Life of the Word of God (8)

Psalm 119:57–64.

The Lord is my portion; I have promised to keep your words.
I beg your favour with my whole heart: be gracious to me according to your promise!
I consider my ways; and turn my feet to your ordinances.
I hasten and do not hesitate to keep your commands.
Though the wicked’s ropes ensnare me, your law I do not forget. 
At midnight I rise to praise you for the judgments of your righteousness.
I am the companion of all who fear you and so keep your precepts.
Of your steadfast love, O Lord, the earth is full; teach me your statutes!

The beauty of this stanza, I think, is the way it breaks down obedience into its component parts. We see that obedience involves:

1. Thought: I consider my ways; and turn my feet to your ordinances. Considering leads to correction. Obedience is not, you see, blind and thoughtless. It requires attention, not only to the command of God, but also to myself, my own ways, and what it means for me to be obedient.
2. Action: I hasten and do not hesitate to keep your commands. Obedience involves action, when the time for action has come. It cannot forever reflect and consider. Consideration must come to a moment of decision and commitment. I must act, and not hesitate.
3. Resolve: Though the wicked’s ropes ensnare me, your law I do not forget. Obedience confronts obstacles, inevitably. In this case, the snares of the wicked. But it is the mark of obedience to meet obstacles with resolution, with perseverance and enduring commitment.
4. Faith: The final three lines of the stanza show us that this obedience is anchored in and sustained by faith in the One who commands, the God whose love fills the earth, and whose justice is worthy of rising at midnight in praise. “The obedience of faith”, as Paul put it (Rom 1:5; 16:26), is not just the obedience that accompanies faith: it is the obedience that is empowered by and held up by faith.

 

The Living One

“When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he placed his right hand on me, saying, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades.” (Revelation 1:17–18)

Dots and strokes: Right worry

The long passage about “worry” in Matthew 6:25–34 needs careful thought. Initially it seems to be about what we often think of as “anxiety” — and it surely includes that; but as the passage progresses it becomes apparent that it is about worry understood more broadly, as concern or care. It is about what you “run after” (v32), what you “seek” (v33). So what is it really about? Here is Oliver O’Donovan’s take on it:

“The argument against bestowing care upon material things and immediate time is not that we should not care about ourselves. Earlier generations of expositors have found in the Sermon on the Mount a pre-eminent ethic of selflessness. Even the outstanding commentator, William Tyndale, could not resist a sideswipe at the scholastic tag, proximus esto tibi, ‘Be your own neighbour, for who is nigh thee as thyself?’ My own impression is almost exactly the opposite: this text urges proper attention to the self. Neither is it that material existence is of no significance. ‘Life is more than food, and the body more than clothing’, we are told. Our material life has a higher aim than merely to sustain and decorate itself, a further time in view than the ‘tomorrow’ of our immediate material need. Its importance lies there. To attend to life’s material conditions is to attend to things which, the argument goes, need no very serious attention and cannot be attended to effectively anyway.

These conditions are given with life itself, and, as the birds and the flowers show, sustain themselves very well without attention. Attention turned in that direction is attention wasted. The peculiarly human power of paying attention, which must always and necessarily be attention to ourselves as well as to our object, should be bestowed on what bodily life is given to human beings for, which is the righteousness of the Kingdom of God.” (“Prayer and Morality in the Sermon on the Mount”, Studies in Christian Ethics 22.1 (2000): 25–26)

 

Dots and strokes: dots and strokes

Matthew 5:17–20, which contains the reference to “not an iota or a ‘serif’ (= a dot or a stroke)” passing from the law, is a tricky passage. It’s tricky for a few reasons. First, it’s tricky because on the surface it’s quite simple: it’s Jesus’ teaching about the law (thus many Bibles have some kind of heading to this effect). Second, though, it’s tricky because it has some elements which are a bit odd. Jesus mentions both the Law and the prophets in v17, and says he’s come to fulfill them. Fulfill is a word appropriate to the prophets; but how does it apply to the law. But then he goes on and talks about commandments in v19, which is not really so relevant to the prophets. Third, there is a clear connection between vv17–18 and vv19–20. There is a “therefore” at the beginning of v19. But it is not very clear what the nature of the connection is (hence, the NIV decided to omit the word!). Finally, in a passage purportedly about the law, the second half (vv19–20) contains no reference to the law (except for “teachers of the law”) and three prominent references to the kingdom of heaven. What’s going on?

To my mind, there are two basic options open to the interpreter.

(1) The whole passage is about Jesus’ attitude to the Old Testament, and especially, to its legal content. The passage amounts to an endorsement by Jesus of the OT Law and its continuing relevance for the Christian. “These commandments” in v19 are the stipulations of the Law, and the logic of the “therefore” in v19 is that “because the Law will last forever, it’s all still important”. This may not have to mean Christians are precisely bound by the Law (as many commentators insist, although it seems to me they get into muddy water pretty quickly). Yet some critical commentators simply see here a clear divide between Matthew and Paul. But this interpretation is very difficult, at least in part because Jesus does not seem to have maintained this attitude throughout his ministry. Mark, at least, regarded it as fairly obvious that Jesus brought an end to the food laws (Mark 7:19).

(2) Alternatively, this passage might not actually be about the Law at all: rather, it’s about why Jesus’ teaching deserves careful attention. On this reading, “these commandments” are the teachings that Jesus is about to embark on in the Sermon on the Mount (esp. vv21–48). The logic of the passage would then be something like this: (i) The Law and Prophets are not redundant, indeed, they are certain and permanent, and Jesus’ ministry constitutes their fulfillment; (ii) precisely because of this (therefore) it is important to attend to Jesus’ commandments, i.e. because they are the fulfillment of the Law! On this reading, this passage represents a concise introduction to the rest of the sermon, a call to listen carefully to Jesus’ teaching, and give it the respect due to the Law, which will never pass away.

The irony of this passage, on this reading, is that where we often look at these verses as Jesus’ upholding of the value of the Law, originally, the value of the Law was what was assumed, and it formed the basis of Jesus’ appeal to listen to his teaching. Jesus says “Yes, as we all agree, the Law is perfect and eternal; and I have come to fulfill it, that’s why you must take these commandments seriously!” The message of this passage is: Jesus’ moral teaching really, really matters , because of what we know of the Old Testament: that it is God’s eternal Word.

 

Photo: waterfall on the Milford Track. 

Dots and Strokes—born again before I was born!

*Note: This post has been revised thanks to a comment from John McClean. In the earlier version I was, frankly, not careful enough — a peril of the blogosphere.

1 Peter 1:3 contains a surprising statement:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who in accordance with his great mercy gave us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…

What’s surprising about this, at least to me, is Peter’s identification of the moment of “new birth” (anagennaô) with Jesus’ resurrection. Why is this surprising? We almost always speak about being born again as happening when we are converted, when we first put our trust in Jesus (for those who can in fact remember such a moment). This is clearly not wrong. Indeed, in verse 23 Peter goes on to speak of being born again through the Word of God. And of course  there is John 3, where Jesus tells Nicodemus “you must be born again” (though I’m not sure that passage is as straightforward as we sometimes make it out – the “you” there, for one thing, is plural).

But that is not how Peter talks here. Here, Peter sees the decisive moment of rebirth as the resurrection; and it seems to me that this is worth noticing. There is a sense in which the moment of our rebirth takes place first and foremost with Jesus, because we are represented in him.

A more extreme version of this position comes out in this story, told by T. F. Torrance:

“During my first week of office as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland when I presided at the Assembly’s Gaelic Service, a highlander asked me whether I was born again, and when I replied in the affirmative he asked me when I had been born again. I still recall his face when I told him that I had been born again when Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary and rose again from the virgin tomb, the first-born from the dead.”

Torrance continues, arguing,

“Since a conversion in that truly evangelical sense is a turning away from ourselves to Christ, it calls for a conversion from our in-turned notions of conversion to one which is grounded and sustained in Christ Jesus himself.” (The Mediation of Christ, 2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1992, 85–86)

I’m not sure I want to call for a “conversion” from our normal language of conversion. But I do think we need this side of the story. otherwise, I suspect it is possible to get absorbed in an introspective understanding of conversion that can undermine assurance.

Dots and strokes — zeal for whom?

The accounts in Joshua of the destruction and massacre of the inhabitants of Canaan (e.g. Joshua 8 ) are pretty difficult, as are the commandments to Israel to do so in the Law (e.g. Deuteronomy 7). They’re very hard to understand, and are, of course, picked on frequently by opponents of Christianity.

I’m not going to pretend to answer all the questions about these, but I do think we need to understand them rightly. One passage that has an interesting bearing on this issue is 2 Samuel 21:1–2:

“Now there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year; and David inquired of the Lord. The Lord said, ‘There is blood-guilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death.’ So the king called the Gibeonites and spoke to them. (Now the Gibeonites were not of the people of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites; although the people of Israel had sworn to spare them, Saul had tried to wipe them out in his zeal for the people of Israel and Judah.)”

The story of the Gibeonites’ deception of Israel, resulting in the treaty that saved them, is recorded in Joshua 9. What’s interesting here, though, is the mention that Saul’s attempted genocide of them was (a) immoral, at least partly because of the treaty, and (b) motivated by nationalistic fervour — “zeal for the people of Israel and Judah”.

I think this is important to notice, because it reminds us that the devastations of Joshua etc. were not simply a matter of ethnic cleansing or nationalistic zeal (and so can never be taken as any kind of mandate for nationalistic expansion — in fact, Saul’s doing precisely that led to the famine). The “ban” on the inhabitants of Canaan was not really about Israel at all (cf. Deuteronomy 9:5). If we get that wrong, I don’t think we have a hope of making sense of them.

Dots and Strokes — Faithful in heart

One of the most famous sayings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is this one:

“You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27–28)

In a world as saturated in hard and soft pornography as ours, this is a profoundly confronting word (though to be honest, I think it has always been confronting).

What Jesus is saying, here as elsewhere in the Sermon on the Mount, is that what you do in your heart matters — that it is possible to sin in your thoughts and desires. To look at a woman “with lust” (which I think implies more than accidentally noticing that someone is attractive) is to commit the sin of adultery not bodily, but in the heart.

Various thoughts flow from this idea. Amongst other things, we might reasonably infer that other types of sexual sin can be committed in the heart. An unmarried person cannot, I take it, commit the sin of adultery, whether bodily or in the heart. But an unmarried person can commit the sin of fornication, in body, and, we may suggest, in the heart. This may be a useful way of clarifying our speech which will help us talk rightly about issues like pornography.

But what I want to do here is to ask what is the form of of godliness which obedience to this teaching produces. What, to put it differently, is the virtue that corresponds to this vice? I think we could characterise this as something like “purity of the heart”. What Jesus seeks in his people in teaching them about sexual sin in the heart is for them to have hearts which are pure. In the case of the married person, whom, I think, Jesus specifically addresses here, purity particularly means faithfulness. Our Lord wants married people to be faithful not just in body but in spirit: to be people of faithful hearts, hearts which belong solely to our husband or wife, and which flee from any form of unfaithfulness.

What does it look like to be a person who is faithful in heart as well as in body. At the very least it will mean refraining from lustful looking — the sin which Jesus emphasises. But it may also mean refraining from other forms of unfaithfulness of the heart — perhaps fantasy that imagines a more desirable partner rather than delighting in what is; or perhaps emotional unfaithfulness that looks too much to another friendship to satisfy needs.

I have found thinking in this way a helpful discipline. God does not simply want me to not do something. He wants me to be a particular type of person, a person who is faithful not just on the surface, but right the way down. I suspect this kind of thinking would also be fruitful for other aspects of Jesus’ teaching. Thoughts?

Dots and Strokes — A righteous quandry

In Deuteronomy 6:25, at the end of a major thematic statement about the nature of the Law and Israel’s obligations towards God, Moses declares,

If we are careful to obey all this law before YHWH our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.

What is the nature of the guarantee Moses asserts here? What does righteousness mean here and what does it mean for this to follow from careful obedience? These questions reach to the heart of the nature of the Old Covenant, and the relation of Jesus to it.

In particular, we need to ask: does righteousness have the same meaning here as it does in Paul’s theology? That is, is righteousness about being “in the right” with God, and so “saved” (I am aware that this is assuming much, but I don’t see a way around a basic meaning of something like this).

Some tricky implications follow if we say yes. Most glaringly, we have to ask how the apostle Paul can say that “by observing the law no one will be justified” (Galatians 2:16; Romans 3:20)?

As far as I can tell, we have two options at this point. (1) First, we could say that the guarantee in Deuteronomy 6:25 was a real one, but never realised. That is, obedience to the law genuinely did lead to righteousness, but, as Paul points out, no one ever achieved it. This, however, leads us to a real dilemma when we consider another key factor in this discussion: Old Covenant characters in the Bible who are described as “righteous”. There are several such characters, but Zechariah and Elizabeth are particularly stark examples: “both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly” (Luke 1:6). What do we do with this?

(2) Alternatively, we could say that when Paul said “by observing the law” he meant something different to what Moses meant when he said “if we are careful to obey all this law”. This may seem silly at face value, but it’s possible: Paul seems to emphasise the idea of reliance on the law (e.g. Romans 2:17; cf. Galatians 3:10). Is relying on the law what Moses was talking about? On this reading, Moses’ promise was real and Old Covenant saints like Zechariah and Elizabeth are examples of what it meant: they were truly righteous through obedience to the law. But, can we really say that “relying on the law” is not what Moses was talking about? And, where does this interpretation lead us to in terms of justification? Are we saying they were justified by works?

(3) The alternative to all of this, of course, is to say that no, actually, when Moses said “righteous” he meant something different to what Paul meant by “righteous”. Moses wasn’t talking about salvation or anything, he was talking about something a bit smaller — covenant responsibilities, perhaps. Saying this avoids a lot of the complications we’ve seen above. It would lead to the view that the Old Covenant saints have this righteousness, but that this was not righteousness in the sense Paul was interested in. However, this simplicity comes at a major cost, namely, the consistency of Scriptural terminology across the whole Bible. Do we really want to say that when we read about righteousness in the Old Testament it means something fundamentally different to righteousness in the New Testament? Would the apostle Paul have believed this?

I’m not sure what I think the answer to this one is. I’m not at all happy with option (3), though I know people who are. I’m also not happy with (1) because of what it implies about the law and because of the inconsistency with descriptions of people in the Bible. Though I’m also unclear about (2), I think overall it has the best potential. After all, what did being careful to obey the law look like according to Moses? At least in part it meant to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5). This was pretty important for Jesus, too. And I don’t find it too hard to believe that this was not, actually, what Paul was talking about when he said that no one will be justified by deeds prescribed by the law. I wonder if, for Moses, “being careful to obey” the law was not at all a matter of relying on the law?

Hmmmm…

Dots and Strokes* — Two metaphors for Christian maturity

In Colossians 2:6-7, Paul calls on believers,

“As you therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so live in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith…”

There are two metaphors here for the process of Christian maturation. One is drawn from organic life – a tree which is rooted; the other is architectural – a building which is built up. These two metaphors match (sort of), two other ideas the Bible frequently uses to describe Christian maturing: to grow (Greek auxano, e.g. Col 1:10; 1 Pet 2:2; 2 Pet 3:18) and to become complete or perfect (Greek teleioo or katartizo, e.g. Phil 1:6; Heb 13:21; Js 1:4).

It seems to me that we do well to pay attention to these two metaphors. They suggest different things. One implies the idea of flourishing, growing strength, development upwards and outwards – like a tree. The other has a real sense that there is a plan to which one is moving towards, a fitting and determined shape that is the goal of development.

My impression is that in thinking about what is good for people, our world and often our church is big on the first image, growth, but perhaps not so big on the second. We like the idea that I am to flourish, fulfilling my potential perhaps. But the idea that there is a right shape for me, that I was made to be a particular way and that it is not actually up to me to decide what that is, is not so trendy.

The Bible, however, has both these ideas, and both of them are for our good. We are meant to grow and flourish in Christ, like a tree; but we are also meant to become complete or finished, like a building.

*”Weekly Digests” have been renamed “Dots and Strokes”. This is a reference to Matthew 5:18, but was also necessitated by the irregularity of these posts, which had rendered the old name a bit of a nonsense.

Weekly Digest – Factions and possession

Towards the end of Paul’s long argument in response to the factionalism in the Corinthian church the apostle makes a surprising move. He returns to his central exhortation — “So let no one boast about human leaders” — but then says this as the reason:

For all things are yours, ²²whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you, ²³and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. (1 Cor. 3:21–23)

Why does Paul give this reason? What is the underlying rationale here? I think the apostle has tapped into something deeply interesting: what is attractive about factionalism is the sense of possession it creates. To be a member of a party defined over against other parties, and claiming to be the superior one, is to make a claim to possess truth most fully. And truth brings with it the sense of right, the right to control, the right to influence, the right to command. but Paul counters this with a remarkable claim: all things are yours! Because of Christ, there is no need to fight for possession, to treat life and power as a zero sum game where if one group has, the other does not. No, that is the way of the wisdom of the world; but that is foolishness to God (3:19). The fulness of possession that comes through Christ is the antidote to the competitive games of parties and gurus.