CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WHY THE ERROR MUST BE CORRECTED
The obvious answer to why misinformation about the meaning of the message in Holy Scripture must be corrected is this: Scripture does not accomplish the work for which Scripture was revealed unless we receive the exact message God intended to breath into our consciousness. "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." But those good works simply do not occur when we fail to understand the message being communicated by Scripture.
All teachers of God's Word--Pastors, theologians, Evangelists, etc.--only fulfill their calling when they accurately convey the message contained in Scripture. If teachers are participating in misinforming people about the meaning of the message in Scripture, they must be corrected if they are to fulfill their calling. When teachers begin to accurately convey the meaning God intended to convey in Scripture, then we will see the good works accomplished for which God created the Church in Christ Jesus.
The reason the world is going to hell today is the Church is not fulfilling its calling. The gospel we bring to the world is a gospel based on our union with Christ, a mystery we tell the world we do not understand.
The gospel is this: when Christ died, you were united with Him in His death, burial and resurrection. In this way, the dept you owe to God because of your sins was paid. Your dept having been paid, nothing stands between yourself and the Presence of Almighty God. When you received faith that Christ is risen from the grave, you received the gift God gives to those He desires to stand in His Presence. This gift sealed your salvation for eternity.
But you received this gift for a purpose: to fulfill that which is lacking in Christ's afflictions. The only thing that Christ lacked when He died on the cross was the full complement of believers God has ordained to compose the Body of Christ for eternity. If our union with Christ is "in the body", it is a fact that every person alive today was contained in the flesh of Jesus Christ when He died on the cross. If so, the penalty for their sins has already been paid. They stand in the Presence of God in the Holy of Holies and there is nothing to prevent them from remaining there forever except they don't have a clue how God could have done this for them in Christ Jesus! They don't have a clue because no one has told them what God could have done for them. Nobody has told them they could have been contained in the flesh of Jesus Christ because Jesus is God--the God in whom all space and time is contained. And He could have done it! That's what Paul said: either in the body or out of the body, I don't know--God knows. Either way, God could have done it.
Who knows what God might do in a world that hears about its union with Christ in the body? No one knows, because no one has told the world yet. But I know this: God might stop this world from going to hell. For God loves this world. In spite of the sin that holds it in bondage, in spite of the sin that moves people to try to destroy the God revealed in Holy Scripture, God loves the world. In fact, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. When the world understands that the only begotten Son is God in the flesh, God who died Himself, for the sins of the world, the love of God will be revealed in this world in a way not seen since the Apostle's preached about the miracle of salvation God wrought in and through Christ Jesus. Who knows? The Holy Spirit of God might use such preaching to bring the world into the faith that saves.
There's another reason the error must be corrected: our faith has been formed in error, leaving us to struggle with the fear of being separated from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Having been convinced by our teachers that there is nothing we can actually understand about our union with Christ, all of us have had to fall back on the things we can understand in order to find security in the presence of God. What can we understand? The instructions in the book, the rules and regulations breathed by God to be useful "for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." In order to find security that we were doing what God wanted us to do; in other words, to combat the fear that we might do something that displeased the God who had saved us by allowing us to believe the gospel, we had to conform ourselves to the only thing we actually had an opportunity to understand, the only critical aspect of our salvation that was not defined as a mystery--the rules in the Bible.
And there we fell into a trap. It was not a new trap. It was the same trap God's people have always fallen into when their teachers led them into error. Since we had been taught to believe we were to understand nothing about our union with Christ, we naturally assumed God intended for us to find security in His presence by obeying the rules and regulations in the Book.
So we spent our time teaching each other about the meaning of Agape as compared to Philos love, we went to great lengths to understand how we were to act on the Sabbath, we strove diligently to put away anything that might be interpreted as breaking the rules in the book. We built a wall around the rules and we found our security in the Presence of God because we found we had the power to keep away from the wall we had built around the rules in the book.
But we built the wall. In the flesh. As God's people have always done, we defined the rules based on the assumption that if God gave us the rules, it was possible for us to keep the rules. Our definition of the meaning of the rules and regulations became that which it was possible for the majority for us to accomplish. Our interpretation of the rules became the law of God. And in so doing we forgot everything the Apostle Paul ever said about the law of God, about the written code, about the ministry of the letter. Oh, we did not actually forget, in the sense that we put Paul's words out of our mind, we forgot in the sense that we no longer remembered the point he had been trying to make. The point was this: "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 before God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather through the law we become conscious of sin." Paul did everything in his power to let us understand that it is never possible for us to obey the law of God so that we can please God, and through pleasing Him find security in His presence. Oh, we can pretend we are obeying the law, and we can even convince God-fearing people that we are obeying the law, but we can never convince the Apostle Paul. And we can never convince God.
That's why God made a way for us to become righteous in his sight that does not depend on our obeying the law. That's why God moved the Apostle Paul to spend his life trying to find words to tell us about that way of righteousness that does not depend on our obeying the law. But when the teachers of God's Word that everything Paul had to say about that way of righteousness is a mystery that we are not supposed to understand, the teachers of God's people left us no alternative but to do as the Pharisee's had done--Conform ourselves to our interpretation of the meaning of the law and declare ourselves righteous in so doing.
But Paul knows and God knows and the world knows we are not righteous. The world knows we are motivated in this world by the same things that motivate those who do not accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. We are motivated by self-interest and the fruits of self-interest--greed, covetousness, lust, fear. The world sees us interpreting the law to suit our own purposes, the world sees us defining our standards and our goals as the law of God that we obey. Yet the world senses that we are hypocrites, no different in the flesh than any other people on earth.
Because this is the way we are in the flesh, God made a way for us to be righteous that did not depend on anything we have done, do, or ever will do. God made us righteous by uniting us to Christ Jesus in His death, burial and resurrection. But as long as that union is a mystery that we are taught we have no obligation to understand, ever will we be Pharisees, and ever will we suffer the fear, insecurity, and self-righteousness of the Pharisee.
This world can be stopped from going to hell when Christians begin to be motivated, not by fear, but by the love of God. And the only thing that can bring the love of God into this world is the Holy Spirit of God using the word of God to make us aware of our physical union with Jesus Christ in His death, burial and resurrection. I am not talking about awareness of our union with Christ that is a mystery, but awareness that allows us to perceive our physical union with Christ as the actual physical reality in which we live and move and have our being. That can be our reality because that could be exactly the reality that God created for those who are in Christ Jesus. I say this without fear of contradiction because it is the reality in which I live and move and have my being.
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