In This Is Love (part 18 of 18)

It is from that insistence about those that are the sons of the Creator God that Paul goes on to write of the creation that eagerly awaits the revelation of those sons of God (Romans 8:19).  Paul seems to insist that the creation, and indeed the beings that have been charged with the stewardship of that creation, await the revelation of the sons of the Creator God so that they might suffer alongside and on behalf of the creation as did Jesus, and so that they might destroy the works of the devil by which they are enslaved---even if they are part of that group of image bearing stewards that have not yet realized the fact of their own enslavement. 

So it is in this suffering that one finds love.  It is “not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10b).  It is here that one must not overly personalize this statement and think of sins in the usual way of petty moral failings.  One must think of the larger sin of idolatry---of not worshiping the Creator and of improperly bearing His image.  Jesus addresses this in that He not only reveals the Creator God, but He perfectly bears the image of that God, and therefore, shows forth what the Creator expected and expects of His human creation. 

His ultimate self-sacrifice, trusting with a great hope in His God’s power for resurrection and re-creation, shows the way and the truth, along with that which is productive of eternal life (properly understood).  His reported giving over of the Spirit is taken to be the impartation of the power that brought about His Resurrection, and that imparted Spirit gives the desire and the ability to enter into self-sacrifice, while trusting that all that is done in His name will remain because the recipient also look towards the experience of a resurrection, just like Jesus.  This self-sacrifice is thus rooted in the same love that the Creator God showed for the world in the repeated sending of His sons which culminated in the sending of the Son, so that He could, in turn, send a new son (the church) into the world to prepare for the return of the Son. 

It is with these thoughts ringing in open ears that duty is to be considered, with that duty being the ongoing responsibility of the church (as the son of God) to destroy the works of the devil.  How does the last of the revealed sons of God do this?  The Johannine author writes “Dear friends, if God so loved us, then we also ought to love one another” (4:11).  How is this love shown?  It is shown through the embodiment of the Gospel (Jesus is Lord and this demands a certain response), and living as if there is a living and reigning King who gave His life and His all, and seeking to follow His example and His voice (food, clothing, cups of cold water, visiting prisoners, etc…) while also giving voice to that allegiance so that those that submit to that King might be used in somehow sending His power into the world, so that it is never forgotten that it is not by accomplished through one’s own might or power, but that it is by His Spirit that light overtakes darkness. 

Why embody the Gospel?  Because “No one has seen God at any time” (4:12a), which is the unfortunate by-product of the fall.  This is a distortion of what the Creator God had intended.  His son is to be the representative of His glory that will cause all to honor Him.  Therefore, “If we love one another, God resides in us, and His love is perfected in us” (4:12b), and this will enable the world to see God.  Yes, “He has given us of His Spirit” (4:13b) so that we might “testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world” (4:14b). 

Is the church of the Christ, as the son of God in and for the world today, the Savior of the world?  The immediate response is “of course not,” but to that is added a “well, yes and no.”   The “no” comes because none can be the Son that Jesus was.  The “yes” is uttered because those that comprise the church as the son of God are the ambassadors of the Creator God’s love and purpose, as those that are supposed to turn men to the God as revealed in the Christ, compelling a saving allegiance to that God through the Christ, “because just as Jesus is, so also are we in this world” (4:17b), loving the world by the Spirit “because He loved us first” (4:19b).        

Marring Of A Servant (part 4 of 4)

Continuing on, and interpreting Isaiah according to the Christ-event, one finds that the shock of these kings will come about because “they will witness something unannounced to them, and they will understand something they had not heard about” (52:15d).  How will they witness something unannounced and understand something that they had not heard?  This will occur through the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus (He is Lord of all).  The shock will come when they hear that they are now subservient to One that they had shamed and crucified.  The fact of their subjection to this King, Jesus (the one now understood as the marred and suffering servant of Isaiah), was certainly not something that had been announced to them beforehand.  Indeed, a suffering messiah was not even expected by His own people  Nevertheless, the fact, at least as interpreted by the followers of Jesus after His death and Resurrection, was inescapable. 

In addition to the shock of the announcement about subservience to a crucified man, no one had ever heard of one rising physically from the dead in the way that Jesus was said to have risen from the dead.  As a matter of fact, the very idea was ludicrous.  Men did not come back from the dead---not in their physical bodies.  Ghosts and spirits?  Yes, this was understood and even expected.  There was language for such things.  A man coming back from the grave and being exalted as the Lord of all people, nations, and things---who would ever have spoken of such a thing?  Little wonder then that the earliest believers in Jesus looked at the words of Isaiah and envisioned him looking forward (while also looking backwards and folding in Israel’s story and purposes according to what he would have understood to be the purpose of the Creator God for His world) and putting pen to paper for precisely this reason and writing “Who would have believed what we just heard?” (53:1a) 

In some sense, it is reasonable to presume that Isaiah had an idea that what he was writing was completely incredulous.  How could this servant (Adam, humanity, Israel, the messiah), disfigured so that he no longer looked like a man, and marred so that he no longer looked human, startle nations, shock kings, and be lifted high, elevated, and greatly exalted?  This question could not only be asked of the suffering servant of Isaiah, but of his God’s servant that was Israel, and His first servant, that being man. 

The answer would lie in the Resurrection of the righteous dead and the restoration and recreation of the world attendant to that as the Creator God would come to live with man (heaven come to earth) and rule all things, which was long held as a hope of Israel, and ultimately for those that would be witnesses of the resurrected One and attempt to put it into words, its power that is mysteriously transmitted and infused into this world through the preaching of the Gospel in both word and deed.  The servant would be resurrected.  Israel would be resurrected.  Humanity would be resurrected.  The previously marred would be restored, according to the power and promise of the Creator God. 

The Resurrection is put forth as the answer to the question, but is that when this would happen?  Isaiah seems to ask the same question as he writes, “When was the Lord’s power revealed through Him?” (53:1b)  The answer has already been heard, but it is returned to now, declaring again that the Creator God’s power to do all that He planned to do, for and through His covenant people throughout all of time, was made manifest when Jesus “was appointed the Son-of-God-in-power according to the Holy Spirit by the Resurrection from the dead,” which made Him “Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 1:4). 

As the Lord Jesus is elevated and lifted high through proclamation of His Lordship in word and in deed, nations continue to be startled and kings are still driven to shock.  As the Gospel proclamation is live, the Lord’s power is continually revealed through those that have cast their allegiance with Him, and the powerful and faithful Creator God continues to re-shape, re-make, re-new, and re-store His people and His world through them, reversing the marring of the fall of the creatures that had been created as His image, and making them into those that truly bear His image and reflect His glory into the world.     

Fundamentals Of Justification

When we read the letters of Paul, we must allow ourselves to do some from a viewpoint with which we are successfully and helpfully resisting any ingrained tendencies to equate circumcision and its associated works of the law with the completely Scripturally irrelevant paradigm of performing good works as the means of entrance upon God’s covenant and a membership standing among God’s kingdom people that have been called together (elected) for His kingdom purposes.  Similarly, we must also reach the point at which we no longer think of justification (salvation) in terms of the promise of a heavenly existence once death comes a-calling, but in Hebraic terms of covenant, exodus, exile, restoration, re-creation, and God’s meta-narrative of concern for His created order and the divine image-bearers that He formed to inhabit it that encompasses the entire arc of Scripture.  It is hyper-necessary to incessantly militate against mindsets and worldviews that would have had no place in the mind of Jesus, or for our more immediate purposes, the mind of Paul.

These ideas form a useful and important part of our hermeneutic, as we constantly seek to come to terms with the scope of Paul’s own hermeneutic and vision of the kingdom of God as presented in Romans.  Paul’s thought-world, when it comes to the movement and goal of his letter to Rome, is dramatically revealed with his statement in chapter ten of Romans that “the Scripture says, ‘Everyone who believes in Him will not be put to shame’” (10:11), thus approaching the issue of justification from a slightly different direction that takes in the overt New Testament justification texts (Romans 3, Galatians 2) while also calling attention to the Abrahamic covenant-rooted issue of participation in the covenant people of God and the inclusion of Gentiles in the mission of God as part of God’s plan to accomplish that which He has purposed from the time of the establishment of His cosmic Temple (creation and the creation account).  With that hermeneutical mindset understood, we are able to proceed to the twenty-third and twenty-fourth verses of chapter four and hear “But the statement it was credited to him was not written only for Abraham’s sake, but also for our sake, to whom it will be credited, those who believe in the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead” (4:23-24). 

This statement is jam-packed with weighty statements that touch upon a number of ideas that are at work.  We must bear in mind that a large part of Paul’s concern in Romans (and other letters) is Gentile justification and the covenant marker that indicates their justification that is the counterpart of the new age of the new creation that dawned with the Resurrection of Jesus.  That which was credited to Abraham, of course, was righteousness.  Abraham came into covenant with God.  Naturally, any writing about this was not done for the benefit of Abraham.  He did not need to read about it.  He lived it.  The Abraham story is included in the narrative tale of God’s people and God’s purposes, specifically constructed to demonstrate that belief in the God of the covenant is paramount, with specific covenant reminders tacked on at a later point in the story so as to serve as reminders of the faithful God and the believing response to that faithful God that produced loyal actions post-covenant (as if the entirety of the creation, generated at the hand and command of that same God, at least according to the story on offer in the first two chapters of Genesis, is not enough to serve as a reminder of that faithfulness---a point that Paul raises in the first chapter of Romans).

Paul’s use of “for our sake” gains prominence as part of his ongoing efforts to identify himself with Gentiles and his efforts to downplay his Jewish status.  He continues to place all those that are believers in the covenant God on the same level, insisting that the same righteousness (justification, covenant membership, part of salvation, as we seek specificity in our conception of salvation as an ongoing experience of living under the covenant and participating with God in such a way that generates the overlap of heaven and earth through our conscious, kingdom cognizant activities) that was credited to Abraham will also be credited to those that do what Abraham did, which is believe in God.  This God, of course, is the one that raised Jesus from the dead, thus reminding his hearers that the Resurrection can never, and should never be too far from the thoughts of the covenant community, as it is the basis for the widening out and advent of God’s mission to defeat death and bring resurrection and restoration to His creation, and for the “all-peoples” participation in the covenant.  To that point specifically, Paul writes “He was given over because of our transgressions,” our failures to live as truly human beings in the image of our Creator (falling short of the glory of God), “and was raised for the sake of our justification” (4:25).  Justification, as it goes out to all nations, cannot be disconnected from the Resurrection. 

In addition, the fact that in his statement about believing in the same God in whom Abraham believed, while mentioning His raising of Jesus (the basis for justification and an implicit reminder of the veritable resurrection of Isaac), he makes it a point to refer to Jesus as Lord, thus referencing Him as King (and what King lacks a kingdom?), does not go unnoticed.  In Jesus, God has become King.  Heaven and earth have come together in Him (He is the Temple and so too are those who are filled with the same Spirit that raised Him from the dead, as evidenced by claiming Jesus as Messiah and Lord of all against all reasonable evidence to the contrary, i.e. the crucifixion ).  The fact of His kingship and His kingdom is determinative for how covenant members will engage in, with, and for the world in which He is King.  We cannot allow justification to be separated from such considerations.  These concerns are not additions, but are fundamental.