"... for the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf. Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer. Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come."
(2 Co 5:14–17, NAS)
I was reading this morning's entry in Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest, an article called "The Uncritical Temper." This discusses the importance of not judging others. Something occurred to me while reading through this.
I am extremely critical of others.
I never realized before that most of the time when I see a fault in a fellow believer, and I focus on that, I am viewing him through Satan's eyes.
Satan is the accuser of man; God is just and the justifier of man. In the passage from 2 Corinthians above, Paul is giving a defense for himself as a true apostle, saying that everything he does is NOT according to man's ways, but is according to God's ways. Those who attack his apostleship do so on the grounds of mankind's wisdom and criticism. So then the way he says Christians should view Christians is according to the way God sees them. If we have died with Christ and no longer are living but Christ's life is lived out through us, then we should view each other accordingly.
So how does God view us? As blameless. As holy ones. When Christ's righteousness is blanketed over our lives and covers over all the things that we've done, all the Father sees when He looks at us is Christ's blamelessness and perfect obedience.
One of the biggest debates in biblical studies is the translation of the word where our Old Testaments typically say "faith." This word (and its Greek counterpart both in the Septuagint and the New Testament) can be translated as either "faith," or "faithfulness." In any context, and in either language, the word refers to steadfastness, reliance and reliability. So what is it then? Are we saved by faith or by faithfulness? (this is relevant, just hang on...)
A few decades back there began what is often referred to as a movement, but wasn't properly a movement. It's called the New Perspective on Paul. N.T. Wright, the Anglican theologian, is the current primary spokesman for this view (He and John Piper have been at it for several years). Without going too far in depth into this (since I don't understand all of it myself), I'll just point out that this view acknowledges that we are declared righteous by God, although it denies the concept of imputed righteousness ("Abram believed in God and it was credited to him as righteousness..."). The claim is that church fathers and other theologians invented imputed righteousness; that's not what Paul meant. So, instead of Christ's righteousness being actually granted to us through faith, we are only declared righteousness by our faithfulness to God. The problem is that this view considers only the declaration of one as righteous without considering the means whereby they can be declared righteous; it addresses the what but not the how.
Simply put, how can one be declared righteous by a righteous God without being made to be like Him? Without perfect righteousness being put over us, even if God did declare us righteous it would not keep us that way. We would have need to be "saved" every few minutes, and our judgmental views of one another would drive us to witness to who was a believer just a few moments ago, to one who is now a newly-un-born pagan again.
Through faith God gives us the Son's righteousness. We are not only declared righteous, but we are made righteous. Paul could never have said we are new creations if we were not somehow "made" into something new.This is more than sentimentality.
In the Old Testament, under the Levitical code, in order for there to be atonement for the sins of the people of Israel, each year on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) the high priest would enter into the holy of holies in the tabernacle and apply blood to the covering, the "mercy seat," of the ark of the covenant. On the top of the ark were two golden angels, cherubs (or the Hebrew plural cherubim). The real cherubs are not the romanticized fat babies of the Renaissance. They are, in fact, God's hitmen. Every time cherubs show up in the Old Testament people die. These cherubs on the ark faced each other with wingtips overstretch above them coming together in the middle, and the cherubs were looking down. Now, what were the cherubs looking at? If they're looking down, then they are facing the contents of the ark, which were some manna, Aaron's staff and what else? Oh yeah! The Ten Commandments, God's law! The cherub's job (symbolically, of course, because they were made of gold) was to look down at the ark and kill whatever is between the presence of God (which dwelled at the place where the wingtips joined) and God's Law! The blood of the sacrificial goat on Yom Kippur was placed on that covering as a substitution for those who deserved to be killed because their sins had separated themselves from God. They were between God and His Law.
Interestingly enough, the Hebrew word for this covering as translated into Greek in the Septuagint (the Bible most often used in the 1st century, including by Jesus and the apostles), ἰλαστήριον (hilasterion), is the same Greek word Paul and John use in talking about Christ being a propitiation for our sins. When the judgment is carried out for the sins of a believer, it is Christ's blood who is put between God and His Law. Christ took that punishment in our place. A believer is viewed as wrapped with Christ's perfect righteousness having been cleansed by His blood. When we view other believers we have no right to see them as less than this. When we look at each other we should ask if we are trying to view each other more strictly than God does. When we do so we are looking at each other the way Satan does, the was the accuser does. Of course, Satan is also the father of lies.
When I consider a believer, my view of him or her should be consistent with God's view of him. God's view of a believer is Christ.
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