Lord, you know how tiny our minds are. I am sure you made them that way
for a purpose and we ask that you would guide us so that our minds might
be avenues to you and that our will might operate in the light of the
knowledge that you bring to us by your presence with us. So, we thank you
for all of that and we just ask that you will suit the words and thoughts to
each person’s condition in ways that certainly outrun any ability of my
own. And so, we wait before your presence and as we wait, we are going to
talk and think the best we can and ask that you would override and direct
everything to the glorification of your son in our midst. And of your
Kingdom forever so we ask that in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Jan helps us by putting up a word for the day and the word for today is
Knowledge. Knowledge and knowledge takes a beating. But in the scripture, it is absolutely central. You never find faith except in a context of knowledge in the scripture and that’s how it works in life. So, we will want to be directing attention to this in many ways including some pretty stiff and formal definitions, of course because we really do need to try to be as clear as possible when we are talking about things that are this important, of course.
So, I’ve written a bunch of stuff up here on the board and I will get around to it more or less and I’ll be putting up some things on the screen also here. We will start with that. In case you can’t see this, this is one of the most important things is to understand who we are and why we are here and the enemy works overtime to mess you up on this thought. I want to work with you for a few moments on that first statement: You are a never ceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe. Now, you have probably heard this before from me because I say it often. It’s so important. I would like you to think about that for a moment. You are a never ceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe. Now you see, even if you are dead in trespasses and sins, you are still a spiritual being. That’s your nature and you don’t get out of that just because you have rebelled against God if you have. You are a non-physical reality. Your world is very busy trying to convince you that things about you are all physical and we talked about this some last October in trying to get the theology of it all straight. But we need to be able to affirm that. I am an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe. Have you been able to say that? Let’s try it together and if it’s forcing you, don’t’ say it. Just listen. OK? I am an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe. [4:39] Now, in the light of that, you have to put God and how you think about God. All human problems come from thinking wrongly about God. Directly or indirectly, they come from thinking wrongly about God. And you will know the story of the first temptation well and you will understand that the form it took was getting Eve to think wrongly about God. In particular, it was getting her to think that if she didn’t do something God said not to do, she was going to miss out on something. Missing out is the form of all temptation. If I don’t do this, I am going to miss out on something and the idea of God as having your interest always at heart is one that we have to struggle to maintain. How we think about God—how we place him in our minds is related to everything whether we are in rebellion or at peace with Him—how we think about God. So, we think of Him as positioning us as spiritual in substance, never ceasing in duration, and this last one is perhaps what is most likely to be left out—that we are ruling or creative governance in destiny. You want to keep that in mind that is what you are here for. You are here training for reigning. You are learning how to reign in life through abundance of grace as Romans 5:17 says, “Abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness to reign in life through one Christ Jesus.” That connection now is—I’ll be spending most of our time in this first hour on that connection. We reign through one, Christ Jesus. He’s the one who brings us back but then that extends into eternity, and we have this marvelous statement from the gospel of John, “This is eternal life.” Now, you know, you get more of what this is saying if you say, “This is eternal living.” Eternal life—life has been kind of drained and it’s been postponed. Eternal—this is eternal living “that they may know knowledge—that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Eternal living is knowledge. Now, leaping ahead a lot—knowledge is basically interactive relationship. That’s what it is basically. We will be trying to spell that out as we go along. [8:40]
So, basically, if you’ve got that, then here is some little wording that shows up in William Law’s wonderful book, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life and you know, he creates little scenarios in there and this is a father speaking to his son, and he says, “First of all, my child, think magnificently of God.” Now, that’s the first thing. If you are thinking about your rule of life, you may want to put that up there somewhere. “Think magnificently of God. Magnify His providence. Adore His power. Pray to Him frequently and incessantly. Bear Him always in mind. Teach your thoughts to reverence Him in every place for there is no place for there is no place where He is not.” A good thing to do to start your morning is to say, “God is here. God is here.” And if you’ve got that straight, things will go well. “My child, fear and worship and love God first and last, think magnificently of Him.” Now of course if you do that, you will be caught up in worship constantly and worship is the single most effective discipline against wrongdoing in the moment. [10:43] Try worshipping and doing something naughty. Try it. One of the interesting stages in life’s way is the point of where a person has grown where their living in the presence of God and then they want to do something wrong. They really want to do it, and they take a little vacation from God. Just step out of—that’s a part of the messed-up condition of human beings—they do it. But they know they have to take a vacation because if they stand in His presence, then the goodness of doing what He wants us to do is overwhelming. Learning to choose that and live that and get to the point to where you know you are not missing out on anything by doing what is right. That’s progress.
We have a lot to cover today. [12:11] I do want to understand that the message that comes from Jesus Christ restores this way of thinking about God, fills our mind with his goodness and greatness and we learn to sustain that and of course, we are upheld by grace in doing that. Now, when you look at this from the viewpoint of not having made a lot of progress, you think this will ruin your life. What would your life be if you did that? God allows us to progress slowly and gives us instruction and gradually teaches us how our life is filled with good things as we do this. Right? “Whatsoever true, whatsoever is lovely, whatsoever is of good report—anything that is honorable”—see, you remember Philippians 4:8 and that’s what becomes your mind; it isn’t impoverished. It’s enriched by thinking rightly about God because then every good thing falls into place and there is much good, and God enjoys His own creation and thinks it’s good.
Now, I want to transition now to the fruit briefly because the fruit of the spirit describes what your life is like from the inside when you are rightly occupied with God. [14:23] God has rightly occupied you. Love, joy, peace, longsuffering and so on and we didn’t cover all of it. I tried to cover the first main parts. I think the other parts are really important, but they are not as central as the five parts that we did talk about. Now the question I want to raise and pursue with you today has to do with the connection or relationship between salvation and spiritual formation—the connection between salvation and spiritual formation. If you are looking at your notebook, I have to straighten the pages out a little bit here. It says Wednesday-Salvation as a Life; that’s right and that’s what we are talking about in this hour, but you have to go to Lecture Six to get the outline for this hour. I somehow managed to get these inverted so Lecture Six is actually Lecture Four and that’s the one we are going to be doing in this hour, and we will come back to what is in your book as Lecture Six this afternoon. My apologies for that—I don’t know how—you never know how you get things messed up, do you? But I did and so if you would please just make that little shift. We are talking in this hour about Salvation as a Life, and we are paying attention to Christology and Atonement. Now, let me tell you why it is necessary to do that.
The greatest barrier to spiritual formation as a plan that is followed by those who in some way profess allegiance to Christ is their view of salvation. The soteriology, to speak the theological language, creates a huge problem because the version of salvation that is presented has no natural connection to spiritual growth and we must get into that today and try to help us understand salvation as presented by Christ and in the New Testament and for that matter, in the whole Bible. That presentation is precisely salvation is a life, not an arrangement—not an arrangement, it’s a life. Now, the statements in the scripture are extremely clear, perhaps, the clearest of all is 1 John 5:11, which says simply, “God has given us eternal life and this life is in His son.” Where is this life that has been given to us? It’s in His son so that’s why, to use the big word; Christology is all-important—how we think about Christ and His work. We have many statements about what Jesus does but of course the favorite ones often tell us the most and we are apt not to see their depth. John 3:16—God loved the world so much that He gave His son—sent His son into it—that was the incarnation. How did He send his son—in the form of a baby that was born in a natural way. Mary was a witness to this in her lifetime because there were long discussions about whether or not Jesus had a real body and Mary was there to affirm that he did. You have a baby; you know this is not a hologram or something of that sort. This is the real thing and so, God loved the world so much that He sent His son in order that those who put their confidence in Him would not perish but have eternal, everlasting life. Life! You see, our way of reading that robs us of the meaning because we are apt to read John 3—the whole thing as if it were about forgiveness of sins—it’s not about forgiveness of sins, it’s about life. When you read the context—Nicodemus came saying that he could tell God was with Jesus—that he could tell that—and the way he knew this was by the things that Jesus did. And Jesus instructed him that you could not see the kingdom of God because the kingdom of God was God acting with Jesus. I wish I had time to spend a lot of time just exposing this passage, but I have to go quickly because I want to get on to more of the meaning. Nicodemus was claiming to see God acting with Jesus and Jesus knew his condition and knew that he was right but for the wrong reasons. He knew that Nicodemus could not see the kingdom of God and He said, “unless you have been born from above”—that is to say, you have received the life of the kingdom—you can’t see the kingdom at all. You can’t see it. [21:31] Nicodemus makes very clear that he does not understand what he is talking about by immediately reverting to the natural birth. How could a person be born a second time—enter his mother’s womb and so forth? He was just off over here in left field wondering around, so Jesus said, “no you have to be born from above if you are going to enter.” Now, seeing is one thing; entering is another. Entering means you are now involved in what the kingdom of God is doing so that’s the same lesson actually as Matthew 5:20 unless you go beyond the goodness of the Scribe and Pharisee, you can’t enter. It’s the same lesson as Matthew 18 unless you repent and become like a little child, you can’t enter the kingdom of Heaven. The Christology and the atonement depend upon your understanding passages like this. God so loved the world that He sent his son into the world—His only begotten son—into the world that people might put their confidence in him and receive eternal life. [22:53]
Salvation is a life. Salvation is knowledge that is interactive relationship. Knowledge is always based in interactive relationship. Now, if you have interactive relationship, then you can raise to a level of abstraction. A person who operates on brains, for example will normally have some abstract knowledge but if he or she is going to operate on your brain you probably will want them to have had a little “hands on” experience—maybe have seen a brain or two. Right? And that’s interactive relationship is where knowledge arises and of course, you don’t want to get too far from it because you will just wonder off into the abstractions and that’s what happens to many people when they get too much theology in their heads is they are off into abstractions, but they are not interactively involved with what they are talking about. It’s important to know that it’s through interactive relationship that we come to have knowledge that is ongoing. When the book in Genesis tells us that Adam knew his wife, it doesn’t mean he read a book about her. You know? That was interactive relationship and that is one of the primary forms of knowledge that we have a personal engagement. Sexual intimacy is only one form of intimacy, but knowledge turns upon that idea of engagement. When Jesus gives us this definition of eternal life—by the way, this is the only one that I know of in the scripture—he is very carefully giving us a description that will guide us when we come to think about him and about what we get by our relationship to him and it’s really important to hang on to that. [25:24]
Now, life—if I have gone over this previously with you, forgive me but we need to renew it. Life is self-initiating, self-sustaining, self-directing activity. That’s the mark of life. When something that has been alive is now dead, that is what is absent. That’s what is absent. When the scriptures say that we were dead in trespasses and sin; that is saying we did not have this kind of life in relationship to God. Now, it’s true that only God has life in himself so a cabbage plant or a snail or a person, they have life, but it is relative, and God is the one who gives life to everything as 1 Timothy 6 tells us. Everything that has life, it receives life and is sustained in life by God, and I think that it means everything. I think it means the cabbage plant would be dead if God didn’t keep it working, right? And now we have to think a great deal about life between now and tomorrow evening so please try to get that idea. Whenever God said to Adam and Eve, “if you take of the fruit of that tree, you are going to die;” well, obviously, biologically, they didn’t die. They kept going but they did die in relationship to God. Right? So, what that meant practically was that everything they did that had been previously accompanied by God’s action now, they had to do on their own. Apparently, Adam didn’t sweat before he fell. Right? How did he do what he did? Well, I think he spoke, and God acted with him. I think the second Adam illustrates how the first Adam acted before he fell. Today we still say when we are talking about how we are doing—“Well, I am cool; no sweat.” You are not cool; that means, you are grinding it out—you are sweating and that’s life on your own. This understanding of life now is absolutely crucial. Salvation is a life, and this life is given to us from God and if we break away from God, we lose the life from above—above remember is not like the other side of the moon—above is here, the first heaven is right here, going back to some of the things we went over last fall. It’s really important to keep those things in mind. We are trying to be more practical in this retreat, but you can’t—there is nothing more practical than knowing the truth about things and so you want to hang on to that. We lose the life that we should have in relation to God and Christ comes to bring that back. Now, of course, God was working with people through the ages. He somehow, for some reason known to him, he selected Abraham and He began to work with him and Abraham becomes very famous and he’s very big now. We speak in kind of purified terms on the campuses of the Abrahamic religions. The Abrahamic religions are Islam, Christianity, and Judaism and Abraham is very big when we say—remember that Lazarus when he died or the poor man when he died—went to Abraham’s bosom and there was a conversation then between Abraham and the other guy. That’s a picture of how God chose an individual to be the conduit through whom Jesus would come and life would come to all of the nations of the earth, so God has been working. We were having a little talk at breakfast about the language that is often used in the Old Testament that is brought up repeatedly as a scandal to Christians. I mean, how could God be like that? Well, God was working with people who needed to hear from Him, and he was communicating with them in the best way possible to help them move forward in God’s project of redemption which would lead to Jesus Christ who would say, “Now forget everything you think you know about God, and I will tell you what He is like.” So, Christ comes in that progression and situates life down in reality and a major part of what He does is to pull God out of the context of Judaism that had ossified and had become an oppressive force even to the people of Israel. If you watch Jesus then, you notice then that He is always reaching out to the people who were outside. They were not just Jews, but He was very careful to stay with the Jews because they were the prepared people. Nevertheless, the only two times that Jesus talks about the greatness of faith of someone He was dealing with, they were not Jews. You remember who they were? The Roman centurion and the syrophenician woman and—He was just sort of holding the line as best He could to get done what He was trying to get done with a group of people who would then explode across the earth.
He would say before he left, now go to all kinds of people, all nations—nations ordinarily mean Gentiles but basically it just means all people. [33:03]
Salvation is a life. How do we run into trouble with this today? If salvation is a life, spiritual formation is a natural progression. Of course, supernatural but I’ll drop the prefix because you understand that—a natural progression. What does life do? Life grows! Life grows! That growth is laid out repeatedly in the scriptures like, for example, Romans 5 or Philippians 2 or Colossians 3 and perhaps the—I think, 2 Peter ordinarily is recognized as possibly the latest piece of writing in the New Testament—and 2 Peter 1 has this wonderful progression and if I can move along fast enough here, we must turn to that in a moment and look at it just so you get the idea but the basic idea here is this. If salvation is a life from above, spiritual transformation is the natural result. So, your soteriology is going to determine how you think about spiritual growth. Spiritual formation—that’s just language covering growing in grace. More and more of your life is being taken over by grace and knowledge. 2 Peter 3:18 puts grace and knowledge together because actually they are the same sort of thing—a kind of an intersection. Knowledge is an interactive relationship. You remember what grace is—God acting in your life to enable you to do what you can’t do by yourself. Knowledge and grace go together. They are natural accompaniments. We have to think a moment about how we get in trouble with spiritual formation, which is talked a lot about now but if you go to our seminaries and most of our churches, you will find that it does not have a home in the ecclesiastical framework at large. It’s treated as a marginal interest of some sort and there is some progress being made in this regard but instead of floating it at the center of seminary education, for example, it gets parked over in some distant parking lot—to use airport language. Some have a little program for it over here but it’s not—you don’t tell the people who are training for ministry that this is the central reality. I don’t want to get carried too far away on that and talking about what turns up as the central reality, but you have to think about that if you are involved in a church situation or you are concerned about how the work of Christ is going in general. What is it that we really think is central? The theology of salvation goes with that because the dominant theology of salvation in our culture—our religious culture—is forgiveness of sins. Then how do you arrange for that? Actually, that’s the issue because forgiveness of sins is a big deal because what it means is you now come out of the position of rebellion. God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself not attributing their sins to them any longer. Why?—Because they have come out of the position of rebellion. If the issue is forgiveness of sins, then you have to struggle with all sorts of things like universalism, right? If Christ paid for the sins of the world in His death, then why isn’t everyone saved? So that’s where you have your Calvinist’s position—the tulip position—the five points of Calvinism—one of them is limited atonement because it’s kind of logical that if Christ died for the sins of the world, everyone is forgiven. Right? So, you get universalism out of that particular version of salvation, and you have to rush up and put a little patch on—well, really it wasn’t for everyone—it was just for the ones that God foresaw. So, I guess that means that the beating that Jesus took—He didn’t take some people’s beatings—it just gets so awkward, you see, when you try to think that out. You wind up trying to think about well, how could the atonement be limited? And then you wind up, well it could only be limited if God foreknew the ones that were going to be saved. And now then, you are in real trouble, and you are going to need some more patches. Let me be sure. Forgiveness of sins is important but that is not what being saved is about. So, we have all of these wonderful old songs—“There was a time on earth when in the books of heaven, an old account was standing of sins all unforgiven. My name was at the top, there were many sins below; I went into the keeper and settled long ago.” That’s it. How do you get that? The idea is you believe the right things. You believe the right things so that’s where in the Protestant tradition, they don’t believe in the sacraments of the church saving you, but they do believe right belief saves you. And now then guess, who has the right beliefs? Well, I do. I have the right beliefs and so, if you would like to be saved, what should you do? You should accept my beliefs. You should line up with me because—so now, the idea here is that just because you have the right beliefs your ascent to the truths of the gospel and again, I always hesitate to go over this because it can be taken so wrongly. Listen, right beliefs are absolutely fundamental but not because God likes you to have them. He looks down on your mind and says, “Oh, I see, yes; you believe in the Deity of Christ; you believe the Bible is the Word of God; you believe in the virgin birth, right? OK; I’ll check that off and transfer the credit and now then, the merits of Christ replace your de-merits and when you die, they can’t find any reason to keep you out of heaven. So, they let you in.
Forgive me for speaking half humorously about all of this but you need to understand the two systems that are engaged here. One is salvation is life. How does belief function in that system? It puts you in touch with the realities of Christ and the kingdom and of God. That’s what belief is supposed to do. Belief doesn’t get you points. The function of belief is to integrate you with reality. Why does it matter if you believe in the virgin birth? I’ll tell you. A world in which there is a virgin birth is a different world from one in which there is not a virgin birth. Right? It’s a different world. It isn’t that you fight over the virgin birth; that isn’t a little thing about who’s intellectually right or whose exceptional doctrinally. It’s well, you know, you believe that Daniel was in the lion’s den and survived and the lions got lockjaw. Well, that isn’t a little credit point you get. Oh, well okay, they believe the Bible. No, No. A world where things like are described in the Bible happen is a different world and you are going to be acting differently because you believe that. So, it isn’t just an academic discussion. Ah! Are there miracles? Well, no, there are no miracles because science says things like that can’t happen. So, you will rush around and say, “Well you know the lions—a virus struck them—a short lived virus—so that by the next day, they were ready to eat the enemies of Daniel so you rub your intellectual tummy and say, “oh that was so satisfying—a virus, a virus. I don’t have to believe that.” Right? So, belief functions very differently on these two systems. On the one, belief is in effect a work of righteousness. That’s what many people don’t realize how this comes to pass but the idea is because you have the right beliefs, God will forgive your sins. Now, you ask yourself, why in the world would He want to do that?—Just because you had the right beliefs? Although, we say, “Well it’s a mystery,” we might say or you might say, well, “He just likes you to believe those things.” So, he looks down and inspects your mind. That’s good. No, you see, its belief integrates you with reality. Now then, that reality leads on into discipleship and spiritual transformation in a natural way. If you are over here on the mere forgiveness idea of salvation, there is no natural progression. You’ve got everything that you have to get, and the next stop of the train is heaven. On the idea of life as salvation as a life, you’re on a progressive movement that shows up every day….every day. A wonderful minister up in Toronto—I enjoyed him so much—he said, “When I got saved, I thought I had three things: I had a certificate that said I got in; I had a ticket for the trip, and I had a catalogue where I could put in orders while I’m still here.” And, of course, he was talking about how he learned differently as he went along. [46:36]
So, now, where is Jesus in this picture? Here I want to be very careful because many people today struggling with these issues that I am going over here in a rather light fashion; I hope you will not be deceived at how important they are. Many people are really troubled by this because they don’t know how to position Jesus in salvation if He’s not just a sacrifice for our sins. Well, actually, there is a lot of good things that we find in the scripture to help us with this. 1 John gives us language; 1 John 3: 14-15; 1 John 5:11 says, “God has given us eternal life and this life is in His son.” We see that life is a gift that is through His son. 1 John 2:2, “He is the propitiation for our sins.” He is the propitiation for our sins; propitiation is a covering. It’s a covering and that language is extremely important. It’s used in 1 John 4:10, “He gave his son to be the propitiation for our sins.” He is our covering and that is, I think you can put it in terms of this—that when we are trusting Christ, He comes to live in us so that when God looks at us, He sees Christ. He is the propitiation. Now that propitiation is indeed as Romans 3 tells us, “the propitiation in His blood.” You can’t understand Christ until you follow Him to the cross and the cross represents the heart of God. He laid down his life and that eventuated in the cross. Did Christ have to go to the cross? Yes, He had to go to the cross. Well, why did he have to go to the cross? Well, probably for a lot of reasons we will never understand at least in this life. But he had to go to the cross to reach human beings. The only suitable meeting place for humanity and God is the cross and there is a lot to be said about this when you asked what happened on the cross. One way of describing it is to say that the best human beings on earth killed the best man who ever lived. You know, Jesus didn’t wonder off into the jungle and get eaten by a lion and He didn’t die of a heart attack in the garden. Why not? Because His plan and the plan of the father was that human goodness would be revealed for what it is in the unjust judicial murdering of an innocent man—and not only an innocent man, but the best man who ever lived. The best systems, Roman law and Jewish religion killed the best man to reveal the true nature of human goodness. They planned that carefully and Jesus knew what was going on long before it happened. As he said, “no man takes my life from me.” That’s why you don’t want to see Jesus as a victim. Everyone around Jesus in the passion story was a victim; they didn’t know that they were victims. Jesus is the only one that wasn’t a victim. He was conducting the orchestra and that’s why He had to be careful about what He said because if He had said two more words, Pilate would not have crucified Him. He already had his wife on his neck. He never said a mumbling word—as the old spiritual goes—why not? Because His words were so powerful that if He had said more, He would not have been crucified. Well, I may be tweaking your concepts a little too much here, but we’ll have a chance in a moment for you to straighten me out. [52:25]
We have unfortunately a misunderstanding of Jesus on the cross, which it was merely—He was merely there to suffer—now, He went to the cross in our place. It is vicarious. It is substitutionary. He died for our sins. Don’t turn loose of that. Hold to the fact. Don’t worry too much about the theory because in many quarters what is actually preached as the gospel is a theory of the atonement. Not the fact of the atonement. He died in our place. He suffered for sinners. If it hadn’t been for sinners and His desire to save them, He wouldn’t have gone to the cross. There are many dimensions and don’t narrow it down to someone little thing that someone suggested is what happened. Just keep the fullness of the person. Remember there is one God and one mediator between God and man—the man Christ Jesus. That’s the fact. Don’t substitute a theory for it. If you substitute a theory for it, you will lose the living reality of Christ in the life of the believer when you come to verses like “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself not attributing their trespasses to him.” -2 Cor. 5:19 “When you see he is able to save unto the uttermost those who come unto God by Him because He ever lives to make intercession.” Wait a moment! You mean, He’s not done in his saving work? No, He’s not done. His saving work goes on. That was Hebrews 7:25 in case you want the reference. In that same chapter, it goes on right at the end to talk about how we should draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive help in a time of need. That’s an on-going thing. The mediation of Christ is still on going. He is the Savior, and we are saved by Him coming into our lives and becoming central to everything that we do.
So now when you go back and you look at verses such as shows up in Romans 3, for example, very important to understand these verses. It talks about how the death of Christ made it possible for God both to be just and the justifier. Now, if you are going to work through this stuff I am talking about, you have to work through that verse. How did Christ and his death—how did that make God just? This is where we have an unfortunate picture of God that says God can only be just if He punishes everything—that being just is a matter of punishing. That’s how people read that verse. He didn’t let anything go by. Everything was punished. But the punishment that some people deserved was given to Christ and that’s how God was just. He made sure that everyone got punished except there’s a little substitution of punishment. Well, how are you going to understand that He may be just? What is God’s justice?—if it’s not making sure that everyone gets the punishment they deserve. Now, I suggest to you that the answer is His justice is His love. And that His forgiveness comes out of His love, not out of making sure that everyone that the beating fell on someone—if it wasn’t on the people who deserved it. Still, someone got it. Now, folks, you’ve put up with me very well so far and just let me say that many peoples’ view of the atonement gives you a very bad image of God—a very bad image. It gives you an image of a God who never forgives—never forgives. Where is forgiveness? It’s in the love of God. Jesus coming and living and dying and it was his dying was a necessity from who He was and how He lived. If you lived like that, there would be people who would like to kill you too. But it was an expression of the love of God so that people could understand this and approach God through Christ. So, what does Romans 8:5 say, “God commends His love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.” Now that’s a part of the atonement—that’s a part of the atonement. The atonement is Christ Himself—the person of Christ. That’s the atonement. He is the propitiation of our sins. He is the covering and that covering is in His blood because His life is in the blood. That’s the constant teaching of the scripture. The life is in the blood. That’s why the Jews were forbidden to eat blood. Scotsmen have permission to have blood pudding, but no Jew would do that and why was the blood important?—because the life was in the blood. When I tried to minister, I routinely asked that God would cover me in the blood of Christ. The life of Christ is what I am talking about, and the symbol of His life poured out for us is His blood and it was real blood. When He says, “unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you”, He is not talking about His blood, He is talking about His life. We have to come back to that later. That sixth chapter of John is so important in all of this.—eating and drinking—the substance of Christ. What does that mean? Well, it means “Him”—it means “Him” unless you—and He goes on to explain that. He talks about how you take Him in through His words—the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, they are life.” Now, He’s responding to the horror of the Jewish people sitting around there saying, Ah, ah, ooohh…eat his blood? They were just shivering. Look, the flesh doesn’t profit anything. “The spirit is what matters and the words that I speak unto you convey myself to you.” That’s why it’s so important for us to take in the words of Christ. It’s because they bring his substance with Him.
Let me just try to summarize a bit. Let’s see if we can get it down to where its rather simple and it is this—Christology, atonement, who is Christ—He is the propitiation for our sins—how does that work? By Him living in us and how does that work? By us counting on Him—relying upon Him—living with Him as the one who is developing us further and further along. The atonement is Christ Himself. That involves everything that He did but it keeps us out of the position that the atonement is something He did that is detachable from Him. That’s where you get a version of the gospel that essentially invites people to believe something that He did and if you are on the left, it’ll be different from if you are on the right theologically. But it’ll be some little teaching of His or some big teaching of his; perhaps caring for the poor. He cared for the poor. He brought good news to them. That’s one of the marks that He gave, you remember, to the people who came from John the Baptist that He was the one. One of the marks was that for once the poor hear a good “good news.” Now, what was that good news? It was basically that they too could live in his kingdom with him—that being poor was no barrier because it was assumed in that day that if you were poor, you were out of the blessing of God. Now days, that’s been inverted where many people seem to think being poor is a recommendation because after all, Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor.” They don’t understand that He didn’t say, “Blessed are you because you are poor” but blessed are you poor. So, you can take the things that He said—beautiful things and then that will be our gospel and that will show up in certain identifiable religious connections that I suspect you are all very familiar with from our life and your experience. And then on the right, well the one thing was He took our punishment. [1:04:39] So our sins are erased, and you get a version of justification that is horrendously wrong, and it comes out of trying to teach this to children but misleading them. You take the word justified and say it’s just as if I had never sinned—never, that will never be the case. It will always be “I have sinned” and the grace of God has claimed me as a sinner. I will never be an innocent person. I will always be a redeemed sinner. Now, why am I redeemed?—because I have put my confidence in Jesus Christ. Please don’t miss that because given all the other stuff I’ve thrown at you; you are apt to think that somehow, I have missed that fundamental reality. The fundamental reality is “trust Christ,” but that means trust the whole person. If I trust Christ, that means I think he was right about everything and if he says, “love your enemies,” I say, “must be a good thing because he said so.” It must be possible; maybe I can do that. I need to learn. He will teach me. That’s the natural progression of trust in Christ. [1:06:21]
I’ve got just a few minutes, and I did want to go over that passage in 2 Peter so if you will turn to 2 Peter and see how this was viewed in the early church. You know, Peter—and I’m prepared to just take it at its word that this is the second letter of Peter—I don’t worry too much about those things because at this point, it has a record—a historical record and it wouldn’t matter to me that much whether it was written by a crow or something of that sort. It’s the test of the scripture is what happens when you put it into practice and now, we have a long series of practices from this.
This is a glorious statement, verse 2: “Grace and peace be multiplied unto you in the what?—knowledge—What is knowledge? Interactive relationship—so, “grace and peace be multiplied unto you in the “interactive relationship” of God and of Jesus our Lord.” Looks like John 17:3, doesn’t it? “Seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and Godliness through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us his precious and magnificent promises in order that by them you might become partakers of the divine nature.” Well, how do you do that?—by your association with Jesus. You become the partaker of the divine nature through him. Now, of course the new birth is a moment in that but then there is a life. New birth is not the place you live; it’s the door. “That you might become partakers of the divine nature.” So, now you are going to be an eternal being with an eternal destiny and all of that. ”Having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. Now for this very reason—that is because this is what’s been given to you, apply all diligence. Don’t sit down and wait for God to do it. How much diligence? All diligence. In your faith, add moral excellence. Now, it’s a good exercise, most of you are teachers, and you can spell out each one of these as you go along. Add from faith. You don’t start with moral excellence–you start with faith. Your faith is confidence in Jesus Christ that he was right. He had it all right. He makes all of the provisions so moral excellence is a natural progression and then moral excellence; add wow, third time around, knowledge. There is knowledge and then there is more knowledge and, in your knowledge, add self-control and in your self-control, perseverance, “stick-to activeness” and in our perseverance, godliness and in your godliness, brotherly kindness and your brotherly kindness, agape. All of these progressions wind up with agape. Col 3 says, “And above all the things put on agape which is the bond of perfection.” You don’t start there but you get there, and you get there by increments as you allow the Christ who is your covering to teach you and lead you and impart to you his kind of life. “If these qualities are yours and are increasing—see it’s a progression sort of thing—“they render you neither useless or unfruitful in the true interactive relationship of our Lord Jesus Christ.” I’m not going to read the rest of it. That’s enough, I think.
See, that’s the picture of how atonement and spiritual formation come together. Say that again. This is the picture of how atonement and spiritual formation come together.
I think I’ve worried you enough on that.