Although I don’t mention it often, I have mentioned publicly a number of times through the years that I don’t vote. I recently received a letter from a good friend who has a hard time with me over my position and urged me to rethink it. I promised him and others on a broader basis that I was going to write an article on the topic, and here it is.
As a young person growing up in Louisiana (then a very strongly Democratic leaning state), everyone in my family voted, as did most everyone else I knew. I remember hitting the voting age myself and how much I was looking forward to voting. I was a senior in college when I cast my first presidential vote – for Barry Goldwater in 1964. He carried six states, of which mine was one, the beginning of the turn toward being a Republican state when it came to electing presidents. I remember how immersed I was in that election. I literally had dreams about America going down the tubes unless Barry was elected. I should mention that I was about as far from God at the time as a young person could get.
I remember that many of my relatives and friends of my parents were divided in which political party they favored. But the big difference between then and now is that they could differ and even make jokes and laugh about those differences. For one to say that they were Republican and the other to say that they were Democrat was about like one saying that they were Baptist and the other saying that they were Methodist. Differences, yes. A call to arms, no.
Run the clock forward to our move to Dallas at the end of 2014. In the process of getting new driver’s licenses and other necessary documentation changes, my wife said she wanted to register to vote. I had stopped voting by then, but cheerfully drove her to the place of registration and played games on my phone while she registered. I have never tried to persuade anyone, including my wife, not to vote. I am not writing this article for the purpose of trying to persuade anyone who reads it not to vote. I am just trying to explain carefully, using biblical principles, why I choose to exercise my rights as an American citizen NOT to vote.
Loss of Influence
When we moved to Dallas this time (4th time for me), I was a part-time ministry staff member and still teaching quite a bit. (Now I have been put out to pasture as far as speaking!) Politics had become an increasingly heated topic, and I knew that both the nation and the church were pretty evenly split on party preference. If I publicly identified with either party, I would lose some influence with those on the other side of the political aisle. My spiritual influence is far too important to me to do that. That is one reason why I don’t vote and make that fact known. Influence. Spiritual influence.
The responses to this have been very interesting. Some get emotionally worked up and tell me that I should be voting and fulfilling my “God-given duty!” Wow, just where is that duty described in the Bible? Others would confine it to my duty as an American citizen, but some of those also get worked up about it. I often tell them that they are likely assuming that I am a reasonably intelligent person, and as such, I would vote as they do. But I go on to tell them that if they knew I was going to vote opposite them, in effect cancelling out their vote, they would be glad that I didn’t vote!
Effects on Fellow Disciples
Seeing what getting strongly emotionally involved in politics does to my fellow Christians deserves its own subheading. In the 2016 election, we started reaching the boiling point when Donald and Hillary squared off. I did make the statement in a sermon that one side was saying that the other candidate should be in prison, while the other side was saying that the other candidate should be in a rubber room somewhere. It was quite the atmosphere. Social media comments, from professed Christians, were shocking to me. I finally “defriended” one of my Facebook friends, a very dear personal friend, because he simply refused to contain himself in print. I spoke to one of our mutual friends, who was actually on the same side politically as the defriended, who had done the same. You know what I am talking about, right? Social media can be a very encouraging tool, and it can be a tool of the devil. In the political realm, it is most often the latter.
In my next subpoint, I will attempt to explain why these effects are taking place and hopefully say something helpful. I understand that I am treading on a controversial path, but I am not hesitant to do so if it seems like help is needed. My last book would make that point for me, “The Bible and Women: How Did I Miss So Much?” I believe that topic and the political topic often involve righteousness or a lack thereof.
I understand that present politics is more complicated than I’ve ever seen in my nearly 82 years of life. On the Democratic side, until very recently, you had a candidate who obviously had an age-related issue mentally. Yet, if you believed in the platform issues of the party, what to do? That issue has been settled at least to some degree and yet many of the Democratic persuasion are not too happy with the new candidate. So, in that case, as one of my relatives sometimes said after voting for his party when not liking the candidate, “I held my nose and voted for…!”
We have a similar situation with the Republican party, in that some strongly hold to the platform issues of the party, but don’t like the candidate. Others love the candidate, although I don’t understand that myself, for a number of reasons. But calm down and remember that I ain’t voting or supporting either side. Yet the dilemma is there for those who like the platform and not the candidate. In both parties, millions will vote for their party while “holding their nose” regarding the specific candidate.
But as I dip my toe into the waters of even mentioning the two parties by name, I know that some of you reading this already have elevated blood pressures. That is a second reason why I don’t vote. If it makes those who claim allegiance to Christ react like that, I don’t want to have anything to do with voting. But now, let’s get to the Bible, the Word of Almighty God.
What I Can Know About Satan
The final two subpoints need some careful explaining. A part of my reason for choosing not to vote concerns what I can know about Satan and what I cannot know about God. I know that Satan is a liar and a deceiver, and an absolute master at both. His intent is to divide, destroy and kill. You already know that if you know much about the Bible at all. I don’t need to quote the verses. These facts about him are undisputed by Bible believing people. Paul did say in 2 Corinthians 2:11 that “we are not unaware of his schemes,” referring to Satan. And what was the context? One of trying to make sure brothers and sisters in Christ were not divided. The battle plan of “divide and conquer” was not initially devised by some general on the battlefield. It belongs to Satan. He is constantly devising ways to divide marriages, families, groups of all types, nations and the entire world. He has done a hell of a job, I must say.
He also divides church families and does that astoundingly well – throughout history. He has done it over doctrines, spiritual and non-spiritual practices, leaders, spiritual terminology and this list could go on. In recent years, he added another weapon to his arsenal like never before – politics. I am trying hard to obey this passage and its principles: “Join with me in suffering, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. 4 No one serving as a soldier gets entangled in civilian affairs, but rather tries to please his commanding officer” (2 Timothy 2:3-4). For that reason, I don’t profess to totally understand what I am about to illustrate here, so bear with me. I simply am not going to get pulled into civilian affairs far enough to understand the nuances of politicized issues.
But here is what I observed during our last election. There were people for and against wearing masks during the Covid pandemic, and there were people for and against being vaccinated for protection against contracting Covid. I don’t know how such a situation developed and what one’s political leaning had to do with it, and I don’t care. I was just shocked that such things could even be connected to politics in the first place.
I have gone “under the knife” for several surgeries in recent years. In every case, all of the medical personnel wore masks for my protection. I know enough about medical history to know that this wasn’t always the case, and it wasn’t that long ago historically when the transmission of germs causing disease wasn’t understood much at all. Doctors would go from one patient to another without ever washing their hands. Thankfully, someone figured out that germs are transmissible and have learned the various ways that certain types of diseases are transmitted.
But somehow the wearing of masks became a political matter, which affected me and others like me. You see, my wife of nearly 60 years has COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). She has fought off pneumonia seven times, once in the hospital for over a week. We both have managed to avoid getting Covid. But at age 80, if she gets some sort of serious lung disease, she very likely won’t make it. When we first started back trying to attend church assemblies after the pandemic subsided a bit, most were wearing masks, but those with politically related “Non-mask” convictions (I suppose?) were present also in their designated seating to one side. So here’s what I was thinking. The non-mask people valued their political stance more than the health of people like my wife. Whatever you may think about my observations here, I know what Satan thinks. He is a divider with a capital D.
Then we have the vaccine divide. I remember polio vaccine first being made available. We gladly stood in long lines to eat that little sugar cube with that pink or purple liquid on it. I knew people who died from polio. I was often in high school classes with a girl in an iron lung because of polio. Even back in the late 1950’s, they figured out a way to patch her into the class via a phone line. Her dad was an elder in a local Church of Christ, and her uncle was one of the most famous biblical scholars in that group and in the religious world in general. Oh yes, we were anxious to eat that little sugar cube.
My granddad died at age 30 with a disease that is no longer a threat in the US because of vaccinations against it which became widely available after his death. The 100th anniversary of his death is this coming December 9th. My mother was three years old when he died. One of my uncles was a few months old. My grandmother raised four children through the depression, leaving her and her children emotionally scarred for life. One of those scarred children raised me and left me with some of my own scars. You want to talk vaccinations with me? I have plenty of thoughts about it.
I have often traveled to parts of the world to preach and teach which required various types of vaccinations to enter the country. I used to keep a yellow folded document to show the types and dates of all the shots I took to be able to preach the gospel in those countries. What should I have done? Say, “If you insist on me getting those shots, then you can just stay lost!”
You see, in the past, this stuff wasn’t an issue, certainly not politically. It is possible that some must avoid shots purely for possible health reasons (potential reactions). Although I might not see it as you do in those cases, that is not my issue. My issue is how politics has somehow divided us over things that no one could have possibly imagined a few short years ago. So, does Satan know his stuff? You bet he does. Division, division and more division. This point really is just an illustration of my second subheading – what politics does to people, even those who profess Christ.
As a segue to the next point about not being able to figure out what God is doing, let’s look at another aspect of Satan’s work. He deceives us about ourselves, about our own sins. In a little book of mine (“God, Are We Good?”) written during the pandemic, I examined all of the ways we can sin (words, thoughts, motives, actions, not doing and being what we could do and be). I quoted one theologian who guessed at the number of sins a mature adult might commit in a lifetime, even if they were trying not to. It was predictably a very large number. If Satan can deceive each of us time and time again in order to get us to sin in many different ways, how can you be sure he hasn’t deceived you about your political views? After all, the other half of the population differs from you and both sides have highly intelligent people in them. If Satan is trying to destroy the world, how can you be sure you have all the right views and are not being used by Satan to accomplish purposes you cannot fathom? That leads to the next point quite naturally.
What I Cannot Know About God
Although Satan is far more intelligent than any of us humans, he doesn’t hold a candle to God. Therefore, I can learn more and understand more of Satan’s purposes than I can of God’s. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. 9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9).
One thing I do know about God is that he is in control of all the nations. Read the following.
Psalm 22:27-28
27 All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him, 28 for dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations.
Psalm 33:10-11
10 The LORD foils the plans of the nations; he thwarts the purposes of the peoples. 11 But the plans of the LORD stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations.
Isaiah 40:22-23
22 He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in. 23 He brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
Isaiah 40:15
15 Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket; they are regarded as dust on the scales; he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust.
When you look through the Old Testament, especially the prophets, you find many nations mentioned by name and what God said he was going to do to them and with them. They had no idea. Like our nation and all of the nations of the world right now, their finest and brightest intellectuals were planning and plotting the directions they believed their nations should follow. God was sitting up there (wherever “there” is) and saying, “O yeah? Watch this!” Then he did exactly what he wanted, when he wanted, any way that he wanted, to anyone he wanted, and all of the rulers of the nations and their citizens could do nothing about hindering his plans. Nothing about that has changed from that day until this one. To think otherwise is illustrative of the foolishness of mankind, which the Bible affirms over and over and over. Humans think they are so smart and well informed, but compared to God and his purposes, they are abysmally stupid. We cannot know what God’s plans are for any nation, including our own. Period.
That said, I do know that he will ultimately bring nations down because of their sins. He is astonishingly patient, but nations reach a point in their sinfulness that he takes them out. He always has and always will. The verses quoted above say it plainly. A very interesting verse to me is Genesis 15:16: “In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.” Here God is talking to Abraham about the promise to build a great nation of his descendants and give them a land to inhabit. But he informs Abraham that it will be about four hundred years from then because the Amorite nation hadn’t reached the point of the necessity of being destroyed. So yes, God is patient, but he knows exactly when he is going to destroy any given nation. He knows exactly when he is going to take America down, and he is going to. How could he not, given our constant descent into worse and worse sinfulness at an almost inconceivable rate?
When I was a young preacher, an older preacher named Richard Rogers often made a rather shocking statement. He said, “If God doesn’t punish America for their sins, he is going to owe an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah!” I have repeated that statement many times. However, although it is a clever sounding statement, God can do whatever he wants and knows is best and will never owe anyone an apology. But when I first repeated it fifty plus years ago, I was even then shocked at how fast our nation was departing from biblical principles into the dark night of sin’s degradation. At that point, I could not have envisioned where we are now in sin’s degradation. The sins of a nation are like a snowball going down a hill, getting bigger and going faster as it goes.
When I was yet a young minister, I also heard another quotation, this one about what would most likely bring on the fall of our nation. It involved an immense study of civilizations historically and what their progression of sin in one particular area was like. This study was done by an Oxford social anthropologist named J.D. Unwin, who published his findings in a book entitled, “Sex and Culture.” Although it was more than 600 pages long, Unwin said it was only a summary of his research and that it would have taken seven volumes to fully report all of his findings.
His book was published in 1934 and can be downloaded as a PDF file from the internet. In his book, Unwin examined the data from 86 societies and civilizations to see if there was a relationship between sexual freedom and the flourishing of cultures. It is important to note that Unwin was not a believer. He was not writing from a religious perspective at all, but purely as a social anthropologist researcher. A good summary article can be found at: https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/unwin
The quotation I heard from Unwin’s findings was that all of these nations fell when their sexual morality (lack thereof) reached the stage that many sexual acts condemned by the Bible were accepted as normal. Although I have not read the long book, other articles I have read about it supported the concept that all sexual activity apart from that between a man and woman married to each other was a part of what led to the downfall of nations, and the more flagrant such activity became, the more certain it was that the nation was nearing its end. The fact that a highly acclaimed non-believer through massive research came to the same conclusions that a Bible believer would imagine to be the case is absolutely astounding! The Bible was not wrong in Proverbs 14:34, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people.”
Sin at a certain point destroys a nation and sexual sins will play a big role in that destruction, based on Unwin’s research and the history of the 86 nations he researched. The level of sexual sins America has now reached, including many different types of sexual sins, suggests strongly that we are nearing our end as a nation. Sex was created by God and is a beautiful thing – in one setting and one setting only – between a man and a woman married to one another. All other sexual activity is degrading God’s design. I have no question that America is nearing its end, and sexual sins are not the only reason I say that. Satan is a liar and the father of lies, and our nation has reached a point that a popular dictionary (Oxford) labeled the word, “post-truth” as the word of the year in 2016. America is filled with every sin mentioned in the Bible, and the majority of our populace doesn’t even consider most of these as sins, as they have become so widely accepted.
So yes, I believe our nation is nearing its end, and though it is a personal opinion, if true, no human being can know when and how it will occur. God is God and unpredictable. His ways are not our ways and not discernible to us. For example, and this is a most pertinent example in my argument, God has used pagan leaders of nations as his servants – to inflict horrible punishment on his own people. Plus, he has also used pagan leaders of nations as his servants – to bless his own people. You and I cannot know how God is going to use any leader to accomplish his purposes, nor can you know what his purposes are. Let’s look at two of God’s OT “servants.”
Jeremiah 25:9
“I will summon all the peoples of the north and my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon,” declares the LORD, “and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants and against all the surrounding nations. I will completely destroy them and make them an object of horror and scorn, and an everlasting ruin.”
Nebuchadnezzar was going to be used as God’s servant to punish his own people, and when you read the details of what that destruction was going to include, it was indeed punishment of the most horrific kind. God will not hide his just nature in a corner for you or for our nation, although his incredible patience sometimes makes you think he has. Judgment always comes when repentance doesn’t. And sin can reach the point where repentance is simply too late to avoid the consequences of sin. On a corporate level, you can look at the people of Noah’s day. No doubt people were banging on the side of the ark as the water rose, begging for entrance. No doubt parents were holding up their babies, begging Noah to at least take them. The answer was no —they had sinned away the day of grace.
On an individual level, the same result can occur. Take a look at Esau’s case.
Hebrews 12:16-17
See that no one is sexually immoral, or is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son. 17 Afterward, as you know, when he wanted to inherit this blessing, he was rejected. Even though he sought the blessing with tears, he could not change what he had done.
On the other side of the coin, pagan rulers also served as God’s servants, blessing the people of God in quite unexpected and amazing ways.
Ezra 1:1-3
In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and also to put it in writing: 2 “This is what Cyrus king of Persia says: “ ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. 3 Any of his people among you may go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the LORD, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem, and may their God be with them.
As you continue to read this passage, Cyrus was beyond kind to the people of God, offering them gifts and protection as they traveled back to their homeland to rebuild in preparation for the ultimate coming of the Messiah. The Jews of that day must have been shocked at what happened. The Jews who were destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar’s armies would not have believed in advance that they, the very people of God, would be so harshly treated at the hands of their God.
All of this should illustrate the opening point of this section about God’s utter unpredictability. I can know a lot more about Satan’s purposes and schemes than I can about God’s. How God might choose to use an American president is only a guess. Could he use one of either party for his purposes to bless us? Yes. Could he use one of either party to severely discipline US inhabitants? Yes. Can you or I know who and how any of these answers might play out any more than those of history could know in their nations? No.
Bottom line, God knows exactly what he is going to do in and with America, and he ain’t telling. But some of you have it all figured out, do you? HaHaHaHaHaHaHa! Thanks for the laugh. I needed one about now. This is heavy stuff to me. The only thing I can think to do about the whole arena of politics is what God clearly said to do, and here that is.
Titus 3:1-2
Remind the people to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready to do whatever is good, 2 to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and always to be gentle toward everyone.
1 Timothy 2:1-3
I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people – 2 for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. 3 This is good, and pleases God our Savior,
You have the choice to vote or not vote. You don’t need anyone’s permission to vote and I don’t need anyone’s permission nor forgiveness for not voting. And I am not. My only hope in these troubled times is God and I am confident that earnest, urgent prayers will weigh far more heavily than my vote might. End of story. Cheers!
When we read the Gospel accounts, demon possession is mentioned a number of times. When Jesus and the apostles did miracles, one type was casting out demons. I have written at length explaining that miraculous gifts were limited to a first century setting and gave the reasons for that limitation. This material was originally included in Chapter Ten of my book, “Prepared to Answer,” and in a Second Edition, revised slightly. The revised chapter can be read as a stand-alone article on my website (gordonferguson.org) under the title, “A Study of Miraculous Gifts.”
Although demon possession and miraculous gifts of the Spirit are definitely related in the Gospels, they can be seen as separate topics. They can also be addressed as responses to two different questions. “Are miraculous gifts still operative today?” and, “Is demon possession still occurring today?” I have addressed the first question in the article, but now in this one I want to address the second.
Most Bible scholars believe that demon possession was a phenomenon that God allowed specifically during the time of Jesus’ ministry on earth, continuing during the time of the early church. It was a special way of demonstrating God’s power through his chosen leaders to convince those watching and hearing that these leaders were sent by him with his message. You find no mention of demon possession in the Old Testament, nor exorcism of demons, but you do find the presence of evil spirits, which is simply another term for demons. Demons are a reality and a part of Satan’s forces of evil used to influence humans to do and be evil. Their existence is not in question nor is their intent. What is in question is whether they possess people today like they did in the first century.
Demonology and Speculation
Demonology is a subject that historically is connected with more mythological theories than can be easily imagined. Theories of what demons are like and how they work is as varied as history’s theories of deity. The NT doesn’t give us much information about the origin of demons nor an explanation of their exact nature either. Therein we simply see what they did and how Jesus and the apostles spoke to the ones possessing humans and cast them out. Nothing is to be gained by speculation regarding areas not explained in the NT. Demons exist and they did possess humans during those early times. Sometimes their possession was associated with illnesses and sometimes not. Attributing illness or other calamity to demon possession today is nothing more than speculation and I believe a wrong one.
Bottom line, it seems best to relegate actual demon possession of the type found in the NT to a time when Jesus and the early disciples were performing a variety of miraculous works to confirm them as God-approved messengers of his new covenant. That new covenant began in spoken form by Jesus and the inspired apostles and prophets and ended up in written form, which we call the New Testament. Once the written form was completed, no further use of miraculous gifts was needed. With the death of the apostles and those upon whom they laid their hands to confer those miraculous gifts, they ceased. My article previously mentioned covers the miraculous stage of the church pretty thoroughly. If you still have questions, please read or reread that article.
It is also worth noting that the prevalence of demon possession and the casting out of demons is found much more in the ministry of Jesus than in the ministry of the apostles after Jesus ascended back into heaven. The Book of Acts has little mention of the exorcism of demons. The rest of the NT books beyond Acts contain no mention of this phenomenon at all. Even in the listing of the miraculous gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12, the casting out of demons is not found among them. Again, demon possession seems to be a phenomenon allowed by God especially for the ministry of Jesus and extending to the apostles as they carried on his ministry.
Another Related Possibility
That said, I do believe a type of demon possession might well be possible today, but a different type than we read about in the NT. In our present age, demons are constantly working to influence us for evil purposes. I have observed a few people who had given themselves over to Satan fully enough that they seemed to be completely controlled, or possessed, by demons. Even their facial features and the looks in their eyes seemed to be altered in very disturbing ways. But these were adults who had chosen to be influenced by Satan’s forces to sin, and then sinned long enough and deeply enough to be fully controlled or something close to it. Demonic influence seemed to progress to demonic control, which would be a type of demon possession. And yes, I did pray over them, shared Scriptures and reasoned with them, as with anyone caught up in sin. But this situation is different from what we find in the NT.
During Jesus’ ministry, you read about even children being possessed by demons. They had not fallen prey to temptation and sin, but they were unwillingly possessed by demons anyway. For example, look at this account:
Mark 9:20-22
20 So they brought him. When the spirit saw Jesus, it immediately threw the boy into a convulsion. He fell to the ground and rolled around, foaming at the mouth. 21 Jesus asked the boy’s father, “How long has he been like this?” “From childhood,” he answered. 22 “It has often thrown him into fire or water to kill him. But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”
Have I ever seen anything like this take place with a child? No. I’ve not seen anything like this take place with an adult, for that matter. What I have seen are a few adults who seemed to be so in the control of the forces of evil that it appeared to me that they were possessed. Therefore, the bigger issue for you and me is not focusing on demon possession as a special topic of interest, but on demon influence which is not a questionable matter at all. I want to stay as far away as possible from the temptations Satan provides, regardless of how and through whom he provides them, and avoid ever coming close to being controlled by him and his army of evil.
This last sentence is clearly the path to choose, while the overall subject of demonology in detail is not close to being clear in the Bible. Further speculations about the topic can easily create confusion and become a distraction (or worse). I have seen that happen. Being aware of Satan’s schemes and approaches is biblical; attempting to study him and his demons in depth as a topic is neither biblical nor helpful. I have offered my opinions about what might still be possible in our day, but I am labeling them as my opinions. Let’s just concentrate on doing what Paul admonished us to do as disciples in Ephesians 5:11: “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness…” If you follow that inspired advice, you cannot become possessed by demons.
Taken from Chapter 10 of Prepared to Answer, Second Edition
Without question, miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit were very common in the early church as described in the New Testament. To the casual reader, the question would readily arise as to why these gifts would not be available and beneficial for today as well.
Purpose of Miraculous Gifts
In a word, the purpose of these gifts was to reveal and to confirm that the message of the early preachers and teachers was from God, and that these preachers and teachers were also God-sent. Just imagine yourself among those audiences of Jewish listeners described in the early chapters of Acts. Your Jewish training would have caused you to respect the written Word of God, the Scriptures, and to settle all issues of your life by it. Now you are listening to these early apostles and other preachers teaching that this controversial figure, Jesus Christ, has fulfilled the OT Scriptures, so you are no longer under their authority. However, these preachers have no written word from God containing this new message. In fact, no book of what we now call the NT will be written for about 20 years! Therefore, the challenge of leaving a written, time-tested covenant, to accept one which was only verbal at that point, would have been staggering for a Jew! That is, unless these new preachers could validate their claims with miracles.
In Mark 16:15-20, Jesus spoke of these miracles which were to confirm his message and messengers.
He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.” After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God. Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it.
Hebrews 2:1-4 speaks clearly of the signs and wonders that were needed to confirm the word that was originally preached.
We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation? This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him. God also testified to it by signs, wonders and various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.
It is vital to remember the background of the Jewish audiences (and later the Gentiles), and how it would have been difficult for them to accept the gospel (as yet unwritten) without these confirming miracles. Also, without the miraculous gifts, there would not even have been a message, for “prophecy” (speaking by inspiration from God) was one of these gifts. Some of the gifts were revelatory (they revealed God’s message) types, and some were confirmatory (they confirmed God’s message). When Paul mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12-14 that the gifts were to be used to build up the body of Christ, he was referring primarily to the revelatory type of gifts. Since God’s revelation is now completed in written form, we can enjoy the same strengthening when this message is spoken by those with non-miraculous gifts of teaching and preaching.
For the gifts to have their desired effect, they would need to be obvious, even to unbelievers: and they clearly were, according to Acts 4:15- 16 and Acts 8:9-13. These were not the kind of alleged “miracles” which were attributable to other causes. Even the enemies of the early church could not deny that the miracles were real and totally amazing.
Furthermore, if the “tongues” were merely ecstatic utterances (unintelligible vocal sounds, as with modern claims), they would not have convinced anyone of anything, because ecstatic utterances were widely practiced in pagan religions long before the church was established. This fact is easily documented, and therefore such “tongues” would have done nothing to impress unbelievers with the truth of these messengers and their messages.
How the Gifts Were Received
The position that I have taken here is that the miraculous gifts in the NT times could only be passed on through the laying on of apostles’ hands. They had received a special measure of the Holy Spirit, which enabled them not only to possess these gifts, but to spread them to other Christians as the needs in the church dictated. A careful examination of the applicable passages will yield evidence that is quite compelling.
In Acts 2, although 120 believers may have been present, only the apostles spoke in tongues which were actually languages or dialects (glossa and dialekto in Greek). Note the following reasons: (1) in verse 1, “they” goes back to the nearest antecedent “the apostles” in 1:26; (2) in verse 7, all of the speakers were said to be Galileans. (Although the apostles were all chosen in Galilee, the setting for this occasion was in Judea, quite a distance away. Certainly, not all of the 120 would have been from Galilee.) (3) in verse 14, it specifically says that Peter stood up with “the Eleven”; (4) the question raised by those in the audience was addressed to Peter and the other apostles; (5) after baptism, those early disciples devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching; and lastly, (6) verse 43 tells us that the ongoing wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles.
Acts 2 also demonstrates that the “tongues” were understandable languages, not simply some kind of ecstatic utterances. In verse 6, the audience heard them speaking in their “own language.” The Greek word here is actually the word for dialect, which is even more specific. The same word indicating dialect is found in verse 8, where it is translated “own native language.” Then, in verse 11, it says that “they were declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.” The Greek word for “tongues” here is glossa, the basic word for a language.
Between Acts 2 and Acts 6, all miracles were performed by apostles only. Then, in Acts 6:1-6, seven spiritual men were chosen to help with the distribution of food to widows, after which the apostles’ hands were laid on them (verse 6). Immediately afterwards, Stephen, one of the seven, did miracles (verse 8). This is the first mention in the Book of Acts of anyone besides the apostles doing any miracles. And it occurred right after the seven men received the laying on of the apostle’s hands! Philip, another of the seven, is the next person to perform miracles (Acts 8, beginning in verse 5). Although Philip could do powerful miracles, he could not pass on this gift to others, as verses 14-19 make clear.
When the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. When they arrived, they prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit had not yet come upon any of them; they had simply been baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. Then Peter and John placed their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. When Simon saw that the Spirit was given at the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money and said, “Give me also this ability so that everyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.”
Notice that Simon tried to buy this ability from the apostles, rather than from Philip, although Philip could do the miracles.
The apostle Paul also laid hands on those who then received miraculous abilities (Acts 19:1-7). When writing to the church at Rome, Paul mentioned that he wanted to impart some additional gift (Romans 1:11) by which the Roman Christians might be strengthened. When Romans 12 is compared with a very similar chapter discussing gifts in the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 12), the difference in the nature of these gifts is striking. Notice in Romans 12 that the gifts in the body are all non-miraculous, except for prophecy. The parallel in 1 Corinthians 12 names many miraculous gifts. Paul planted the church at Corinth, and laid hands on many of the disciples; but when Romans was written, no apostle had yet been there. Therefore, one church had many who could do miraculous gifts, while the other church had very few (if any). Those few evidently had moved to Rome from other churches that had been planted by apostles.
How Long Were the Gifts to Last?
If the miraculous gifts came only through the laying on of apostles’ hands, they would cease when the apostles, and those on whom the apostles had laid their hands, had all died. Also, if the reason for the gifts was to reveal and confirm the message and the messengers, then when the message was delivered in written form, the need would have been met. By the time Paul had written his last inspired letter, he must have known that the Scriptures (which now included his own writing) would soon be completed, as the NT joined the OT in God’s complete revelation. These Scriptures would equip Timothy and all disciples for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
An important point to mention at this juncture is that the miraculous gifts accompanied new revelation. If the miracles are occurring today, as the Pentecostals claim, where and what is the new revelation? The Mormons actually claim that their additional books are confirmed by their practice of miraculous gifts. The proponents of the Holiness Movement, then, should not reject the Mormon writings, but they do. Now that the message has been revealed and confirmed and committed to writing (the NT), the written descriptions of the miracles do for us today what the actual miracles did for them in that day (John 20:30-31):
Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
If the written descriptions of the miracles are sufficient to produce faith in man, which leads to salvation, just what else would we need? Actually, Jesus recognized a greater degree of faith in us who have not seen these things personally but have accepted the Word’s testimony:
Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:27-29).
Some claim that miracles are still needed today in order to confirm the Scriptures for us. This overlooks the fact that the Scriptures have already been confirmed and can now produce saving faith in us (John 20:31; Romans 10:17; 2 Timothy 3:16-17; Ephesians 3:3-5). Also, according to Romans 1:4, Jesus was confirmed to be God’s Son by the resurrection. If miracles are needed in each generation to reconfirm the Scriptures, then every generation would also need another resurrection of Jesus to reconfirm him as God’s Son! Certainly, the Scriptures have been confirmed adequately, and they carry within themselves their own self-authenticating miracles. Besides these obvious and necessary logical conclusions, 1 Corinthians 13:10 (which we will explore later in this chapter) predicted the ending of the miraculous gifts.
Miraculous Gifts in 1 Corinthians 12-14
Enumeration. The church at Corinth had problems with their attitudes toward, and use of, spiritual gifts. A particular problem was their pride in exercising the somewhat “showy” gift of tongues. Paul corrected their problems by demonstrating the proper way to view and use these gifts. In chapter 12, he gave the enumeration (listing) of the gifts; in chapter 13, the duration of the gifts; and in chapter 14, the regulation of these gifts for as long as they were to be in effect. Importantly, the church at Corinth provides conclusive evidence that the presence of the gifts, even in abundance, was no guarantee that the Christians would be spiritual. In fact, this church seemed to have more gifts than any other mentioned in the NT, and yet these disciples were about the least spiritual of any mentioned! The modern claim that the truly spiritual people get the gifts flatly contradicts what we see in the NT.
The enumeration of the gifts is found in 12:8-10. They were as follows:
-
- the message of wisdom
- the message of knowledge
- faith (evidently of a miraculous type)
- gifts of healing
- miraculous powers
- prophecy
- distinguishing between spirits
- tongues
- the interpretation of tongues
In verses 29-30, Paul asks some rhetorical questions: “Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret?” Clearly, not everyone had the same gifts. Specifically, all did not speak with tongues, contrary to charismatic teaching. Furthermore, verse 30 shows that a non-miraculous gift is greater than the miraculous. Thus, Paul leads into chapter 13 with the call for every person, above all else, to exhibit love.
Duration. The duration of the gifts is described in chapter 13, in a context which depicts the superiority of love. Tongues, without love, were worthless. Prophecy, without love, was and is worthless. Knowledge, without love, was and is worthless. Faith, without love, was and is worthless. Giving, without love, was and is worthless. Even a sacrificial death without love is worthless (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). Notice that tongues, prophecy, knowledge and faith, in the context of the preceding chapter, are all miraculous gifts. Then, in chapter 13 verses 4-7, Paul describes real love (the “agape” type), as contrasted with their spiritual immaturity and erroneous use of gifts.
Next, in verses 8-10, Paul shows that love will continue when the gifts have fulfilled their purpose and ceased.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.
This passage says plainly that prophecy, tongues and knowledge were going to cease. Furthermore, they were only partial in their effects (verse 9). For example, a prophet could give only a partial message at any one time (see 14:29-32). He could not state all aspects of a subject, as we can today, through the use of a completed Word—the OT and NT.
Then, in verse 10, the partial gifts were said to last until perfection came. Just what was the “perfection”? It is not Christ, for the Greek term is neuter in gender, whereas it would be masculine if it were referring to him. It is not love, because love is feminine in gender. Notice that the “perfection” will take the place of the “partial.” Since the partial gifts mentioned here are all revelatory gifts, then the perfection must have to do with revelation. Otherwise, it could not replace the partial. Therefore, the perfection (or complete, from “telios” in Greek) must at least include a completed revelation, which would end the need for miraculous gifts. Our earlier study has shown this to be a logical conclusion of a completed revelation, and now this passage has demonstrated the validity of such a conclusion.
We now can turn to a written and “perfect” law of liberty (according to James 1:25) which employs the same Greek word as that in 1 Corinthians 13:10. Paul’s argument is a warning against being so enamored with gifts that are temporary anyway. He urges concentration on love, for it will always be with us. While it is tempting to say that the perfect in verse 10 is simply the completed NT revelation, the text doesn’t demand such a limitation; the context suggests that more may be involved and logic would say that more must be involved. The real purpose of these three chapters in 1 Corinthians, as already noted, was to deal with worldly pride and immaturity in their view and the use of miraculous gifts.
Having a completed revelation does not rule out pride and immaturity, although it surely would help in their case. What does rule it out is maturity and spirituality. Thus, in our verse under examination, it seems best to focus on the cessation of gifts (especially their misuse and abuse) as Paul’s plan for their maturation process—when love would reign supreme and disunity be dispelled. He uses similar wording in Ephesians 4:11-16, when unity based on maturity was to rule out being tossed to and fro by every wind of teaching. Certainly, the completed revelation would be a part of that, as it would in 1 Corinthians 13:10, which would help eliminate immaturity based on pride. Just knowing that the gifts were partial, temporary and inferior to love would help the hearts and attitudes to change. This interpretation fits the context in showing that the partial, miraculous gifts were to cease, but keeps the real focus on maturing in love and respect for one another. The completed NT in writing was not incidental to Paul’s purpose in writing, but neither was it his main focus.
Regulation. The regulation of the miraculous gifts is found in chapter 14. As long as these gifts did remain in effect, they needed to be exercised with God’s restraints. Prophecy was a much greater gift than tongues because it was understood much more easily (verses 1-19). Some find a supposed basis for ecstatic utterances in verses like verse 2: “For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God. Indeed, no one understands him; he utters mysteries with his spirit.” If one only read verse 2, such an interpretation would seem possible. However, verse 2 could also be explained as being a situation where a person was speaking a real language which neither he nor anyone in the audience understood. Thus, it would be a mystery to everyone present except God.
The above explanation is in perfect accord with the context of the discussion, as verses 22-23 show:
Tongues, then, are a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers; prophecy, however, is for believers, not for unbelievers. So if the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues, and some who do not understand or some unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your mind?
It is true that just knowing that God was speaking such a language through someone would provide some building up for them (verse 4). However, it would not do anyone else real good unless someone present had the gift of interpretation (see verses 5, 13, 27, 28, in this regard). This explanation takes into account all other considerations which we have studied, such as the meaning of “glossa”—a language—whereas the ecstatic utterance position does not.
In verses 26-40, the specific regulations for using the supernatural gifts in the first-century assemblies are outlined. Everything in the assembly was to be done for strengthening the hearers (verse 26). When tongues were being used, three people at the most could speak, one at a time, and only if an interpreter were present. If no interpreter was present, no tongues could be spoken (verses 27-28)! Two or three prophets would speak, one at a time, only until the next prophet received a revelation, and then the speaker had to stop and sit down (verses 29-33). Note that in verse 12, a warning is given against getting “carried away” and saying that you could not stop because you were “in the Spirit.”
Women were to be silent in the assemblies, not being permitted to speak (verses 34-35). As we discuss in Appendix III, these women were most likely the wives of the inspired speakers in the service. The wives were interrupting their husbands, and in doing so, were disrupting a service which was to be conducted in an orderly manner. Paul then warns people against over-reacting and forbidding certain people with the gift to speak in tongues entirely. However, they were to be careful about keeping within these regulations as long as the gifts were operative (verses 39-40).
In view of the foregoing biblical consideration, the charismatic movement today is not based on the Holy Spirit’s activity. Although its adherents are often well-intentioned and sincere, it is a movement based on emotionalism. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to promote truth in a spirit of gentleness and love. May God help us to help others who have been misled in this area of exercising so-called spiritual gifts!
How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! (1 John 3:1)
God is our Father and those of us in Christ are his specially adopted children – no truth in the Bible is more exciting! The cost of this adoption is the blood of Christ, which should humble us and fill us with a depth of gratitude that becomes our greatest motivation to serve. In fact, the fatherly love of God is what we are to imitate as we serve others in his name. Paul said it this way in Ephesians 5:1-2: “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” As we imitate him and live a life of love, we surely must develop his heart for his children.
How does the love of God show up in his treatment of us? Keep in mind that this is the kind of love that we are to imitate as disciples and show to the world.
Sacrificial Love
From his first contact with man until the present, God has shown himself to be a giver, not a taker. His concern is never what we can do for him, but only what he can do for us. He is absolutely selfless in his relationship to mankind. He gives and gives and gives some more. He is a Servant of servants, which explains how he can keep blessing us when we are unlovely, undeserving and unappreciative.
God does not take our sins against him personally, get his feelings hurt and pull his heart back. He keeps on giving in the hope that his kindness will once again lead us to repentance (Romans 2:4). When Jesus said that the first prerequisite for following him was sacrificial self-denial (Luke 9:23), he was only calling us to do what God has always done. Sacrifice is what God’s heart is all about – it is not something that he does, but something that he is. As you serve others, we must imitate that.
Respectful Love
God shows us respect by treating us as individuals and by expecting us to be the individuals we have been designed to be. He does not expect us to be like everyone else, but to be the best that we can be. The command to “train a child in the way he should go” (Proverbs 22:6) implies the need to understand who each person is and then help them to blossom into the plan of God for their life. Similarly, God does not try to force us into any mold that we were not made for, but patiently develops us into the mold for which we were originally designed – to be like Christ.
In essence, God shows us respect in order to help us become respectable. His approach is never to make us earn his favor by our performance, but rather, he treats us with love in order to help us grow and mature. As we work with others, we must give them what they need as an impetus to move them in the direction God has planned for them.
Resourceful Love
God uses any and every means available to help us grow into becoming like him. He has a multiplicity of circumstances and people he can call into play for our guidance, and he works everything out for our good. And our ultimate good is “to be conformed to the likeness of his Son” (Romans 8:28–29).
The greatest miracles, in my mind, are not the obvious ones in the Bible, but rather the everyday variety that are produced by God’s orchestration of so many behind-the-scenes details. To make the application to us as people helpers, we need to be getting as much (behind-the-scenes) input and help from others as possible. As Proverbs 15:22 puts it, “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.” We must continually be learners if we are to be effective teachers. Don’t be lazy and don’t be prideful; get help to be your best, and get the help from all available sources.
Positive Love
God’s love is positive in its expression to us. Positive reinforcement is one obvious demonstration of his kindness and gentleness. He knows exactly how to call us higher by encouraging us. It is easy to think that we help others improve by focusing on their weak points, believing that if they can just eliminate them, then they will really be great. The problem is that the other person’s self-esteem can take a beating in the process. God is full of encouragement as he generously expresses his love and commitment to us. With this approach, we can face critiques with confidence.
Protective Love
God is protective of us, choosing to expose our weaknesses in embarrassing ways only when we are stubborn and prideful. He works gently as he leads us to see ourselves and to resolve to change. Many of us can remember times in our childhood when we were embarrassed by teachers or parents in front of our peers. Such deep hurts are not easily forgotten. Thankfully, God is not that kind of parent. He deals with us gently and sensitively (Isaiah 42:3).
Determined Love
God never gives up trying to mold our characters and hearts into his own image. Gentle he may be, but sentimental he is not! The definition of discipling as “gentle pressure, relentlessly applied” finds its highest application in God’s approach with us. He never gives up and he never gives in. His attention to discipling is constant, for he always wants the best for his children. He perseveres with us far beyond what we can imagine. Just think of the story of the runaway son in Luke 15. No matter how long the rebellious son had been gone, the father in the story (representing God) never ceased to gaze at the horizon for any sign of his son’s return. When he caught a glimpse of him at a great distance, he literally ran to his son, eagerly accepted his repentance, and then quickly arranged a celebration party of grand proportions. God is determined to save us and determined to help us become the best we can be. How quickly and easily we can be tempted to give up on others. How unlike God we are when we do.
As we look at these amazing qualities of God as our Father, let’s determine to imitate them as fully as possible. He wants to express his love to others through us. Pray that others will feel his love through your love for them. Love like God loves, and both you and those around you will be filled with inexpressible joy. The love of God is the love of a perfect Parent. Embrace it for yourself, and then share it with others.
NOTE: This is the announcement I made on my Facebook page just after posting this article. I think it is important to read before reading the article itself. Here it is: “For the past two weeks, I have been working on an article that I believe God put on my heart. It delves deeply into the question of where God is in the midst of our current, ever-increasing health plague. The article is not a short and easy read, but rather a somewhat lengthy and complex one. It could not be otherwise, given the gravity and complexity of the topic. Therefore, unless you are willing to pay the price of reading it carefully and prayerfully, please don’t even start. I don’t want to be misunderstood and/or misquoted. But I do urge you to read it with those parameters in mind. Thank you.”
No doubt this question is being asked by millions of people in our world at this very moment. When calamity strikes, we humans want answers. Some aim their pained questions toward their governmental authorities. “Why hasn’t the government done more?” Why didn’t the government act more decisively much sooner?” “Why isn’t the government doing more right now?” These are common questions and probably relevant questions, but I can’t answer any of them. I am addressing a much bigger and more important question in this article.
Is the Coronavirus COVID-19 a judgment of God or not? Many similar questions are being directed toward him, in the hearts if not outwardly, and most of us with a Christian orientation are definitely asking them. Some of our questions are asked in a way that calls God into question. “Why doesn’t God stop this awful pandemic when we pray?” “Why would God allow this kind of suffering to go on when he could stop it?” “Where is God in this pandemic?”
God’s Nature and Human Nature
None of these questions have simple answers. God is in this plague with us in more ways than we imagine. Those who belong to his family in Christ can rest assured that we have not been forgotten and God wants us to cast our burdens on him (1 Peter 5:7). Those who are not yet in his spiritual family are still loved by him deeply and he wants them to seek a relationship with him through Christ. At times like these, a good starting place is to consider the nature of God and the nature of human beings. God is good, loving, merciful, forgiving, just, powerful and many other things. Does he gain any pleasure in the suffering of his creation? No, none at all. Then why does he allow it? That is the age-old question, is it not?
After the calamity of September 11, 2001, commonly referred to as 9/11, a Boston church college student at Suffolk University reported that one of his professors made this statement: “This proves that God doesn’t exist.” The professor called attention to an age-old dilemma, which is stated in some way similar to this by atheists: “If there is a loving, all powerful God, he wouldn’t allow such things to happen. So, if he exists, he is either not loving or not all powerful. Therefore, the best case is that he simply does not exist.”
Well, God does exist, a topic we will deal with later in the article when examining a biblical text in some detail. And yes, he is all powerful and all loving at the same time. In his power, he created the universe and all that is in it, with mankind being the highest order of that creation. When he created humans, he gave them a gift having extraordinary potential – potential for good and potential for bad. That gift, of course, was the freedom of choice. The choices we can make may be good or bad. The choices made by terrorists on 9/11 were obviously horrendously bad ones. But for God to block choices like those would be to reduce us to robots and that he will not do. He created us to have fellowship with him in both time and eternity, and such fellowship must be based on choice. Otherwise it is not love.
Thus, we see that although God’s nature is righteous in every way, man’s nature includes the ability to choose to be like God or like Satan. Sadly, human nature is always going to tend strongly toward the negative unless we choose to seek God and imitate him. Those who make that choice will be blessed and those who don’t will fail to be blessed. Those are the basic ground rules involved in what it means to be human. God loves us and wants us to be blessed, but we cast the deciding vote in the matter.
Wait a Minute!
You may be saying “Wait a minute!” about now. What does our human freedom of choice have to do with a pandemic that is infecting hundreds of thousands of people and killing thousands as of today (March 29, 2020) – and spreading exponentially at this very moment? Perhaps not much, although refusals to make good choices like obeying “shelter in place” directives could be noted. The bigger picture of how natural calamity and human choice may be related is a complex topic, but the foundation must be laid regarding the nature of God and the nature of humans.
God created the world as a preparation for an eternity with him, and cause and effect are a part of our world. If there were no cause and effect operating in the physical world, it would be difficult to understand its operation in the spiritual world. At this point, we could address how we have damaged our environment to the extent that natural calamities are much more likely, but we will save that discussion for another day.
Where is God in All This?
Let’s return to our question about where God is in all that we are experiencing right now. It is vital that we understand God’s place in this world and what occurs in it. In the broad sense, everything that happens does so with God’s knowledge and involvement. That involvement may take one of two forms: the direct or the indirect. Stated another way, he either causes something to happen or he allows it to happen. Nothing occurs without his permission, even the death of a little bird (Matthew 10:29). Further, God has both an ideal will and an allowed will. His ideal will is for us to seek him but his allowed will gives us the option of doing the very opposite.
Two passages in the Old Testament give us some insight into these two “wills” of God and how they work together. King David had a desire to number his fighting men, which was directly against the (ideal) will of God. In fact, David’s sin resulted in a plague that killed 70,000 Israelites. The motivation for his decision was attributed to both God and Satan. Read the following passages:
2 Samuel 24:1
Again the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.”
1 Chronicles 21:1
Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel.
Of course, those who reject the inspiration of the Bible try to discredit it in any way possible. Pointing out assumed contradictions is one of their favorite approaches, and this example is understandably a primary one they use. What do we Bible believers do with these two verses? Easy answer (at least for me) – Satan was the primary promoter of the decision and God allowed him to do it. In that sense, God is said to have done it because he is in control of the universe through both his direct agency and indirect agency. This particular example is one of the best showing the difference between ideal will and allowed will. His ideal will was that David not number the people; his allowed will was that he number them.
Here are another couple of passages from the Old Testament that make the same point.
Isaiah 45:7
I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.
Lamentations 3:37-38
Who can speak and have it happen if the Lord has not decreed it? 38 Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both calamities and good things come?
We may find this concept confusing and maybe even distasteful, but we actually shouldn’t. The fact that God is ultimately in control of everything helps us to understand and accept passages like this one: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). Reading the remainder of Romans 8 adds a great deal to the concept expressed in verse 28. God can not only use the bad things in his overall plan for humanity but can use them to bless his people spiritually.
Naturalistic Explanations Available
Whether God is directly causing the present health challenge or simply allowing it is honestly a matter of conjecture. I don’t pretend to know the answer. God gives us evidence, but not in an overwhelming way that all but forces us to a conclusion. He insists that our positive responses to him remain in the faith realm. For example, the creation itself can be explained in a totally naturalistic way (without a Creator). As ludicrous as that actually is, many very intelligent people, including some scientists, accept it as fact.
However, human reason alone, in looking at the creation, should come to another conclusion – one that has God in the center of it. That is the precise argument found in Romans 1, which we will examine further later. The Psalmist had it right when he wrote: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” In Psalm 19, the first six verses describe God’s general revelation through creation and the last eight verses describe his special revelation, Scripture. Thus, while God reveals himself and his spiritual truths, he does not do it in a way that overwhelms and forces conclusions.
And why is that important? It helps us weigh more carefully explanations that are simply naturalistic. They may be absolutely valid; possibly valid; or absolutely invalid. Sometimes the available evidence could be interpreted one way or the other, or possibly both ways in combination. As it relates to pandemics, human history is replete with them. I have a web page open as I write this, showing thirteen such pandemics that killed at least a million people, dating back to the Second Century AD. The greatest killer was the Black Death Bubonic Plague, dating between 1347 and 1351, which killed 200 million people (nearly half of Europe’s population). In the last century (the 1900’s), five pandemics are listed, with two of them being in the top five of the most deadly on record: the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, killing 40-50 million, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which began around 1981 and continues, killing 25-35 million thus far. In our present century, this current Coronavirus outbreak is one of five pandemics listed.
So what is the bottom line of these facts and figures? Only that such health plagues infecting most of the world geographically have occurred throughout recorded history and may or may not be linked to a direct judgment of God. Only he knows. Even if they are not, surely God wants us to use all such calamities to motivate us to examine ourselves spiritually and to serve our fellow humans in their suffering. Don’t you expect that he wants us to take a much closer look at our morality and our materialism right now? Our early brothers and sisters in the third century were known for loving each other and serving those affected by a destructive plague in their day. Non-believers did the exact opposite. We currently need to heed the example of those early disciples. It is the way of Jesus.
Not Done Yet
This article could have ended with that last sentence. But we are not done with this serious subject just yet. How this present virus may relate to a direct judgment of God needs more examination. Here is what we can know for sure. God hates sin and God punishes sin. As Peter put it, God is very patient in his desire that people come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). Thus, we cannot know exactly when that patience is going to reach its limit and bring about Divine judgment. That being said, one particular passage in the New Testament gives us very strong markers about when a nation is going to be severely punished by God. That passage invites a very close look and a very serious examination. Here is the opening verse of it:
Romans 1:18
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness,
The wrath of God – what a beginning! Most people disdain any consideration of God’s wrath, including many professed Christians. However, the Bible is full of it, from Genesis to Revelation. God’s love is perfect, but so is his justice. At least five types of his wrath can be identified in Scripture.
Wrath in Five Forms
First, we have eternal wrath, the consequences of ending up in hell. The scariest part of this type is that most people on planet earth are going to experience it after they die. Matthew 7:13-14 could not be clearer in describing the “few” who find the narrow road leading to life and the “many” who follow the broad road leading to destruction. I’m sure Jesus must have spoken these words with a very heavy heart, but he said more about hell than the rest of the Bible combined.
Second, we have eschatological (end-time) wrath, that associated with the second coming of Jesus and the end of the world as we now know it. The Book of Revelation provides the most detail about this wrath, and although I thoroughly reject most popular interpretations of Revelation, we can all agree that God’s wrath is in the middle of whatever transpires. In any case, severe judgments come against the earth’s inhabitants in the end-time.
Third, we have consequential wrath, the cause and effect nature of life itself. We reap what we sow in the spiritual and behavioral realms. As creatures of choice, good choices bring good results and bad choices bring bad results. The plan of Satan is to keep us looking at short-term benefits rather than long-term ones. He works very much like our modern credit system – buy now and pay later. His vote is for us to sin now and pay later. God’s vote is for us to live in a way that ensures long-term benefits, so it is pay upfront and reap the rewards later.
Fourth, we have cataclysmic wrath, which includes both natural disasters and man-made ones. The calamitous events of 9/11 fall into this category as does COVID-19. Sin most likely has some relationship to all of it but figuring out exactly how is to entertain a question with an uncertain answer. After looking deeper into Romans 1, you may well end up believing that there is a connection. I’m inclined to think so myself, but as I said, the answer to how cataclysms relate to God’s direct judgment is uncertain.
Fifth, we have the wrath of abandonment, a wrath described in the remainder of Romans 1 following verse 18. God will abandon an individual, a group of individuals or a nation. The Old Testament warns those in living then that such will be the case unless repentance occurs and then describes multiple times when the warning is not heeded and judgment comes. Both the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah were eventually taken into captivity. The level of pain and suffering accompanying both events was almost unbelievable.
God’s Promise of Abandonment
Many examples of abandonment can be found in the Bible. If you want to study those examples further, look at Judges 10:11-14, Judges 16:18-21; Hosea 4:17-19 and Matthew 15:14. Without question, the most detailed treatment of this topic in the entire Bible is likely Proverbs 1:23-33. Read it carefully.
Proverbs 1:23-33
Repent at my rebuke! Then I will pour out my thoughts to you, I will make known to you my teachings. 24 But since you refuse to listen when I call and no one pays attention when I stretch out my hand, 25 since you disregard all my advice and do not accept my rebuke, 26 I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you; I will mock when calamity overtakes you – 27 when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind, when distress and trouble overwhelm you. 28 Then they will call to me but I will not answer; they will look for me but will not find me, 29 since they hated knowledge and did not choose to fear the LORD. 30 Since they would not accept my advice and spurned my rebuke, 31 they will eat the fruit of their ways and be filled with the fruit of their schemes. 32 For the waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them; 33 but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm.
When I read this passage and others like it, I think back to the time of the great flood and Noah’s ark. I can imagine people screaming and begging to be let into the ark as the flood waters rose. I can picture mothers holding up their babies and small children, pleading with Noah to at least save the little ones. But it was all to no avail, for they had sinned away the day of grace. God had abandoned them to the consequences of their own sinful choices.
The Causes of Abandonment
Romans 1 describes the sad condition of the Gentile nations in the first century and says three times that he had given them over, or abandoned them. They had passed the point of no return and without genuine repentance, they would fall without remedy as individuals and as nations. None of the nations from that era remain. All have fallen and lie dead in the pages of history. The same is going to be true of every nation in existence today, including America. The question is not “if” – it is only “when.” We are clearly at or very near the point at which God abandons a nation, which will become obvious as we look at the text more closely. As a young preacher many years ago, I recall older preachers saying that if God didn’t punish America, he would owe an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah. They could not have imagined those decades ago how far our society has fallen, along with the multiplicity of nations we have influenced to do the same.
Romans 1:19-20 make it clear that the existence of God is unmistakably shown through his creation. Only an idiot could believe that all that we see and are came about without a Creator. One of the most famous atheists of the last century, Anthony G.N. Flew (whom I once heard in debate with one of my graduate school professors), finally renounced his atheism after studying DNA structure in all of its intricacies. As multitudes have realized, something this complex could never have appeared without due cause and that Cause was God. The mathematical probabilities rule out any other possibilities.
Let’s look at the progression of sin into its final stages. Paul said three times that God gave the Gentiles over. Read carefully what the final stages were that brought about this abandonment.
Romans 1:24-32
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. 26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. 28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Sexual Impurity
Sinful desires led to sexual impurity (moral uncleanness) and to the degrading of their bodies with one another. The word for impurity is often used to denote lust and unchecked lust leads to physical actions. The Bible is clear about how sex is to be viewed and practiced. It is to be enjoyed only in a marriage relationship between a man and a woman. Premarital sex or extramarital sex is taught against in both the Old Testament and the New. But that is not what Paul witnessed in the first century.
Here is a further description of what he saw, in Ephesians 4:19: “Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.” Peter wrote something quite similar in 2 Peter 2:14: “With eyes full of adultery, they never stop sinning; they seduce the unstable; they are experts in greed – an accursed brood!” Note in both passages the connection between the lack of morality and the presence of materialism. More must be said about this oft-mentioned connection as we proceed.
Can anyone doubt that we live in a pornographic age? Adult film stars are treated with the same respect by entertainment media as are other entertainers. The statistics of the pornographic world are almost unbelievable. The age at which boys and girls first start looking at porn, the percentages of those in all age groups who indulge in it, and most shockingly, the percentages of professed Christians who frequent pornographic sites – all nearly unbelievable. I started looking up stats and just shut down the search engine. They are sickening. In addition, advertisements are filled with suggestive photos of women. If you use the internet, you cannot escape them. The only alternative is to avoid looking at those sidebars and popups, a near impossibility. Pornography alone should be enough to bring about the judgment of Almighty God!
And then we have the sexual revolution in its mature stages. That revolution began in the 1960s and has blossomed in almost every conceivable way. I remember the first time a couple came to me who were living together and asked me to perform their wedding. They were not in our church, in case you were wondering. They just saw our church building and came in with their request. I agreed to do the wedding on the condition that they would study the Bible with me. They did, but to no avail. In the course of the study, I asked what their parents thought about them living together without being married. They said that both sets of parents were fine with it, but were also happy to see them get married.
I remember watching a talk show in the airport while I was waiting for a flight some decades ago. The show had a live audience, as most such shows do. One of the persons being interviewed said that they believed that sex outside marriage was wrong, prompting the audience to hoot and holler for a long time. Since I didn’t then or now make a practice of watching such shows, that reaction was shocking to me. A person today will be mocked by most if they say they plan to wait for sex until married (think Tim Tebow). But dare they express a belief that premarital sex is actually sinful, they can count on getting an earful.
Homosexuality
I know that I am entering politically incorrect territory here. I also know that I am entering very sensitive territory for some of my brothers and sisters in Christ, for two reasons. One, we heterosexual folks have friends inside and outside the church who are homosexually oriented and we don’t want to be offensive. I understand. I’m in that same boat with you. To make it perfectly clear, I am not addressing same sex attraction, but same sex actions. I have the utmost respect, love and appreciation for those like Guy Hammond (Strength in Weakness Ministries) who live righteously with same sex attraction. They don’t know how they got that attraction and wish they didn’t have it. I feel for them as they battle in a way that I can’t fully understand. I know about my temptations to lust, but the stigmas and shame attached to their desires are in another category altogether.
What I do know is that the Bible condemns same sex actions. Homosexuality is sin and in the Romans text, seems to be a step deeper into the sin pit. This sin is called shameful and unnatural, ushering in what Paul called the “due penalty for their error.” Is that talking about HIV/AIDS, many people wonder? In spite of the fact that it began forty years ago and is still growing, it is already the fifth largest pandemic in history, having claimed upwards of 35 million lives. The homosexual roots and spread of this awful disease are well documented, although it can be contracted in other ways.
Those with same sex attraction have to control their actions if they want to please God, and many such as Guy are able to redirect their desires enough to enjoy successful marriages. They are my heroes. As I said earlier, they didn’t ask to be “gay,” as popular terminology styles it. But think about this: those who have sexual attractions toward children didn’t ask for their orientation either. Some with that malady are also avoiding ungodly sexual actions, although most perhaps aren’t. It just seems odd to me that we can show disgust and disdain toward those battling these desires and feel justified in doing so, and yet show compassion toward those with homosexual attractions.
In either case, the actions are sinful and pedophilia is also unlawful. Homosexual practices were for many years also unlawful in America, and still are in some countries. My point is that while unnatural desires put into practice are unquestionably sinful, the ones who are abstaining from actions because of their spiritual convictions need love too. The homosexual community appealed for toleration for decades and once they received it, they appeal for acceptance and finally, for approval and agreement. Those are different things. Christians should offer both toleration and love, toleration because we live in a country that grants the right of homosexual activity, and love because we are Christians. I cannot offer approval or agreement because God doesn’t, although he loves and longs for repentance on their parts. So do I and surely, so do you.
Every Kind of Wickedness
Sin is spiritual cancer. It does not lie dormant but rather grows and picks up speed as depravity increases. Let me drop in those last five verses again here:
Romans 1:28-32
Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Most of these sins prompted by depraved minds (where logical thinking no longer functions) are self-explanatory. The Greek term translated in verse 31 as “no love” is a word meaning without family love, one of the most natural types of love imaginable. The nature of this sin provides some understanding of how millions and millions of abortions have been performed in recent years, a practice approved by a majority and viewed as murder by a minority (which includes me).
Another term is mentioned that we understand as far as its basic definition is concerned, but we have little understanding of the magnitude of this sin in God’s sight. That term is greed. We have already noted its inclusion along with sexual sins in Ephesians 4:19 and 2 Peter 2:14. One of the most striking usages of the word is found in 1 Corinthians 5 where Paul is commanding the church to withdraw fellowship from an immoral person. Note what he includes in the sin list requiring church discipline. “But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people” (1 Corinthians 5:11).
In our materialistic culture, we have become all but blind to this sin. We have ignored it, rationalized it and excused it, but rest assured that God has not. I have no doubts that our present health crisis has as one of its primary Divine purposes to force us to examine our materialistic greed. If you think I am overstating the magnitude of this sin, along with sexual immorality of all types, just listen to Jesus on the topic in a passage specifically dealing with our view and use of money. His words were directed toward respected religious leaders of that day.
Luke 16:13-15
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” 14 The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus. 15 He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight.
Hello America! What are our two greatest concerns right now in our crisis? Health to the point of potential loss of life, and loss of money – the economy. I promise to write a separate article soon and post it on my website. Its title will be, “Greed and Its Root of Materialism.” Watch for it!
Verse 32 sheds some light on several important points. One, people know inherently the basic morality expected by God. Romans 2 describes this knowledge as a law of conscience. Yes, one’s conscience can be hardened by repeatedly refusing to heed it, but unless you are a psychopath, it is never disengaged entirely. In the deepest recesses of our hearts, we know something of our Creator’s expectations in the realm of basic morality.
Two, these sins deserve spiritual death. We sense that reality at a deep level. The fear of death is linked to this sense more than to simply a fear of the unknown. We somehow feel the realness of a Reckoning Day when we will meet God as the Judge of all mankind. This explains why Paul could in only a single sermon, speaking to idolaters who had no recognizable knowledge of the true God, yet speak of the Judgment Day (Acts 17:31). Humans instinctively know somewhere in the recesses of their soul that they will face their Creator. They were created in his likeness and that instinctiveness is evidently built-in to their very nature.
Three, since in their depravity they continue to violate their consciences, they cheer on others doing the same. They want to believe that there will be safety in numbers. If “everyone is doing it,” surely they won’t be held accountable. The people of Noah’s day might well shed some light on that one. The majority is always wrong when it comes to following God’s righteousness and might (numbers) doesn’t make right. So, in looking at this principle, is America fully here? One example should suffice to provide the answer.
Bill Clinton was impeached while serving as our president back in December of 1998. Despite the fact that he was only the second President in U.S. history to be impeached by the House of Representatives, President Bill Clinton received a 73% job approval rating from the American public after his impeachment. This was the highest rating of his administration, and one of the higher job approval ratings given any president since the mid-1960s. He was clearly guilty of sexual immorality in the White House itself, using what the MeToo Movement would now call his power of position and authority to take advantage of a young woman. While sincere Christians were shocked and outraged, most Americans were anything but. Why? The answer is in Romans 1:32.
Scientific Evidence for the Fall of Nations
When I was a young minister, I heard two striking statements a number of times that stayed in my memory banks. One I’ve already mentioned, that if God doesn’t punish America, he will owe an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah. We will classify that one under the heading of preacher talk for now. The second statement was about a very in-depth study done by a scientist who studied ancient civilizations. I remembered his name and his bottom-line conclusions as they related to sexual immorality. Through the years, I tried to research that study but for whatever reason, couldn’t locate it. Recently, a post on Facebook helped me to find it. Essentially, the findings tracked almost exactly what a Bible student would expect.
The study was entitled “Sex and Culture,” written after a lifetime of research by Oxford social anthropologist J.D. Unwin. The 600+ page book is, in Unwin’s words, only a “summary” of his research. He stated that seven volumes would be required to lay it all out. His writings suggest he was a rationalist and not a religious person, believing that science is our ultimate tool of inquiry. Unwin published his findings in 1936, long before the sexual revolution occurred in the West.
The article I read which summarized his findings was entitled, “Why Sexual Morality May be Far More Important than You Ever Thought,” written by Kirk Durston and posted on his blogsite. I will be using significant quotes from that article, which is based on Unwin’s research conclusions. Basically, Unwin’s findings showed that when strict prenuptial chastity was abandoned, absolute monogamy, deism, and rational thinking disappeared within three generations of the change in sexual freedom.
Let’s unpack each of these concepts. The abandonment of prenuptial chastity would include premarital sex and living together without being married at all. Absolute monogamy gave way to what is termed modified monogamy. Durston’s comments about that are as follows:
Common-law relationships are becoming the norm. Although divorce occurred prior to the 1970’s, the mainstream of our culture still maintained the view that marriage should be for life, and common-law relationships were regarded with some distaste. That has clearly changed. Those who actually practice life-long commitments in marriage have become the minority, with couples born prior to the sexual revolution much more likely to maintain a life-long commitment in marriage.
In describing the loss of deism, or belief in God, he had this to say:
Prior to the 1960’s, a combination of rationalism and a belief in God was the norm for mainstream culture. Not only has belief in God greatly decreased since the 1960’s, but there has been a trend to remove the concept of God from government, the educational system, and the public forum. Those who still believe in God sense a strong societal pressure to keep deistic beliefs private.
Finally, his comments about the disappearance of rational thinking describe what we call Postmodern thinking, clearly the prevailing type of thinking in our younger generations.
The swiftness with which rational thinking declined after the 1970’s is astounding. In its place arose post-modernism, characterized by “skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism” and “a general suspicion of reason.” But it gets worse … post-modernism is giving way to “post-truth”. In direct contrast to rational thinking, a post-truth culture abandons “shared objective standards for truth” and instead, stands on appeals to feelings and emotions, and what one wants to believe. People can now “identify” themselves as something which flat-out contradicts science and rational thinking and, in many cases, receive the full support and backing of governments and educational systems. Not only do people feel they have a right to believe what they want, but any challenge to that belief, even if supported by truth and logic, is unacceptable and offensive.
Important Conclusions
The statements I recall hearing as a young man about Unwin’s conclusions often included a comment about homosexuality. It went something like this: “When any nation accepts homosexuality as behavior approved as normal, that nation is in its last stage before collapse.” One writer who had studied Unwin in far more detail than I have said that Unwin lumped this behavior in with all aspects of unbridled sexual immorality. Either way, I don’t have to tell you where America and other Western nations are in this regard.
In studying Romans 1, these current nations are right in the middle of the same sins as were the Gentiles of Paul’s day. How long it took for their nations to fall we leave for Unwin’s research to document, but combining his conclusions with Paul’s inspired ones sends chills up my spine.
My own conclusions about the question posed in the title of my article, “Is the Coronavirus COVID-19 a Judgment of God?” are as follows:
- I think the answer is “yes,” with explanation.
- The explanation includes the futility of trying to ascertain whether this judgment is a direct one or an indirect one. It doesn’t ultimately matter. God either caused it or allowed it.
- My study of the Old Testament shows clearly that any plague or natural calamity, whether locusts or sustained drought or any other calamity, was seen by the people of God as God’s discipline for their sins.
- Further, in those repeated occurrences, the call by the prophets was for repentance on the part of the people with the promise of God’s removal of the discipline upon their repentance.
- In my day of prayer and fasting last Thursday, I prayed multiple times on my knees for many needs I see in this current ordeal. The one final conclusion I ended up with time and time again was for enough repentance to occur to move God to intervene.
- Certainly I prayed for protection from the virus for myself, family, fellow disciples and other friends. But I must accept the fact that illness and suffering will likely affect us all randomly. I can get the virus just like anyone else, as can you. If suffering only happened to the unrighteous, the temptation to seek God for wrong reasons would be tremendously strong.
- At the end of each prayer, after expressing my sincere and strongly felt desires, I prayed what Jesus did in the Garden: “Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.”
- Many of my friends have expressed what I have been thinking for the past several weeks. We have been surprised, even shocked, that something like COVID-19 hasn’t happened sooner. Looking at the depravity of our world through the lens of Romans 1 and many other similar passages, it should have been expected.
- As for me and my house, we are praying and repenting and begging all others to do the same. God is still in control and still responds to prayer and repentance. Let’s get on with it!
A Parting Thought
A few days ago (March 26, 2020), Robert Nicholson wrote an article entitled, “A Coronavirus Great Awakening?” I found the article on the Opinion page of the March 28 online edition of the Wall Street Journal. In it, he used illustrations from the Old Testament and World War II as examples of how cataclysms can move us to repent and return to God. I close with a rather lengthy, but exceedingly profound, section from that article.
Today the world faces another moment of cataclysm. Though less devastating than World War II, the pandemic has remade everyday life and wrecked the global economy in a way that feels apocalyptic.
The experience is new and disorienting. Life had been deceptively easy until now. Our ancestors’ lives, by contrast, were guaranteed to be short and painful. The lucky ones survived birth. The luckier ones made it past childhood. Only in the past 200 years has humanity truly taken off. We now float through an anomalous world of air conditioning, 911 call centers, acetaminophen and pocket-size computers containing nearly the sum of human knowledge. We reduced nature to “the shackled form of a conquered monster,” as Joseph Conrad once put it, and took control of our fate. God became irrelevant.
Who will save us now that the monster has broken free?
“Men may live to a great age in days of comparative quietness and peaceful progress, without ever having come to grips with the universe, without ever vividly realising the problems and the paradoxes with which human history so often confronts us,” Butterfield wrote. “We of the twentieth century have been particularly spoiled; for the men of the Old Testament, the ancient Greeks and all our ancestors down to the seventeenth century betray in their philosophy and their outlook a terrible awareness of the chanciness of human life, and the precarious nature of man’s existence in this risky universe.”
The past four years have been some of the most contentious and embarrassing in American history. Squabbling over trivialities has left the public frantic and divided, oblivious to the transcendent. But the pandemic has humbled the country and opened millions of eyes to this risky universe once more.
“Sheer grimness of suffering brings men sometimes into a profounder understanding of human destiny,” Butterfield wrote. Sometimes “it is only by a cataclysm,” he continued, “that man can make his escape from the net which he has taken so much trouble to weave around himself.”
For societies founded on the biblical tradition, cataclysms need not mark the end. They are a call for repentance and revival. As the coronavirus pandemic subjects U.S. hospitals to a fearsome test, Americans can find solace in the same place that Butterfield did. Great struggle can produce great clarity.
“The ancient Hebrews, by virtue of inner resources and unparalleled leadership, turned their tragedy, turned their very helplessness, into one of the half-dozen creative moments in world history,” Butterfield wrote. “It would seem that one of the clearest and most concrete of the facts of history is the fact that men of spiritual resources may not only redeem catastrophe, but turn it into a grand creative moment.”
Could a rogue virus lead to a grand creative moment in America’s history? Will Americans, shaken by the reality of a risky universe, rediscover the God who proclaimed himself sovereign over every catastrophe?
An old hymn has a stanza that asks the question posed in the title of this article. That’s a very good question, with many answers, but at least four of them are of ultimate importance in truly understanding the gospel of Christ. I recently preached a series of two sermons answering these questions, and since the lessons seemed to be received well, I was motivated to put them into article form and post them on this teaching website. Each of the parts is placed in a sequence that I believe is logical, and you will hopefully understand the reason for the sequence as the answers unfold.
Answer #1 – His Death Makes Possible the Impossible
First, Jesus came to die for our sins. The verses that say this could be multiplied, because this is the foundation of the gospel. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” He didn’t just die for the sins of the world; he died for the specific sins that each of us has committed (and will yet commit).
The Astounding Nature of Forgiveness
Astounding is the right word when thinking of the magnitude of our individual sins, to say nothing of the combined sins of the entire human race from its beginning. The ways to sin are many, the Bible tells us.
- Wrong actions – 2 Corinthians 5:10: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.”
- Wrong words – Matthew 12:36-37: “But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. 37 For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.”
- Wrong thoughts – Mark 7:21-23: “For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.'”
- Wrong motivations – 1 Corinthians 4:5: “Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts.”
- Failure to do right – James 4:17: “Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.”
In light of these passages, and many more like them, the sin problem of mankind is enormous. How many sins have you committed? How many sins has humanity as a whole committed? I remember reading an old restoration preacher’s writing who made a comment back in the 19th century about the number of our personal sins. Since he was a part of a very doctrinally focused group, his answer was surprising. I supposed that he thought of sin mainly as doctrinal errors, but he said that a mature sinner had surely committed at least a couple of million sins. He was far more in touch with reality than most today, I would have to say.
To even start approaching the number of sins that mankind as a whole has committed and will yet commit, I had to Google the terms by which large numbers are called. Starting with millions, it goes in this ascending order: billions, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions, nonillions, decillions, googols, centillions, googolplexes – and beyond. Astounding! Unfathomable! Overwhelming!
How is Forgiveness Even Possible?
Then we must come to a consideration of how all of those sins could be forgiven. Hebrews 10:4 assures us that “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” In the Old Testament, there were many types of animal sacrifices prescribed by God, the main ones being the burnt offerings, grain offerings, peace offerings, sin offerings, guilt offerings and a number of others. The burnt offerings were sacrificed each morning and each evening, plus additional ones on the Sabbath and other special days. This means that well over 1 million animals were killed from the time of Moses to the time of Christ just in this one category of sacrifices. I recall reading of an official Roman report sent to Rome from Jerusalem during the first century, noting that 256,000 lambs had been sacrificed in Jerusalem during one Passover Feast.
All told, no doubt billions of animals were slaughtered during the Mosaic period. Keep in mind that these animals were totally innocent, they were painfully slaughtered (often by the one who brought them to be offered), and in spite of these sacrifices numbering in the billions, all of them combined simply could not take away one sin! With this realization comes the realization that our sins are far more heinous before our God that we can possibly imagine.
Our problem in grasping the awfulness of sin is that we have allowed Satan to do what he does best – deceive us into thinking that we are basically good people. Perhaps many of us are, when compared to our fellow man (the bad ones for sure). But compared to the sinless Jesus, we are anything but good. What we deserve is death and hell; by God’s grace we can escape the latter if we truly live as Jesus calls us to. When I teach the first three chapters of Romans, I give it the heading of “The best of us is a mess!” Chapter 1 shows the horrific sins of the Gentiles; chapter 2 shows the self-righteous sins of the Jews; chapter 3 sums up the problem of all mankind with these words: “As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one’” (Romans 3:10). “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).” Isaiah described it in even more shocking terms when he said in 64:6 that “all of our righteous acts are like filthy rags.”
Are you overwhelmed yet? I am. Forgiveness of the magnitude of sins we have all committed is a concept that our mortal minds simply cannot begin to grasp. Then how can God possibly forgive as freely as the Bible says he does? God had to become a man – there is no other possible answer. The Deity of Christ cannot be glossed over in any way. It is a salvation issue.
The Nature of Christ Jesus
The Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that Jesus was God’s first creation and then Jesus created everything else. They believe that Jesus is an archangel, nothing more and nothing less, and specifically they view him as being Michael the archangel.
This is nothing short of heretical teaching. Mathew 4:10 says that only God can be worshipped. Revelation 19:10 shows clearly that angels cannot be worshipped by humans. Jesus accepted worship from humans during his personal ministry, and Hebrews 1:6 states clearly that Jesus was worshipped by angels. “And again, when God brings his firstborn into the world, he says, ‘Let all God’s angels worship him.’” The term “firstborn” is obviously used symbolically to mean “highest honored,” as it is used of David in Psalm 89:27. Two verses later in Hebrews 1 (verse 8), the Father says of Jesus, “But about the Son he says, ‘Your throne, O God, will last for ever and ever, and righteousness will be the scepter of your kingdom.’”
Regarding Michael the archangel, Jude 1:9 had this to say: “But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not dare to bring a slanderous accusation against him, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!’” Jesus certainly had no hesitation in rebuking Satan personally and strongly (Matthew 4:10).
But back to the biggest issue of how forgiveness of sins is possible when considering the just nature of God! I mentioned the first three chapters of Romans in how they describe sin and the penalty due for it. A careful study of these chapters doesn’t leave you with the question of how a loving God can send people to hell; it leaves you with the question of how a just God can do anything else! Sin is deadly and a deadly serious matter. By the grace of God, Jesus came to earth and died for a magnitude of sins that our finite minds cannot begin to grasp. Hence, living as Jesus demands is no small matter, and self-denial is the only possible starting place in imitating him.
Forgiveness in the Old Testament
Some of you may be wondering about those who lived before the sacrifice of Christ – were they saved and if so, how were they saved? If the blood of bulls and goats could not take away sin, what happened to those who died before the cross? The general answer is that they were saved just like we are, by grace through faith. Their faith was a seriously committed faith as ours must be, and the grace came by the cross of Christ just as ours has. The effects of the shed blood of Christ went backwards as well of forwards.
Hebrews 9:15b – “… he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.”
Romans 3:25-26 – “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished – 26 he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”
We tend to get confused by the time factor of when Christ’s crucifixion took place, but that is because we are time-bound creatures. Time means nothing to God. As Peter put it in 2 Peter 3:8: “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” Revelation 13:8 ties it all together beautifully as it states that Jesus was “the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world.” Before God created humankind, he knew that he would ultimately be nailed to the cross for the redemption of his creatures. And that is the story that mortal mind could never have invented nor comprehended without the revelation of God.
Answer #2 – His Life Makes Known the Unknowable
A second fundamental answer to our question is that Jesus came to reveal God to us. If you try to fully understand God from just the Old Testament, you are going to find it very challenging. I sometimes feel a bit schizophrenic from my study of the OT. On the one hand, I see much about God’s grace, but even more about his judgment – a judgment that at times seems quite harsh.
On the other hand, studying the life of Jesus helps us understand God in a much better way. He made it clear that one of his primary purposes was in fact to reveal God to us. Here are some good passages addressing that purpose.
John 1:18 – “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.”
John 14:6-9 – “Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.’ 8 Philip said, ‘Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.’ 9 Jesus answered: ‘Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?”
One of the most thrilling descriptions of this purpose of Jesus is found in Colossians 2:9, which reads: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” This means that Jesus was God in the flesh, both fully God and fully man, a truth that is still beyond our comprehension in many ways, but the revelation of this truth in the Bible is unmistakable. Jesus shows us God in a way that he could never have been known otherwise, and that was surely one of his key purposes in coming to earth.
God’s Nature Revealed
Certainly Jesus came to reveal God, and to reveal much about God. In our efforts to grasp the nature of Deity, what is one thing that we cannot afford to miss? The Apostle John expressed it quite clearly in 1 John 4:8: “God is love.” Love is the normal English translation of more than one Greek word. Phileo is the word for friendship type of love. Thus we call Philadelphia the “City of Brotherly Love.” Although it doesn’t live up to its billing too well, that is its meaning.
The greater word for love in the original language is agape. This type of love goes far beyond friendship love, for it is a love that describes much more than simply a feeling, but rather a serious commitment to the good of the object of that agape love. It is this word that is used in John’s description of God. Paul uses this same term in what is likely the most famous love passage in the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:4-8. If we substitute the name of Jesus in this passage, it would look like this:
Jesus is patient, Jesus is kind. Jesus does not envy, Jesus does not boast, Jesus is not proud. 5 Jesus does not dishonor others, Jesus is not self-seeking, Jesus is not easily angered, Jesus keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Jesus does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 Jesus always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Jesus never fails.
How does this passage read to you if you substitute your name in each of these descriptions of what love is and is not? Doing that will give us a very good idea of the areas in which we need to grow if we are to imitate Jesus and represent him to the world. That would be a good exercise for all of us on a regular basis at some interval – perhaps once a month, and then spend the rest of the month working on the areas in which we are not like Jesus.
Two Stories
Paul Harvey, a radio commentator of yesteryear, used to tell a fictional story every year around Christmas. As the story went, a couple lived in a part of the US where the winters were pretty brutal. The wife was a believer and the husband was not. He wasn’t opposed to her involvement in church, but he just didn’t want any part of religion himself. One particularly cold and snowy day, she left him at home in front of the fireplace while she went to a church service. As he was enjoying the cozy fire, he heard an unusual sound at his front door. Out of curiosity he went to see what was making the sound. He discovered a little flock of birds huddling in his doorway, trying to escape the cold. It appeared that they were freezing in the weather.
At first, he just shooed them away and went back to his rocking chair. In a few minutes, they were back at the doorway once again trying to find some escape from the snow. His sympathy kicked into gear at least a little, and he decided to try to move the birds along the ground and into his tool shed in order to protect them. The birds, of course, had no idea of what he was trying to do, and they scattered in all different directions.
Once again, he found his way to his warm, comfortable rocking chair, consoling himself with the fact that he had at least tried to help. A few minutes later, the birds were back and he repeated the process of trying to help them – with the same results. Finally, the thought popped into his mind that if he could have just become a bird for a short time, he could have led them into the shed. He then had a much more profound thought. He realized that this imagined process was exactly what his wife had been telling him about why Jesus became a man – to lead us otherwise lost beings into a safe place. Thus, Jesus not only leads us to safety, but became one of us in order to make it possible. The true story is much more amazing than the imagined one, is it not?
Answer #3 – His Priority Exposes Our Misunderstood Priorities
A third primary answer about why Jesus came is found in 1 John 2:4-6. “The man who says, ‘I know him,’ but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. 5 But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: 6 Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did (1 John 2:4-6).” He came to show us the path, how to live our lives on this earth.
This passage introduces at least two other questions. What does it mean to walk as Jesus did? Why is this important enough to be given to us as an absolute command? To walk as he did obviously goes far beyond simply believing in him. Because the word “faith” or “believe” is used in a number of different ways in the Bible, we can misunderstand passages like John 3:16 and think that simply believing the basics about Jesus will get us to heaven. Quite a number of passages show that this very popular view of salvation being a matter of merely believing those basics (such as the virgin birth, Jesus’ death for our sins and his resurrection from the dead) simply cannot be accurate. Read the following passages carefully and you will see what I mean.
John 12:42 – “Yet at the same time many even among the leaders believed in him. But because of the Pharisees they would not confess their faith for fear they would be put out of the synagogue.”
Luke 9:23-24 – “Then he said to them all: ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. 24 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.’”
Luke 14:26-27, 33
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple. 27 And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 33 In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.
Matthew 7:13-14, 21 – “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it… 21 Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
From the Gospel accounts, we know how Jesus lived in a physical body. From Paul’s inspired writing, we can also know how Jesus intends to live through us in his spiritual body, the church. Just as Jesus was the fullness of God in the flesh, demonstrating to the world what God was truly like, we as Christ’s family are to demonstrate what he is truly like. “And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way (Ephesians 1:22-23).” What God is asking of us is that we represent Jesus to the world, to do what he would do if he were here in a physical body again. This truth helps us understand why the religious world’s watered-down version of what it means to be a Christian cannot possibly be acceptable. As the old saying goes, Jesus is either Lord of all in our lives, or Lord not at all.
Imitating Jesus’ Priority
If the nature of God can be defined simply as love (1 John 4:8), then we know that Jesus lived a life of love – which we are specifically called to imitate. “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children 2 and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” How was Jesus’ life of love demonstrated in his ministry? He loved every person, and he loved the whole person – physically, emotionally and spiritually. Spiritually, we’ve already considered somewhat in depth his death for the sins of the world. It is only logical that his life on earth was focused on helping prepare people to accept his offering and receive salvation. We are not surprised to read in Luke 19:10 that he came to seek and save the lost. If that is what he did, that is what he expects his followers to do also.
Physically, we see him healing all types of illnesses and maladies, including raising the dead on several occasions. Emotionally, he wept when others wept, he was carried away with compassion for those who were hurting in any way. A great passage to sum up his love for people is Matthew 9:35-36: “Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
The word found here for compassion is a long Greek word (splagchnizomai). It is never used of a human in the Bible, but only of God and Christ. We use the phrase about having our hearts go out to someone, and if you multiply this by 100, you come pretty close to the literal meaning of the word. Jesus felt deeply for people, more deeply than we have ever felt. But he is calling us to develop more and more of this divine compassion for those who are hurting, spiritually, physically or emotionally. The passage in Matthew 9 is also found in Matthew 4:23, and both passages describe what I call the gospel triad – teaching, preaching and healing.
What Was His Priority?
Which do you think was the most important – loving people emotionally, physically or spiritually? In order to answer that question, we must understand the top priority of Jesus’ ministry. It is easy to say all three areas are equally important, which would seem to allow us to choose which we find most appealing to us and focus on that one area. However, is that really what Jesus did and now calls us to do?
Seeing the physical and emotional needs of others is far easier than grasping their spiritual needs. The latter is not simply a matter of observation, but a matter of revelation – believing what we have already read about the lostness of people. We have more ways to minister to people emotionally and physically than ever before. HOPE Worldwide has been a great channel through which to serve the poor and needy, both locally and globally. We have more Christian-oriented counselors among us than ever before, and that number continues to grow substantially. I’m grateful for all that we are doing collectively in these areas, and I’m trying to do my part individually. It is important to love the whole person.
Having said that, let’s reason together a bit. In Jesus’ ministry, what happened to those whom he healed and raised from the dead? They died or died again. I find it immensely interesting that in our current society that we are obsessed with health issues, while Jesus never said anything about how to be physically healthy and live as long as possible. Most of us moderns want to live to reach our 100th birthday. The life spans in most developed countries has continued to lengthen. At what price? More and more developing all sorts of dementia, and more and more spending their latter years drooling and in diapers. Why are we so obsessed with life on this earth if we believe in heaven? Something is surely amiss here in our value system and in our view of time and eternity. I suggest you read and meditate on passages like the following:
Hebrews 11:13-16
13 All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. 14 People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. 15 If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 Instead, they were longing for a better country–a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
Evangelism Must Be Our Bottom Line Focus
I’ve recently been speaking a lot about what drew me into the churches of which I am now a part, and the main drawing card was what could be called the practice of “One Another” Christianity. The New Testament has over 60 passages which use the phrases “one another” or “each other,” and many more that describe how God’s family should be loving each other through genuine spiritual relationships. God’s religion is decidedly not a private matter! To put it gently, we are not nearly as committed to helping each other grow spiritually after conversion as we once were.
The same can be said of us regarding our evangelistic zeal to seek and save the lost – why are we not as motivated to help people spiritually as we are physically and emotionally? When I first became a part of my present church movement, it was a fast-growing movement. That was also a strong drawing card for me, because in combination with the one another relationships, both parts of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) were being obeyed in earnestness. Prior to joining the movement, others asked me how these churches were converting so many. My answer was that pretty much all of the members had a constant focus on seeking and saving the lost, and their relationships helped them stay accountable to keep imitating Jesus by so doing.
Sadly, I see a serious deceleration in carrying out both parts of that Great Commission among us. It is commendable that we have planted churches in at least 150 different nations. But 70% of our churches have under 100 members. It now takes 85 members to baptize 1 person in a year’s time, something unthinkable back when I first became a part of things. Over half of our churches baptized 10 or less people in 2016. 111 of our churches had ZERO baptisms in 2016. Our growth rate as a movement continues to decrease – from 1.9% in 2015 to 1.2% in 2016 (about a 60% decrease if my math is correct). The number of baptisms and restorations has declined for the last four years. We cannot spin those facts in a way that makes them sound encouraging. Something is obviously missing!
What are we missing? Obviously, we are missing an understanding of the priority in Jesus’ ministry and our imitation of it. True enough, he helped people emotionally and physically, but it had as its ultimate aim the helping of them spiritually to get right with God. The help they received emotionally and physically was temporal in nature. But people were lost – and people are lost now – and this is an eternal issue.
It is Time to Get Real – and Get Serious!
All spiritual roads don’t lead to heaven – and we can include every religion in the world outside Christianity. All approaches to Christianity don’t lead to heaven – we have the spiritual partner of the American Dream, called the American Church Dream, which means that we pursue this world’s values with a dab of religion thrown in as fire insurance! But as popular as this viewpoint is, we cannot be saved simply by claiming to be Christians! The very first step of Christianity is to deny self, take up our crosses and follow Jesus! That is the essence of imitating him. Read these passages and let them cut your heart. If Jesus and his apostles cannot be believed on these sobering points, how can we believe anything else that they said?
Matthew 7:13-14, 21 – “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it… 21 Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
John 14:6 – “Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”
Acts 4:12 – “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”
I want to love people as Jesus loved people – physically, emotionally and spiritually.
But I cannot love as he did without having the same priority that he had, and that was clearly helping people to get right with God – above all else. And we will not do that unless we believe what he did about heaven and hell and salvation! This life goes by fast, faster than we could have imagined as young people. My 75 years have been just what the Bible said that they would be: a breath, a shadow, a flower that withers away, a passing breeze, fleeting, a vapor. Death is real; the Judgement Day is real; Heaven and Hell are real! And God is serious! It is indeed time for us to get real and get serious!
Answer #4 – His Power Overcomes Our Weakness
Yes, Jesus came to die for our sins; to reveal God’s nature and heart to us; and to leave us an example that we should follow in his steps (1 Peter 2:21). These three reasons give us a greater understanding of God, an example to follow and a solution to our sin problem. Yet, we still have one great need remaining, that of finding the power to do what we have just read that we must do – live as Jesus did.
For starters, it should be obvious that while our hearts must be set on imitating him, we will not do it perfectly. In spite of having the dedication demanded in passages like Luke 14, our performance will always be flawed. Our theme verse is translated in other versions as “walk,” thus to walk as did. Actually, the Greek term is more accurately translated as walk, although the meaning in context is live. Looking at the idea of walking with Jesus, a very important passage occurs only a few verses prior to our theme verse and uses the same Greek term.
1 John 1:5-7
This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. 6 If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. 7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”
Two walks, or ways of life, are herein described: walking in darkness and walking in the light. John is clearly describing one’s direction in life, the characteristic way in which one lives. A person living in darkness will likely turn aside from that path occasionally and do some good, but they are characterized by walking in the darkness and they will always return to it. Satan’s world is their chosen path. A person living in the light will also likely turn aside, in this case doing something not good, but then they turn back to the light, for that is the focus and intent of their heart. Christ’s world is their chosen path.
Walking (living) in the light cannot mean sinlessness, for then there would be no sins from which to be purified. It does mean serious commitment and consistency in following Jesus. Interestingly, the Greek verb translated “purifies” is a continual action word. It means that Jesus’ blood continues to cleanse our sins, as long as we are walking with him. Just as the blood in our physical bodies continually circulates and takes away the impurities in our body, Jesus’ blood does the same in his spiritual body, the family of God. Here is a related passage that should thrill our hearts:
Romans 4:7-8
Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. 8 Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him.
Certainly we are blessed with forgiveness, but this passage goes far beyond forgiveness when we become Christians – it describes someone whose sin the Lord never counts against them. A person who is not in a saved relationship with Christ has every sin counted against them. A person who is in a saved relationship with Christ has no sins counted against them. I want to be that second person, don’t you? Grace is not a hopscotch game, in which we sin, repent and then are restored to grace. If we are in Christ, we live in grace – in our good days and our bad days.
A marriage analogy provides a great way of looking at those good and bad days. I am a good husband most of the time, if my wife’s viewpoint can be trusted. But I’m not always a good husband and there are times when I sin and hurt my wife. I should feel badly about those times and I most certainly do. Yet I don’t ever feel unmarried. On my bad days spiritually, I should feel badly about my sins and turn from them, but I don’t feel separated from my relationship with Jesus. (Or at least I shouldn’t!)
Continuing with another marriage analogy, living in the light is interchangeable with the idea of being faithful to our vows to make Jesus the Lord of our lives. Just ask my wife of 53 years if I am a perfect husband, and you already know the answer. Ask her if I am a faithful husband, and the answer will be just as quick and as certain – except it will be a yes this time! I am not a perfect follower of Christ, but I am a faithful one – faithful according to the Bible’s definition of faithful. That that is what Jesus is asking of us as we live for him and imitate him.
The Ongoing Investment Jesus Makes
We know the investment Jesus made – on the cross. But he makes continual investments as our High Priest. Listen to the writer of Hebrews:
Hebrews 4:14-16
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are–yet was without sin. 16 Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Hebrews 7:25
Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.
Jesus promised his apostles that he would send the Holy Spirit to them, and ultimately to all who would follow Jesus. We close with a passage about how Jesus blesses us through the Spirit. It is filled with God’s multiple promises to bless us as we live with him, for him and through him. It is arguably Paul’s high-water mark of promising victory in Christ.
Ephesians 3:14-21
For this reason I kneel before the Father, 15 from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. 16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge–that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. 20 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
