The Chapters that Changed My Life: Part 8
The series continues by drawing practical lessons from Scripture’s account of human weakness, redemption, and the hope found in Christ.
Read Time: 7 minutes
In our last article, we finished with a question: “How?” As in, how did Christ condemn sin in the flesh? I admit it was an awkward point to stop an article. But it is not always easy to summarize a whole stream of thought in 1,500 words.
So, let’s jump right back in. How did Christ condemn sin in the flesh? The answer is simple, really: through Jesus’s resurrection.
What do I mean?
Think about it. When Jesus rose from the dead, did he have sinful flesh? In other words, did he desire to sinfully rebel against his Father? Did he desire to oppose his Father’s will? Did he struggle with his nature any longer?
No, he didn’t. Yet, he was alive.
Now you tell me; given his resurrection, was Jesus condemned or was sinful desire condemned? In other words, was Jesus destroyed or was the desire to sin within him destroyed?
Where was the desire to sin destroyed then? The answer is in Christ’s flesh which he shared in common with us all, which is why he had to come in the same sinful nature we all have.
While Jesus death was how sin’s nature was condemned, his resurrection makes clear that God condemned the body of sin and not the sinless Lord. Why? Because the sinless Lord was resurrected to life, but sin as represented by his rebellious bodily nature stayed in the grave.
Clearly his resurrection shows that sin, not Jesus, was condemned.
Scripture presents this idea in many ways. For example, the body of sin was destroyed (Romans 6:6); that which has the power of death, the devil, was destroyed (Hebrews 2:14). The old man was put off so the new man might live (Colossians 3:9-10). They’re all different ways of saying the same thing.
But why was Jesus resurrected? For two reasons, really:
- He didn’t sin, so the grave couldn’t hold him (Acts 2:24).
- He alone perfectly declared that God was righteous (Romans 3:25), because he put to death the nature that asserted its own will over God’s (Romans 6:3-6).
It’s the second of those two points I would like to dwell on for a moment. Ask yourself: what was the first temptation, the first sin? Let’s turn to Genesis 3:4-5: “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
You see, sin isn’t simply just acting against the will of God. Sin, as revealed in this passage, is trying to usurp God. One of the clear qualities of a supreme Sovereign is the ability to distinguish good from evil. When we rebelliously sin, we declare that God’s judgment of what is good and what is evil is wrong. We’d rather obey the good and evil of our own choosing, hence being “gods, knowing good and evil.”
According to the serpent, there is no real consequence for asserting equality with God in this way because “You shall not surely die.” So, by this serpentine logic, we all become our own god and the judge of our own version of righteousness (good and evil), without consequence.
In other words, the serpent invented humanism. It is a very old idea.
So, what is God supposed to do with serpent logic exactly? Is God right or are we right? Who is sovereign? Will God allow an eternal challenge to his supremacy and oneness?
He will not. He cannot. So, he acted to destroy that challenge with death.
Yet, inside, we have that “knowledge of good and evil.” We think we know right and wrong and, as a result, rebel against God’s will.
The rebellion and willfulness that Jesus had to destroy in his own body are expressed perfectly in Mark 14:36, “not what I will, but what thou wilt.”
It was Jesus’ contradictory will that had to go to the cross and die.
And by destroying the will that opposes God (which we all share), he showed that only God was righteous. In this act, he reversed that first sin in the garden. How so? In the garden, Adam and Eve wanted to be like God, thinking, “You shall not surely die.” By dying contrary to his own will, Jesus showed conclusively that he was obedient only to God. (Perhaps you can see the irony of this demonstration to the Trinity-believing Christian).
With this in mind, let us read Romans 3:25-26 from the NET version.
God publicly displayed [Jesus] at his death as the mercy seat accessible through faith. This was to demonstrate [God’s] righteousness, because God in his forbearance had passed over the sins previously committed. This was also to demonstrate [God’s] righteousness in the present time, so that [God] would be just and the justifier of the one who lives because of Jesus’ faithfulness.
Brothers and sisters, young people, we are saved through God’s righteousness. Romans 3 says plainly that Jesus’s death demonstrated his righteousness. Further, it states that God was first just and then the justifier of the one who lives because of Jesus’ faithfulness.
Is there an alternative to God saving on the basis of His righteousness? What would be the alternative basis? For example, can God save based on your version of good and evil? Can you be saved if you want to be the just one?
Just imagine it. You are standing before God and pleading, “God, please forgive me, although I really think I was right the whole time.”
Can God forgive the self-righteous person? Forgive what? By definition, the self-righteous person is right, not God.
God can’t forgive without the unreserved declaration of His righteousness. This Jesus declared by doing what we could not do. He took his bodily nature that rebelled against God, the “body of sin,” and destroyed it, while he himself was a sinless man, so that God would be unrivaled. In doing this, he declared that God alone is righteous. Yet by doing this as a sinless man, the grave could not hold him. God was righteous to resurrect him, while leaving his sinful nature condemned in the grave.
God accepted this as a perfect sacrifice; this sacrifice was something an animal could not be.
According to Paul in Romans 8:3-4, Jesus fulfilled the righteous requirement of the Law. What was that?
I’d suggest that Philippians 2 helps us see that the righteous requirement of the Law was obedience. Notice how Paul pulls all these things together in Philippians 2:6-8 while contrasting Jesus with Adam:
Who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. (RSV).
The point, of course, is to contrast Jesus with Adam and Eve. When Eve listened to the serpent, she did count equality with God as something that could be grasped by man. This, Christ did not do. He instead bore our likeness, the likeness of sinful flesh, the “likeness of men” (considered in our last article), and he emptied himself, and became obedient unto death.
This was the righteous requirement of the Law: total, humble obedience.
Okay… but how does any of this affect us? Well, that depends. Would you like to join with Christ?
It’s your choice. But as Paul explains it, the options are: be in Christ or perish.
I can hear someone say, “Well, why not? It almost sounds easy. Christ died for me. Great! Hey, once saved, always saved, right?”
But here is the principle. Christ did put sin to death in his death. But that act, as courageous as it was, meant nothing if Christ didn’t rise again from the dead.
And so the same goes for us. If we symbolically take on Christ’s death in baptism, then we must symbolically take on Christ’s life and the life Christ lives to God. This is the point Paul makes in Romans 6:10-11 (NKJV). “For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
If we take on his death, we must take on his life. The Old Testament is full of examples of Jews taking on death as a symbol through animal sacrifice, but not taking on the life.
For example, in Psalm 40:6-8: “Burnt offering and sin offering You did not require. Then I said, ‘Behold, I come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me. I delight to do Your will, O my God, and Your law is within my heart.’” (NKJV).
Death by animal sacrifice, even of a perfect, unblemished animal, has no meaning without the life of delighting in God’s will.
It takes one to get the other. You cannot symbolically take on the death of Christ unless you symbolically take on the life of Christ. You cannot simply destroy death unless you embrace life.
But how do you embrace life? How do you live a resurrected life?
It would be great to have the freedom but not the responsibility, but that is not a life in Christ. And this is the confusion of many who believe grace cures all. Does God want a horde of saved yet unrepentant sinners? What He desires is those who are like Christ. Thus, Paul says in Romans 8:4: “That the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who [this is a big “who”] do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” (NKJV).
So, ultimately, you and I are saved in Christ and by being like Christ. In fact, all God will save is that which is like Christ and is conformed to his image. He will not save your fallen nature.
It is in that confidence that we can say there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because we understand and believe in what it means to be in Christ Jesus and to walk according to the spirit, not according to the flesh.
It means you crucify your flesh and your desires and, like Christ, declare God’s righteousness.
You do this imperfectly, of course, but you faithfully continue because you know that, despite your weakness, failings, and struggles, there is no condemnation for you in Christ Jesus. Sin has been destroyed in Christ’s flesh, and it will be in yours. Death will be no more. Christ’s death doesn’t become a license to sin; it becomes motivation to persevere.
But how do I do that? Now that I’m in Christ, how do I live like him? How do I walk according to the spirit? Good question. We will take that up in our next article.
Ben Brinkerhoff,
Christchurch North Ecclesia, NZ