We would be so totally lost had Christ not become one of us, putting on our flesh, taking on our trials, sufferings, everything that we endure. We would be so absolutely ruined had Christ not stepped down from His heavenly throne, taking on our form, living a perfect life, without error, without blemish. Thank God that Christ became one of us, that He should become the atoning sacrifice for any who would believe on Him for salvation. Praise God that He Himself took on the Sin and its deserved penalty for any who would believe in Him, that we could even have a relationship with Him again at all. Lord, You are so magnificent and wonderful to have stepped down into this wretched world, that You would become one of us and die for our wretched, rotten, no-good souls that spurned You to Your face in unbelief and unrighteousness. You are wonderful and mighty. Nothing, no one compares with You. You are the great King ruling from above and what a mystery it is that You would even consider us at all, that You would even give Your own life for us when we wanted nothing to do with You. It’s because of Your death Lord Jesus and its application on my life that I am even able to believe in You. O Father, thank You so much for the incarnation of Your Son. What a wonderful gift, the best ever! You are amazing …
Category: Theology Page 66 of 67
“Thus says the LORD: ‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest? All these things my hand has made, and so all these things came to be, declares the LORD. But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.'”
– Isaiah 66:1-2 (ESV)
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever!”
– Psalm 111:10 (ESV)
Something that hit me in particular in verse three of Isaiah 66 was the person that God hears or listens to. And having just posted on moralism and stating that if you’re in Christ, there’s nothing that you can do to make yourself any more or any less acceptable in the site of God because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, how is that God only hears the one who is humble and contrite in spirit? If we cannot attain it on our own merit, works, or effort, how do we get there? Very simply, look at Christ on the cross. Let’s observe for a minute, not look at ourselves at all for just a moment, and simply look at the cross. We have the Son of God, existing from all eternity at the right hand of the Father; perfect, without blemish, the Lamb of God; the One through whom creation came to be; He is the prophecied Messiah; the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega; Jesus is the one who defines reality; there is no reality apart from what He has set forth; He is the sovereign King over all His creation; all things are subject to Him; not even a sparrow falls in creation apart from His command; His power is infinite and the words from His mouth are as sharp as a double-edged sword; He is the great lion of Judah, the one who will display His anger in great fury against all wicked people on the day of His glory.
And yet willingly, He set aside His heavenly realm and divine power to dwell amongst us; He became a person, just like any one of us. He suffered all the things we do so that He can make intercession on our behalf. And though He set aside His heavenly dwelling and powers, He was still God, existing fully as God and man at the same time; He was absolutely sinless, living a perfect life, without blemish; He came to save any who would believe in Him, and yet we killed Him. We killed, murdered even, the Son of God! With our sin and wickedness we drove the nails into the King of the Universe; we beat, mocked, scorned, insulted, humiliated and murdered the Son of God, the King of the universe.
Now let’s turn and look at ourselves based on the things spoken above: if we did this to the Son of God, what does it say about our nature as humans? I believe it speaks volumes. It says that even the morally best of us are wicked and corrupt, without hope of being saved on any merit of our own, any merit at all. It speaks things that cannot even be conveyed in words, mainly that we are so desperately blind, sinful, and wicked that we cannot even understand a fraction of our nature until we look at what we did to the Son of God.
When we consider this, that we/I/you murdered the Son of God, the Creator of the universe, we should all mourn and fear for our souls of being tormented in hell forever because of this great God’s wrath against sin (i.e. the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom). God is just, and to act out in any way other than pure wrath against people who trample on His glory constantly, would be to not consider Himself the most important being in the universe, something He cannot do, because He is the most important being in the universe. But what else happened at the cross beside us murdering Him? Jesus Christ, by the will of the Father, was submitted to the cross where He suffered, died, and rose from the grave, for the sins of any who would believe in Him, for the purpose of saving them from His awful and terrible wrath, raising them to eternal life.
How do we obtain a contrite spirit? How is it that we come to a point where we’re truly repentant for our sins against Him? It is through looking away from yourself, throwing away your righteousness, giving up on your works, your deeds (both positive and negative), or looking to any other thing to save you or do anything for you spiritually, and looking to Christ as the great sufficient One. He has fulfilled all righteousness by His work at Calvary on the cross, and having risen from the dead, we can have true life in Him. “He must increase, but I must decrease.” We look to Him as our God, Savior, Lord, and King, and seek for Him to change our hearts, knowing that in our deadness, we can do nothing to create an affection for Him apart from Him. In my flesh, I desire nothing of God, but in Christ I am made new and renewed by the Holy Spirit every day. But it is a continual process of sanctification by the application of Christ’s work of redemption in my life on a constant basis. Every day, I must recite the Gospel to myself, lest I forget Him and His work, and slide back into moralism, becoming sinfully prideful because of any self-righteousness I may have or loathing myself because of my wrong-doing. The whole point of the Gospel in this regard is that we come to an end of ourselves, forget ourselves, lose ourselves in the light of the glory of Christ and His love very clearly displayed on the cross. We turn to Him because He is glorious and has shown so much love to us through the cross. A contrite spirit is born in you by the Holy Spirit by comparing yourself to the glory of Christ. Fear the Lord in His glory and yet know that You are perfectly accepted by Him because of Jesus Christ, not anything within you.
Christ vs. Moralism by John W. Hendryx
Within our “Christian culture,” more and more there seems to be a rise in the number of people believing in a moralistic, worldly version of Christianity instead of a Christ-based, Biblical version, abandoning belief in Him as the only Savior and Lord, and instead relying on their own behavior change. They simply view Christ as a good teacher or good example of how a person should be devoted to God. In addition, they believe their works in some way get them in better with God somehow, as if the death and resurrection of the Son of God were not payment enough that they would have to add something to it. This couldn’t be further from what Christianity is all about. The point of the commandments is not for us to show our moral strength and superiority, but to show our inability, that we can never fulfill the law of God to the T, just as John Hendryx says in this blog entry. It’s about taking your eyes off yourself, what you can do or what you can’t ever live up to, and seeing that Christ is the one who has fulfilled all of this. He is the Son of God, the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament, come in the flesh, born in a filthy feeding trough. He lived a perfect life, submitted Himself in obedience to the Father, where He was beaten and ultimately crucified for the sins of any who would believe in Him. And He then rose three days later, conquering sin, death, and hell. If you think you can give God something comparable to Christ and His work, you are putting the finite up against the infinite. Our works don’t even begin to compare to Christ’s work on the cross and nothing we could ever do would ever be enough to satisfy the wrath of God as the death and resurrection of His own Son. It’s all about Jesus Christ, taking our eyes off ourselves, our spirituality, our works in both the positive and negative sense, forgetting about ourselves altogether, and fully looking to Christ as our all in all, our great King, Savior, wondrous maker, the one who desires to give you life, eternal life in Him, offering pardon from the wrath of God that we all deserve because of our sin. Consider these things and look to see if you are falling in the trap of a moralistic endeavor to win God’s favor, and turn to Christ, leaving yourself and your works behind, embracing the Son of God as your Lord and Savior.
In this passage, at the very beginning, it is shown the Lord’s willingness to save any who call upon Him in the sincerity of their hearts, and that he has the strength and sovereignty to accomplish it. It goes on though to describe in detail why it is that we are separated from Him and what keeps us from being saved. Of course the easy, textbook answer is that our sin has caused that separation. But expanded and reflected upon, the blame is clearly placed on us, not on God deciding or not deciding to save us. He does choose who He will save, but He cannot be blamed for your sinful actions. In no way will He ever be blamed for whether or not you were saved in the end. That’s the point of this passage, to show where the blame lies and why. It describes the condition of our hearts before the Lord and why it is a person is not saved. Indeed, in the first verse, the Lord’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save you. But after that truth is stated, it then shows what holds us back from salvation: to put it bluntly, it is all our fault; and more specifically directed to you, the reader, it is all your fault. “For your hands are defiled with blood and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies; your tongue mutters wickedness,” the passage states. This is all of us, not just the “worst” of us from the world’s perspective. We all have blood on our hands, we are all guilty of murder before the eyes of the Lord. In our hearts, when we are simply indifferent toward another person, we have committed murder in our hearts. Men, Jesus stated that if you even look at a woman lustfully, you have already committed adultery with her in your heart. It states in God’s word that if you break one law, you are guilty of breaking the entire law. It’s all or nothing, you keep it all, or break one law and you are done for. What’s the point? We are all spiritually bankrupt, and until you see the utter desperation of the human condition (more specifically, your own personal desperation and inability to anything right[eous] in the eyes of the Lord apart from His grace, you will never understand, appreciate, or attain salvation. To be poor in spirit is to rightly understand your spiritual condition before the Lord and mourn because of that condition. You have no hope in and of yourself. To be really honest, this passage is quite a downer to man apart from the grace of God. It is extremely negative and no one wants to admit their condition to be this bad. In fact that world takes the opposite approach, attempting to build up self-worth within you, which only lasts for a time and is dependant upon your actions. If we view ourselves as anything better than this state, we’ve missed the mark on understanding where we stand before the eyes of the Lord. All of us have blood on our hands. We are all murderes, adulterers, liars, filthy, wicked sinners. All of us have broken the law of God many times over, more than can be counted. All of us speak lies everyday, and our tongues are always muttering wickedness. It may not be the type of wickedness people consider wickedness in the world (like a serial killer, rapist, child molester, etc.), but other people’s opinions don’t matter in this context, only the Lord’s decree matters here. He defines the reality of right and wrong. When it all comes down in the end, it’s between you and the Lord and what He deems righteous in His eyes. And He has deemed that before His eyes, all of us, even you, are so desperately wicked that if you were to see the rottenness and decay of your soul, it is my speculative opinion you would die from shock. So again, what’s the point here? You cannot save yourself by any willing of your volition, or rolling up your sleeves and “gettin’ it done (morally speaking) for Jesus.” God does not help those who help themselves because we can’t help ourselves, scripture is very clear on this; this is what it means to be dead in our sins (Ephesians 2:1, speaking about the state of believer’s prior to their conversion); we are totally morally unable to do anything right before the Lord. To express the attitude toward Christianity that, “God helps those who help themselves,” is to show a complete lack of understanding of the Biblical nature of man (morally dead and decaying) and the Biblical nature of God (sovereign, just, righteous), and what it cost God to save anyone at all; namely the precious blood of the Father’s Son. So where’s the hope for any of us? What do we see here? We are at out wits end before God, we have nothing to offer Him, so what can we do? Nothing, that’s the point. God has to change us first before we can even see or hear God spiritually. The hope comes in though with Jesus Christ. He is calling, even commanding everyone to believe in Him for salvation. Because everyone is so desperately wicked, and being that no one can save themselves, someone has to do it for us with the strength to carry it out. That person was Jesus, God in the flesh. Jesus, being God, became one of us, putting on flesh just like the rest of us, living as we do. The only difference here is that Jesus was both fully man and fully God. In order for us to be saved, someone had to live the life we couldn’t live. Jesus lived that perfect life, fulfilling all righteousness before the eyes of the Father. Because of the great chasm between man and God, our sins have to be atoned for, wiped away, cleansed, before we can even have a relationship with God again at all. Jesus was perfect, and because of this, He became the perfect, spotless sacrifice for sinners. By the will of the Father, Jesus was beaten, whipped, cut, His back ripped apart, insulted, humiliated, strung up on a cross. Nails pierced His hands and feet, a crown of thorns driven into His skull. He hung on that cross until satisfaction was made for the sins of any who would believe in Him. The thing that struck Jesus to the core more than all of that though was the wrath of the Father. He drunk deep of the full wrath of God, stirred in all of its fury, all for a bunch of wicked, viper-like sinners who rejected Him in their sin, even killing God on the cross! What amazing love. Jesus made satisfaction for sins on the cross, bled, and died. He died the the death we should die, even now, for our awful sins. But this Savior, this wonderful God who became one us was not defeated by death, but by the power of God was brought back to life, and he reigns in heaven above, over all things. All things have been handed over to Him by the Father in heaven and on Earth. This is where our hope is in all this negativity about man. Our hope is completely rooted in Christ and His work alone, not in our work and what we can give to God. We can give nothing to God in return for the death of His Son. Nothing would ever match up to an infinitely perfect gift as Jesus. For those of you who think you’re pretty good, moral people, look at the cross where Christ died. Consider what it took to atone for sins. If you’ve believed on Christ for salvation, it took the death of the Son of God to atone for you! What a clear indictment of your infinite guilt before the the Father. Is your separation from God not just as bad as the mass murderer or the child molester? Did it take that ultimate sacrifice to cover pretty good, moral people? Absolute not! It took the death of Christ to cover wicked sinners, all of us are included, there are no exceptions to this. That’s the point here, even you are wicked beyond measure. Jesus made this very clear to the Pharisees in the Gospel’s. He stated that unless your own self-righteouess surpasses that of the Pharisee’s, you will never see the kingdom of God (Matthew 5:20). Even they, in their own self-righteousness, fell infinitely short of the glory of God, and they were the moral best of all of us! For those of you though who think you are totally beyond the reach of God’s grace to save you because of the things you’ve done in the past, look at the cross where Christ died. If His blood is of infinite worth (which it is), can it not cover an infinite number of sins in your life, no matter how big or small? Repent from your sin, turn from your ways of wickedness, and believe in Him, trust Him as your Lord and Savior, the great Messiah, and He can rescue you no matter where you are at spiritually. He has the infinite power and strength to save you and He will if in the sincerity of your heart you ask Him. “The Lord’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save.” You are never beyond the reach of God’s grace, no matter what you’ve done. I don’t know how much clearer I can make that.
Though I typically don’t like using movie quotes as illustrations, especially from this movie, this one applies here from the movie Fight Club (Tyler Durden): “It’s not until you lose everything that you are free to do anything.” Until we’re bankrupt spiritually before God, we cannot fully appreciate what Christ has done on the cross. If you think you have it all together, consider the things I’ve said. Even our best works are like filthy rags before the eyes of the Lord (Isaiah 64:6). Our only hope is in Jesus Christ, His death and resurrection for sinners. My plea to you is to believe in Jesus Christ and He will wipe away all of your wrong-doing, all of your sin and wickedness. We have nothing to offer God, but He offers us everything in Christ, even His own righteousness, the only thing God will accept as payment for your sin; paid for through Jesus’ blood.
In studying this piece of scripture again, something stuck out to me that has been there, but I haven’t focused on. In particular, the portion speaking of putting on your feet “the readiness given by the gospel of peace” is what got my attention. It occurred to me this comes from a daily preaching of the Gospel to yourself. It’s rather obvious but it’s one of those things that you can kind of read over.
On a daily basis, along with all of the other pieces of our spiritual armor, remember and consider our glorious Savior, that He became one of us, lived a perfect life in submission to the Father, suffered and died a brutal death, bore the wrath of God in Himself, and rose from the grave, in order that we might live. This has to be apart of our daily walk with Christ and cannot be forgotten. This is the hope of all life and the centrifuge upon which all other aspects of Christianity hinge.
Just wanted to give everyone a brief introduction to Monergism.com. The breadth of material on this site is astounding, on almost every conceivable theological topic imaginable. Monergism, in its basic form, is about the Gospel; the Biblical, truthful Gospel. It’s about self-deprecation, God-exaltation; it simply describes the very Biblical truth that in our sinfulness, we cannot and will not understand the things of God, His way of salvation in Jesus Christ, or that we are even in need, apart from Him coming and removing our heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh. Monergism is all about the fact that it is God alone who regenerates us, we don’t participate in the regeneration of our hearts. To say that we in any way cooperate with God concerning our salvation is to not understand human nature from a properly interpretted Biblical point of view. It is true that God does not believe for us, we exercise our own faith and truly believe on Christ of our own volition, but that volition is dead in sin until God creates in us something that was not there. The only reason anyone is saved at all is because of God applying the work of redemption on those He’s chosen, the work of redemption bought by Jesus Christ on the cross, paid for in His blood. Monergism is an admittance to how unbelievably wicked we are, how we will never turn to Christ apart from His regeneration to give us eyes to see and ears to hear, and how infinitely loving and merciful God is to save anyone at all. This concept can be found in many parts of Scripture, but somehow seems to go overlooked by many pastors and teachers these days. It’s comfortable in our humanness to believe things about God that make us feel warm and fuzzy, but it seems that as soon as you give people a taste of what it’s like to not be sovereign, to be a true subordinate on the eternal level, that’s when people seem to throw up all of their offenses against God, that He is free and can do whatever He pleases. It is in my opinion that this concept unlike any other concept really tests where your faith is. In my experience, most people (not all though) that struggle with this are also in some way struggling in their faith to some degree or another. This is not to say that every person who disagrees with this very Biblical concept is floundering in their faith, but it is to say that the people I have personally dealt with on this issue of God’s election, application of the atonement, etc., almost every one of them were struggling with their faith at some level. So basically, the theme of the Scrpitures is one of Monergism, that God does it all, that we are “dead in our sins” prior to faith, the faith that God gives us on His own agenda. This website is one of my favorite sites, I always learn something new, and it challenges me to always be loving Christ with all my heart in my time spent with Him personally, to love Him with all my mind in pursuing the knowledge of Christ through Biblical theological understanding, and to love Him with all my strength by putting hands and feet to my actions, behavior, and in every other way, to gloryify Christ because He is my lovely Savior.
I was just considering what a great and wonderful God we serve (we who believe in Christ that is). Words cannot sum up how wonderful He is. First of all, He secured our eternal destinies by His blood out of pure love, from no other motivation other than to glorify Himself and show His immmense love toward us. By making a sacrifice at great expense to Himself, He secured our salvation so that we could spend eternity with Him, forever enjoying His presense, the way it was designed to be before the fall. I am so amazingly grateful not so much for material blessings (though I am greatly thankful for that), but more, I am so grateful that Christ purchased me on the cross with His blood. I would be totally lost, a ship without a rudder had it not been for His eternal sacrifice paid for by Christ bearing the wrath of God in Himself. He is so wonderful, majestic, creative, beautiful, glorious, powerful, sovereign, loving, kind, just, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omnivorous (jk), patient, kind; He is everything I am not. Jesus Christ is what makes me whole. I praise God that He chose to save sinful, loathsome me from an eternity without Him. He is my all in all, my great Comforter. He is pure and holy, beyond expression. Praise God that Jesus Christ didn’t simply die but that He also rose from the grave by the power of God! With this wonderful hope in Christ, we will be raised to kingship to reign with Him for all eternity, forever glorifying the God of grace. And not only do we receive all of these eternal blessings (many not yet experienced to their fullest), but we get to experience them now (to a degree)! That is just wonderful and drives me to the cross to constantly experience His forgiveness and pardon based upon His finished work. Thank You, Father, that You did not abandon me to my sin, allowing me to pursue the desires of my heart to their fullest, thus hardening me to a life of sin and eternal damnation. Praise You God that You sought me and changed me when I was not seeking You. Praise You that You are the almighty King that for whatever reason (pure love) You decided to rescue me from my sin, myself, and the result of that life, hell. Jesus You are everything to me, and I pray You would pour out Your Holy Spirit in me that I may show you to all I come into contact with, that all may see and know that You are Lord, the Sovereign King, through which the whole world came into being. I love You. God is so amazingly gracious …
“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
I just love going back to the Old Testament and seeing Christ spoken of so clearly. This is the very Gospel in the Old Testament, that our Messiah would suffer so greatly on our behalf. I find it interesting to see how the writer talks about how He carried (past-tense) our sorrows, how he was stricken, smitten, and afflicted. Christ’s sacrificial death spans and pierces through time. When He died, He died with supreme, sovereign intentionality, to purchase those those the Father had chosen in eternity past, before the foundation of the world, His children (John 17). Christ’s atonement was to bring glory to God and to purchase salvation for the children of God, Jew and Gentile. The Holy Spirit then applies this work of redemption to the children of God in time. One of the cool things though is that the work of Christ was clearly perceived by the prophets several hundred years before Christ was born, this piece of scripture being a clear picture of this. How cool is that? They saw the work of redemption that was coming, not necessarily knowing all the particulars, but nevertheless seeing the Work of works. Thank God for Jesus, that He would put on human flesh, live a perfect life unto God, die on the cross for our sins, and rise from the grave, that any who would believe in Him would be saved. It’s just simply amazing, the very thing that brings life, and meaning to life. If you’re depressed, look to the cross of Christ; if you think more highly of yourself than you ought, look to the cross of Christ; if you have huge decisions to make, look to the cross of Christ and base them upon and as a result of His work. Are you worried or anxious? Look to the cross of Christ. There is nothing better than personal communion with the God of all time, the Sovereign King, the LORD of lords. Go to Him and look to Calvary where He was “crushed for our iniquities” and that “with His stripes we are healed.” Sin has ruined everything, Christ and His work can fix anything.
I’m finishing up Ethics in Management today and man am I glad. This class was a good exercise though in not only defending absolute truth (as it pertains to scripture and such), but also taking down the whole system of relativism which much of ethical theory is based on.
Post-modernity has infiltrated every facet of the West, and it seems people are slowly discovering it’s a dead-end philosophy. However, many within the academic community seem to still be holding on to this thought (not sure why, they’re supposed to be the smart ones). So, taking some of the apologetic arguments from one of my favorite books, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air, by Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, I was successfully able to take down this system which is what a majority of the theory behind ethics in our day comes from.
“Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.'”
Having been adopted into the Kingdom of God by faith in Jesus Christ, we have been destined to receive all of the righteousness of Christ, the righteousness He earned while He was here, submitting perfectly to the expressed will of the Father, where it climaxed at Calvary.