CHAPTER TEN
REPLACING THE PHARISEE'S MODEL OF GOD
At the heart of the model of God held by the Pharisees is the idea that it is possible for people to actually obey God's commands so that God's purpose in those commands is served. The Pharisee believed they could do what God wanted done, the way God wanted it done, for the reason that God wanted it done. In the last chapter we saw that the Apostle Paul realized that when he had been a Pharisee his fundamental assumption about the purpose for which God had given us Scripture had been an error. This left Paul with a major problem on his hands: how to describe in words why words, even the words of God Himself, were not capable of providing people with righteousness, a right relationship with God.
At first glance this is an impossible task. If words are powerless to provide people with a way to find a right relationship with God, then a reliance on words to make that point would require one to use powerless vehicles to accomplish that which required a vast amount of power to accomplish. Such an impossible task would require something more than words; namely, a massive infusion of the power of the Holy Spirit of God.
Paul explains to us the purpose for which God gave His words written down in Scripture in the third through the eighth chapter of his letter to the Romans. When one has firmly grasped the fact that everything Paul is saying is a reflection on the errors Jesus led Paul to find in the model of God held by the Pharisee, one can hear clearly the message Paul is trying to convey. But in order to hear Paul's message a comprehensive review of that message is required.
Paul begins with the premise that no one on the planet could claim to be righteous before God. All had sinned. He summarizes the point in Rm. 3:19-20, "Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God."
Two points must be emphasized for this sentence to be intelligible: (1) Paul believes everyone on earth is under the law. I explained to you in the previous chapter that Paul understood that Gentiles who do not have the written law have the law written on their heart by the Spirit of God. From Paul's point of view, neither Jew nor Gentile can claim to not be under the law. So, Paul's statement can be rephrased this way: God's instructions were given to mankind to shut people up, and make them know they were standing in a place and time where God was going to judge them. Why was God going to judge them? "We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin." "Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin." In short, everybody knew the law, and nobody kept it.
(2) We must grasp clearly what Paul means when he says "the law". In light of how precisely Paul tries to inform us about the fact that God's instructions are available to Jews who have the written Scripture and to Gentiles who have the law not in written form but written on their hearts, we must see that Paul is using "the law" in the sense of instructions received from God. These instructions from God come in two forms, written and unwritten. The Jews received written instructions from God, the Gentiles received unwritten instructions that nonetheless were communicated as the Spirit of God "wrote" God's instructions on their hearts. This is a good example of how words must be examined with infinite care if Paul's model of God is to be perceived. When Paul says the Spirit of God "wrote" his instructions on the hearts of Gentiles, Paul clearly does not mean for us to visualize God with pen in hand inscribing the letters of an alphabet on people's hearts. But, to Paul, these instructions written on the hearts of Gentiles are "the law" in precisely the same sense that Holy Scripture is "the law." Anytime Paul uses the phrase "the law" he intends for us to understand he is referring to instructions from God, whatever the form those instructions are delivered in. Much of the material in Romans becomes easily intelligible when we understand that unless Paul qualifies his statement about law by denoting a specific type of law, for instance the Law of Moses, or the law of sin and death, etc., Paul is using the word law to refer to instructions received from God.
Paul wants us to understand clearly that the purpose of the law is to make us conscious of sin. Period. In other words, God gives us instructions in order to make us conscious of how far we are from being able to carry out those instructions.
If my analysis of the meaning of Paul's words is correct, what Paul is telling us boggles the mind. Why in the world would God go to all the trouble to give us instructions if He knew from the start we weren't going to carry them out, but instead were going to fail to carry them out, leaving the only purpose for giving the instructions to make us conscious of our failure to carry out the instructions. Mind boggling! What kind of God is this?! There is little doubt that this is one of the most difficult to grasp teachings of the Apostle Paul. For this reason, Paul went to great lengths to show us why he had to say such a difficult thing.
First Paul tells us how sin entered the world. Rm 5: 12, "Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man..." Paul wants us to see that before Adam sinned, sin had not been in the world. Why? Because people had not disobeyed God's instructions. After God issued instructions to Adam, sin came into the world because Adam sinned by disobeying the instructions.
"...and death through sin." Before Adam sinned, there was nothing called death in this world. After Adam sinned, death entered the world.
"...and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned." Issuing from Adam, like a virus transmitted throughout the bloodline of Adam, sin infected all the offspring of Adam, and all the descendants of Adam died because all Adam's descendants sinned.
"...for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law." This statement of Paul's tends to be exceedingly perplexing. Is Paul saying there was a time, after Adam, when God did not write his instructions on the heart of everyone, and therefore the people who lived between the time of Adam and the time of Moses (when the law was written down) would not be held accountable for their sin? Is this the model Paul had in mind that those words are attempting to describe?
He continues his thought, "Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come." There Paul shows us that the consequences of sin, namely death, were still operating in the lives of people, even people who had received no instructions from God. Sin at least was "taken into account" enough to cause these people to die. But Paul seems to be saying that there is another account that God intends to call due someday, an account that includes more than a death penalty for sin. It is this account which is not tabulated by God when there is no law.
What is the account that God is going to call due someday, an account that will require something more from people than death? Saul, the Pharisee, and Paul, the Christian agreed that Scripture makes clear that a Day of Accounting is on the calendar for all of mankind, living and dead. Judgement Day. On that day, God would square the accounts of everyone who had ever lived. Those who God accounted to be righteous would live with Him in Paradise forever (For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous), those God accounted to be unrighteous would be separated from God for an eternity of conscious suffering and torment. The message is as clear in the Old Testament as it is in the New. Paul knew about Judgement Day. When he says "sin is not taken into account when there is no law" he is describing God's attitude toward those who were so separated from His Spirit that they never received any instructions either written or inscribed on their hearts. Apparently Paul would have us see that from Adam (when the law was spoken directly from God to Adam) to Moses (when God wrote the law) there were such people. But the primary point Paul is making is to point out that they died as a consequence of sin even if they did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam. Death comes through sin, even when the people do not know they are sinning.
Virtually everyone on earth understands that the God of the Bible condemned Adam and Eve and the offspring of Adam and Eve to death. Death is something that God caused to occur as a consequence of our failing to obey God's instructions. Christians who have found deliverance from this condemnation through faith in Christ Jesus tend to forget what its like to live condemned to death by the God of the Bible.
In fact our reflex is to defend the God revealed in Scripture. We are quick to tell everyone that Adam and Eve brought on their own condemnation. Death would never have entered the world had Adam and Eve not sinned, we say.
And we are correct in our assessment of the facts. But we tend to forget that God was a very active mover in the story. In his wrath, God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, God placed a cherubim with a flaming sword so that Adam and Eve could not have access to the tree of life. God condemned Adam and Eve and their offspring to death. In our defense of God, we tend to forget that God had a plan for Adam and Eve and their offspring, a plan that involved being glorified by those He had created in His own image. In our defense of God we tend to downplay the fact that God could have created a universe where death never entered.
We must realize that the world resents the God revealed in the Bible with a resentment born out of the knowledge that if such a God, a God like the One described in Scripture, actually exists, that God bears final responsibility for the presence of death in this world. Man might bear responsibility for sin, but God created Death as the punishment for sin. All the world knows this much about the God revealed in the Bible.
And the world is right. The God revealed in the Bible could have done anything He wanted to do. The fact is God could have created a world where death never entered. God could have created a world where Paradise was the only reality in view. Yes, the God of the Bible could have created such a world; but that world would have been created for a different purpose than the world actually created by the God of the Bible.
The actual world created by the God of the Bible was a world created for only one purpose: to glorify Himself. In Isaiah 43:5-7 we find only one of countless passages in the Bible designed to explain to us why God created the world in which we live, "Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I will bring your children from the east and gather you from the west. I will say to the north, 'Give them up!' and to the south, 'Do not hold them back.' Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth--everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."
As Christians, we have been delivered from the wrath of God through our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. In Christ, we have found the Love of God, a Love that blots out for us the image of the wrathful God who refuses to allow sinners to approach Him, a wrathful God who destroys those who dare to even touch the Mountain where He lives, a God who stations angels with flaming swords to prevent any but the chosen few from approaching Him. We want the world to know the God we now know, we want the world to know the love our God has made available to the world in Christ Jesus. But we can never forget that the God we know is precisely the same God that stationed the angel, that created the mountain that roared and shook, that stands at this very moment poised to reveal His wrath on a world that dares to stand in Judgement of Him, that dares to condemn Him.
As we explain to the world the insight Paul received into the purpose for which God gave us the law, we must understand that the purpose is a purpose that no one can feel comfortable with. AND THAT IS THE POINT! God's law is not designed to make people feel comfortable with God, God's law is designed to make people conscious of sin that inevitably leads them to resent God because the God revealed in the Bible has condemned a world of sinners to death.
Paul made the point this way: "The law was added so that the trespass might increase." What? Is Paul saying the law was added to make people sin? No! Paul is saying God gave us the law, His instructions, so we might have a clearer awareness of just how sinful we are. Let Paul explain, "What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what it was to covet if the law had not said, 'Do not covet.' Now listen closely! "But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire."
There we have the ex-Pharisee explaining what he now understands about the purpose for which God gives us his instructions. Paul's words take on great meaning when we reflect on what revolutionary change has occurred in Paul's understanding of the purpose of the law. Before Paul met Jesus, he believed himself never to have coveted. We can know this about Paul because we can see that Paul was an extremely sincere person. It takes little imagination to see that Saul was no different in this respect from Paul. When Paul was Saul, he would have never, in good conscience, have claimed to be a Pharisee if he believed himself to have broken the tenth commandment delivered by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Saul would never have consented in the murder of Christians unless Saul was absolutely convinced the Pharisee's definition of righteousness was in complete accord with God's definition of righteousness. Yet, here we have the Apostle Paul telling us that he was guilty of "every kind of covetous desire." These words only take on meaning when we realize that Paul is now defining "covetous" as Jesus defined covetous, a covetousness that included any desire for anything that God had not ordained for him to have. The Apostle Paul realized that he had coveted many things that God had not ordained for him to have. For instance, Saul had coveted a way to make himself righteous before God, Saul had coveted a way to make himself have a place of honor and respect in the presence of God. Saul had seen in God's law such a way, and Saul had interpreted God's instructions so he could justify coveting a way to make himself righteous before God. But the Apostle Paul heard Jesus say things that made him know he was guilty of "every kind of covetous desire." Luke 18:9-14, "And he spoke this parable unto certain who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, 'God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.' And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, 'God be merciful to me a sinner.' I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." It was Paul's awareness of how utterly he had misunderstood the purpose of the law as a Pharisee that had made Paul dig so deeply into the mind of the Lord for an explanation that would show him what the law was for.
Paul continues to try to explain to us what he learned. "For apart from the law, sin is dead." I must admit this statement has, until recently, always baffled me. On the face of it, Paul seems to be saying that apart from the law, sin is dead in the sense of "extinguished, not there." But if apart from the law sin is not there, then Paul is directly contradicted what he said earlier when he pointed out that "before the law was given, sin was in the world." I always knew Paul was not contradicting himself, and had a point to make by saying what he said, I just couldn't see the point. Yesterday, I realized that Paul was using "dead" in the sense of invisible. I was amazed at how dense I'd been. It was obvious all along that Paul was telling us about what happened to him when he finally saw the actual purpose for which God had given the law. Until he saw that purpose, he had been able to define the law anyway he wanted to. He had been able to keep the actual sin that existed in his life invisible to himself. "Apart from the law, sin is dead" describes what had happened to him perfectly. Sin was alive and well in Paul's life, producing every kind of covetous desire. But until Paul realized what God intended to do with the law, the sin in Paul's life was as good as dead because Paul didn't have a clue it was there. In other words, when you don't know that the purpose of the law is to make us conscious of our own personal sin, it's possible to use the law in a way that allows our sin to become invisible to ourselves.
Paul described it this way, "Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died." Paraphrased, Paul's thought goes something like this: Once I thought I was really living because I thought I had God all figured out. But I was actually far from God and didn't have a clue what his law was supposed to do in my life. Then, one day, God's law came alive for me and I saw what a sinner I was. As a result I died.
Paul continues, "I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death." Now this is another one that had always stumped me until recently. I was stumped because I assumed that when Paul said "the commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death" he was saying "the commandment that God intended to bring life actually brought death." Now I know enough about God to know that God does what He intends to do. If Paul was saying that God had intended the commandment to bring life, but it had actually brought death, then Paul was saying God's intentions were overcome by something! That can't happen to the God I know. Nothing can stop God's intentions, nothing can change God's intentions. If that's what Paul was saying, Paul had to be wrong. Of course, Paul wasn't wrong because he was not saying God intended for the commandment to bring life. In fact, Paul was doing everything in his power through the Holy Spirit to open my pea brain to understand that God knew all along that the commandment would bring death. It was Saul who thought the commandment was intended to bring life. The Pharisee,Saul, had assumed the law was given to bring life. When the Pharisees assumed it was God's intention to use the commandments to bring life, they naturally assumed God would make a way for people to obey the commandments. The structuring premise guiding everything Paul is saying in the book of Romans is this: God intended to use the law to bring death to everyone. In other words, Paul is doing everything in his power through the Holy Spirit to get all God's people to understand that the law, God's written instructions, are not designed by God to bring life but, instead, are designed to bring death.
I expect that last statement got the adrenalin pumping through some of God's people. God's word designed by God to bring death! What is this guy doing? That's blasphemy! Where does he get off saying something like that!
Actually, I didn't say it. Paul did. I think we react the way we do because it makes God look like the bad guy. Paul certainly encountered the reaction many times. That's why he went to such pains to explain to us that "the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good." Paul wants us to see that God's instructions are words that define the desires of God, and those desires are good, are righteous--in a word, holy. The law is not the problem, the commandments are not the problem--Sin is the problem.
"For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death." The commandments of God, God's law, give sin an opportunity to do what sin does in the presence of God's law, in the presence of the commandments of God. What sin does is deceive us into believing we can listen to the commandments of God and find a way to accommodate those commandments without dying. "You will not surely die," the serpent said to Eve. But we do die. Why? Because we do not keep the commandments of God. Through the commandments we are put to death.
There he goes again! He's making it sound like God's law is what's killing people; he's making it sound like God's law is evil! How Paul must have struggled with God's people to make himself understood. Truly, his message is not an easy one to swallow. Hear him struggle, "Did that which is good (God's law) then become death to me? By no means! But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it (sin) produced death in me through what was good (the law), so that through the commandments, sin might become utterly sinful." We needed to understand about sin. God sent us the law, which was a perfectly good, truthful, righteous, and holy statement from God about good and evil. But God knew that sin would take the law and use it to produce the desire to do exactly what the law forbids. In this way, sin would produce death in us by using the good, holy, and righteous words of God. God allowed this to happen so we would have the opportunity to understand how utterly sinful sin is.
We can't blame our dying on God's law. Our sin is what causes us to die. But God's law is what makes us conscious of our sin. And God meant it to be that way. In fact, God gave the law so that our trespasses would abound, in the sense that we would have a myriad opportunities to see how much and how often we violate God's commandments. This knowledge of our sinfulness created within us by God's law would literally kill us, bring us actually into the presence of death.
Paul amplifies the point like this: "The law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."
Why can the law never give people what they need to be righteous before God? "For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature..." The sin within us is more powerful than any words spoken by God. Our sin has the ability to transform the words of God into the fuel that drives the engine of sin within us. The more we are told not to covet the more we covet, deceiving ourselves all the time that we never are coveting. This is sin, sin that resides within the Apostle Paul, sin that resides within me, and, dare I say it, sin that resides within you. God never intended for us to find anything in the law of God that can deliver us from bondage to sin like that. Instead, the law was given to make us conscious of our sin. So conscious of our sin that we would understand that only one consequence would satisfy the debt we owe God for our sin. Our death.
"And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit." What are the righteous requirements of the law? The law requires that sinners die. The death of the sinner fulfills all the righteous requirements of the law. "But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin..."
And that is how the purpose of the law is fulfilled: the law kills us. How does it kill us? Paul explained in Galatians 3:19-28, "What, then, was the purpose of the law? It was added because of transgressions until the Seed to whom the promised referred had come. The law was put into effect through angels by a mediator. A mediator, however, does not represent just one party; but God is one.
"Is the law, therefore, opposed to the promises of God? Absolutely not! For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law. But the Scripture declares that the whole world is a prisoner of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Christ Jesus, might be given to those who believe.
"Before this faith came, we were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed. So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law. You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise."
The law, convicting us our utter sinfulness and inability to keep the commandments of God drives us to Jesus Christ, there to find ourselves in union with him in his death, burial and resurrection. We are clothed with Christ, and Christ becomes for us righteousness, salvation, justification, sanctification, beatification. The purpose of the law is then fulfilled.
And that is the only way it can be fulfilled for a Christian. If you think there is any other purpose for the law, the instructions of God, your argument is with Paul who has the mind of Christ. And your argument is with Christ Himself.
Who among us can deny that we like to believe we are capable of doing God's will the way God wants it done? I like to believe that. Don't you? To fail to believe that we can do what God wants us to do the way God wants us to do it is to leave ourselves in the grips of fear, the fear faced by those who believe in the God of the Bible, yet know they are not doing what He wants them to do. Paul knew he wasn't capable of doing God's will the way God wanted it done. And Paul knew there was nothing in the Bible that could give him that power. It was not to the Bible that Paul looked for his power, his hope, his salvation, his righteousness, his justification, his sanctification. He understood the purpose of God's law too well to look to Scripture for his hope.
Many Christian teachers and preachers have utterly distorted the message that Paul is trying to send to us. They tell us Paul is only referring to the rules and regulations God set down in the Old Testament. This is not what Paul tells us. Paul is trying to tell us that every word written down in Holy Scripture is designed to make us conscious of sin, even the words of the Apostle Paul. God intends for us to read the words in Holy Scripture, and through reading those words become conscious of sin, sin that dwells within us, sin that condemns us before God, sin that drives us to lift our eyes from the words written down in Holy Scripture and search fervently for some way to be delivered from our sin. And as our eyes dart frantically looking for a way of escape, the Apostle Paul tells us in words about a way of escape that does not depend on words written down in a book, but depends totally on something God has done in reality, the world around us, something that we can find if we will listen closely to the words in the book, unafraid to face the sin those words will bring to mind.
Some of the most prominent Christian television personalities teach people that the words in the Bible are the source of power in this world. We live at a time when many Christians simply do not understand that nothing in the Bible can ever make us righteous. Nothing in the Bible can make people right with God, nothing in the Bible can grant people forgiveness of sin, nothing in the Bible can grant people eternal life, nothing in the Bible can keep people from going to hell. If you are a Christian who is shocked by those words, please hear me out. I love the Bible as much as you do, but I understand that I did not find my salvation in the Bible. I found my salvation in Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ is not some character in a book, even a Book written by God Himself. Jesus Christ is as real as the hand in front of your face. No! Jesus Christ is more real than the hand in front of your face. And our salvation is not something that God's words in the Bible created. Our salvation is something that came to us, not because of what God said, but because of what God did...in Christ Jesus. Unless we get that idea clearly and firmly embedded as the foundation upon which our model of God is erected, we will never be anything in this world but a bunch of Pharisees. The fact that this is how the Church appears to this world goes a long way toward explaining why the world is going to hell today. If you want to participate in stopping this world from going to hell, you'll pay close attention to how you got saved.
You Can Mail A Donation To: Neal Horsley, PO Box 1081, Carrollton, Ga 30116,
Or If You Can't Donate Now, Click Below and Join The We Choose Life Network.
Use Your Internet Connection Fee To Help Deter People From Butchering God's Children
|