Tag Archives: the power of God

ROMANS…PAUL’S THEME – 5

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“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

‭‭Romans‬ ‭1‬:‭16‬-‭17‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Righteousness! The righteousness of God. Why God’s righteousness? 

Put yourself to the shoes of these Roman converts. Their background was paganism…they had worshiped a plethora of gods who were evil, capricious, controlling, and demanding…originated in the imagination of those who created them….

“Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”

‭‭Romans‬ ‭1‬:‭22‬-‭23‬

Against this background, there were people in Rome who had emerged from the darkness of idolatry to believe in Jesus and to be made new creatures in Christ.

Where was Paul to begin? What had happened to them that had caused a radical change deep inside them. Despite the way they had thought and behaved, they were different now…viewing God, themselves, and the world from a different perspective. They knew they had changed inside but on what did they base their faith?

However, they still had to contend with minds and lives shaped by an evil belief system that had infiltrated their thinking and shaped their lives. This belief system had to be dismantled thought by thought. 

There were so many things Paul could tell them but…he must start at the beginning…with God. 

Paul’s readers had heard the gospel…the good news…and believed it. Something amazing had happened to them. They were different people…but how… why?

It was God, God who had stepped in with a way so daring that it takes one’s breath away. He d done something for them and in them that needed explanation…a solid foundation that would not shake when troubles came. 

Righteous by faith? What did that mean? In the following pages, Paul would give them a thorough explanation of God’s righteousness…how they could approach a holy God and be accepted, and how, by faith, they could live in fellowship with this holy God. 

God’s story was, first, good news. All their lives, the Romans had lived sin, apart from God, and had within them the sentence of death. No peace…always fearful and aware of guilt even if they tried to deny what their conscience was telling them. 

So, what Paul had presented to them was indeed good news. When they received Jesus, they knew that something radical had happened to them. They had peace inside… the burden of guilt, fear, and shame was gone. They felt free. 

They had experience salvation…a wholeness in which their whole world had turned right side up. Apart from the peace that had replaced their dis-ease, even their desires had changed.  They no longer lusted after the desires of their old selves. They felt comfortable with God. Jesus was real to them. They enjoyed being with God ‘s people. 

All these changes happened to them when they gave themselves to Jesus as a choice based on what they heard about Him…as Paul later explained. 

“Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.”

‭‭Romans‬ ‭10‬:‭17‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Righteousness by faith…the gospel…God’s power… big subjects that Paul was about to unpack, one step at a time…

To be continued

THE FOOLISHNESS OF THE CROSS

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THE FOOLISHNESS OF THE CROSS

We’ve travelled a while through a series I called “Things Jesus did not say.” As westerners – at least some of us who read this are – our worldview is different from the ancient Hebrew worldview which the Bible represents. When we understand what Jesus said from His perspective, many of the things He said which made no sense to us before, have come to mean something to us now. Then I asked myself, “Where now?”

A short while ago I was browsing on YouTube and came across a beautiful song with simple but powerful words called “The power of the cross”. I got to thinking about the title. What is it about the cross of Jesus that is so powerful? After all, He was just a man who was crucified – or was He? Paul wrote this in his letter to the Corinthian church over two thousand years ago:

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (1 Cor. 1: 18)

In the Gentile and Jewish world of his day, Paul was up against huge opposition to his message.

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 1: 22-24)

Throughout His private life with His disciples, Jesus referred to His approaching death on more than one occasion. He informed them that He was to die at the hands of the Jewish leaders.

From this time on Jesus began to explain to His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that He must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. (Matt. 16: 21)

Apart from His time with His disciples in the upper room when they celebrated the last Passover together, Jesus told them nothing about the reason for His death. He indicated that He was to be the fulfilment of Passover when a lamb was killed for a family, and its blood painted on the doorposts of their houses to protect the family from the angel of death. That He would be killed, yes, but why? No.

He promised His disciples that the Holy Spirit would come to take His place, and that He would be within them. It would be left to the Spirit to lead them into all truth and to teach them everything they needed to know about Jesus, including the ramifications of His death. God chose the great Jewish rabbi, Paul, a man who had a powerful legal mind and a thorough grasp of the Scriptures, to understand and explain the meaning of the cross for all who came after him.

Paul had studied under Gamaliel, one of the significant rabbis of his day, but one whose yoke led Paul into deep bondage to legalism and produced a fanatical persecutor of those who believed in Jesus. It was only through a personal encounter with the risen Christ that Paul recognised Him as his Messiah and his understanding of the cross was transformed from foolishness to power. He knew the way the Jews thought. He was one of them. He had also dismissed the crucified Jesus as nonsense until his eyes were opened on the Damascus road.

It was the power of the very cross he despised that had changed him from a vicious religious fanatic to a passionate lover of Jesus and preacher of the cross. From that moment on, his stance was:

I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on God’s power. (1 Cor. 2: 3-5)

There it is again; what to humans was foolishness was really God’s power.

The Jews rejected Jesus’ claim to be the Son of God because they demanded signs, yet they dismissed as foolishness the greatest of all signs – God’s love demonstrated by His presence among them and His sacrifice for them. They were too blind to see in Jesus the fulfilment of all the prophetic signs in the very Scriptures they claimed to know and hold to.

How ironical that they had Him killed because they refused to believe that He was their Messiah, and yet His death, the very death they had engineered, was the greatest of all the signs that He was who He said He was, and that He had to die and rise again according to their Scriptures.

The Greeks dismissed the cross of Jesus as foolishness because it did not fit with their human “wisdom”. They had no understanding of sin because sin was not an issue in their religious beliefs. In fact, the very way they worshipped their idol gods was through the celebration of every fleshly lust. That God was holy and demanded payment for sin did not suit their lifestyle of indulgence. They wanted something to tickle their minds, not change their lives.

In our world, nothing has changed. People still follow false religions and reject Jesus because he is too “nice” and His gift of forgiveness and salvation too easy. People either want to indulge their fleshly appetites without conscience or restriction or they slavishly follow the demands of their legalistic gods because it satisfies their need to “save” themselves.

The real foolishness lies, not in believing in Jesus, but in rejecting Him. If He said He would be crucified and raised again on the third day, and it happened, why would we not believe everything else He said? Why would we throw away the opportunity to get rid of our guilt, our fear and all our hang-ups and insecurities and live lives of peace and purpose because we don’t want to trust the most trustworthy person who ever walked this earth?

To me, that is sheer foolishness!

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.

THE GOSPEL OF MARK – ALL OUR ECSTASIES AND INTIMACIES

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ALL OUR ECSTASIES AND INTIMACIES

8 Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 19 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. 20 Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. 21 The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. 22 In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. 23 At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”

24 Jesus replied, “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? 25 When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. (“All their ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God.”  – The Message). 26 Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the account of the burning bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? 27 He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!” Mark 12:18-27

“All their ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God.”  If only we could catch and lock that thought in our spirits forever! That about sums up the entire purpose for our existence! In the final phase, when God has completed His restoration of everything to its original purpose, the entire universe will be ECHAD and eternally worshipping God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in the purity and perfection of their original creation.

But there will be an element to complete, the revelation of the nature of God which was unseen before the fall – His mercy. In spite of man’s tortuous journey from the sixth day of creation to the Day of the Lord when He will execute judgment on all who have refused to embrace His plan, God’s full-orbed character will be clearly visible to the entire universe, and His wisdom clearly recognised.

Everything will be revealed, including the subtleties of Satan’s deception and the folly of our ways. Will an aspect of hell be the eternal regret of lost potential? What of all the opportunities unbelievers had to embrace the truth but they refused and chose to pursue the lies Satan sold them for the passing pleasures of this world? What of the wasted opportunities we as believers will clearly remember?

According to Jesus, in spite of our fumbling and failing, we will be embraced by the Father with no accusation or condemnation. All our sin has been swallowed up by the cross. Perfect love receives all His sons with perfect acceptance. All our suspicion and misgivings will melt away in an instant. Mercy triumphs over judgment. John wrote, with awakening assurance, “If anyone does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defence, Jesus Christ the Righteous One…”

Will not our worship forever be that much richer because of the revelation of God’s mercy! Gratitude will enhance our capacity to lose ourselves in the ecstasies and intimacies of loving God.