enemy. Think of Shakespeare’s Richard III: “Since I cannot prove a lover/To entertain these fair well-spoken days,/I am determinéd to prove a villain.”
Does the author of Hebrews believe his hearers are actually going to fall away from God? No: both warnings are followed by firm reassurances on that point. Hebrews doesn’t deny what Paul teaches about the perseverance of the saints, but it warns its audience not to take that lightly. People can spend their whole lives in the church, hear the gospel thousands of times, take communion, be baptized, see God turn human wreckage into saints over and over again, and be as alienated from God in their hearts as Richard Dawkins.
The author wants us to see how big a thing it would be to defiantly abandon Jesus. If you reject the only one by whom you may be saved and the only way in which you can possibly repent, you have no options left. Christ’s sacrifice was once for all and there won’t be a second opportunity. If you decisively reject him, you’ve locked yourself in a windowless room and welded the door shut behind you. There is no way but the One who is the Way; if you turn your back on him, you have no way forward.
Even so, Hebrews is confident in the salvation of its audience because of everything we see in 7:1 through 10:25—in a nutshell, that Jesus Christ who died for us and was raised for us is now standing at the right hand of God interceding for us. Our future sin is future to us, but not to God. Jesus didn’t just die on the cross for the stuff I already know about now, he died on the cross for me—my whole life, all the sins I will ever commit in the future, the deepest, blackest pit in my soul, all of it. If someday I commit a sin which seems too big to ever be forgivable, it will remain true that there is no sin so big but the cross is bigger still—because, as Corrie ten Boom wrote, “there is no pit so deep but Christ is deeper still.” And Christ died for you, too, and there’s nothing you can ever do to change that, because whatever it is, he’s already died for it. He’s already saved you on every step of your journey, not just the ones you’ve already walked.
But even if we agree that wrong action cannot make God change his mind and reject us, what about wrong belief? Isn’t that what Hebrews is talking about, after all? No question there are some things we have to get right. For example, Paul tells the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 12:3), “No one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says, ‘Jesus is accursed!’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.” Paul was a Jew who had spent his life saying “Lord” wherever the Scriptures had God’s name; to call Jesus “Lord,” in his understanding, means Jesus is the God of all creation whom you’re committed to obey. If you don’t believe that, whatever you are might include a lot of wonderful things, but you’re not a Christian. It’s definitional.
That said, we need to be careful. What’s Paul’s emphasis here? Why does he tell us it matters so much that you can say, “Jesus is Lord”? Because that’s only possible by the Holy Spirit. What’s most important isn’t that your ideas are right but that your heart is right. If we miss that, we risk playing into the pathologies of our age—an age in which being wrong is risky, and growing riskier. Many in our culture are incredibly threatened by the fact that other people disagree with them—because, I think, the mere existence of disagreement suggests they might be wrong about something important.
The anxiety there is deep. I believe it’s rooted in the fact that so many people are only loved conditionally. If you stop believing the way I do, I might stop loving you, and if you feel you need my love for your happiness, that’s a risk you can’t take. I find a group that loves and accepts me—as long as I share their core beliefs. It’s group dynamics. Many churches emphasize doctrine so much, their members assume the church—and therefore God—sees them in the same way and will reject and abandon them if they don’t get it right. When it comes to those churches, they’re usually correct. What that teaches them to believe about God is tragic.
That phrase “getting it right” points us to another issue: there’s a difference between being right and knowing the truth. Being right is school language: “What’s the right answer to this question?” It’s about mastering something smaller than us. Once I have the right answer, I’m good enough, and I don’t have stretch to learn anything more about it. It’s a posture of arrogance and superiority toward the subject—and, more, toward people who don’t know the right answer. Knowing the truth, seeking understanding, is a posture of humility. It’s literally about under-standing—we’re standing under something larger than us and submitting ourselves to it.
For myself, I can see the difference between the two in the way my brain works. If someone asks me a question and I know “the right answer,” my reflex is to switch into expert mode—“let me impress you with how smart I am.” It’s my inner third-grader coming out. If I can catch that reaction and instead choose to respond with a focus on the other person, rather than on the information, and on the truth of their question rather than on showing off, my mind opens up and slows down, and we can dig deep into the question and seek the truth together. That’s fun. That’s life-giving, to them and me both.
But if someone asks me a question and it’s clear they have a “right answer” in mind, that whole part of my brain shuts down and something else lights up. Instead of thinking about the question and questing after the truth, I find myself trying to read the mind of the questioner. I’m not trying to understand the truth, I’m trying to figure out how to convince that person that I’m right. It’s stupid—and counterproductive, because it leaves me unable to think straight—but it’s wired pretty deep, and it’s hard for me to stop. Of course, maybe it’s just me, but that’s what I see in myself, anyway.
I think it’s clear from Scripture that God doesn’t give two hoots about us being right. He wants us to know the truth because he is the truth, and the source of all truth, and he wants us to know him. You can see that in prophets like Micah and Amos, who come down hard on the people for their worship even though the people are doing all the right stuff. They have all the right answers and they’re following all the proper rituals. The problem is, they don’t know God at all because they don’t care about knowing God. They’re practicing vending-machine religion. They just want to put in the right answers and get back the right blessings. God wants no part of it.
It matters that what we believe about God is true because the more closely our understanding of God conforms to the truth of his character and will, the more clearly we will see him and the more deeply we will be open to knowing him. If you think I’m a San Francisco 49ers fan, that probably won’t hurt our relationship—but if you try to talk football with me, you’re going to end up confused, and if you give me a Niners jersey as a present, you’re going to wonder why I’m not grateful. To the extent that our theology is wrong (and everyone’s is to some extent), we’re following and worshiping God as we imagine him to be rather than as he truly is.
But you know what? If our hearts are open to God and his Spirit is in us, he can fix our wrong theology, just as he can fix all the other things that are yet unresolved in our hearts—and will, in his good time, in the new creation if not in this one. God tells the exiles through Jeremiah, “If you seek me with all your heart, you will find me.” After all, it’s never really us finding God anyway, it’s always him finding us. I think Anne Lamott’s theology is deeply cracked and seriously confused, but I love her work all the same because she clearly loves Jesus deeply and knows just how desperately she needed and still needs him as Savior. I’ve known plenty of folks, some in churches I’ve pastored, whose theology was as perfectly polished as the stone of their hearts. Give me Anne Lamott’s love of the One who is the Truth over all their right answers any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
I have come in recent years to take great comfort in Philippians 3:15. The verses immediately before it are probably more familiar to you: “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Then he says, “Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that to you.” I love that! Paul lays out this great truth about the Christian life and says, “If you’re a mature believer, this is how you should understand and approach your life,” but he knows there are bound to be those who disagree. Is he threatened by that? No! He just waves his hand and says, “God will take care of it.” He understands that truth is God’s and he doesn’t need to defend it—and neither do we. That’s God’s job, and he trusts God to do it.
That’s the key: trust in God. If we worry about getting it wrong, if we worry about him abandoning us because we don’t know enough of the right answers, we’re showing that at bottom, we don’t trust him to lead us to himself. We’re afraid we’re capable of being foolish enough, confused enough, or just plain stupid enough for God to give us up as a lost cause. The thing is, God is smarter than our stupid. He knows all our frailties and weaknesses and he takes them perfectly into account as he leads us. If we care more about believing what we want to believe than we do about what God wants, that’s a sin issue: it’s idolatry. If our primary motivation is to know him and we truly want to hear him, he is perfectly capable of making himself clear to us, however confused or uncertain we might be.
The bottom line here is the same one with which we began: God is bigger. God is bigger than our fear. He’s bigger than our fear for ourselves, and bigger than our fear of ourselves. He’s bigger than our fear for others, and bigger than our fear of them. He’s bigger than our fear of doing it wrong, or getting it wrong, or being wrong, and he’s bigger than our fear of what could happen if others do or think or say things wrong. He calls us to humble ourselves before him and open ourselves up to the questions we don’t want to answer and the truths we don’t want to hear, and beyond that, he says, “Trust me. I’ve got this. You won’t have it all right until I make all things new. For now, just follow me, and if you’re wrong about something important, or if they are, I’ll straighten that out in my good time. Be patient with all that is unresolved; resolving it is my job, and I have already done it. Trust me, and I’ll take care of the rest.” Thanks be to God.
Photo 2017, photographer unknown. Public domain.