Election from Dr. Riddlebarger

Sometimes the best posts are links to another's work. 

Dr. Riddlebarger has been running a series similar to my own.  Even though we are going a bit out of order with this, I thought I'd post it.

Election

Troll

Justification

Returning to our building blocks series on vocabulary, today we are going to tackle one of the most important terms in all of Christian theology.  Raise your hand if you have ever heard this term in a sermon at church.  Really?

Justification.  From Webster, justification is the act of proving or showing one to be just, right, or reasonable.  Let’s not spend any time considering the obvious breakdown in terms of man, but instead, let’s think of these ideas from the perspective of God.  On the Last Day, we will quite literally face a trial.  There will be a judge.  The charge is sin and the penalty is eternal damnation.  What is just?  God’s view of justice, we have seen is perfect obedience to His will.  What is right or righteous?  What can we say about the righteousness of God?  This perfect righteousness has been attained by one Man only.  Is this reasonable?  When the writer of the rulebook says that these are the rules, I’d say it is perfectly reasonable as well.  Justification is the means by which people may obtain perfect righteousness before God on Judgment Day.  Let’s break it down again by groups.

Pelagian.  Remember that this groups starts from the denial of original sin.  Therefore, Adam is a bad example and Jesus is a good example.  That is why the question “What would Jesus do?” is appropriate in this context.  There is no imputation of Christ’s righteousness.  All of our efforts in our life time become the grounds for our justification.  We will be judged based upon our own actions, thoughts and omissions.  Our lives will be on display and we will be judged.  This is clearly fair.  No one will deny that this is the most fair system.  I have two questions: is it the most Biblical system, and do you really want fair?

Semipelagian.  This group starts with original sin that is subsequently cleansed for all of mankind by the work of Jesus Christ on the Cross.  Our righteousness is still based upon our own efforts in thought, word and deed, by what we have done and what we have left undone.  At Judgment, we will be able to say that we got a good start with a clean slate.  But the righteousness of Jesus is not imputed to us beyond the moment of our birth.  From then on, we are back to “What would Jesus Do?” as our road map to Salvation.  Once again, this is fair to us, though not so much to Jesus who had to die to give us that fresh start.  Therefore, God designed a system that was fair to the creature, but not to Himself.  Really?  That’s what we want to believe?

Arminianism.  We are entering the realm of prevenient grace, yet again.  At the moment we receive prevenient grace, and cooperate with God by believing and having faith, we are justified.  The trouble is in the issue of maintaining that justification.  The rest of our lives involves our vocabulary word for the next post, sanctification.  Even though there is a prevenient grace that precedes our response, this is still a synergistic system of justification.  Justification is by grace through faith, but not by grace alone through faith alone.

Roman Catholicism.  In order to understand the Roman Catholic view of justification, we need to start with something very similar to the Arminian view of justification, and then add the Arminian view of sanctification, to get a combined justification and sanctification that is the full Roman Catholic definition of justification.  In other words, Rome has no use for sanctification; to Rome, it is all part of the same thing.  This is not an altogether unhelpful concept as it is at least honest.  But because the first part is as a result as the input of prevenient grace, the second part which we view as sanctification is pure works, albeit within the context of the infusion of regular dosed inputs of grace.  There is no way to be clear on this topic in one paragraph, so if this seems confusing, it is because the terms are not the same in this system.

Reformed and Calvinism.  We are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone to the glory of God alone as testified in scripture alone.  Every part of that sentence has historical references and is worthy of conversation.  We will be going through each of the five solas in the near future.  The bottom line is that this is a system of monergism; God does it all.  Our justification before God on the Last Day is based solely upon the imputed righteousness of Christ to us, with absolutely no contribution of our own merits.  Our faith that brings this righteousness to us is solely a gift from God through the power of the Holy Spirit, having no input of cooperation from us whatever.  We don’t think about any aspect of the Law as capable of contributing to justification, only as defining the terms required for justification.  We do not presume to elevate ourselves to a position capable of contributing anything worthwhile to the efforts of Jesus on the cross; it is all to the Glory of God alone, not to us.

This was intended as a brief overview of the basic positions, a reference point.  In one sermon this past week, I heard a basically Arminian definition of justification articulated, without ever using the Biblical term justification, followed by thirty minutes of rambling explanation that sounded semipelagian or Pelagian in the amount of effort required for justification.  This illustrates two important points.  The reason that we don’t have the vocabulary any longer is that even when discuss the topics, we don’t hear the Biblical words used.  This leads to imprecision and a muddying of waters that I believe is intentional.  Second, the exegesis that passes for scholarly and Biblical most often fails to view these definitions in light of the redemptive historical narrative.  There is a metanarrative that has been lost as well as the vocabulary of the faith.  The two are intertwined and essential to mutual understanding.

In our next vocabulary post, we will attempt to unravel the key distinctives of sanctification.

– Troll –

The Vocabulary of the Faith: Imputation

I have tried doing posts on particular topics in the past and I have discovered that the language of the faith seems to bog down the conversation.  It was not that many years ago when I was a Biblical illiterate as well.  Biblical literacy is not just memorizing Bible verses.  Biblical literacy is having a working knowledge of the story, the major themes, the main characters.  When you studied Moby Dick in high school, your English literature teacher would not have accepted a synopsis of the novel that basically said that a whale ate Ahab’s leg, so he went on a revenge hunt.  While it is true, it does not even begin to touch on the complexity of the story.  If Ahab is an interesting character, the main character of the Bible is absolutely riveting.  Still, we have to acknowledge that the vernacular of the Bible is largely unknown or lost in this day.  My goal in the next few posts is first to introduce a few terms, then walk them through the various systems that we defined in the last few posts.  Do not worry if you do not understand them initially.  There will be a moment when it all clicks together.  Remember, this used to be standard fair for catechism of young children.  We can handle it.

Imputation.  We have already seen this word in action.  This word is a legal or accounting term in its usage.  Webster says that imputation is the attribution or ascription of a quality to a person or an object.  Webster goes on to give the word negative connotation with definitions such as accusation or insinuation, but this negative additional connotation is the result of the usage of imputation possible by a fallen creature than a quality of the term itself.  Still, we can see that we are attaching a quality to the object of the verb impute.  In its Biblical usage, imputation is a larger concept than this.  There is a specific quality of one party that we are going to not only attribute or ascribe to another, but we are going to transfer this quality to the other.  This is the legal or accounting aspect of this word.  In Les Miserables, Jean Valjean steals candlesticks from the Bishop of Digne.  When he is caught and brought back to face the Bishop, the Bishop imputes innocence to Jean Valjean, despite his clear knowledge to the contrary, in order that Jean Valjean is righteous in front of the magistrate.  Now, let’s take this into the Bible and see where and how this imputation works.

Original sin.  To understand this particular example of imputation, let’s consider a topic that is more familiar to us: inheritance.  Most of us are familiar with a document known as the Last Will and Testament.  If we are fortunate enough to have a wealthy family member who might have a bit of misfortune that results in his death, this document will distribute his worldly possessions to his family.  Now, unfortunately, if he was a horrible manager of money, the family will instead inherit his debts.  In the Biblical sense, this is the blessing and curses principle as it is applied to inheritance.  Regardless of your belief concerning a historic Adam, clearly we can use the language of government to call him the federal head of mankind.  In other words, Adam represents all of mankind in the Garden of Eden.  When Adam commits his sin, the punishment is death.  What is worse, his punishment under the curse principle is inherited by his family for a thousand generations (figuratively a very large number if you prefer.)  The bottom line is that mankind has the guilt of that sin imputed to us for the rest of time.  That’s a heavy inheritance.  The whole Old Testament is trying to teach us about this debt and the fact that we are incapable to restore our account.  The problem is that we have no access to the proper currency.

Jesus Christ on the Cross.  In this example, there are two imputations occurring.  This is sometimes called the Great Exchange.  In the first of these imputations, the sin of Adam is imputed back from all of the true believers to Jesus Christ.  In return, that capital that we so desperately require and have absolute no way to attain, righteousness before God, is simply given to us.  This perfect righteousness before God of Jesus Christ is imputed back to those who believe in the saving work of His work on the cross.  The amazing part of this double imputation is that is has already occurred.  This transaction is past tense.  It occurred 2000 years ago.  Plus, it costs us absolutely nothing.  It is completely free.  By this accounting move, all of our sin is imputed to Jesus Christ, while all of His righteousness is imputed to us.

Therefore, on Judgment Day, we can bring either our own self righteousness before God for judgment, or as Rod Rosenbladt likes to say, we can bet all of the blue chips on this Great Exchange.  We can be judged based upon the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ.  Clearly, not all of the systems that we have discussed in prior posts view imputation in this way.  Therefore, let’s go through each of our systems and see what each makes of imputation.

Pelagian.  There is no role for imputation in this system at all.  Consider the first premise of the Pelagian: there is no original sin.  If you start with a denial of the first imputation, what need have you for the other two?  If Adam was a bad example, and Christ was a good example, we can work out our salvation without any of this legal or accounting funny business.  Besides, how is it fair that something that was done by Adam could be imputed to me?  How, in turn, is it fair that Jesus could die for anyone but Himself?  We’ve been here before, but let me restate the obvious, in this system, if Jesus Christ only can die for Himself, why did He have to die at all?  If Jesus Christ lived without sin, He should still be living and breathing and walking on this earth, encouraging all of us to do our best, to work our way to Salvation.  If this system is true, why did Christ have to die?

Semipelagian.  The first imputation is preserved in this system.  Now, let’s look at Jesus Christ on the cross.  Due to the first imputation of Adam’s sin to all of mankind, Jesus is going to rectify the situation by returning all of mankind to the same state as Adam and Himself: perfectly sinless creatures before God.  The idea of cleansing the slate is that all of the sin of all of mankind is imputed back to Jesus at the cross.  However, His perfect righteousness is not imputed back to us.  We have to earn our righteousness. (I want to avoid conversations about eschatology for now, so let’s assume that we are only talking about from 33 A.D. going forward.  Later, we will address the Old Testament times.) So, we now have two very important assumptions made by this system.  First, all of mankind is restored to sinless perfection so that we are conceived and are born in perfection.  Second, we are therefore responsible for our own salvation.  Do you know anyone who is perfect?

Arminian.  In this system, the assumptions of imputation are slightly different.  The first imputation is again preserved.  Now, before we continue, let me say that this section and the Roman Catholic section are a bit confusing.  Remember that we have this little issue of Prevenient Grace.  Do we assume that everyone receives this gift or not?  If everyone receives this gift, then we have reverted back to the Semipelagian view of imputation.  If this gift is only given to those in foreseen knowledge of their faith, then the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is only to those who come to saving faith.  The imputation of our sin to Jesus Christ is still to all of mankind, but we are free to choose whether or not to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in order to receive the perfect righteousness of Christ or instead to continue in sin and lose our Salvation.  If this seems slippery and difficult to pin down, then you have arrived at my position.  I’m not even sure I’m explaining this position properly.  The reason is that there seems to be inherent contradiction in the application of prevenient grace.  If we cannot logically and consistently apply all of these Biblical terms to a system, then perhaps that system is flawed.

Roman Catholic.  This is pretty close to the Arminian view.  Sin is imputed to us.  Our sin is imputed to Christ and Christ’s righteous is imputed to us based upon prevenient grace.  This time, unrepented mortal sins will remove us from the grace equation, while a sin/grace deficit will send us to purgatory to complete our process of making ourselves perfect and righteous before God.  Again, there is this problem that not all will be saved, therefore, for whom did Christ die?  All sin was imputed to Christ, at least up until the moment of our birth.  But who receives the righteousness of Christ?  Perhaps, of these last two categories, it might be better said that while our sin is imputed to Jesus, His righteous is not imputed back to us.  It must be earned, just as in the semipelagian position, but with the assistance of and cooperation with the Holy Spirit.

Calvinist and Reformed.  The Calvinist position has already been explained: the full three imputation position with the Great Exchange as described at the outset.  What is important is the distinction that is drawn concerning who the parties are in the imputations.  The first is from Adam to all of mankind.  The second two involve Jesus on the cross and all true believers from across all of time, but not any of the reprobate.  Jesus accomplishes exactly His intention.  In all of the other systems, the whole of mankind is included in the imputation of sin back to Jesus Christ on the cross.  This distinction usually can be seen most clearly in a discussion of the familiar passage beginning with John 3:16.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.” (John 3:16-21 ESV)

Look at the grammar of this passage.  What you do not see are if-then statements.  If-then statements are the structure of Law passages.  This is a gospel passage such as the Matthew 5-7 passages that are so often abused in sermons.  Did God love the world?  Yes, that is a statement. Will those who believe in Jesus have eternal life?  Yes, that is a statement.  Does it say that “if you believe, you will be saved?”  In one sense, yes, it does.  But it does not say that you have the power over that belief and if you will just do the believing, you will be saved.  This is a declaration, not an if-then statement. 

Look at it this way.  I like to put bananas on my cereal in the morning.  In the fruit bowl in our kitchen are apples and bananas.  If you are a banana, you will end up in a bowl of cereal.  This is not suggesting that apples can turn into bananas or that apples have a choice in the matter.  Apples are who they are, and bananas are who they are. Now, look at the passage again.  Do you see the difference?  This is the difference between the Calvinist and Reformed mindset and most of the rest of Christendom.  There is an important distinction between Law and Gospel.  The grammar of the passage is important.

Those are the three Biblical imputations.  I expect that I have at least explained the meaning of the term, even if its application and to whom is still a bit fuzzy.  The extremes are easy.  There is no imputation in the Pelagian system, while there is very specific imputation in the Calvinist system.  We will see how these fuzzy middle grounds truly operate in the next post on our next important term: justification.

– Troll –

The Grace of God

This is such a simple phrase, and yet, it can be spoken in conversation where each person who hears it, understands it to mean something completely different. Using the constructs of the relationship between God, man and sin developed in the last few posts, let us see how Grace would fit into each model.

The first model we labeled Pelagian.  The key identifying feature was the denial of original sin. Since Adam’s sin was not imputed to mankind, man is capable of working his way to salvation. In this model, there is not much need of grace; in fact, I cannot see that there is any need of grace. Grace becomes nothing more than some amorphous idea of blessings. We receive grace when we receive blessings from God.

The next model is at least more interesting. In this semipelagian system, we do start with original sin in principle.  However, after Easter, all the slates of mankind are washed clean.  We are capable of making that first move towards God.  Grace then is everything that God does after we have turned towards Him.  Or maybe Grace is what Jesus did to cleanse the slates of mankind.  Perhaps it is both.  It still depends upon us, though.  All and all, this idea of grace is not all that different from the first one.  God doesn’t really do anything without an invitation.  That’s not very gracious, is it?

As we turn the corner in essentially the same place as the last two posts, we will start to see a more interesting idea of Grace.  Both the Arminians and the Roman Catholics use the term prevenient grace.  Since I am neither, I might not get these two sections right.  Understand their usage to be similar in context, but different in application.  Let’s see what that means.

The Arminian view of the sin problem is that all men are dead in sin from birth.  This is the position of the imputation of original sin to all of mankind.  The Arminian insists that man is not capable of choosing God unless the Holy Spirit gives the gift of prevenient grace to an individual.  This gift of prevenient grace essentially cleanses the free will of man who can now respond to God and cooperate with God’s grace.  There is often some disagreement whether some percentage of cooperation means semipelagian rather than Arminian, but my understanding is that the issue is not quantity but cooperation.  As long as we receive prevenient grace, we are free to cooperate with God for our salvation.

The Roman Catholic view of grace and prevenient grace is significantly more complex.  This is a very elaborate system of quantification and calculation concerning sin and grace.  The best place to start is at the beginning.  Prevenient grace has a similar meaning as in the Arminian system.  Once we have received prevenient grace, we are now ready to cooperate with God.  The Roman Catholics look at sin as having a quantifiable badness, that I’m going to call anti-grace for our purposes.  For each sin, you have to repent and then do penance of a particular value of grace to compensate.  Both sin and grace have quantifiable effects on your righteousness.  It’s sort of like a bank account.  When you are overdrawn at the time you die, you go to purgatory to work out your debt so that you can enter heaven.

Now, with the Roman Catholics, we need to introduce a new concept: the means of grace.  To some, this concept is going to sound off the wall, but it is actually very Biblical.  We receive Grace through specific means as outlined in scripture.  Now, the Roman Catholics extend the means of grace to other means as given through tradition.  Let’s look at specific examples.

The Bible discusses Word and Sacrament.  The Roman Catholics have seven sacraments, all of which have some value in dispensing grace.  Word means prayer in this context.  So, once prevenient grace has started the process, we can receive infusions of packets of grace through any of the sacraments, particular Holy Communion, and by saying prayers.  In the Middle Ages, Rome introduced monetary opportunities as well.  By gifting to a specific papal cause or project, you can receive an indulgence that is a quantifiable packet of grace.  There are also things called plenary indulgences that sort of wipe the slate clean again.  These are given for particularly large services to the church.  Pilgrimages to specific locations are often tied to indulgences as well.  Saying prayers also earns grace.  Say 5 Hail Mary’s and 7 Our Father’s, and that will be penance for that little sin you just confessed.

This was not intended to be an exhaustive discussion of the Roman Catholic system of grace, merely an introduction.  Let’s move on to the last system, one that looks at grace as the gas that makes us go.

The last system in which we have a monergistic salvation, where God does all the work, we need a lot of Grace.  By Grace, we are given the gift of faith.  By Grace, we are now able to do good works that actually glorify God.  By Grace, we are sanctified.  By Grace, we receive absolution for our repented sin.  Everything good we accomplish is by Grace alone, to the Glory of God alone.

So, it’s clear that we need a lot of Grace in this system.  How do we get it, and is it quantified in the same way as in Roman Catholicism?  The means of grace are identified by scripture alone: Word and Sacrament.  In this case, Word means the preached Word as per Paul in Romans 10.

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?

And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. (Romans 10:14; Romans 10:15-17 ESV)

There are only two sacraments in the Protestant world, Baptism and Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper.  Therefore, we receive Grace when we go to church, say the confessional prayer (and mean it), receive absolution, listen to the Word read and then listen to the Word preached (correctly, we hope) and then receive Holy Communion.  That earns us a full recharging of Grace so that we can run around loving our neighbor to the glory of God until the next time we receive Grace through these means.  No, this is not a similar quantified system.  God and His Grace are infinite.  We always get a full tank of Grace through any means of Grace.  The Grace can last as long as it needs to last, but we run better with frequent replenishments.  Weekly or more hearing of the Word read and preached and weekly or more Communion are the optimal situations. 

Now, we have been beating around the bush for a couple of posts.  In the next post, we are going to start looking at some key definitions.  We are going to learn the language of Christianity.

– Troll –

Summarizing God and Sin

When we speak of original sin, we often do so in the context of our humanity.  Perhaps, instead, for just a moment, we might consider addressing this issue from the context of the Holiness of God.

What does it mean to be Holy?  Webster defines Holy as exalted or worthy of complete devotion as one perfect in goodness and righteousness.  This is actually an excellent definition, and one that has Biblical roots from which we can work.  Let’s start from the second half of the sentence: one perfect in goodness and righteousness.

The perfection of God is an essential Christian theme.  God is perfect in every aspect.  We will address this point again soon.  Perfect in goodness means that God is the ultimate boundless Goodness.  We have discussed the problem of evil already, and how God allows evil but manipulates all things to His perfect intension.  God, Himself, does not create evil; God is perfectly Good.

The perfect righteousness of God is the problem that burned inside of Martin Luther.  We owe the match light of the Protestant Reformation to the concept of God’s perfect righteousness.  Once again, we will come back to this point shortly.

One other key Biblical distinctive about God is justice.  God is perfectly just.  This perfect justice is the problem that we will discover in scripture.  One of the key historical points concerning doctrine is that into the late Middle Ages, the work of Jesus on the cross was considered to be a ransom paid to the devil for the sinful world.  Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century put forth the understanding of scripture that the ransom paid by the blood of Jesus was actually to God.  The key to understanding this logic is to understand the perfect justice and righteousness of God.

Now, let’s introduce sin into the picture.  Remember, we are examining this question from the perspective of God, not man.  When man commits the original sin, man has done a number of things that are hugely problematic.  There are Old Testament Biblical passages that discuss the inheritance of curses for a thousand generations. (We will leave eschatological calculations out of the mix for now.  It’s a long time!) If we assume the progenitor status and federal headship of Adam, by either standard, mankind is now in a whole world of hurt due to the original sin.  Why was this such a big deal?  The problem is that God created Adam perfectly capable of fulfilling the Law, the law written on his heart as the creation covenant of obedience.  If Adam had kept the Law, we might all be perfectly righteous and without death.  It is, of course, difficult to speculate on the what ifs of theology.  But Adam did sin, and now Adam was no longer perfect.  Perfection is the standard of our most Holy, righteous, good and just God.  Perfection.  You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:48 ESV) Now what?

This is the problem of sin.  God has an expectation of perfect goodness and righteousness.  He isn’t going to look away from sin, because He is perfectly just as well.  Justice must be satisfied.  Also, now that mankind has sinned, God is just a little bit put out and ticked off with mankind.  Sin is offensive to God.  Offensive.  We have offended God.  Not only does He expect perfect righteousness, but we offended Him as well.  Are you feeling comfortable with the situation still?

So, here is the situation from the context of a perfect, Holy, righteous, good and just God.  We have through sin, failed in perfection, are no longer Holy or righteous or good, and God’s perfect justice demands punishment for us.  Oh, yes, and God’s wrath is heading our way.

Here is an easy question: what are the wages of sin?  Death!  Of course.  Everyone can come up with that one.  So, let’s put things into some perspective here.  Adam took a bite of fruit from the wrong tree.  For that transgression, all of mankind for at least a thousand generations is condemned to die and remain in hell forever.  If you have any argument about mortal versus venial sins that you want to discuss, do so now in this context.  How much worse can we be punished?  There is, of course, more to that discussion; but it behooves us to have laid that foundation for later discussion.

That, my friends, is not fire and brimstone.  That is plain and simple Biblical truth.  All of the churches from Eastern Orthodox to Roman Catholic to Reformed, Confessional Protestants hold this to be the truth.  It is only from this position of sheer, utter devastation, that we can begin to understand our next topic: Grace.

– Troll –

The Problem of Sin

Our question for today is very straight forward: are most people, deep down inside, basically good?  Your answer to this question will set the stage for the rest of our conversations.  We will look at each answer and the consequences to each answer.  Finally, we will see where scripture leads us citing both Old and New Testament passages. 

Let us begin with the affirmative answer to our question.  In this paradigm, we have some significant theological consequences.  The first and most obvious is that this answer means that somehow all of humanity is free of Adam’s sin.  There are only two possible ways that this can be true.  First, we can assume that Adam’s sin is not imputed to all of mankind, that Adam was not a federal representative of all of us and did not sin for all of us (denial of original sin.)  Second, we can assume that Adam did impute sin to all of us, but that sin has been cleansed in some manner.

The first assumption was put forward by the British monk Pelagius in the fifth century.  The primary source of the church’s opinion regarding this position in that time was written by Augustine.  This position that denies original sin and the imputed sin of Adam to all of humanity is known as Pelagianism.  It has been condemned by every church counsel since the fifth century.  This point of view is held by many Americans and is clearly heretical.

There are other consequences of this assumption.  In order to attain salvation, man must seek God, an activity that he must be able to undertake in this system.  Because man has free will, he is able to choose to follow Jesus’ good example instead of Adam’s bad example.  The purpose of Jesus’ life was to provide a good example for man to follow in order to attain righteousness before God.  The question that is left unanswered in this system, though, is why then did Jesus have to die?

The second assumption has a couple of permutations.  It starts from the point that original sin is affirmed.  However, the purpose of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is to provide victory over sin and death and give mankind a clean slate.  This allows man’s free will to again be able to choose to follow God.  There are subtle nuances here about whether we take the first step or whether God takes the first step.  When we take the first step, this is called semipelagianism.  This is the default position of most Americans.  It has also been condemned by church counsels.  If we take a step towards God, He’ll do all the rest.  Does that sound familiar?  If you pray this prayer and walk this walk, God will come down and do the rest.  If you just turn around and just face God, He is standing right there.  These are semipelagian positions that have become the mainstay of American religion due the revivalism movement of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  This theology also assumes that if you can turn towards God, you can also later turn away from God and lose your salvation.  So, now that you have prayed this prayer, walking this walk is vital to maintaining your salvation.  Let me tell you the five rules for walking the walk in this area, and the seven rules for walking the walk in this area, and the fifteen principles of “Christian” living.  Deeds, not creeds.  All of this mess is under this theological umbrella, and it is all considered heretical.  Altar calls belong to this general heading, although they can also be seen with Pelagian and even Arminian theology.

Here is a historical aside.  On everything that is above this point, there is complete Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and historical Reformation Protestant agreement.  This is the horrible irony of the state of the church.  Over 1500 years of church history gets undone by our insistence on the efficacy of our free will and our American egalitarianism.  This combination may look great in our Constitution, but the historic church has condemned this position.  Therefore, the majority of what we Americans call Christianity and Church is actually neither.

The next position to consider is the reverse of this position.  What if God takes the first step, but we need to cooperate with God and make a decision to turn toward Him.  God enables us through an infusion of grace, prevenient grace, to be able to make a proper decision for God.  After God makes this first move, we have to cooperate with God and choose to follow God.  We have to choose to believe.  This is the position of a sixteenth century Dutch theologian named Arminius.  Original sin is intact in this system.  God offers the potential for salvation to all humanity and makes the first move.  It is up to us to respond.  This system is still synergistic; it requires action by both God and man, but God has to take the first step.  We are not capable of choosing God without this infusion of grace.  We can also choose not to follow God, and many people make this other choice.  Salvation, therefore, can be lost.  Arminianism is not considered heresy, but rather a doctrinal error by more orthodox branches of the Protestant traditions.  The Canons of Dordt are the Dutch Reformed response to Arminius and contain the enunciation of the five points of Calvinism, which refute the five points of Arminius’ Remonstration. 

The Roman Catholic position is more complicated and falls somewhere in here for our discussion.  The Roman Catholics have some notion of the perseverance of the saints, in other words, you cannot lose your salvation except by the unrepented commission of a mortal sin.  Their theology still insists on perfection for admittance into heaven.  There is a complicated system of sin, repentance and penance that is required to return to a right standing before God.  After we die, whatever deficit that we have from perfection has to be worked out in purgatory prior to acceptance into heaven.  At Baptism, we receive a similar prevenient grace that enables us to perform good works through the power of the Holy Spirit, and through the other sacraments (seven total in Roman Catholicism,) we receive infusions of grace throughout our lives that quantitatively accumulate to balance against our sin.  I want to make no effort to defend this position at this time.  Most Americans identify Roman Catholicism as heretical by definition, without ever bothering to understand what they believe.  The Roman Catholic system of justification is actually closer to the Reformed position than most Americans, who are either full blown Pelagians or semipelagians. 

Now, let us answer our original question in the negative.  Are most people, deep down inside, basically good?  No.  Let’s go to scripture to see why everyone except for the Pelagians who deny original sin would affirm this position.  We have done this exercise on this blog in the past, so for many, this will be familiar.  Here are some examples, by all means, not an inclusive list.  1 Kings 19:9-18, Isaiah 59:1-13, Jeremiah 21, Psalm 5, 14, 53, 140, Romans 3:1-20. 

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—

 (Romans 5: 6-8, 12 ESV)

These are heavy words and they condemn all of us.  If you hold to this position, then not only do you need God to clean the slate, you are horribly incapable of even cooperating with God.  This is known as monergism, where God does all of the work.  God recognizes the problem and arranges the solution.  Jesus enters the world, lives the perfect life and overcomes death, thereby ushering in the interadvental time of this present evil age (between His life, death, resurrection and ascension and the Age to come, which begins at the second coming, Judgment Day. the Last Day.)  He then imputes righteousness to His elect and reconciles His elect to Himself.  As each elect saint enters the world, the Holy Spirit arranges for their conversion and belief.  The Good Shepherd does not lose even one.  God does not fail in His purpose even the slightest.  He accomplishes exactly that which He intends.

Americans will yell, “That’s not fair!” Our egalitarian sensibilities insist that this is arbitrary and capricious.  But from God’s perspective, when He looks out upon the world from all eternity, all he sees is sin and death, a vast graveyard of humanity.  In His infinite Mercy, He decides to save a vast number of humanity, more than can be counted.  Do not ask for fair, because fairly we are all condemned.  Rest assured, instead, in the certain hope of His mercy for you, His elect.

That is our biggest problem.  We are all condemned to die and enter into hell forever.  Only the absolute perfection of God can satisfy the righteousness of God on the Last Day.  Without the imputed righteousness of the One who did what we cannot do, and the reconciliation He offers by the imputation of our sin to Him, where He has already paid the price for that sin, we will get what we deserve.  Death, hell and eternal damnation.

– Troll –

Arranging the Order of the Eternal Edicts

In the last post, we introduced the idea of eternal edicts.  We stated that there are essentially five eternal edicts that we will need to arrange.  Afterwards, we will discuss the more commonly held, and also heretical as we have seen, end of the spectrum.

Did God create evil?  The answer to this question fairly uniformly, if you believe that God is Good (with a capital “G”,) is absolutely not.  This creates a problem for those of us who hold that God is all powerful, all knowing and intentional.  The paradigm that is used is that while God did not introduce evil into the world, God permitted evil to enter the world.  And since He permitted it, He is still sovereign over evil.  He controls evil so that His ends are met even through the presence of evil in the world.  A good example of this is found in the Old Testament in God’s relationship with Pharaoh.  Pharaoh hardened his heart to the pleas of the Israelites, but this was used by God through Moses to fulfill God’s purpose of getting the Israelites out of Egypt.  How did evil enter creation?  Romans 5 tells us that evil entered the world through the action of one man, Adam.

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.  (Romans 5:12-14 ESV)

We can say, then, that God permitted the Fall of Man.  We will come back to this passage in a later post to discuss original sin.

The next question is over Salvation.  Since God has allowed the Fall of Man, how will God go about saving man?  The first point to realize is that we are assuming that man cannot save himself.  He is going to require some help from God at the very least, or God is going to have to do all the saving Himself at the most.  This is the basic point in the discussion of synergism versus monergism, does God help man to salvation or does God do all of the work of salvation by Himself. 

If you believe that God does all the work, then we come to our next major issue: how does God decide who He will save and who He will not save?  This is the question that begins to pry open the Gulf between the Reformation and essentially all other positions, whether Roman Catholic, Arminian, Wesleyan or Pelagian.  Notice that this places the vast majority of American “Protestants” on the same side of the discussion as Rome!  Why do we say this?  Let’s look at the issue more closely.  The issue is predestination.

But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. For this is what the promise said: “About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.” And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls—she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” (Romans 9:6-13 ESV)

I wonder how many people even know that this passage is in the Bible?  Though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad, in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls….  That has to be the most earth shattering, paradigm blowing passage in the Bible.  God’s purpose is independent of man, independent of our deeds, independent of who is called.  Our salvation is dependent only on Him who calls, not those who are called.  It’s there in black and white.  Why?  That, we are not told.  Look at this passage:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.  (Ephesians 2:8-10 ESV)

What is this about God preparing beforehand?  That sounds like predestination to these hairy ears.  It is not our doing, it is a gift of God, not a result of works.  That’s pretty clear.  The idea of predestination and an elect remnant goes back through the whole Old Testament.  Look at this example:

There he came to a cave and lodged in it. And behold, the word of the LORD came to him, and he said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He said, “I have been very jealous for the LORD, the God of hosts. For the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.” “Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.” (1 Kings 19:9-10, 18 ESV)

God holds back his remnant.  The whole world will be saved through that remnant.  There were many in the covenant community of Israel, but only a few (relatively speaking) were within that remnant of whom God spoke to Elijah. 

Back to the eternal edicts, in which order shall we place them?  Let’s try this one.

• Creation, the Fall, Election, Provide Salvation, Call the Elect.

How does that look on the ground?  God creates man, then He allows man to Fall.  God then elects people from throughout time to be His people, His remnant, His elect.  Remember that for God there is no time.  These are placed in chronological order because we are chronologically oriented creations.  Next, God determines how He will provide for the salvation of His elect.  Finally, He calls His elect to Himself.  This ordering is called Infralapsarian, and it the predominant Calvinist position.

• Creation, the Fall, Provide Salvation, Election, Call the Elect.

How does this look on the ground?  Because Salvation precedes election, we have caused two very important effects.  First, whereas in the example above, only the Elect are saved, now every person on the planet has the opportunity to be saved.  Second, because election occurs after Salvation, the means of Salvation will not be wholly sufficient for some people who will perish.  Therefore, God is unable to accomplish exactly what He intends with the Death and Resurrection of Jesus.  Surely, if God can create the world, He can save exactly the number of people that He intends to save, regardless of the number.  This system is called Amyraldism, and it is the position of the so-called Four Point Calvinists.  It is beyond my goals to explain this nuance at this time.

• Creation, the Fall, Provide Salvation, Call all to Salvation, Elect those who believe

This is the classic Arminian position, and it will seem more familiar to you.  God provides for the Salvation of all man, calls all men to receive salvation, then elects those who believe.  Arminius talks about prevenient grace at this step.  Because he believed in original sin, God still had to provide a part of grace to those who would believe so that they could believe.  Some go so far as to say that God elects based upon foreseen knowledge of who will believe.  Whichever way you explain it, it lessens even more the power and precision of God, at the same time increasing the role of man.  Our egocentricity must supersede the Christocentricity of the Bible, in our fallen minds.

The last question for this post is: did God permit the Fall before or after creation?  If God permitted the Fall prior to creation, then God would have created a flawed world.  If this is the case, then Adam was not a perfect creation capable of the full obedience required by God.  See above that that Adam was of a type of the One who was to come, Jesus.  This position is called Supralapsarianism, and we can see that it is not tenable.  I bring this up because there is a group called hyper-Calvinists who hold this Supralapsarian position.  There are others who hold this view, but I point out the hyper-Calvinists so that you will see that there are some who claim to be Calvinists who may not hold to classical Calvinist doctrine.

In summary, we have examined the eternal edicts from Biblical theology with an eye to first recognizing our own positions and secondly to understanding how the other positions work.  When we examine the implications of one doctrine on others, often we will run aground on a contradiction.  Contradictions mean one of three things, by definition.  Our understanding of one doctrine is wrong; our understanding of the other doctrine is wrong; our understanding of both doctrines is wrong.  Our willingness to let go of our suppositions as we demonstrate that they do not fit with the Biblical text is vital in understanding God and His Word.

In the next post, we will look at the main problem of man: what is it, and how do we fix it?

– Troll –

Eternal Edicts and Covenants

As we discussed in the last post, there are specific events that are theologically supposed in the beginning of the universe before time.  It is important to understand that these events, while discussed chronologically are logical orders as opposed to chronologically ordered.  For God, there is no time.  Nonetheless, there is structure and order to this argument.  The importance of these will become apparent as we go along.

The first of God’s eternal edicts is the decision to Create the universe and with it man.  Later in this discussion, we will see an extreme position in which this is not the first of the eternal edicts.  But for the most part, we can assume that the decision to create came first.

The second of God’s eternal edicts is to permit the Fall.  Without much debate, the four major orderings of soteriology (study of the religious doctrines of salvation) will place the fall after creation.  There will be some discussion in a few areas about this ordering, but again, this is fairly consistent.

At this point in all of the soteriological systems, we can start asking questions.  There is the problem of evil and sin.  There is also the problem of salvation, how does it happen and for whom does it happen?  We will examine passages for each of these questions after we finish laying out the edicts, but I wanted to point out where the questions will arise.

I have mentioned above that most views of soteriology view that the fall of man occurs at this point.  It is important to understand that a heresy that is now rampant in the modern religious world holds that the fall of man is figurative or symbolic, and that the actions of Adam could not possibly have any consequence for anyone but Adam.  It must be said that the whole of Christianity other than full blown Pelagians rejected this idea in the fifth century.  There is another position as well (Semi-Pelagianism,) that we will discuss later, but it does not deny the fall.

Since Pelagius, no prominent theologian advanced a theology based upon a denial of the fall of man until Charles Finney in the nineteenth century.  Now, thanks to Charles Finney and revivalism, the default position of most people in the United States is Pelagian.  It is hugely important to recognize that this position was uniformly viewed as heretical prior to Finney.  This is the sadness we face in the church today, that so prominent a leader in US Protestantism was a heretic.  In the next post, we will discuss Finney, Wesley and Arminius, and how Finney's point of view makes light of these eternal edicts, while Wesley and Arminius have somewhat different edicts.

Finishing up the eternal edicts, we have in some order depending on which school of thought, the decision by God to save some or all, the decision by God to make possible the salvation or some or all and the decision by God to not save others or passively to overlook others.  That will be two points in most of the arrangements, depending on the theology involved.  We will call these two steps Election and Provide salvation.

Finally, there will be some sort of Call by God to his elect or to everyone. There is some agreement again that this Calling is mediated by the Holy Spirit.  Notably, in the synergistic (working together) systems, this Calling will not look the same as it does in monergistic (working alone) systems.  The reason for this we will investigate in the next post.

Switching gears for a moment, there are eternal covenants as well.  There is an eternal covenant between creator (God) and creature (man).  There are eternal covenants between the persons of the Trinity.  These covenants are not explicitly mentioned in Scripture, but they are implied by scripture.  Later, we will examine how these covenants work.

In summary, the purpose of this post was to point out five eternal edicts, which have to do with salvation or soteriology.  These five edicts are Creation, permitting the Fall, Election, Providing salvation and Calling.  We discussed that there are eternal covenants between the Persons of the Trinity and also between God the Creator and his creation, man.  In the next post, we will explore how rearranging these edicts greatly effects our theology, or vice versa. 

– Troll –

Who is God?

This sounds like too much of a basic question, but it is fundamental to Christianity.  Who is God?  Is God one person or three?  Is God the Father?  Is God the Holy Mother?  Is Mary divine?  Is Jesus divine?  When did Jesus come into existence?  When did the Holy Spirit enter the world?  All of these questions have been asked about God just in the world of para-Christian theology.  Who is God?

God tells us He is the Great I Am. “I am God Almighty.” “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” “I am who I am.” “I am the Lord.” All of these quotes are from Genesis and Exodus. God is eternal.  With God, there is no time.  “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” (Revelation 1:8) While God tells us much more than this, what can we say of these first few quotes? 

God created all of the world, the heavens and the earth, the universe, the stars, the lands and the oceans, the plants and the animals, and people.  Man, we can then say, is a creature.  What is the relationship between creator and creature?  Man can create many things from many materials.  All things that we create, we have the power to destroy.  No man-made thing has dominion over man.  Such is the relationship of creator to creature.

Therefore, what God creates, He can wipe away from existence with the shrug of a shoulder, or the blink of an eye.  What is more, God creates ex nihilo, from nothing.  Everything that man can make, man must start from some raw material.  Only God can make something from where just before there was nothing.  This is the God moment of creation, to create something from nothing.  All philosophy and science must eventually address this one issue.  It is the moment of existence that cannot be explained by reason, philosophy or science.

But we do not need to remain in the dark about this event.  God has revealed much to us through His Word.  Is it reasonable for us to expect to understand creation?  Are the motives of God in creation revealed?  Are we to be given the knowledge of ex nihilo creation?  Certainly, it can be argued that these questions and many others remain hidden.  God does not reveal the nuts and bolts of creation, nor does He reveal his motives.  What does God reveal?

God reveals that He expects worship and obedience.  That’s not asking much for One who created everything.  Fear and awe might be expected of One with such omnipotent power and omniscient knowledge.  Certainly, we may expect that this is a posture that should be assumed in approaching God, dare we ever deem it necessary to approach God.  Clearly, this is the sort of relationship that existed between God and Israel. 

In creation, there are what theologians call eternal covenants, edicts or decrees.  These are not actually documented in the revealed Word of God, but covenants that can be inferred by logic and understanding of Scripture.  For example, what is the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit?  While we have revelation about these relationships, the actual nuts and bolts of these interactions remain unknown to us.  John 1 tells us that Jesus was with God before time and that He was involved in creation as its instrument.  This is a controversial position, despite its clear presentation in John 1.  The Arian heresy, the first great heresy that required resolution, remains with us to this very day.  Ask a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon about John 1 and you will get either a  vastly different Bible version or a wholly different Holy Book that enables them to deny this basic Christian premise.  So, we can say that there were covenants or formal relationships between the persons of the Trinity before time, eternal covenants. 

In creation, we have eternal decrees implied as well.  These eternal decrees will form the basis of the next post in this series.  These decrees are the basis of Truth that we receive through divine revelation.  These decrees order all of creation and therefore our relationship with God.  We cannot understand all that God has revealed about Himself without some manner of addressing these eternal decrees.

Therefore, Who is God?  God is the great I AM.  God is the creator.  God is capable of erasing that which He created.  God expects worship and obedience.  God is Good.  God is Just.  This opens up two more huge kettles of fish that we will also address in the future.  If God is good, how did evil enter the world?  If God is Just, how can He allow injustice to occur in His creation?  The answers to these questions will reveal more about God.

The purpose of this post was to raise an important question: Who is God?  Without understanding all that we can know that God has revealed to us about Himself, it is impossible to understand how we should be expected to live, to worship, to know and to understand God.  We all want to have a relationship with God, and yet we do not take the time to know who God is.  Let us endeavor then to understand the nature and Truth that God has revealed about Himself through Scripture.

Who is God?

 – Troll –

Blog plan for 2012, part A

Every team needs a game plan, and the dynamic duo of Troll and Ogre have come up with the blog plan for 2012.  At the start of the new year, after assessing my progress as a theologian and a blogger, and listening to suggestions from all interested readers, I have come to the conclusion that the following series will done over the next 6 months.

1.     Complete the discussion of Hebrews.  I owe that to the readers who were following along with it.
2.     Complete the Heidelberg Catechism discussion.  I discovered we stopped about one section short of the end.
3.     Repeat and make shorter and more accessible to lay readers the series on critical doctrinal issues, the building block series.
4.     Post various papers that I write for seminary.  In this area, I may or may not post them with instructor comments or corrections.  This will probably have to be taken on a case by case basis.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the name of the blog continues to receive much negative feedback.  I cannot teach the reason and meaning behind the name if I lose my readers before they start reading because of the name.  Towards that end, I’ll be floating some alternative names by on various media and in person, and let’s see what you think about them.

Maranatha!

—Troll—

The Old Testament Covenants

Another great topic from last week was that there are five Covenants in the Old Testament.  This post will review each covenant and discuss how it is a type and shadow of what Jesus would do later in redemptive history.  As we have said often, every word of the Old Testament is about Jesus in much the same way that every word or the New Testament is also about Jesus.  The Old Testament presents types and shadows of the New Covenant in Christ.  What does this phrase mean?

 

Let’s look for a moment at cars.  The regrettably named Smart Car is a type of thing in the group that we call cars.  Yes, this is debatable, but that helps make the point.  There are other types of cars that we place in this group that we call cars.  Let us take for example the Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4.  This even sounds like a more impressive car.  Look how impressive the name of the car is.  Now, let’s look at the car itself.   Now that’s a car!  It has a 396 cu. in. V12 engine with 700 horse power.  It goes from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in only 2.9 seconds.  To give you some perspective, the Smart Car comes in blue; the Lamborghini comes in red.  While the Smart Car was a type of car, it was only a shadow of the Lamborghini, and a poor shadow at that.

In much the same way, we can say that Jerusalem is a type and shadow of heaven.  It was meant to give us a vague idea of what heaven might be like.  The Jewish people were a type and shadow of what God’s people would be like.  The Old Testament goes a step farther than this.  It compares a wagon or a skateboard to a Lamborghini.  The type and shadow is so vastly inferior to the real thing that we sometimes do not realize that the skateboard was actually pointing towards the Lamborghini.  And yet, some people mistake chapters and verses and even books of the Old Testament wanting to talk about skateboards instead of Lamborghinis.  Every word of the Old Testament is pointing forward to Jesus Christ and His redeeming work for His people.

Now, let’s move on to the Covenants.  All five of these Old Testament covenants point forward to an aspect of the New Covenant in Christ, but each has a different purpose in redemptive history.  Some of them are still intact and some have been broken.  Let’s start with a table and then fill in some details as we go.

Covenant	Lesser King	Blessings	Curses
Creation	Adam	Remain in Eden	Banishment from Eden; Sin; Death
Noah	Noah	No further cataclismic distruction	More trouble
Abraham	God	People the planet	?
Moses	Jewish people	Land promise	Destruction of Temple; dispersal
David	God	King will come from his line	?

The Creation Covenant, Genesis 2-3 is unlike all other covenants in the Bible in one aspect.  This covenant is not specifically spelled out as such in the text.  The covenant is understood.  We know that it is a covenant because it has the characteristics of a covenant.  There were blessings, curses and conditions.  This conditional covenant had the provision that Adam should never eat of a particular fruit.  He broke this covenant and suffered the consequences of that action.  The curse of this covenant was that sin and death entered the world.  The curses of covenants remain intact, while the blessings are lost.

At this point in redemptive history, God looks at His creation and it is doomed.  His creation is totally incapable now of passing judgment.  Since I am handling the doctrine of original sin elsewhere, I will not belabor the point here.  For our purposes, God needs to create a scheme by which He can save some of His creatures for the Age to Come.  We are not told why He chose progressive revelation or why He didn’t just wipe us out and start over.  We are given a series of covenants that point to the New Covenant in Christ.

When we come to Noah, the situation is that God was angry again and had just wiped the slate nearly clean.  Notice Genesis 6:5.  I would ask what is different now.  Paul’s answer is that nothing has changed.  It is interesting that man sort of receives a second punishment for the creation covenant here.  God saves Noah and then he makes a new covenant with Noah.  In Genesis 6:9, Noah is accounted as righteous, blameless in his Age.  By what means was Noah accounted as righteous?  Was Noah accounted righteous based upon his works?  Noah was still in Adam.  We are given his genealogy in chapter 5 to prove this.  His condition was still of sin.  He was included in the statement of God in Genesis 6:5.  Why was he accounted as righteous by God?  Noah believed in the promise of God.  He believed in the flood and the promise of God to deliver him from this peril.  Noah was accounted righteous based upon his faith in the promise of God.  In Genesis 8, we see that while God had decided not to punish the whole earth again on account of man, the condition of man has not changed.  The intension of man’s heart is evil from his youth.  We still have a sin problem.

Let’s examine the actual covenant in Genesis 9.  First, what are the conditions?  There are two.  Don’t eat live animals.  Don’t murder.  What are the blessings?  God promises never again to use a flood to wipe the earth clean.  The issue and imagery of water both here, in the Exodus and with Jonah makes for an interesting issue, but I will return to that later.  Remember that everything here is a type and shadow.  What are the curses?  If you violate this covenant, you will die by the hand of man.  One can also argue that the curses came first in the form of the flood, but that line of thinking is fairly thin in my view.  With whom is this covenant made?  Noah’s offspring and all living creatures are included in the covenant.  The sign of the covenant is the rainbow.  Now, for the tough question: is this covenant still intact?  Of course it is.  We have empirical evidence of this in the sky.  Has man violated this covenant?  Absolutely.  But as we have said before, God never breaks covenants.  Man is the one who breaks covenants.

At the end of the first two covenants, here is the situation.  God has cursed man through Adam and his sin.  This curse is the remnant of that covenant and it is intact.  God has not flooded the whole earth again and we still have rainbows, but man commits murder with alarming regularity.  Both the blessings and the curses are intact for this covenant, although man continues to violate it.  God is indeed merciful.  But man still has a problem: man is still evil in his heart and not worthy to stand before God in judgment and receive a verdict of righteousness.  With Abraham, God will get the ball rolling in the righteous direction.

Abram was deemed righteous before God.  The Abrahamic Covenant sort of tumbles out over 7 chapters and has several parts.  I will ask the covenant questions and then go get the answers.  By what means was Abram accounted as righteous?  From Genesis 15:6, we see that it was due to Abram’s belief in the promise of God.  This is an enormously important point.  Abram had already deceived Pharaoh concerning his wife.  This was not exactly righteous behavior.  His righteousness is specifically attributed to his belief in the Promise.  Who guarantees this covenant?  This is the most amazing section of Genesis, and perhaps the most important of the whole Old Testament.   The smoking fire pot representing God passes through the pieces first, as usual.  However, the flaming torch, representing the Son of God passes through second.  They are both fire, of the same substance.  One, the torch, comes from the fire pot, the father.  The guarantor of the covenant, therefore, is God!  The blessings and the curses will therefore fall upon God Himself.  He creates the covenant in Abraham through which Salvation will finally be possible.  He does all it.  He takes all the responsibility on Himself.  He demonstrates infinite Mercy and Grace.  Who benefits?  Clearly, there is a land promise that has to do with Abraham’s offspring.  Read this part of Genesis 13.  Now, it will be Paul who will spiritualize this land promise both in terms of the land itself and the beneficiaries.  That discussion will be in the Progressive Revelation series, part 2.  Who carries the curses if the covenant is violated?  The torch does. 

Now for the confusion, let’s go to Genesis 17. “Walk before me and be blameless.” The grammar of this sentence is a declaration.  There is no work of Abraham involved in this declaration of righteousness.  We already know that Abraham is adjudged righteous based upon his belief in the promise.  What do we make of verse 4?  Do we take this at face value?  Will Abraham be the direct patriarch of a multitude of nations?  Perhaps.  Paul will answer this question.  Now, we move to verse 10 and circumcision.  The male will have the covenant seal on his body.  I will make mention of a modern Jewish commentary on Paul and circumcision in the Part 2 post to which I have referred above.  In the lines of Genesis, the seal of circumcision is required for covenant benefits.  Again, Paul will have much to say on this topic.

Now, let us move on to Moses.  The problem is that God’s chosen people, the Israelites, do not realize that their behavior is an affront to God.  God needs to teach them the meaning of sin.  God needs to spell it out for us.  Moses was deemed righteous before God.  As another aside, I will come back to the Passover when we discuss the water issue of the Red Sea.  God gives Israel the Law through Moses.  The Covenant of Mount Sinai is sealed with the blood of a sacrificial animal.  Notice upon whom the blood is poured in Exodus 24.  Half is poured out on the altar and half is sprinkled upon the Book of Law and the people themselves.  This is not just a random ceremony.  The burden of obedience to the Law is attached to the people of Israel through the blood of the ceremonial sacrifice.  The curses of the Covenant will fall upon them if they break the Covenant.  The blessings of the Covenant were deliverance from captivity in Egypt and a new homeland.

Notice at this point something vastly important.  Circumcision is associated, not with Moses, but with Abraham.  Many Jewish scholars throughout time have viewed the Mosaic Covenant as the fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant, and that the Mosaic Covenant supersedes or replaces the Abrahamic Covenant, but this cannot be the case for two very important reasons.  First, a Covenant that involves different parties than the original cannot supersede the original.  It wouldn’t make any sense.  Secondly, the terms of the Mosaic Covenant have clearly and obviously been broken by Israel, bringing about the curse portion of the covenant, while the Abrahamic Covenant is still completely in force at this point, unbroken by either party.  The purpose of the Covenant of Law is to demonstrate to Israel that they cannot possibly keep the Law, and they should therefore be repenting and begging God for Mercy.  Unfortunately, man doesn’t see things as they are intended.  Israel actually believes that they can keep the Law.  They create more and more rules to protect the actual Law from being in danger.  They do not see or understand the spirit of the Law, much less the letter of the Law.  But this was the purpose of the Law: to teach man of his sinful nature.

David’s Covenant was similar to that of Abraham.  David, whose highlights include arranging the death of Uriah and taking Bathsheba as his own although after the covenant is made, is reckoned righteous.  Look at the actual Covenant blessing in 2 Samuel 7.  The key word is the word “offspring.” In many places, this is read as meaning a collective noun implying family.  It is often translated as such.  But the Hebrew is in the singular number, not plural.  There is one seed, one offspring.  Notice the language of the rest of the passage.  I will establish the throne of His Kingdom forever.  I will be to Him a Father, and He shall be to Me a Son.  This is all singular.  We are talking about one man in this passage, one king, one messiah.  It is clear that David believes that Israel is ethnic Israel over whom he is king.  But Paul will, again, take this in another direction, spiritualizing this Covenant as well.

In summary, we have looked at the five Covenants of the Old Testament.  I have hinted at some of the types and shadows that we will find in the Old Testament.  In order to fully understand what it is that Christ did for us, in His life, in His death and in His resurrection, we must fully understand what it was that God did in redemptive history in the Old Testament.  Although we are in Covenant with God through Christ and His blood, we are still the wild vines, grafted into a Jewish family by adoption.  It behooves us to learn about our adoptive family.

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