A Propitiation for Sin

...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, ²⁶to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Romans 3:25

Everyone loves a loving God. But when you begin to talk about God's wrath, God's jealously, the carpet and the conversation over there (anyone but this one) becomes more interesting. Why? Because no one really likes the idea of an all-powerful God on the rampage.

Now, the term "rampage" is certainly utilized here more for it's abrasive nature than for it's theological merit, but it is a close definition of God's feelings about sin. The reality is that God not only dislikes sin, but his feelings take on a more active nature. The jealously and wrath of God are uncomfortable, but essential concepts for every Christian.

The jealously of God (Ex. 20:5; Is. 48:11) simply means that God will have no other God's (or anything else) receiving worship in His place. Idolatry, simply defined, is spiritual adultery. And God's desire to restore us to proper worship of Him is very active, and His desire to be the only object of our worship is supreme.

The wrath of God (Ex. 32:9-10; Deut. 9:7-8; John 3:36; Romans 1:18) is God's reaction to sin. He doesn't just dislike it, He actively hates it! And God's wrath is Him actively seeking to punish sinners.

"Propitiation" is a term which, to a Christian, pertains to Christ. In this Christian understanding, Christ was the propitiation for our sins, meaning that he received the full wrath of God, those actions dictated by the jealously of God, for us. This is why the understanding of the wrath of God and the jealously of God are essential for every Christian, because without them, there was no need for Christ to die on the cross, and thusly no need for salvation.

The Essential Attribute

"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."

- 1 John 4.7-8 (NLT)

It's quite amazing, actually. In 1 John, chapter 4, John takes roughly from the 7th through the 21st verse to focus on the relationship of love with God. In understanding the nature of God, I would call this the Essential Attribute, because without it, the God the bible presents us with ceases to exist.

"God is love." An amazing concept. I don't think that too many of us truly realize the ramifications of this statement. In verse 19, John makes this statement, "We love because he first loved us." So the first question we must ask ourselves is this: Do we love?

That is a tough question - tough, but essential. In Matthew 22.37-40, Jesus establishes love as the essential ingredient of the two greatest commands (which sum up all the law of the prophets). And this is not the warm and fuzzy feeling of modern-day Hollywood. John states that love is evidenced in death, the giving by God of his son for our sins (1 John 4.10). This is a love that lives and breathes. A love that gives its final breath for others.

Let me ask again: Do we truly love?

Because here is the key, John has laid it on the line for us: "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." (1 John 4.8) It's actually very simple. If we do not love, then we do not know God.

Let us always remember, let us always strive to live this simple fact: God is love, and to know God is to live love.

Of gifts and the Giver...

"If we only trust Christ to give us gifts and not himself as the all-satisfying gift, then we do not trust him in a way that honors him as our treasure. We simply honor the gifts. They are what we really want, not him. So biblical faith in Jesus must mean that we trust him to give us what we need most - namely himself. That means that faith itself must include at its essence a treasuring of Christ above all things."
John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life. (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2003) p. 70

Where is Christ in your faith? I love this excerpt because it highlights the selfish tendencies in our relationships - we gravitate towards relating to people in regards of what they can do and/or provide for us. Of course, we don't always relate in this manner - but we have a selfish tendency to do so. And this is magnified in our relationship with Christ because here is one we are to relate to, yet we cannot see him or touch him physically. So, many times, we come to relate to God, to Christ, in the only way we can see him - by what he does.

This is the foundation of sand upon which all theology centered around the blessing of God is based: That our relationship with God is evidenced by what he does for us, which is directly affected by what we do or how we live. I like to call this the "Genie in a bottle" faith: a fantasy in which God is one whom, if we rub just the right way, will pop out and do what we want or give us what we desire.

Look at Matthew 10:38 and 16:24. Or Mark 8:34, or Luke 9:23. What does Christ say you must do to follow him? Put a shoulder to the cross, lift, and begin walking. Even when he was talking with the rich man in Mark 10, he finishes his statement in verse 21 with the phrase "...take up the cross and follow me." If Christianity is supposed to be centered around such a wonderful thing as living a beautifully blessed life daily, then why was it's climaxing moment that of the brutal, nightmarish agony of the cross?

Are there blessings in Christ? Yes, absolutely. But they are blessings which reflect riches as sand and dirt, which turn poverty into generosity, which takea death meant for me and gives life in return. And these blessings are never the point, the purpose to life in Christ. Rather, they are an outflow, a natural result of the most natural phenomenom: our dying. For us to truly treasure Christ we must first lay aside ourselves. For it has never been about us, it has always been about God.

Christianity will be the death of me. At least, I pray it will be so. Because my treasure must be Christ himself, nothing else. And the more I die to myself, the more he can live in me and be known through me.

So is my faith in Christ based on what he can do for me? Never, yet it has been bolstered by what he has done for me and what I've seen him do for others. Do I believe so that I will be blessed as others have, so that I will prosper? No, for then I have lost sight of the Giver amongst his gifts.

Let me have Christ alone, treasure Christ alone. And let me never lose sight of the Giver as I marvel at his gifts.

The Potential of Desire

"There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels."
- a quote from C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, Harper Collins edition 2001, page 106

When C.S. Lewis penned this statement, he sandwiched it between two different illustrations. One of a man controlled by lust, symbolized by a lizard on the man's shoulder, whispering in his ear. When the man finally gave this desire over to the Lord and allowed the lizard to be killed, he was reborn as a new man, a stronger, fresher spirit; and the lizard was reborn as a stallion, no longer controlling him, but rather carrying him.

The other illustration was that of a mother wanting to enter heaven only to be with her child. The love of a mother for her child, in this poor woman's case, had grown so distorted as to eclipse her love for anyone else - including God. And the saddest part was that she couldn't let go of that twisted maternal love.

When comparing both of these illustrations, this question is posed: "...if the risen body even of appetite is as grand a horse...what would the risen body of maternal love or friendship be?"

There is a common thought, not modern yet many times presented and posed as such, that if a desire or impulse is natural, it is therefore okay and right to indulge it without inhibitions. But if steel were never hammered and shaped it would never become a beautiful sword. And while God designed us with natural impulses and desires, they were never intended to be ships without rudders.

One has only to look to the Proverbs to see a plethora of examples of this, specifically in regards to sexual desire. As God revealed it to the writers of this wisdom literature, the natural sexual desire was to be limited and focused, and therein would it bloom and blossom into it's intended splendor.

The challenge is to look at our desires, to see them as God sees them. To enable them to reach their full potential. And this means death. The desires must die at the feet of God, we must give them up to him, because no matter what they may be, they are animals we cannot control and focus on our own.

Lighting Your Own Fire

Who among you fears the Lord
and obeys the word of his servant?
Let him who walks in the dark, who has no light,
trust in the name of the lord and rely on his God.
But now, all you who light fires
and provide yourselves with flaming torches,
go, walk in the light of your fires
and of the torches you have set ablaze.
This is what you shall receive from my hand:
You will lie down in torment.

- Isaiah 50.10-11

This is just a really neat passage that came to my attention recently. I love the imagery used: darkness and light. The darkness is our confused lives, where we are in our anxieties and stress and helplessness. The light is wisdom, and there is two types: 1) God's and 2) our own (or man's wisdom).

It's very simple, actually. We need light to see the way out of our depravity and hopeless helplessness. But the light we chose determines the path we walk. How? Simple. God's light comes from Him, and thus acts like the light at the end of a dark tunnel - it reveals the path to freedom. But light we make on our own is controlled by ourselves - it only illuminates the path of our choosing. It's like being lost in a cave with many tunnels, but one way out. If you light your own torch, and choose from the available paths yourself, the odds of you choosing the correct path on your own are very slim. Meanwhile, if you could turn out your light (let go of your wisdom) you would see a glimmer in the darkness, which would grow brighter the closer your approached. Before long you would find yourself in the brightness of day, and no longer lost in darkness.

But, you say, could I not find the correct path on my own? Rare might that occasion be, it could happen. But note the progression of the analogy. Let's say you did actually (through the favor of God, no doubt) choose the correct path. In the end, to fully enjoy the freedom of daylight, you'd have to relinquish your grip on your own torch, that man-made wisdom. In the end you must admit the inadequacy of your own light (and wisdom).

Let us look to God for our light, for our path. Let us strive after his wisdom, and count our own as foolishness.

Grace vs. Pride

But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
"God opposes the proud
But gives grace to the humble"

- James 4.6

Those are pretty strong words about pride, aren't they? That God "opposes" pride. What's so bad about pride that actually causes God to actively oppose it? Well, think about it. If you are prideful, then you are usually overly confident in your own abilities, in how you look, how smart you are, and yourself in general. What actually happens with pride is that it displaces God. One of the biggest keys to pride is the fact that it says, "I don't need anyone else's help, because I can do it myself!" That last little section, the italicized portion, says it all.

God actually designed us to interact and live with him. For us to lean on him, so that he can be our strength. What's more, is God loves us so much that he must pursue us, because he knows where we would be and what we would be like when left entirely to our own. But, to pursue us, he must deny our self-sufficiency.

Here, let's put it out really simple: Pride says, "I don't need you." When we connect with God, we find his grace, and we find him lavishing it upon us. What is God's grace? Everything we need: forgiveness, redemption, healing, strength, ect...the list goes on and on. That's what James was pointing out. When we walk around, in our daily lives, doing our daily things, we (at some point or another) come in contact with God. When we look into his eyes, we see his love, and we hear him speak to our heart that he has everything we need, in him we will not need or want. But this opposes our pride. How? Because our pride says we don't need anything - including God.

We are just like a little boy who wants to build himself a clubhouse. We go around in our daily lives, collecting everything we need to have 'the good life', just as a little boy would collect all the wood he thought he'd need for that clubhouse. But then when the collecting is done, we find that, though we have all the elements we can think of for our perfect life, it just won't hold together - just as the little boy takes all his pieces of wood and stacks them this way and that, striving for the best way to put it together. But all the striving is in vain, for every time the wind gives a nice hard blow, it all tumbles down. There is something missing. Our pride stands up and says we should be able to find everything we need on our own, and be able to put it together correctly. What is so beautiful about children, is that, though they think they know a lot, they seem to always understand that their father knows more. And what separates us from this little builder is the fact that he runs to his father and asks for help. Then his father pulls out a hammer and nails, and begins to teach the little boy how to build a clubhouse that will last the tests of time.

Let us always set aside our pride, and go to our Father. So that he can lavish his grace upon us, and teach us the secrets of building our own lives to last through eternity.

Inheritance of Sin, Inheritance of Grace

"Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men."

- Romans 5.18

Here's an interesting way to think of the fall of man, and then of salvation. Looking at the fall of man as an inheritance, we note that we all are of Adam's line - we have received from him the inheritance of a tainted soul, dipped in sin. Though none of us like it, through Adam, our minds and even our souls have been exposed to sin - those deceitfully intense but alarmingly quickly fading pleasures of sin, indulgences of ourselves. Carried in the lifeblood of his soul, this stain is passed on to the next generation from him or his offspring. Before the fall, Adam accompanied God daily, walking and talking intimately. How? He was pure, unsoiled. But after eating of the fruit, he became stained, a rottenness eating away at him from within, and he could not interact intimately with God because of the stain upon his soul.

But God desired the company of man, of Adam and his descendants. Yet Adam's line was stained, his blood spoiled, and none who came from him would be worthy to know God in intimacy. So God, seeing the dilemma in his infinite wisdom, perceived a solution to the problem. If the original plan had been for man to receive his purity of spirit as an inheritance from his father (a purity Adam would have been able to pass on had he not taken the apple). All God needed was one man who would give his inheritance of purity to Man, and who would then take on Man's rotten blood line (for the impurities in Man's line were not those that could be disposed of, they were written upon the very spirit of man, and could only be removed by being written upon the spirit of an unstained line).

Thus was Christ brought forth. God knew there were none who could provide this for Man, so he (God) provided it himself in Christ. Into a rotted and despoiled world he came, purity in flesh. And he set aside his inheritance of purity, of intimacy with God, so that we might take it up. All we must do is set aside our stained and spoiled inheritance, to take up his perfected bloodline.
That is salvation, the taking up of Christ's inheritance, and the setting aside of our own.