Jesus, Incarnation & holiness
I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.
(Phil.3:8-9)
…if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!
(Rom.5:17)
I will rejoice greatly in the Lord, my soul will exult in my God; for He has clothed me with garments of salvation, He has wrapped me with a robe of righteousness…
(Is.61:10)
Launching into a term’s teaching reflecting on how we grow as Christians to become more like the people Jesus died to make us is as daunting as it is dangerous. In the weeks ahead we will face at least two, at times contradictory, temptations. The culture of British Christianity makes us susceptible to a kind of spiritual brittleness. We tend to be unsure of the structures of our relationship with God, and have so habituated ourselves to a need for relentless affirmation in our faith, that any challenge that exposes our sinfulness, any call to holiness, or a reference to any part of the Bible that teaches that our trajectory of righteousness is critical, tends to throw us into a kind of tail spin.
On the other hand, our natural default as redeemed sinners is to reflex into a kind of legalism. As soon as sense the Scriptural emphasis on transformation and growth into the likeness of Jesus, we invert it so that it becomes the condition of our acceptance with God, rather than the outworking of our loving relationship with Him. The instinctive religion of a fallen humanity, whatever its cosmetics, comes down to the basic idea that if we are good people God will accept us. There are ‘christianised’ versions of it (see Galatians), but except for when it is being denigrated there is no thought of this in the Bible. The Gospel thunders against the pride and arrogance of sinful humanity. It utterly denies the assumption that we could ever be ‘good enough’. It refutes even the notion that we could contribute some ‘goodness’ to our salvation, as if we do the best we can and then Jesus somehow adds the rest. The relentless and clarion teaching of the Holy Spirit is that everything in our salvation is gift of God, born out of His love and rooted in His grace. That we contribute nothing but the sin of which we need to be forgiven is the benchmark of all Biblical spirituality. Only as we confront our moral bankruptcy, our poverty of spirit, are we in a position to receive the gift of God. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’, we are told, ‘for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt.5:3).
It is all of Christ. Only as we stand on this solid rock can we be sure that we won’t find ourselves thrown into the depths of despair on the one hand, or lifted up to the heights of human pride on the other. And it is only as we are united with Christ through faith that we are enveloped in the benefits Christ has won for us. Paul’s explosive summary of the Gospel captures the dynamic: ‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (II Cor.5:21). The consistent teaching of the Scriptures is that the righteousness in which we stand before God, that allows us to stand before God is the Righteousness that God Himself gives us, through our identification with Christ by our faith in Him (theologians sometimes speak of Christ’s righteousness being ‘imputed’ i.e. credited to us). This is just one reason why we should delight to witness Christ forging His very human righteousness throughout the Gospels. This is our righteousness.
But our experience of righteousness is not limited to this. By virtue of this same union with Christ we are given a new nature, the Spirit of Christ takes up residence in un; we are given a new love and longing for the kind of new creation life God calls us to (Matt.5:6, I Jn5:3-5 etc.)). As a preacher of a previous generation once said: Love God and do as you please! We will in our life and character increasingly bear the image of God in which we were created and to which we have been redeemed. We will become more righteous, growing into the righteousness of Christ that we have been gifted. Only by holding these two colossal realities together can we navigate the temptations we face ahead.
Questions
How does the prospect of spending the next three months studying the Law of God make you feel? Are you excited? …fearful? …curious? …anxious? Can you explain your answer(s)?
How important do you think ‘obedience’ is in the Christian life? Does it matter if we follow the teaching and example of Jesus? Why / why not? How does knowing, understanding and living by God’s Law work out in your life?
Do you think the Ten Commandments should continue to shape Christian living? …or were they something confined to the Old Testament? Can you explain your answer? What passages from the Bible would shape your thinking about this?
Read Heb.2:5-12
This passage is part of a longer section exploring why Jesus had to be made like us ‘fully human in every way’ (2:17). Heb.2:13-18 explores more directly His human death, and how it redeems our experience of death; but we’re focussing on the human life of Jesus. This passage provides a nice transition from Christmas into our series:
The passage quotes from Psalm 8 & 22. How does the writer of Hebrews understand the Psalms, and use them (see also quotes from Is.817-18 in Heb.2:13, and the 7 quotes from the OT in Heb.1)? Do you think Hebrews is right to use the Psalms this way, or is it reading into the Psalms a meaning that isn’t in the original understanding of this OT book?
If you were to summarise the argument of Heb.2:5-12, what would you say was the main point? Having articulated that main point, how does that shape how you think of yourself as a Christian?
One of the big hits in the passages is the idea that Jesus is ‘not ashamed to call [us] brothers and sisters’ (2:11). How would you use this passage to help someone who was struggling to believe God accepted them?
How would you use this passage to help someone who was caught in a pattern of ongoing sinfulness?
Catechism:
As we work our way through this series we’ll be using an ancient method of teaching ourselves to think through all we are being taught. For over a millennium the Church used set Questions and Answers (called a Catechism, from the Greek word Katekeo, meaning ‘to teach orally’) to help rank and file Christians get a handle on their faith, and to grow in their understanding of how it works. For centuries, the greatest theologians and pastors of the Church produced such Catechisms, and were often explicit in their expectations that families would use them on a daily basis as part of their worship together.
In our own generation, there has been a welcome re-discovery of the practise, and I’ll be introducing us to a modern Catechism produced by the Anglican Church of North America (written substantively by Jim Packer). It is somewhat more extensive than the original Anglican Catechism (see Book of Common Prayer, p289 ff); and is called: To Be a Christian. It is available online as a PDF, or from Crossway Publishing if you would like a full copy. As part of this series, I’ll be re-producing the section covering the 10 Commandments, entitled ‘Becoming Like Christ’. That in itself is a revealing title, and sets Law of God in a compelling context of spiritual growth and maturing discipleship. As we’ll see next week, love and obedience are two sides of the same coin, inexorably linked to the extent that John can say: ‘In fact, this is love for God: to keep His commands’ (I Jn.5:3, drawing on passages such as Deut.11:1, Ps.119:88; Jn.14:23-24). As our Catechism puts it in the introduction to the Questions and Answers covering the Ten Commandments:
God wants us to have fullness of life in a relationship of loving obedience to Him. He teaches us His will for our lives through the Law, and most fully through the teaching and example of Jesus (John 12:49-50; Heb.1:1-2). God’s Law is outlined and distilled for us in the Ten Commandments, and displayed for us in Jesus’ sinless life and atoning death … God’s purpose for our new life in Christ is to make us like Jesus (Rom.8:28-29). Scripture teaches that our actions are pleasing to God only if the attitudes of our minds and hearts are also godly. God sees our behaviour as the fruit of our hearts and character, not something external or separate from our inner being. Thus the goal of our life in Christ is that we become like Christ – not only in our actions but also in our thoughts and attitudes.
We’ll start to see how that works out in practise next week.
