 Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; Healing and salvation go together |
RH #1: Revealing the Ruin
Meetings Overview
It is a privilege to meet with you in this convocation. My dictionary says that a convocation is a calling together, an assembly. Searching the Scriptures for truth, Christians do come together, to pray, to study together, to learn side by side, to think together. The meetings this weekend are focused on plowing through the deadwood of traditional views that may not be so well founded upon the Scriptures, and letting the true people-changing effect of the gospel stretch itself out before us, to invite us into closer union with Jesus. This is why we are here.
So, may we all consider ourselves as put "on notice" that everything is up for grabs but truth, while not one jot or tittle of the truth is up for grabs. For 2000 years Christendom has walked out into the world as agency of truth, but regrettably always with many an error trailing along behind her. But you and I are this day convicted, I would expect, that our society has come to a time when casual attitudes toward truth are no legitimate option. We must discard every plant that our heavenly Father has not planted, and let Him take us forward to glory.
Heaven's Original Purpose
So then, let us make a start. Here is a question, a premise upon which whole foundations of belief are built: what happened at the fall of man? Here is the starting point for truth and for error. What was the original purpose of God in creating man, and what occurred at the fall? The answers to these questions will determine where God has to go and what He has to do to bring humankind back to its original image.
Heaven's original purpose for man is built on the fact that he is made in a certain image. turn to Genesis 1:27.
So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.
God is a moral Being--the moral Being in fact, the ground of all that is good. He designed man for His--God's--glory, His pleasure, even His companionship. Colossians 1:16 says that we were created "By Him, and for Him [Jesus]." Revelation 4:11 goes further. There we are told that for His pleasure we "are and were created." But God is holy. He does not take His pleasure as we take it.
His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 18:23, 32; 33:11), no pleasure in burnt offerings or sacrifices (Hebrews 10:6), no pleasure in wickedness (Psalm 5:4). He does take pleasure in what is right, what is morally upright (1 Chronicles 29:17), in those who understand their relation to Him (Psalm 147:11), in His people (Psalm 149:4), in giving us the kingdom (Luke 12:32), in making us His sons and daughters (Ephesians 1:5; John 1:12-13), in working His will in us (Philippians 2:13), and in our restoration through Jesus:
His purpose for us originally was that we, made in the image of a moral Being, would ourselves echo that moral perfection within our own sphere. He wanted His people to be holy and happy, and knew that in order for us to experience this, we had to follow the original design of the Designer.
Men was made, not only to be holy and happy, but to be self-aware, a thinking, choosing race, able to understand the difference between good and evil, and to cleave unto the good. This being the original purpose, we may expect that still it is heaven's purpose. If God wanted robots, he could have made them. But instead He made us able to choose between good and evil; able to make good choices, and bad ones.
What Happened at the Fall?
To Adam and Eve in their natural state before the fall, the natural world itself was a lesson book. From the rocks and the leaves and the trees and the flowers and the animals and the insects they were to learn, in detail, much about who they were and who God was. But at the fall the ceiling fell in on their classroom. The lessons they were to learn there were obscured, good and bad were blended. Their faculties of perception were damaged, blocked. A vast chasm opened between man and God. Suddenly all the race was blinded, psychologically shifted in desperate ways.
God then began to communicate with humankind through alternative means. In came the inspired revelation, and its written recording in Scripture. Revelation is an unveiling, a revealing of that which in our present situation we could not know apart from His unilateral intervention. God chooses to reveal that which shall help us return to Him.
We are born in a spiritually weakened state, alienated from God. We enter the world having done neither evil or good, yet leaning all the way over toward the evil; but the Bible nowhere says that we are "born sinners."
If that doesn't sound like what you are used to hearing, hang on, because we are not going to side-step the texts. We are going to try to look at them carefully, soundly, and lett them speak.
Consider texts such as Romans 5:6: "For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." Humankind after the fall is weakened, even portrayed as being "without strength." No power lurks casually within helping us to obey. Our condition, then, is critical at this point. We must obey, we want to obey, but we have no strength.
That is something the Scripture is clear on. But there are several texts which are taken to teach something different than that, that make man guilty for that which he has not done. Let's consider some of these.
Some Texts Commonly Misunderstood
Psalm 51:5
Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.
This text is understood by some to teach that we are born into sin--an assertion which, if accepted, moves the question of morality from the realm of personal decision (something over which we have control), to state of being (something over which we do not). If the sin for which we are held accountable is our nature, we would have to cross-out our understanding of the conflict between good and evil and start over with a blank page; a built-in guilt-bearing state would render our role in the universe's moral conflict mere spectators. David stated that he was "shapen in iniquity," "conceived in sin." What did he mean?
Other content from the same Psalm sheds light on David's thought. In Psalm 51:1-4 he demonstrates an understanding that God can blot out his transgressions, that he can be thoroughly washed and cleansed from his sin. Psalm 51:5-9 include similar statements, as well as the recognition that God desires truth in the inward parts. Complete purging, cleansing, and washing from sin is envisioned. The Psalm's remaining verses (Psalm 51:10-19) offer creation of a clean heart, renewal, restoration, and conversion. If the fifth verse of this Psalm were ejected from the context of the surrounding verses, we could conceive of the sin-state interpretation. But to do so would spin the rest of the material in this Psalm into self-contradictory chaos. As a whole, the passage insists forcefully on the real possibility of fallen man being cleansed and the power of the Creator God to do the cleansing. Further, such cleansing is anticipated by the Psalmist in the immediate present.
Since the whole Psalm insists that the sin-state understanding is wrong, we are left with the question, what did David then mean? David in this Scripture comments on the all-encompassing impact of sin upon the whole created order. All of us are shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin--brought into this world within the context of a sin-distorted environment. To be injected into such an environment doesn't make one guilty, but does mean one is impacted. David pleads with God and only after confessing his personal guilt (Psalm 51:4), reminds Him of his fallen human frailty (Psalm 51:5). Such frailty is not an excuse for sin, but a reasonable basis upon which to appeal to a just and merciful God for help and forgiveness. Such an interpretation is vastly more satisfying than one cutting directly against the grain of the rest of this Psalm, even removing humankind from significant participation in the conflict between good and evil because of a nature so far gone that even the Creator God can do nothing with it.
It is like a baby subject to second-hand smoke. The child has no way of removing himself from that poisonous environment, but he didn't seek out that environment, either. He is placed into it by some other force outside of himself. He would never be held morally accountable for smoking, but the effects of second-hand smoke are going to impact his health. He is impacted by sin but not guilty of acting in sin. How precious is the testimony of Scripture when untwisted by the doctrines and the commandments of men!
Isaiah 64:6
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.
This verse simply states that all our righteousnesses--all that we would seek to do on our own, entirely apart from God and faith in Him, can bear no salvific merit, for it is tainted inevitably by sinful motivations. But take heed: nothing in this verse says that righteousnesses flowing out from us when Christ is inside of us (Colossians 1:27-29; Galatians 2:20) are useless. Such faith-filled actions are not (for merit) plugged into our personal salvation equation, for only the merits of Christ accomplish our salvation. Yet Spirit-empowered acts of faith have an understood role as conditional to salvation (Matthew 19:16-22).
Now let's look at the verse just before Isaiah 64:6, the one no one ever reads in the same breath. Isaiah 64:5 includes this line: "Thou [that is, God] meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, those that remember Thee in thy ways." Why is it brethren--why is it that everyone jumps to the sixth verse and insists that no one can do righteousness, when the fifth verse insists that everyone can? "Thou meetest him" it says, that doeth righteousness. "Him" is not restricted here. What does John 3:16 say? "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
On our own, we can never do righteousness. With Jesus indwelling us through His Holy Spirit, we may all do righteousness. Our righteousnesses need not be filthy rags. "All" that we try to do on our own apart from God inevitably results in filthy rags, but all that we do in union with Him and through His divine strength, can be pleasing to Him. God stands ready to "meet" us when we come to Him on His terms. This is good news!
Romans 5:12
Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.
Let's look now at the text that most of the false understanding about what sin is traces back to. A millennium and a half ago, this famous teaching was introduced by the man whom history calls St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo. Born in A. D. 354, the writings he left changed Christendom.
Augustine was a convert from Manichaeism, a non-Christian teaching insisting on a dualistic universe. He struggled with sexual temptations, and in the process became convinced that Adam and Eve's having sex had been the "original sin." He was a prolific writer, and after his death his writings exerted greater and greater influence. Among his teachings was what came to be known as the doctrine (the teaching) of "original sin."
Augustine taught that everyone ever born after the fall was, in fact, born guilty of Adam's sin. That is, not only Adam was guilty for the sin that he had chosen to commit, but that all of his descendents were also guilty of the sin that Adam alone had chosen to commit. If this sounds diametrically opposed to several Scriptures, that's because it is! Now this man was no dummy. He may have been wrong, but that didn't stop him from having a key verse to be wrong about! He centered his teaching on a text in the book of Romans. And we ought to turn there for a minute and take a look at it. It is Romans 5:12.
Working from the Latin Vulgate and not from the original Greek, Augustine followed Jerome's unfortunate translation of the verse. The verse in question, in King James, reads: "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." Augustine though, built his arguments on the Latin version, in which the Greek phrase eph' ho is rendered "in him," so that the last part of the passage reads, "for in him all men sinned." Today, it is really agreed with virtual unanimity by scholars that the proper translation of this phrase in this passage is indeed, as given in the KJV, "for that [or "because"] all have sinned." Indeed, had Paul meant that all had sinned in Adam, he could have saved us this confusion by simply using the two words en Adam, ("in Adam"). Nonetheless, with the passage of years Augustine's ideas came to form the foundation of most of Christendom's understanding of what sin is.
Enter stage left two extraordinary men, to whom history owes much: Martin Luther and John Calvin. God used Luther as the lightening rod of the Protestant Reformation. But before that, he'd been a Catholic monk; he was a faithful son of his church. He had become, in fact, a monk of a certain order--an Augustinian monk!
What did this mean? That before he'd scarcely seen a Bible, he'd read, reread, and re-reread, and re-re-reread, the voluminous writings of St. Augustine. The observation has been made that as Luther walked through those electrifying years of history, he was able to shed many of the errors that had entered the Roman Catholic Church since the time of Augustine, but almost none of the errors launched into Christianity by Augustine himself. Luther continued to believe until the day that he died much of what Augustine had taught--including original sin.
Calvin, great organizer of the Reformed branch of Christian thinking through his "Institutes" books, had also been a voracious consumer of Augustine's thought, as demonstrated by his numerous quotations from the Bishop of Hippo. In short, while the Protestant Reformers came blazing along with much timely and sound reform, they didn't see and understand all issues at once. Coming forth from a tremendous fund of darkness, it shouldn't surprise us that they didn't get everything right.
Now I don't want anyone to walk out of here tonight saying, "He bashed Luther and Calvin--foremost of the Protestant Reformers!" Not at all. Actually, it was through them that many positive things reached their main development. No. What we are trying to do here is simply to be straight. We can be lucid about what they saw clearly, while we need still to be lucid about what they didn't. Were they here today, perhpas they would see this issue--our understanding of sin--more clearly. We're not slamming these men. We honor their spirit of reform by responding to the light available in our own day, just as they did by responding to the light available in theirs.
Augustine's problematic text really is not so problematic. In fact, were we to make every concession, agreeing that we are born participating in Adam's sin, sons and daughters being held morally accountable for the choices of their ancestors (which several Scriptures including Deuteronomy 24 and Ezekiel 18 make clear cannot be the case), still we would see a solution. Look at Romans 5:18-19: "Therefore as by the offence of one [judgment came] upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one [the free gift came] upon all men unto justification of life. For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous." If we are guilty of Adam's original sin in Romans 5:12, then we are freed from that guilt in these two verses by Christ's "original "justification of life."
If, by the offence of one, Adam, all men were condemned, then by the perfect obedience and offering of Jesus, all men were freed from that original condemnation and became again personally accountable for their own sins. The crime of Adam has been cleared from our own cases. Our own personal choices to sin against God must receive our focus. There is enough right there to discuss with our merciful and sin-cleansing God. We are not guilty for Adam's sin. We are children of the light and not of the darkness. We must let God speak to us in His Bible. The lore of the medieval age, piled up on top of the Scriptures to obscure them must not hinder us. Dogmas disproved must be discarded, replaced with truth uncovered and applied. The dark and cloudy day in which God's sheep have been scattered (Ezekiel 34:12) is ending, for our Father purposes to finish His work and take us home.
Who Was Born a Sinner?
All of us are born impacted by evil, all are weakened, warped, ruined, born onto this battlefield broken. But let's stop short right there at the line between truth and error. Who was born a sinner? According to the Bible, no one. Who was born a saint? Again, according to the Bible, no one. Our Father in heaven intends to repair us, remake us so that we can live with Him forever.
Tomorrow, we're going to look together at Jesus, and how through Him our heavenly Father has provided a tremendous answer, one we don't deserve, but which is granted us just the same through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Tonight, we've laid a foundation. What needs fixing? The whole human race. But Jesus stands ready to do just that, as we invite Him in to repair us. We are ruined, but he will restore. That's good news. That's the gospel. It is time we knew more of it by first hand experience, and walked away from excuses hoary with age, not found in the Holy Scriptures of God.
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