Archives for April 2019

The Gifts of Salvation, Part 13: Adoption

April 29, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Introduction
Our relationship to sin: Conviction / Repentance / Regeneration / Forgiveness / Redemption / Justification
Our relationship to God:
Before conversion: Election / Drawing / Faith
At conversion: Reconciliation / Positional sanctification / Adoption / Union with Christ / Spirit Baptism / Sealing / Indwelling / Assurance
After conversion: Progressive sanctification / Filling / Glorification
Conclusion

As we proceed through the salvation experience, we’re now summarizing the whole pile of gifts that come to us as an immediate result of our conversion. We’ve been reconciled to God; we’ve been set apart for his special ownership and care; and now we find that we’ve been adopted.

Sometimes we see a familiar word and think we know what it means—because it’s familiar. But occasionally in biblical studies the word had a different meaning in ancient times, and we don’t realize that simply because the word is familiar. The past, it’s been observed, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. And that’s the case with adoption.

In our culture, adoption is usually something that happens to a little baby. His parents have died, or they are unable to care for him, so he’s “put up for adoption,” and someone goes through the complicated legal process of adopting him into his family, his “forever home.”

In biblical times, if two parents died, the extended family would likely just take the child in, and on they went. The legal process, if there was one at all, wasn’t nearly as complicated as it is in our culture.

But there’s another important type of adoption in the ancient world, one we know about from archaeological finds. At the ancient site of Nuzi, for example, archaeologists found a tablet recording the adoption of a grown man by an older, childless couple. The arrangement was simple: the adopted son would care for the aging couple as if he were their natural son, and when they died, he would inherit the estate.

The contract may shed some light on the relationship between Abraham and “Eliezer of Damascus” (Gen 15.2), whom Abraham describes as “the heir of my house” (NASB ESV). It might well be that Abraham had adopted him after the cultural tradition of his day. (The Nuzi tablets are from about Abraham’s time.)

What’s the point?

In those days, adoption was at least sometimes the legal equivalent of our “power of attorney.” It conferred legal rights on the person adopted, who was typically an adult with extraordinary privileges.

So with adoption we find that we have entered the family of God in a second and uniquely significant way. In regeneration, or the new birth, we entered the family as an infant, “mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms,” vulnerable and in need of attention, care, and discipleship, of milk rather than solid food (Heb 5.12-14). But with adoption, we enter with all the privileges of adulthood, as full participants, seated not at the “kid’s table” but with the adults, with the fine china and fancy crystal and grown-up food.

Adoption gives us all the rights and privileges available to the lifelong saint. It’s all there for us, the moment we come to Christ.

It’s worth noting as well that adoption is one of three elements of salvation for which we are said to be “predestined.” Paul, the only biblical writer to use the word, speaks of our being predestined to conformity to the image of Christ (Rom 8.29-30; more on that later in the series), of being predestined to an inheritance guaranteed by the Spirit’s sealing (Eph 1.11-14; more on that too), and of being predestined to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to himself (Eph 1.5), with the result that we are heirs of God (Gal 4.7) and joint-heirs with Christ (Rom 8.17); the Son is “the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom 8.29).

I’ve used masculine terminology here; but just for the record, Peter says explicitly that both men and women are “heirs together of the grace of life” (1P 3.7).

The idea of predestination bothers a lot of people—there’s that recurring fear that maybe we didn’t actually have a meaningful choice in all this—but I think we should not insist on more than the Bible actually says about predestination. What it says is that God has guaranteed the outcome of our relationship in 3 specific ways. We his people are going to be like Jesus; we’re going to receive our promised inheritance; and we’re going to be God’s sons and daughters for as long as life endures.

I don’t see anything scary about any of that.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 12: Ownership

April 25, 2019 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

The first step in our new relationship with God is simply ownership—that is, he takes possession of us. We become his. I’ve characterized this as a gift, because it is.

We hesitate at the idea because it’s been so often abused in human relationships. Our culture has come to realize that no human being has the right to own another, and we’re horrified at slavery, both past and present instances.

We should be. The Bible condemns the way we humans have practiced slavery by making it permanent (Lev 25.10), by making it abusive (Eph 6.9), and by making it commercial (1Ti 1.10). When humans own other humans, nothing good ensues.

But God is not fallen and abusive like us. He does own us—twice, because he is our Maker, and he is our Redeemer—and he treats his people with grace and generosity and care and love and fierce devotion.

There’s a particular word the Bible uses of the fact that at salvation we become God’s property. It’s the word sanctification. It simply means “holiness”; sanct- is the Latin word for it, and holy is the Anglo-Saxon word for the same thing. At its most basic, the word just means “apart.” When we say that God is holy, we mean that he is in a class by himself, or unique. When God says that we are holy, he means that he has set us apart for himself—that we belong to him.

Let me illustrate.

When my wife and I got engaged, it was the practice for couples to acquire two sets of china, one for everyday use, and another (much more expensive) set for special occasions. This second set we called “fine china.” (I’ve noticed that many couples these days aren’t doing that. Good for them.) Following the expectations of the day, we set that up. My wife bought a set of everyday china on sale somewhere, and we registered at a department store for her chosen fine-china pattern (Noritake Cumberland, for those who care about such things). We got a bunch of it as wedding gifts and then filled in the missing pieces ourselves later.

The everyday china went in the cupboard in the kitchen. The fine china went in a dedicated “china cabinet” out in the dining room.

And then I learned the thing that puzzles every newlywed husband.

You can’t use the fine china.

If I want a muffin before I go to bed, I’m allowed to use the everyday china from the cupboard. But if I open the china cabinet? Nope. Not allowed to get in there. And if I put a piece of fine china in the microwave? Or the dishwasher?

I shudder even to think about it.

Why is that?

Because the fine china is special. It’s set aside for special use.

And that is a secular illustration of what holiness is.

When you came to Christ and were regenerated. God moved you—I say this reverently—from the cupboard over his sink out to the cabinet in the dining room, and he made you his special possession. You belong to him. And just as my dear wife would sometimes stand in front of the china cabinet and just take pleasure in what she had there, so he delights over us as his special people (Zeph 3.17).

There’s more to sanctification—lots more—than just this concept. We’re going to come back to it again in a few posts. But what we’ve been talking about here is what we call “positional sanctification.” That’s where God makes us special—holy—by setting us apart for himself. He has a special place for us, and a special regard for us, and a special use for us. We’re not like other people—not because of who we are, but because of what he has made us. (Fine china is made out of dirt, just like the everyday stuff. The difference is what the artist has done with what he has.)

And that’s why Paul (Rom 1.1), and even Jesus’ half-brothers James (Jam 1.1) and Judas (Jude 1.1), take such delight in referring to themselves as “bondslaves” of Jesus Christ. We were designed to belong to this delightful Master.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 11: Reconciliation

April 22, 2019 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Our conversion—our turning from our sin in repentance and to Christ in faith—is the blasting cap that sets off an explosion of divine gifts. A whole list of things happen all at once, preparing us to set off down the road of a life in relationship with God. And at the head of that list is the 180-degree change in that relationship. As the songwriter so delightfully puts it, we were “once your enemy, now seated at your table!”

To say that we started out as enemies of God is no exaggeration. In his magnum opus on salvation, the book of Romans, Paul spends almost 3 chapters detailing how far from God, and how adamantly opposed to God, we were, whether we began as Gentile pagans (Rom 1.18-32), as Gentile moralists (Rom 2.1-16), or as Jews (Rom 2.17-29)—and in a blazing volley of condemnation, Paul characterizes everyone, of every time, place, and ethnicity, as completely given over to evil (Rom 3.1-19).

But with conversion, with repentance and faith, everything changes (Rom 3.21-30). In God’s great plan, he can justify the guilty—something no human judge worthy of the office would ever do—and yet remain just (Rom 3.26) because he himself has paid the penalty in the person of his Son (Rom 3.24-25). Justice has been fully satisfied.

And with that, the righteous Judge has been “propitiated” (Rom 3.25). What’s that mean? Simply, that he used to be angry at us, but he’s not anymore.

Some people have a problem with the idea that God could be angry or wrathful. But I don’t think they’re thinking very deeply about the situation. Sometimes wrath is to be expected—in fact, sometimes wrath is the only right response; it would be wrong not to be angry.

Do you remember the scene in the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, when Belle is surrounded by wolves in the forest, and the beast suddenly appears? I first saw that scene while holding my daughter in my lap, seated in the midst of hundreds of college students, and when the raging beast began throwing wolves in all directions, the students cheered. Long and loud. They wanted the beast to be angry. They wanted him to unleash his fury in support of justice.

Sometimes wrath is precisely the right response.

And God, who always responds rightly, was angry at our sin.

But with justice done, the wrath is gone. He’s propitiated. We’re at peace.

And beyond that, we are now in relationship. God doesn’t just walk away angerless and say, “Don’t do that anymore, OK?” We are now “at one” (that’s where the word atonement comes from). We’re friends. More than friends. The word the Bible uses for that is reconciliation (Rom 5.10-11; 2Co 5.18-19; Eph 2.16; Col 1.21-22; Heb 2.17).

Typically, when you become friends with someone, the relationship blossoms in many directions. A healthy relationship has depth and breadth; you discover all sorts of things that connect you and thereby enrich your understanding of one another. It’s common for a husband and wife to realize after a time that while they thought they were “best friends” when they got married, they really didn’t know each other very well at all, relatively speaking. They develop a relationship that’s so intertwined that being apart seems strange and unnatural. When one of them dies, the remaining spouse often casts about trying to figure out where to go from there. “We were one. Who am I without her?”

And so it is with our relationship with God. The relationship is rich and deep and robust. He makes us his own, in a general sense, and then each of the three members of the Godhead embraces his relationship with us in specific ways. We’ll look more thoroughly at all of this over the next few posts.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 10: Faith

April 18, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

At some point in God’s drawing of us to himself—some people take longer than others—our mind changes. We begin to think differently about our own situation, especially about our desire for a relationship with God. We call that change “conversion,” and it’s the precise moment we’re referring to when we talk about “getting saved” or “coming to Jesus.”

In its simplest sense, conversion is simply turning. We speak of currency conversion as “turning dollars into shillings” (or whatever) when we travel. Using more physical language, at conversion we turn away from our sin—we’ve talked about that as “repentance”—and in the same action we turn toward Christ. It’s as though our sin is standing on our left, and Christ is standing on our right, and we simply turn from one to the other. The turning away from sin, as just noted, we call “repentance,” and the turning to Christ we call “faith.”

So conversion is a single act that includes both repentance and faith. In repentance we leave our old relationship with sin, and in faith we enter a new relationship with Christ.

That’s the moment when it all happens.

I think we complicate faith. We know what it’s like to turn away from one thing and turn toward something else. It’s both an intellectual and an emotional shift; because we don’t trust the old thing—it doesn’t satisfy us—we don’t want it anymore, and we turn toward something that we believe will help us. We trust it, and we’re willing to depend on it.

In this case, we believe that Jesus can solve our problem—forgive our sin—and we are ready to depend on him to do what he is capable of.

Because that’s not complicated, you don’t have to be very smart to do it.

How much do you have to know in order to trust Christ?

Do you have to know about and believe in the virgin birth?

No.

(Bear with me here.)

I’m guessing that most of us didn’t know what a virgin birth even was when we came to Jesus. We thought the Christmas carol was about some guy named “Round John Virgin.” Fortunately for us, you don’t have to assent to a whole list of complicated theological truths—and because God is infinite, truths about him are indeed complicated—in order to have him rescue you. Even a child—especially a child—can come to Jesus (Mk 10.14). Just trust him. Anybody can do that.

Now let me mollify some of my readers with the necessary disclaimer.

A believer will believe. He will know his Master’s voice (Jn 10.3, 4, 14). He will hear and believe the Word. And when in his Christian experience he learns that Jesus was born of a virgin, he will certainly believe it. No one who denies the virgin birth is a follower of the Shepherd.

But that comes later. At the beginning, in a simple act of trust, you just turn to Jesus.

Is it “blind faith”?

Hardly.

Is a marriage “blind faith”? Of course not—unless you’re a Moonie, perhaps.

When you marry someone, you do so based on shared experiences that have convinced you that this person is a worthwhile partner. Twenty years down the road, you’ll realize that you really didn’t know each other at all when you got married, but you can hardly say that your trust in your bride or groom was “blind faith.” There was a basis for your decision.

And there is a basis for this one. For millennia, this God has been proving himself faithful. We have been demonstrating ourselves faithless and brainless, in desperate need of rescue.

So trust him.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 9: Drawing

April 15, 2019 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Once God had chosen you—and apparently all of what we call “time” has occurred since then—he began on a patient and devoted plan to bring you to himself. We’ve talked already about a number of the steps in that process, but we considered them in light of the fact that God was ending our relationship with sin. Now we consider specifically how he drew us to himself.

The first of those earlier steps—conviction—was actually part of a larger process that Jesus calls “drawing”:

No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him (Jn 6.44).
And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself (Jn 12.32).

This is an interesting word. It’s used of Peter drawing his sword with the intent of killing a bystanding servant at Jesus’ arrest (Jn 18.10). It’s used of pulling a net full of fish into a boat or onto the land (Jn 21.6, 11). It’s used of townspeople dragging Paul and Silas from the streets of Philippi into the central square, where they could bring them before the town council (Ac 16.19).

It’s a word of force, even violence.

Jesus says that his Father does that to us—that he must, if we are to come to him—and that by his death he does that to us as well. He draws us to himself.

But wait a minute. Did God force you to come to him? Are we back to the “election problem”?—did we actually have no say in our own salvation? Are we just robots?

That wasn’t my impression at the time, and it wasn’t your impression either. We wanted to come to God. We knew we needed help, and we believed that he could and would help us. People are all different, of course, and some go through this experience with more emotions—tears, fears—than others, but we all understood ourselves to be making a decision that we wanted to make.

But as they say, experience isn’t always a reliable guide. Any scam victim can tell you that often people think one thing is happening when they make a decision, when really they’re just being manipulated. Do we have a more reliable source? What does the Bible say?

When God talks about his relationship with us, he regularly couches it in terms of love—and particularly the love between a man and a woman.

“For your husband is your Maker,
Whose name is the Lord of hosts;
And your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel,
Who is called the God of all the earth.
For the Lord has called you,
Like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit,
Even like a wife of one’s youth when she is rejected,”
says your God (Isa 54.5-6).

The entire book of Hosea is about God’s loving and patient pursuit of Israel as his unfaithful wife—and Ezekiel 16 gives further context to that situation. In the New Testament, husbands are told to love their wives “as Christ loved the church” (Eph 5.25). A healthy love relationship isn’t manipulated, and it isn’t forced.

But it is pursued, and it springs out of strong feelings and circumstances and shared experiences.

That’s what God does. He draws us to himself, lovingly, tenderly, but oh so powerfully, and we yield to him willingly.

God uses another term for this as well: calling. It appears in the Isaiah passage quoted above. Paul tells us that God calls whom he predestines, and he justifies whom he calls (Rom 8.30). There’s a special call from God that comes only to those who will hear and respond to it—theologians call that the “effectual call.” I think that’s essentially the same as drawing.

When we look back on the experience of our salvation, some of us can see how God did that. We can tell stories of angrily defying God, resisting his every overture, often failing to see the overture at all. But over time, we come to the end of ourselves, and we turn to him because, finally, we want to.

And we realize that he has been calling us, drawing us to himself the whole time.

What a good and gracious lover he is.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 8: Election

April 13, 2019 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Introduction
Our relationship to sin: Conviction / Repentance / Regeneration / Forgiveness / Redemption / Justification
Our relationship to God:
Before conversion:Election / Drawing / Faith
At conversion:Reconciliation / Positional sanctification / Adoption / Union with Christ / Spirit Baptism / Sealing / Indwelling / Assurance
After conversion:Progressive sanctification / Filling / Glorification
Conclusion

Everything we’ve talked about so far has to do with our relationship to sin, our natural relationship at birth, but one that with justification is now officially over. What matters now is our new relationship with God, one that will last not merely for the rest of our lives, but indeed for all eternity.

Where does that relationship start?

Well, in fact, it didn’t start with justification, the legal severance of our old relationship. You probably won’t be surprised by that; we’ve seen evidences of something going on in the Spirit’s convicting us and drawing us to himself. But you might be surprised by how far back this new relationship has its roots. It goes back to before you were born—in fact, it goes back to before anybody was born.

It goes back to before there was anybody, or anything.

Aaaaallllllll the way back.

That’s what Paul says, anyway:

He has chosen us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world (Eph 1.4).

Before there was anything, waaay back in Genesis 0:0, God chose you. He knew you, and he chose you to have a relationship with him. That’s what the verse says.

The Greek word for that choosing is eklegomai, literally “to say out,” or to choose. The adjective, chosen, is eklectos, in which you can see the roots of our word elect. So the Bible says that God “elected” us before we even existed. You have to believe that. It’s in the Bible.

Some people are surprised to hear that; they think that Calvinists believe in election but others don’t.

Well, it’s true that Calvinists believe in election, but it’s also true that so does everybody else. Calvin didn’t come up with the idea, though he certainly spent a lot of ink bringing it to everyone’s attention.

Different believers have different opinions about the details of how election works, and how far it extends, and that sort of thing, but everybody believes that God chose us, because that’s what the Bible says. Most Arminians believe that God chose people because he knew which ones would believe on him someday; Calvinists believe that God chose them because he chose them—that he may have had reasons for the choice, but those reasons were in himself, not in us or anything we might do (“unconditional election”). Some Arminians believe that God chose Christ, and we become “chosen” the moment we are “in Christ” (“corporate election”).

The thing that concerns most people about election is whether God’s choice of us renders our choice moot. Were we just robots? It felt like we “made a decision” for Christ; was that just an illusion? Did our choice not really matter?

I find it interesting that neither Calvin nor Arminius went that way. The God who chose us also issues commands, and he commands us to come to him, and he holds us responsible for the decision we make—and yes, we do make that decision. We are not robots; in the image of God, we have a will, which he has given us, and he expects us to use it. Your choice mattered, just as your ongoing choices to obey God continue to matter.

But in the end, he chose us.

We don’t get credit for choosing him. We can’t say, “That imputation deal is the best deal in the world! I had enough sense to know a good deal when I saw one!” No, you didn’t come to Christ because you were smarter than other people, or because you had better sense. You came to God—you made a genuine decision to repent—only because God had first convicted you of your sin, and enabled you to see it as the horror that it was, and drawn you to him, and finally given you the gift of repentance.

And he did all that because he first had chosen you.

We like to say that God should get all the glory for our salvation. But we seem to belie that when we resist the idea that he has made it all possible.

Election is not a scary doctrine; it’s a completely biblical one—a direct biblical statement—and it’s going to inform everything about this eternal relationship with him on which we have now embarked.

And no, I’m not a Calvinist. :-)

If that matters.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 7: Justification

April 8, 2019 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Your relationship with sin has been long, intimate, and at its core unrewarding. God’s Spirit has graciously opened your eyes to see that, and he’s led you to change your mind about that relationship, with the result that he has given you new life, spiritual life. And with that regeneration have come three simultaneous and significant changes. The first two are forgiveness and redemption. We now come to the climax of that process in justification.

You’re getting a divorce. The legal relationship you had with sin is coming to an end.

Yes, this is a legal matter. With redemption we were in the economic sphere, the marketplace. With justification we step over into the courtroom to take care of the paperwork, so this relationship will be officially ended.

In court you are never held to be innocent. Some reporters write their news stories using that language, but it’s incorrect. The question in court is not whether the defendant is guilty or innocent; it’s whether he’s guilty or not guilty. And the difference is significant. What the court decides is not whether it can prove that you didn’t do something; it’s whether it can prove that you did. If it can, you’re guilty. If it can’t, you’re not “innocent”; you’re “not guilty.”

That’s a matter of legal standing, not of fact. If you’re found not guilty, then in the eyes of the law you’re not liable to any penalty for any violation—whether you did the violation or not. You’re acquitted. You’re justified.

That’s how it works in divine justification as well. In our case, there’s no question as to our guilt. Yes, we did it. But God pronounces that you are righteous—that there is no stain on your legal record, in spite of what you have done. You bear no guilt for sin, and consequently you face no penalty.

Done.

How can God do that? How can he declare someone to be righteous when he obviously isn’t? In the Mosaic Law, God says that he would never clear the guilty (Ex 34.7; Num 14.18). So what’s going on here?

The key to justification is a related theological concept: imputation. Since I’ve written on that before, I’ll just summarize it here: in what has been called “the Great Exchange,” God has transferred the guilt for your sins to Christ (Is 53.5-6), who has graciously offered to pay the penalty—death—in your place. And he has placed the credit for Christ’s righteous life on your account, so that you are now righteous, so far as the law is concerned (2Co 5.21).

Paul spends some time on this in Romans 3.21-26, in what one New Testament scholar has called “the most important single paragraph ever written.” There he notes that the Law itself, which condemns us, also foretells this great act of justification (Rom 3.21); that the righteousness of God comes to all those who believe, regardless of background (Rom 3.22); and that all this is on the basis of Christ’s death in our place (Rom 3.24-25). The upshot is that God remains just, even as he justifies those who are not just in themselves (Rom 3.26).

Some of us were taught in Sunday school that justified means “just as if I’d never sinned.” That’s not very good etymology, but it’s excellent theology. By a righteous act, God has declared your remitted sins to be vaporized, and he has declared you consequently to be righteous, just as righteous as the Christ himself. As a result, your old relationship with sin is officially over.

But there appears to be a problem. As I’ve noted before, the ex keeps calling us, harassing us, pretending that there’s still something going on. What are we going to do about that?

Well, there’s a really, really good story there. There’s a new relationship, with a righteous God. And it’s to that story that we’ll devote the rest of this series. That story is longer than the one we’ve told so far, and deeper, and much, much more interesting. You won’t want to miss it.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 6: Redemption

April 4, 2019 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

In addition to forgiveness, a second thing happens to your relationship to sin when you’re converted: you’re redeemed.

The word has historical roots to the slave market. You’re a slave, and you get bought by a new master.

Now, none of us like the slavery concept—it’s an evil thing. (Hmm. Maybe a blog post on that one of these days … ) But the fact is that we were born slaves to sin, and our evil master was unloving, abusive, and vile. He didn’t put us up for sale—he had no intention of letting us go—but God, having paid the price for us with the infinitely valuable currency of the blood of his Son, purchased the right to us and torqued us out of the old master’s desperate but infinitely weaker grip.

Please note that God has not “set us free.” We’re free from the old master, of course, and “free from sin” (Rom 6.7)—but we have a new master, a good and loving one, one who welcomes us and lavishes grace on us and provides all of our needs abundantly and protects and directs and accompanies us, even stepping into the yoke with us (Mt 11.29) to ensure that his purposes for us are unabusively accomplished. Paul describes himself, delightedly, as “a bondslave of Jesus Christ” ( Rom 1.1; Gal 1.10; Php 1.1 ).

We have a new boss.

And so the old boss, the abusive one, can’t tell us what to do anymore. Oh, he tries to; he keeps calling, and giving us orders, and acting like nothing’s changed. But the fact is that things have changed, and he’s not our boss anymore; he has no authority, and we can slam the phone down on him when he calls. In fact, we don’t even have to answer. We can tell the old loser to get lost.

Over the years, I’ve had several bosses. I can honestly say that I’ve never had a bad one (well, except for the devil). Many of them became friends, and some were friends before they became my boss. Today I have ongoing relationships with several former bosses, and my current boss is actually someone whose boss I used to be. :-)

In my former roles as an employee, when my boss called, I had to do what he said. He could summon me to his office, and I had to stop whatever I was working on and go see what he wanted. He could give me something new to do and thereby reshuffle my working priorities; I would set aside what I had been working on and turn to the new thing he’d given me to do.

He had that right. He was my boss. And I was OK with that; as I said, I’ve had a lifelong winning streak in bosses.

But now when a former boss wants something from me, he (or she) approaches me as a friend, which he is. He doesn’t give orders; he asks if I have a minute, and he says please and thank you. If he calls, and I’m busy, I can ask if I can call him back later, and he’ll say sure.

We’re friends, so we treat each other kindly and graciously, but he’s not my boss, so I don’t have to do what he says. I have a choice in the matter.

So why do we keep answering the phone when the devil calls?

He wasn’t a kind and good boss, and he isn’t our ongoing friend now. We shook the dust off our feet when we left his workplace, and we ain’t never goin’ back. Good riddance.

You know, you don’t have to do what he says anymore. You don’t have to sin. You can tell him to get lost.

Just do it.

The great hymn-writer Fannie Crosby put it in words now classic—

Redeemed! How I love to proclaim it!
Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb!
Redeemed through his infinite mercy!
His child—and forever!—I am!

And yes, every one of those exclamation points is called for.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 5: Forgiveness

April 1, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

With your repentance and regeneration begins a series of events that happen all at once. Three of those have particularly to do with a change in your old relationship to sin. We’ll begin with forgiveness.

You have a lot of sin baggage. As we’ve noted before, you carry the guilt for Adam’s sin; you have carried from birth a marked predisposition to sin; you have expertly lived out that predisposition in sinning regularly, persistently, and creatively for your entire life. You’re a mess.

Back when I was in seminary, I needed to get a bicycle from my family’s former home in greater Boston down to Greenville, where I was in school, and I decided to ride it. It took 12 days at 100 miles per day. It was August, and the combination of hot weather and heavy riding meant that I was sweating, well, let’s say more than usual. I was a poor graduate student, looking to spend as little as possible on the trip, so I wasn’t staying in motels every night. I would find a quiet spot, throw down a sleeping bag, and rest up for the next day’s exertion. Graveyards worked really well (the neighbors are quiet); one night was in a used-car lot, one in a nice guy’s back yard, and so on.

The upshot of all this was that I wasn’t showering at night. For days. Of significant exertion. You see.

When I arrived in the DC area, I called a former pastor, who picked up on my hint and invited me to spend the night with his family. When I arrived at the house, his 10-year-old son was in the front yard. He took a look at me and said, “Boy, are you dirty!”

When a 10-year-old boy notices, you’re really, really dirty.

The lady of the house sent me straight to the bathtub and instructed me to leave my, um, things outside the bathroom door so she could launder them. A bit later she passed in a bathrobe, with the comment, “Wear this when you come out; your clothes are going to take several wash cycles.”

Good times.

I was filthy.

And that, my friends, was the state all of us were in when we came to Jesus. We were filthy.

We were covered, infused, imbued with the stain and odor and substance of our long-loved sin, the thing that our loving God finds most disgusting and repulsive.

Millard Erickson says that God is allergic to sin—not to imply that God’s immune system is defective, of course, but to try to capture the revulsion he feels toward it.

And what did he do when we showed up at his door, so recently an enemy, and gross and repulsive?

He forgave us. He invited us into the house, and pointed us to the tub, and washed us sparkling clean and florally fragrant.

In the New Testament, the word for “forgiveness” is often translated “remission,” which can include the idea of dismissing or driving away. You may recall that when Paul was in Corinth on his second missionary journey, his theological opponents brought him to court before the Roman proconsul, Gallio, on a charge of disturbance (Acts 18.12-17). Gallio, seeing through their charade, recognized it as a theological disagreement—in a religion in which he had no interest—and dismissed the case, cutting Paul off as he was about to present his defense, with a wave of the hand telling him that no defense was necessary. Get this nonsense out of my courtroom, he said. Stop wasting my time.

That’s what God does with our sins. He dismisses them. He describes that in several ways: he puts them behind his back (Is 38.17); he sends them to the bottom of the sea (Mic 7.19); he puts them as far from him as the east is from the west (Ps 103.12). All metaphors for a simple, stark concept: he puts them out of his mind. The omniscient God knows they’re there, of course, but he refuses to consider them. He can remember, but he will not (Is 43.25).

They’re gone. Blasted, nuked, obliterated. And even the smoking crater is gone too. There’s no evidence that they ever existed.

What grace.

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