7.2.18

Double Trouble & A Double Cure

All of humanity stands before God with two major problems. First, we are legally guilty for our rebellion against God. This rebellion isn't just about the bad things we've done; it encompasses our hearts, our minds, our thoughts and attitudes, our emotions, even things we haven't done that we should have done. Our hearts beat in rebellion against God and are bent inwards on ourselves. The guilt we've accumulated makes us guilty, and the wages of such rebellion is physical and spiritual death. The second problem we face is that we're enslaved to sin; even if we want to do good, we are incapable of doing it! Thus there is absolutely no hope for us to find good footing with God--at least not on our own feeble, futile efforts.

God answers this "Double Trouble" with a "Double Cure." When Jesus died on the cross, he took our place, and he died for God's rebellious creatures. When we turn to Christ and become united with him, Christ's sacrifice on the cross is applied to us: the punishment he bore becomes our own, and the debt we owe to God for our rebellion is paid in full. God doesn't excuse our rebellion; He deals with it on the cross, and Christ's work is appropriated to us. Because of the forgiveness we experience in Christ, we are able to stand before God as if we'd never sinned. In addition to dealing with the legal ramifications of the guilt we've accumulated because of sin, God also breaks the enslaving power of sin in our lives and fills us with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit's task is to comfort us, teach us, convict us, and lead us in the ways of righteousness. Because sin's power is broken, we are able, day-by-day, to become the sort of people God wants us to be. We are able to crucify our sin and live for righteousness as we walk by the Spirit.

How do we experience the forgiveness of our sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit? The Bible is quite clear: we are to respond to God in faith, repent of our sins, confess that Jesus is Lord, and be baptized in His name. 

Belief in Jesus has two key aspects: assent and trust. By believing in Jesus we assent to the truth of the gospel, believing that, yes, Jesus is the Son of God and the Way, the Truth, and the Life. By trusting in Jesus, we give ourselves over to him, no longer trusting in our own efforts for salvation but relying fully on him and the work he has done. By entrusting ourselves to Christ, we are committing ourselves to him as our Master and King. This is why confession is such a big deal: by confessing that Jesus is King, we are stating that the powers-that-be (whoever they may be) are not the world's true king. It is a revolutionary and even subversive declaration. For a Christian in the days of the early church to confess that Jesus is Lord was to mark himself out as someone who isn't 'falling in line' with the state. No halfhearted devotion to Jesus would result in such a damning confession; only those who had truly committed themselves to Christ and his Way would be willing to put themselves on the line like that.

The Bible teaches that, in addition to faith and confession, repentance is necessary for salvation. It has been said that repentance is the first half of faith; you can't get faith without repentance. You can't commit yourself to Jesus without making the decision of the will to turn your back on the Old Ways of living and to embrace the New Way revealed by Christ. If faith is absent repentance, then it isn't really faith at all.

The Bible also teaches that we are to be baptized into Christ. In Romans 6 Paul tells the Roman Christians to look back on their baptisms as the point in time in which they became partakers of the New Covenant. He instructs them to live their lives in light of the reality of their baptism. While it has become commonplace to believe that baptism is nothing more than "an outward symbol of an inward reality," the Apostle Paul (along with the rest of the New Testament and the church in general up to the 15th century) understood that when a person was baptized into Christ, they participated in his death and resurrection. There was nothing symbolic about it; only until the Reformation did the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli advance the idea that baptism is merely a symbolic act. It is in baptism that Christ's work on the cross is appropriated to us. Because many Christians today haven't been baptized (thanks to the ignorance regarding what the Bible plainly teaches about baptism), it's important to note that faith and repentance are the keys that make baptism worthwhile. Those who believe in Jesus, who have confessed him as Lord, who have repented (and continue to repent) of their sins, but who haven't been baptized, will likely be judged by "the light that they have been given." It's my belief that those who hold anemic views of baptism will have experienced baptism without even knowing it--their first bath after faith, or their first dip in the pool, may likely be appropriated to them as baptism.