Monthly Archives: September 2022

DEAD, BUT ALIVE

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DEAD, BUT ALIVE

“But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, we Jews find ourselves also among the sinners, doesn’t that mean that Christ promotes sin? If I rebuild what I destroyed, then I really would be a lawbreaker.” Galatians 2:17, 18.

This is quite complicated reasoning. If the Jews who believed in Jesus, no longer meticulously kept all the minute details of the law in order to satisfy God’s righteous requirements, but trusted in Christ’s righteousness given to them through God’s grace, didn’t that mean that Jesus was deliberately causing them to be disobedient to God? Wasn’t Jesus making them “sinners”?

No, quite the opposite! God gave His Son as an atoning sacrifice for sin so that those who believe in Jesus and what He did to restore us to God, no longer need to work for acceptance with God by trying to obey His laws. Jesus fulfilled the law, and then died as though He were a sinner, in our place. To go back to law keeping as a way of satisfying God’s requirements would make us law-breakers because Jesus Himself did away with law-keeping as a way of being acceptable to God. We would be defying God’s instruction and setting up our own way to gain acceptance with Him.

Let’s use an Old Testament illustration. God gave the Israelites a promise. He said He would give them the land of Canaan as an inheritance. When they reached the border of the land. He instructed Moses to send in twelve spies to check it out (Numbers 13:1-3). Ten of the spies came back with a good report of the products of the land but put fear into the hearts of the people by describing the Canaanites as giants whom they could never overcome. They refused to believe God’s promise and incited the people to rebel against God and Moses.

Instead of trusting God and obeying His command, they complained against Him and against their leaders in spite of encouragement from Joshua and Caleb that God would help them overcome the Canaanites. God was angry with them because of their refusal to believe His promise and to take the land. They would not be allowed to enter the land He had promised to them. They would all die in the desert and their children would take possession of Canaan.

When they heard this, they mourned and decided they would go up and fight the Canaanites in spite of God’s instruction that they were not to go because He was not with them. Once again they disobeyed God, went into Canaan and were soundly defeated in battle. They had disobeyed God’s instruction twice – first to go, but they refused, and then not to go, and they went.

God gave His law to His people but they did not obey it. Then He sent Jesus who fulfilled and did away with the law as a way of salvation. Now Peter and his companions were wanting to go back to keeping the law as a way of pleasing God when God had given them Jesus to replace the law. That would make them law-breakers all over again.

“For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God for, if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” Galatians 2:19-21.

Paul concluded his discussion with a compelling argument. Once he was dead because of the law; now he was dead to the law. All the law did for him was to reveal just how much of a sinner he was. Through faith in Jesus and the righteousness He gave to Paul, he was now joined to Jesus in a faith union which made him perfectly acceptable to God without having to do anything except trust and obey Jesus.

What was the point of Jesus’ coming to earth and dying on the cross if people could be righteous by their own efforts? For Paul, Jesus was all or nothing. Either Peter and those who were influenced by him, trusted Jesus for acceptance with God or they ignored Jesus and tried to do it on their own. They could not have both.

The same truth applies to us today. We are either joined to Jesus by faith and live our lives in union with Him plus nothing, or we abandon Him altogether and work hard to satisfy God’s holy standards by trying to keep rules. There is no middle road. As soon as we add rules to the mix, we cancel out grace, faith and righteousness and go back to slavery to fear because we will never know whether we have done enough or not.

Jesus said, “Follow me.” That’s all!

Acknowledgement

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

ONE SMALL STEP BACKWARDS…

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ONE SMALL STEP BACKWARDS…

“We who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So, we too have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law because, by the works of the law no one will be justified.” Galatians 2:15, 16.

This sounds like a bit of a tongue-twister, doesn’t it? What is Paul saying?

Peter and his fellow disciples, in their association with Jesus, had experienced a rude awakening. As part of a religious system that relied heavily on their performance for acceptance with God, they thought that their law-keeping was what He demanded to satisfy His requirements. Jesus taught them that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was actually their Father, and that He was calling them into a relationship of intimacy with Him as their sons, just as Jesus was His Son, and the model of sonship they were to follow.

Sin had alienated them from the Father, and no amount of trying to do the right thing by observing rules and carrying out rituals could undo their sinful behaviour or change their sinful nature. They were not “sinful” Gentiles, those who worshipped idols and engaged in depraved behaviour but that didn’t make them any better than those who did. Everyone fell short of God’s perfection and they could do nothing about it.

Jesus’ untimely death on a cross, which they thought was a terrible tragedy, turned out to be the opposite. It was God’s pre-ordained way of dealing with the sin they could not get rid of by rule-keeping. Jesus died in the place of sinners to satisfy God’s righteous demand for the payment of a huge debt. He died as an atoning sacrifice for all people for all time so that God could accept as not guilty everyone who submitted to Jesus as their rightful Lord.

What, then, was Peter thinking when he slipped back into his old pattern of behaviour, thinking he was better than the Gentile believers and withdrawing from fellowship with them? It was a backward step, and would have serious repercussions if it was what he really believed. Even his temporary lapse into the fear of man affected his standing before God.

Everyone who takes the step from confidence in his own efforts to satisfy God’s holy requirements to trusting in Jesus for acceptance with God, has a standing in God’s grace which enables him to approach the Father with confidence. He has been declared “not guilty” because of Jesus. His sin has been removed; he has been washed clean of sin’s pollution and he had been given a new nature, one that makes him a son, not a slave. He is indwelt by the Holy Spirit and, through Him, has been restored to oneness with the Father and able to call Him “Abba”.

One small step backwards for Peter was a huge fall from standing in the grace of God to standing in his own righteousness which God declared was like filthy rags in His sight. The great Apostle Peter was unwittingly in danger of disqualifying himself by being afraid to stand up for what he believed.

Thank God for Paul’s boldness and for his understanding of the gospel. Without it, we would not have the letters his wrote to the Roman and Galatian churches which give us a clear explanation of what God did through Jesus Christ to reconcile us to Himself. It was through trial and error, struggle, and debate that the truth of the gospel began to emerge in the early church. We are blessed to share in the great heritage passed down to us from the church of the past.

Thank God we learn from our failures as much as from our successes. Peter must surely not have forgotten the lesson and become stronger for it. Of course, it all depends on whether he received Paul’s rebuke or not. We have a clue to his attitude in his second letter which we have preserved for us in the Bible. He obviously held Paul in high esteem because he wrote this:

“Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures to their own destruction.” 2 Peter 2:15, 16.

Like Paul, we need not only to be thoroughly versed in the details of the faith we have embraced, but to defend it vehemently because our fate and the fate of many depends on our faithfulness to the truth.

I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people. Jude 1:3

Acknowledgement

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

CLAY FEET

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CLAY FEET

“When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned, For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.

“When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, ‘You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?'” Galatians 2:11-14.

Even Peter! How strong are the traditions that enslave a person’s conscience!

Peter was far from Jerusalem. There were no scrupulously traditional Jewish believers in the vicinity of Antioch, so he freely mixed with Gentiles according to the dream which had led him to enter Cornelius’ the centurion’s house in Caesarea and eat with him (Acts 10). But when a group of Jewish believers came from James, the leader of the church in Jerusalem, he slipped back into his old Jewish attitude of exclusivism.

For Peter, it was not a matter of conscience or conviction. He had long dealt with the right or wrong of eating with Gentiles – which was an expression of reconciliation; the Holy Spirit had seen to that. Here it was a matter of the fear of man and Paul was quick to rebuke him, even publicly, for going back on his conviction to appear loyal to his Jewish heritage. He wasn’t even honouring the word of God but rather Jewish customs which contradicted God’s intention.

In his defininition of the gospel of grace he preached, Paul referred to this incident to convince his Galatian readers that he had actually stood up to the great Peter whom he had just described as one of the “esteemed” leaders of the church in Jerusalem.

By Peter’s behaviour, he had inadvertently dishonoured the gospel of Christ which was the good news of salvation through Him alone. Peter was insinuating that Jesus had not really destroyed the barrier between Jew and Gentile through His death; that Jews were still superior to Gentiles and showed it by their refusal to eat with fellow Gentile believers. In the end, he was saying that he had to uphold the customs of his forefathers which took precedence over the truth of the gospel.

For Paul this was unthinkable. He had given up too much for the sake of the gospel and suffered too much at the hands of his fellow Jews because of their fanatical loyalty to useless traditions to sanction Peter’s hypocrisy by keeping quiet. To say nothing meant that he was allowing Peter to lead others, even his companion Barnabas, astray. If it meant publicly exposing Peter’s cock-eyed thinking, so be it.

Paul does not record Peter’s response. Did he defend himself? Did he make excuses? Did he graciously acknowledge his error? We do not know. All we know is that Paul clearly understood the message of the cross and he defended it fearlessly even to standing up to Peter himself. It was not his intention to belittle Peter or to show himself better than Peter. It was always and only his motive to hold Jesus up as an all-sufficient Saviour for both Jew and Gentile.

Paul had long since come to understand that, at the cross, everyone stands on level ground. There is no longer a difference between Jew and Gentile. All the differences that existed were artificial and man-made. The Jews, as God’s covenant people, were chosen, not to make them exclusive, but to set them apart for a divine purpose – to show the world that their God was the only and true God by the way they lived.

They failed dismally, anyway, and all they did was to show how impossible it was to be like Him by following rules and rituals, most of which they made up, without having their hearts changed. It took the Son of God to show them how to love like the Father, and then to die in the place of sinners to reconcile them to the Father. Where, in all that, were they better than anyone else? They stood on level ground with every other human being in both their sin and their eligibility to receive God’s grace through the death of His Son.

Thanks to Paul’s understanding and clear presentation of the truth, Peter and his companions received correction and we have this letter which presents Jesus to us as the all-sufficient Saviour of sinners plus nothing.

How true it is that anyone, including Peter, can have “clay feet”!

Acknowledgement

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.