University Christian Church is kicking off a 9-week study called "Because He First Loved Us," focusing on God's love for us, what that means for us, and how we're to respond to it. I'm really excited about it, and for the handful (and that's a liberal estimate) of people who might enjoy reading the notes I take from the sermons (as I'm an avid note-taker), I'm including them on here. The series focuses on 1 John 4, and I almost put it on this page in block text but decided it'd just take up too much room. Biblegateway it if you care. Okay, here's the recap from the first sermon.
1 John 4.16-21 is striking: it flat-out tells us that Christians have no fear of the final judgment, not because of anything we've done, but solely because of God's love for us. While a lot of us, most notably myself, struggle with the concept of judgment, the idea that God must punish rebellion and evil, including that which is in our own hearts and lives, such a struggle, and dare I say it fear, runs contrary to what the scriptures tell us. There is no fear in judgment. Judgment itself is a good thing, a beautiful thing; the psalmist portrays judgment as God restoring the world to its original goodness. Judgment is a purging, as if with fire, of all that has marred God's good creation. There is, of course, a negative side to judgment, but negative only from the perspective of those who warrant it. Christians, however, needn't fear the judgment, and if we understand forgiveness (and I mean really understand it), then we can perceive ourselves as we truly are and approach God with confidence, for God's perfect love casts out all fear.
When it comes to the gospel, there are at least two wrong approaches to it: arrogance and self-rejection. The spectrum traps us, leaving us with wither an inappropriate low view of ourselves or an inappropriately high view of ourselves. The spectrum colors our perception of the gospel. The one end of the spectrum, self-rejection, sees the gospel as pointing out all our flaws and failures, and we're left trying to make ourselves good enough, or we see that we can never be good enough and just stop trying altogether. On the other end of the spectrum, we may be arrogant enough to assume that the gospel, revolving around God's love for us, is a validation of our true selves, God approving who we are, not just the good but also the bad. But with arrogance, the answers to life's questions, like purpose and meaning, are left answerable only to ourselves.
The solution to self-rejection and arrogance is truly understanding forgiveness. Anthony Jones, who preached the sermon, brought to the spotlight that famous passage from Isaiah, written 700 years before Jesus. Up to the passage, Isaiah had been saying to corrupt and rebellious Israel, "You've been wicked and rotten, and you have to be judged!" But then come Isaiah 52.13-53.12, and Isaiah's tone changes: "Yes, you need to be judged. But though you are faithless, God is faithful, and He'll do something crazy to bring about redemption." The Christian reading of the passage sees Christ through-and-through. Christ's suffering is vicarious and substitutionary: he suffers for rebellious Israel and, in a wider lens, all of humanity. His suffering is our suffering, our due, placed on him by God. But before we see God as a sadist subjecting his own son to such a trial, let's not forget that Christ willfully submitted to it: he wasn't exactly thrilled to be tortured and executed, but he was still DTF. He didn't do it unwillingly, his hand wasn't forced. The purpose of this suffering is, according to Isaiah, that of a guilt offering: Jesus becomes a scapegoat for our sins, but we must adopt him as our guilt offering, we must embrace the fact that he sacrificed himself, weighed down by our own guilt, to carry our burden to the cross so he could finally, and fully, deal with it.
Because of our waywardness, rebellion, and wickedness, if God must be just, someone has to pay for the transgression and sin. That's OUR responsibility, of course. We're the ones who've muddied our hands, and bloodied them in some instances, and justice demands that we pay the price for the crimes we committed. No one can deny that's fair. But there's a kink in the machine, and it's quite simply God's love. God isn't some arbitrary Judge, disconnected from those standing guilty before him. He's overwhelmed with love for his rebellious subjects, and precisely because of that love, not out of obligation or duty, he wants to be reunited with us. And so he pay for our sins in Christ so that (a) justice is done and (b) we can be reunited with God.
It's simple, so fucking simple, but yet we get hung up, time and time again, on that little divine attribute called wrath. God isn't wrathful in spite of love, but because of love. An all-loving God must be wrathful (note: wrath isn't simply anger, but a righteous anger bent on putting things to rights). If God isn't wrathful, if he isn't discomforted in the least by evil and if he has no real aim to fix the problems that sprout up in his created world, then he can't really be loving. You've gone from Christian theism to deism, and you might as well go straight to atheism to be consistent. Justice and love are entwined, you don't get one without the other. God will make people pay for their evil. He doesn't just shrug it off. Our refusal to take ownership of our evil prevents us from seeing the extent of God's love and responding with gratefulness. Really, we need to truly see just how far in debt we are to God to understand God's love, grace, and mercy, and the price he paid to redeem us. If we're mostly good after all, then the cross is more like a silver lining. But if we're wholly corrupt, or even mostly evil, then the cross is a big damned deal. We can't appreciate what God has done if we don't see how sinful, wretched, and in debt to God we really are.
Understanding wrath tears at the fabric of arrogance, but it seems to lay yet another foundation for self-rejection. How do we get out of self-rejection and arrogance? By truly understanding (a) how shitty we are, and (b) what God has done for us. Because of forgiveness and redemption, we stand before God not simply as "forgiven sinners" but as redeemed human beings (if our primary identity as Christians is "forgiven," then how forgiven are we really?). All our accumulated debt has been wiped out, and we stand before God redeemed, whole, bathing in his love and grace, standing in favor as a child of God.
Christianity isn't about being a good person, or an introspective person, but being a forgiven person and, consequently, a redeemed person.
And, yeah, that's pretty damned liberating.
No comments:
Post a Comment