systematic theology

The Gifts of Salvation, Part 10: Faith

April 18, 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

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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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 4: Regeneration

March 28, 2019 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Our repentance is the spiritual equivalent of an atomic bomb. It blows up everything, setting off multiple chain reactions that change everything about us—the way we feel, the way we think, the way we live out our thinking, the course of our life, and the course of eternity.

Everything.

A whole bunch of stuff happens in the instant of our repentance. The most significant of those things, and the one that makes all the others possible, is simply unbelievable.

We rise from the dead.

Oh, we didn’t feel dead before we repented. We were thinking, and feeling, and doing things. But we were alive in only the physical sense—and we are much more than just a physical body, just a collection of about a buck’s worth of chemicals. As I’ve noted before, God created us in his image, with a physical body, of course, but with much more than that—with a non-physical part that survives the death of the body (2Co 5.1-8) and that is in fact the most important part of us (Lk 12.4). And that part of us—the part that really lives, the part that can know God—that part of us was dead.

Like a doornail.

Paul puts it this way:

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest (Eph 2.1-3).

Dead. Not kinda dead, not sorta dead, not even mostly dead.

Dead.

Now if someone is truly dead, he’s going to need help—divine help—to change his state. People talk about their having “died” on the operating table, but what they mean is that their heart stopped—perhaps because of sudden cardiac arrest that was quickly reversed, or perhaps intentionally, during open-heart surgery. But these people weren’t really dead—they were full of cellular life, and their brains were still producing waves. A few years ago medics were stunned to find that cold-water “drowning” victims could be resuscitated after they had been immersed for astonishing lengths of time. None of these people were really dead.

Now, Lazarus—he was dead. He’d been in the tomb for 4 days, and as his sister Martha so indelicately put it, “by this time he stinketh” (Jn 11.39). And he was not coming back without divine assistance.

That was our state. We were dead and decomposed, and we stankethed.

And in an instant, He made us alive.

We call that regeneration. Rebirth. Being “born again,” or born from above, as Jesus put it to Nicodemus (Jn 3.3).

Now that has a lot of implications for the days ahead. We’ll explore those in the second phase of the series, when we discuss the changes that salvation brings to our relationship with God. For now, though, I want to think about what it means for our relationship to sin.

Paul says that when we became alive to Christ, we died to sin (Rom 6.2). It’s an odd picture: we were dead, but now we’re alive, which means that we’re dead to what we were before. But that’s precisely the language that Paul uses.

What does it mean to be dead to sin?

Well, it doesn’t mean that we don’t sin anymore; Paul makes that clear in Romans 7, and John makes the same point in 1John 1.8-10. But it does mean that we’re now disconnected from our old lifestyle—that we have options now that we never had before.

We don’t have to sin. We can say no.

I’ll say more about this idea when we get to the gift of redemption, but for now let’s just revel in that thought for a moment.

You’re alive. You can do things. You have choices. And among those choices is the ability to tell your old life and your old slave-driver to just get lost.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 3: Repentance

March 25, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

With the kind help of the Holy Spirit, we sinners—declared, dug-in, smug, and satisfied enemies of God—have begun to see our sin differently—realistically—and to see our evil master, the man behind the curtain, as he really is. We have begun to feel conviction about our sin as the light comes on in our heads, by God’s grace and the Spirit’s tender attentiveness.

And what happens next?

Something we never would have expected.

Our attitude toward our sin changes. To our surprise, we don’t like it anymore.

How does that happen? It’s true that conviction and illumination have given us both a factual and an emotional basis to see our sin differently, but we’re deeply invested in it. It’s literally part of our nature; it’s who we are. We’ve been sinning since we were born, and maybe longer (Ps 51.5); babies can lie before they can talk. With that much experience, we’re really good at the evil we do. We hide it expertly, thinking carefully through how we’ll keep it hidden even from those closest to us. And we justify it with astonishing sophistry. That guy over there is reprehensible when he does what I’m doing, of course, but I’m different; in this case it’s OK, because of this or that or the other.

We’re good at sin, we’re heavily invested in it, and we’re not inclined to give it up, even when we don’t like the consequences it brings—damaged relationships, lost opportunities, lack of freedom in our choices.

So why, all of a sudden, do we start disliking it?

Again, it’s the gracious work of God, who is Truth, helping us to see the truth. Conviction and illumination aren’t just natural regrets or disappointments; they are works of the Spirit, divinely and thus infinitely empowered, and they are simply overpowering.

And in the blazing clarity of that heavenly light, our thinking changes, because God gives us the ability to think differently about our sin.

There’s a place in the Bible that talks about that. Peter has been divinely sent to present the gospel to the first Gentile to seek to believe. His name is Cornelius; he’s a Roman centurion (Ac 10.1; think of a “company commander” in the modern Army), and he’s been attending a Jewish synagogue in his town of Joppa for some time (Ac 10.2; a “God-fearer” was a Gentile considering converting to Judaism). After God appears to him in a vision and tells him that Peter can give him the information he needs to know Him (Ac 10.3-6), he sends for Peter, who has similarly been prepared by a vision (Ac 10.9-20). Peter preaches the gospel to Cornelius’s household, and before he has even finished his sermon, a second Pentecost breaks out (Ac 10.44). Peter draws the obvious conclusion that apparently Gentiles can believe on Christ (Ac 10.47-48). And then he reports back to the church at Jerusalem, where the Jewish Christians respond with these words:

“Well then, God has granted to the Gentiles also the repentance that leads to life” (Ac 11.18).

Repentance, apparently, is something that God “grants.” Paul says later that it is something that God “gives” (2Ti 2.25). Interestingly, there are both Calvinists and Arminians who agree on this point. When you repented of your sin, that action was something that a kind and gracious God was enabling you to do.

What is repentance, exactly?

Well, most simply, it’s turning away from your sin. Your thinking or attitude changes: what you had regarded as your friend and constant life companion you now see as an enemy.

But repentance goes beyond that. More than just your thinking changes. Because “from [the heart] flow the springs of life” (Prov 4.23), because “as [someone] thinks in his heart, so is he” (Prov 23.7), your thinking has an effect on your actions: you begin to live differently. Repentance is a change of thinking, yes, but it leads inevitably to a change of lifestyle (Ezk 14.6; Mt 3.8; Ac 26.20).

Having said that, though, I should note that turning from your sin doesn’t mean that you have to stop sinning altogether. God doesn’t expect you to stop sinning before you can come to him for salvation (Eph 2.8-9), and he doesn’t expect you to stop sinning in order to “stay saved” (Rom 7.14ff; IJn 1.9). He’ll help you with your ongoing sin problem as you walk with him through life—but more on that in a later post.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 2: Conviction

March 21, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

The best way to understand the generosity and the delight of all that God has given us in salvation is to start with where we were to begin with. What were we like before he found us?

Well, to be precise, from his perspective, there was no “before he found us”—but we’ll get to that a few posts down the road. From our perspective, though, we started out poorly, and it just got worse until, it appears to us, he “found” us.

The Apostle John once wrote that before God bestowed his gifts on us, we were lying in the wicked one (1Jn 5.19). That could be a sexual metaphor, reinforced by God’s stark earlier language in Ezekiel 16, and it’s a powerful picture of where we came from.

It wasn’t pretty.

I’ve written before on the depth of our initial relationship to sin—that we were guilty of Adam’s sin, that we were naturally inclined to sin, and that we followed our inclinations without hesitation and without regret. Even as we saw clear evidence of God’s existence and his greatness (Rom 1.20), we suppressed that evidence (Rom 1.18) and turned intentionally from the light to the darkness (Rom 1.21), following a path that would end, if we continued, in an explosion of all sorts of unrighteousness, an orgy of abandonment to depravity (Rom 1.28-31) that not only would destroy us but would prompt us to destroy everyone around us as well (Rom 1.32).

But that’s not the whole story.

You see, the evil one may have held us lasciviously in his arms, but we did not originate with him. We have a Creator who is in fact nothing like our abuser. He is all that the abuser is not—good, most obviously, but also great, and infinite, and eternal. And when he made us, he placed in us an indescribable gift.

He made us, he says, in his image (Gen 1.26-28). And, as I’ve noted before, he delighted in doing that. He planned, he said, to make us different from everything else, in a completely separate class from even the most intelligent animals. Like him, in significant ways.

And God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the Almighty, the Eternal, is not going to allow his image to lie where it is—in the arms of the wicked one. He’s jealous, in the most positive and proper of senses. He’s going to rescue his beloved. He’s going to win his wife back.

He’s going to retrieve, and cleanse, and polish, and display his image.

Whatever it takes.

And so begins a process—a really long and complex one—of retrieving us from our sin, of wooing us back into a relationship with him, the relationship for which we were created, and the only one in which we can be truly satisfied.

How does that process begin?

Well, it begins with election, but I’m not quite ready to talk about that yet; it’s coming in a later post, when we begin to think about how God nurtures our relationship with him. For now we’re meditating on how he changes our default relationship, our devoted companionship with sin.

And how does he begin that?

He begins with conviction. In the person of his Spirit (Jn 16.8), he gently, tenderly leads us to feel differently about our sin. That includes what we call illumination—he helps us see things that we didn’t notice before, because love is blind, as they say, and there are all kinds of terrible things about our lover that we just haven’t noticed—little things, you know, like the fact that he beats us, and abuses us, and despises the gifts we give him, and plans to throw us away when he’s done with us.

Little things like that.

God the Spirit kindly turns the light on in our heads, and we begin to see things. We see the flaws of our evil master, and we see our own flaws, our own selfishness, our own stupidity, our own blindness.

We don’t usually like conviction when it comes; it makes us sad, and frustrated, and angry. But it’s a generous gift from a kind Father whom we have always treated as our enemy.

And it’s just the beginning.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 1: Abundance

March 18, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

We’re often told that salvation is a gift. I beg to differ, just a little bit.

When we say it that way, we want to emphasize that salvation is free, that we can’t do anything to earn it. And that, of course, is entirely true. If you grew up conservative evangelical, you probably memorized more than one verse about that—

⁸For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: ⁹Not of works, lest any man should boast (Eph 2.8-9).
Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost (Titus 3.5).
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom 6.23).

It’s free. You don’t have to pay for it. It’s a gift.

So far, so good.

But the great emphasis of the New Testament is not on the idea that God has given us a gift. God is generous, gracious, lavish; he gives abundantly, pressed down and running over (Lk 6.38). He gives gifts. Plural.

And salvation is presented not as one thing, but as a bundle of a great many things, given to us over time.

Salvation isn’t a gift. It’s a whole pile of gifts, a pile that will take us a lifetime to open.

I’d like to take a few posts to rummage through the pile. So the next several weeks will be Christmas, and we’ll open 2 presents a week until the whole house is knee deep in crumpled wrapping paper.

How to proceed?

There are several ways to organize all these gifts. In Ephesians 1, Paul runs through a list of about a dozen of the gifts, and he organizes them around the Trinity: what the Father has given us (Eph 1.3-6), what the Son has given us (Eph 1.4-7), then more from the Father (Eph 1.8-10), then more from the Son (Eph 1.11-12), then some from the Spirit (Eph 1.13-14). That approach helps us notice that the Godhead is working together, deftly interacting in the common goal of rescuing and enriching us. That’s a delightful approach.

Or we could organize them chronologically. God was working on us and in us before we even realized it. Then in an instant, the moment we call “getting saved,” he did a whole bunch of things simultaneously. Then he began a lifelong process of conforming us to the image of his Son, a process that will culminate in another instant, one of perfect conformity. That’s a great approach too, but there’s a difficulty: because a bunch of items in the list happen simultaneously, we have trouble deciding what order to put them in.

A third approach is to organize the whole list around its central idea. In that one instant, we are “converted.” What does that mean? Converting is simply turning, changing, exchanging. In physical terms, we are facing in one direction—toward our sin, which we love—when our attitude changes, and we no longer see our sin with the delight that we once did. We turn away from it in rejection, and in doing so, we turn simultaneously toward something—someone—else: Christ. Conversion, then, is two actions in one: turning from our sin (repentance) and turning toward Christ (faith). It makes sense, I think, to organize the gifts, or the elements of salvation, around these two ideas: the change in our relationship to sin, and the change in our relationship to Christ.

That’s the approach I’m going to take in this series.

We’ll start where our experience started—our relationship with sin. Next time, we’ll consider how the Spirit of God began working in us even while we were still his enemies, dead in sin and yet loving it.

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