“Thus too, it happens in estimating our spiritual qualities. So long as we do not look beyond the earth, we are quite pleased with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue; we address ourselves in the most flattering terms, and seem only less than demigods.” - John Calvin
“What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” (Rom. 6:1). Paul pressed the wonderful truth of grace to the edge of heresy. If our intent is to preach orthodox, gospel grace, we must go just that far. Are you teaching salvation ordained by God alone, wrought by Jesus Christ, and proclaimed in the power of the Holy Spirit? Then your hearers should be asking the question that was asked of Paul, “Should I not sin all the more so that grace may flourish?” Many of us “tame” the radical nature of God’s grace to the point that we would never have that question asked of us.
The cosmic criminal (each one of us) stands guilty and condemned before God. The holy and omniscient Judge has vindicated the righteousness of His verdict by exposing the sin accumulated by the transgressor minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, and year by year. The sinner stands knowing the truth of the verdict. In desperation he drops to his knees and cries in a flow of tears, “O God, have mercy on me a sinner.” He falls on his face. All is quiet. Nothing can be heard except his sobbing plea over and over. Then he hears what cannot be true. The court declares his innocence. Can this be? Is the Judge unjust, or has He found some worth in the vile man? Then he hears the explanation: “Arise. My Son has taken all your evil to Himself and suffered the punishment that should have fallen on you.”
This is not a vignette taken from the final judgment. Such scenes have been repeated through the centuries as God has worked in the hearts and minds of sinners, revealing to them the heinous nature of their sins, the certainty of His judgment, and the incredible grace of justification through faith in the atoning death and resurrection of His Son. This is a grace that leaves angels and mankind in astonishment and wonder.
Does the reprobate whom we saw sobbing over his sin and guilt at the foot of the cross rise and return to his former life of rebellion and degeneracy, rejoicing that he can now sin without inhibition? Such a thought is alien to the gospel. There is a vast difference between grace and permissiveness. The grace of justification and regeneration brings an objective change to the hearts and minds of sinners. There is a negative attitude toward sin and a love of God hat was not previously present. In other words, as Thomas Brooks wrote, “Just as heat is opposed to cold, and light to darkness, so grace is opposed to sin.”
Why do we then see church members who speak of the grace and love of God and yet sin with abandon? The grace they have learned from their pulpits is counterfeit. It is a not a grace freely given by a holy and just God who has sworn a righteous judgment on all sin. Rather, it is a permissive leniency of a god who winks at sin. It is a grace that knows nothing of God’s hatred of sin, the awful justice of Calvary, and the sinner’s redemption from the righteous wrath of God. Thus, the recipient of this pseudo-grace regards his mediocre salvation with a levity that allows him to “enjoy” God and continue his selfish, materialistic, immoral life unchanged. We must ask the church: “Where is the preaching and teaching of the fearsome holiness and justice of God, the odious nature and wages of sin, and the terrible price that was paid at Calvary for the redemption of sinners?” Without such truth, there will be no understanding of true gospel grace.
The genuine, amazing grace of God gives birth to a life consistent with that grace and remarkably different from the previous life centered on self-gratification. It is not a rote obedience to a law code. It is a behavior of supernatural love, joy, and peace demonstrated and bestowed by Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit living in us. In Roman 6:14-15 we read that we are not under the law but under grace. The motivation of grace is far more powerful than the motivation of the law. +
Among the insights the Psalms convey, some of the most penetrating deal with the nature of wickedness and of wicked people. Rarely are these put into abstract categories. They are almost always functional and relational.
What lies at the heart of the “sinfulness of the wicked”? “There is no fear of God before his eyes” (Ps. 36:1). This means something more than that the wicked person is foolishly unafraid of the punishment that God will finally mete out (though it does not mean less than that). It means that the wicked are so blind that they do not see the ultimate realities. They either do not see God at all, or, scarcely less horribly, they do not see God as he is.
All appropriate behavior and outlook for human beings made in the image of God find their reference point and measure in God himself. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of both knowledge (Prov. 1:7) and wisdom (Prov. 9:10), for “knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” (Prov. 9:10). The converse is utter folly: “fools despise wisdom and discipline” (Prov. 1:7). Small wonder the psalmist insists that it is the fool who says, “There is no God” (Ps. 14:1). Scarcely less foolish is the conjuring up of domesticated gods we can manage, or of savage gods that are brutal and immoral, or of impersonal gods that depersonalize God’s image-bearers. When one is blind to the true God, including his glorious holiness that must rightly instill fear in image-bearers as rebellious as we, there is no stopping place in our descent into the abyss of folly.
The blindness of the wicked extends to their assessment of themselves. “For in his own eyes he flatters himself too much to detect or hate his sin” (Ps. 36:2). If he could see well enough to detect his sin, to see it for what it is—rebellion against the living God—and hate it for its sheer vileness and utter arrogance before the majestic holiness of his Maker, inevitably he would also fear God. The twin blindnesses are one.
This, of course, is why philosophical debates about the existence of God can never be resolved by reason alone. It is not that God is unreasonable, still less that he has left himself without witness. Rather, the tragedy and ignominy of human sin leave us, apart from God’s grace, horribly blind. Yet this blindness is culpable blindness: the wicked have no fear of God before their eyes. Paul understands the point so well that he makes this the culminating proof-text in his proof of human lostness (Rom. 3:18). Thank God for the next thirteen verses the apostle pens.
In this meditation I want to bring two passages together: “I am the LORD your God; consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy. Do not make yourselves unclean by any creature that moves about on the ground. I am the LORD who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy” (Lev. 11:44–45); “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’ ” (Ps. 14:1).
What does holy mean? When the angels cry “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty” (Isa. 6:3; cf. Rev. 4:8), do they mean “Moral, moral, moral is the LORD Almighty”? Or “Separate, separate, separate is the LORD Almighty”? Just to ask such questions demonstrates how inadequate such common definitions of holy really are.
At its core, holy is almost an adjective corresponding to the noun God. God is God; God is holy. He is unique; there is no other. Then, derivatively, that which belongs exclusively to him is designated holy. These may be things as easily as people: certain censers are holy; certain priestly garments are holy; certain accouterments are holy, not because they are moral, and certainly not because they are themselves divine, but because in this derivative sense they are restricted in their use to God and his purposes, and thus are separate from other use. When people are holy, they are holy for the same reason: they belong to God, serve him and function with respect to his purposes. (Occasionally in the Old Testament there is a further extension of the term to refer to the realm of the sacred, such that even pagan priests can in this sense be called holy. But this further extension does not concern us here.)
If people conduct themselves in a certain way because they belong to God, we may say that their conduct is moral. When Peter quotes these words, “Be holy, because I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16), the entailment, in his context, is a turning away from “evil desires” (1:14) and living life “in reverent fear” (1:17). But it is no accident that these words in Leviticus 11 are found not in a context of moral commands and prohibitions but of ceremonial restrictions dealing with clean and unclean foods. For belonging to God, living on his terms, reserving ourselves for him, delighting in him, obeying him, honoring him—these are more fundamental than the specifics of obedience that we label moral or ceremonial.
Indeed, this stance is so basic in God’s universe that only the fool says, “There is no God” (Ps. 14:1). This is the precise opposite of holiness, the most conspicuous and fundamental demonstration, “They are corrupt, their deeds are vile” (14:1).
 Is the New Testament Text Reliable?. . . our New Testament is 99.5% textually pure. In the entire text of 20,000 lines, only 40 lines are in doubt (about 400 words), and none affects any significant doctrine. Greek scholar D.A. Carson sums up this way: “The purity of text is of such a substantial nature that nothing we believe to be true, and nothing we are commanded to do, is in any way jeopardized by the variants.” This issue is no longer contested by non-Christian scholars, and for good reason. Simply put, if we reject the authenticity of the New Testament on textual grounds we’d have to reject every ancient work of antiquity and declare null and void every piece of historical information from written sources prior to the beginning of the second millennium A.D. Has the New Testament been altered? Critical, academic analysis says it has not. |
Any understanding of the meaning of sin must begin with an understanding of the holiness of God. God is the benchmark in which we gain an understanding of what sin really is. “Every culture differentiates the sacred from the secular and has terminology to make that distinction. Canaan already had such terms when Israel adopted its language. The problem was that what was holy to the Canaanite was abominable to Jehovah. In Canaan the temple prostitute was a holy woman and the homosexual priest was a holy man (cf. Gen. 38:21-23; Deut. 23:17-18). You see, sin is defined by any person’s concept of “God.” If God is a loving, easygoing pushover whose love for man overrides His own holiness, then they will live and respond in conjunction with that belief. If one believes that a loving God would not send anyone to an eternal torment in hell for sin, then their life and actions will most likely reflect that. Some believe that the way to heaven is determined by God weighing their good and bad in the balance, and if the good outweighs the bad, then they will go to heaven. Our concept of God determines our response to that “God.” What one considers holy determines how they will live. No person lives beyond his or her concept of God.
1 TIMOTHY 4:7b-9 “While bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present
life and also for the life to come” (v. 8).
The problems Timothy confronted in Ephesus were such that many of the Christians there no longer paid close attention to the biblical gospel. Instead, they had become focused on speculative matters such as the lives of those many individuals whom Scripture names in its genealogies without telling us anything else about them (1 Tim. 1:3-4). Correcting this error meant that the leaders in Ephesus had to abandon their speculations and get back to the foundations of the faith. This charge Paul gave to Timothy so that he could convey it to the elders and teachers who were entertaining errors. The apostle did not hold back in calling these conjectures “irreverent, silly myths” (4:7a), or as maybe translated literally, “old wives’ tales,” for he wanted to make sure that everyone would see their futility.
Yet fixing the problem of false teaching, then as now, involves more than leaving falsehood behind. Diligent pursuit of truth and godliness is also required. The Greek word translated “train” in verse 7b is a form of the verb gymnazo, from which we get the English terms gymnasium and gymnastics. Paul is using an athletic metaphor, telling us that training in godliness requires persistent effort. Gymnasts and other athletes have to train for months and years to hone their skills; similarly, we must realize that godliness and holiness are not developed overnight. Regular prayer, Bible study, worship, fellowship, and the like are necessary if we would subdue our flesh and walk by the Spirit (Gal. 5:16-26). Matthew Henry says, “Those who would be godly must train themselves to be godly; it requires a constant exercise.”
Godliness, Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 4:8, brings eternal benefits. We have been given everything that we need for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3), and as we make an effort to supplement our faith with virtue, love, self-control, and a host of other virtues, we will grow in our full assurance of salvation and even find ourselves with a greater reward in the life to come (vv. 4-11; see also Matt. 25:14-30). All of this is possible only through the grace of God who is the one who granted us the ability to have faith in the first place (Eph. 2:8-9). +
Godliness and holiness, mature saints will tell you, are virtues that reinforce themselves. As we grow in holiness we become more aware of our own sin and, consequently, our own need for His empowering to defeat sin and become even more holy. Where does the development of a life that pleases God rank in your scale of priorities? What can you do this very day to expand
your knowledge and practice of that which pleases God?
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