A dangerous question

Cover of All of Grace

At Redeemer this week we looked at the question Paul raises in Romans 6:1:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?

The good news, as presented in Scripture, leads a reader to naturally conclude that the freedom given by Jesus means that I can just keep on sinning when I become a Christian. So, some guy’s cheating on his wife and becomes a Christian – great news! But he keeps on cheating on his wife. Is this contrary to the Bible’s good news? According to Paul, who wrote the book of Romans, probably not; it’s the natural conclusion.

Now wait one cotton pickin’ minute. Surely that can’t be right? The Bible’s always going on about how bad sin is and how great it is to do good – doesn’t this undermine everything? Well, Paul doesn’t let us hang on for too long; the immediate answer is ‘By no means!’ because in Christ we have died to sin, so why should we continue living in it?

As Christians we’re new creations, we’ve been born again, so we’re free to be good, where before we were slaves to sin. In fact, Romans 6 goes so far as to say that we’re slaves to righteousness – as Christians we need now to actively rebel if we’re to sin. And that’s pretty sobering.

But what this all comes down to is that the Christian message is one that is all of grace. If the good news we’re preaching doesn’t make people ask ‘you mean I can just keep on sinning and God loves me all the same?’ it’s not the good news preached in the Bible.

How to spot a false gospel

The Bible is pretty keen that we get the message of Christianity right. The apostle Paul writes to the Galatians and says, ‘even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.’ Even if an angel came down from heaven and preached a different message? This is clearly important.

But it’s sometimes very difficult to spot a false gospel – when several significant leaders all claim to be Christian but all preach a different gospel, which one should we respond to?

Well, if you work in a bank then you might be trained on how to spot counterfeit money. Makes sense. But how would you be trained? I can tell you what you wouldn’t do: you wouldn’t spend ages looking at every different counterfeit anyone can think of, because how would you know if a new counterfeit appeared? What you’d do is study the real thing in such detail that you’d simply know how to identify the real thing, and therefore what to reject as false.

Surely the same’s true with Christianity. I remember finding a website a few years ago which literally specialised in as many different heresies as it could find. I’m sure the owners of that site had great intentions but surely they’d be doing a better job for themselves and the global church if instead they simply aimed to familiarise everyone with the genuine gospel?

So here’s how to be an expert on spotting false gospels: completely immerse yourself in the Bible. Read it, re-read it, and read it again. Learn how God thinks. Then, when someone preaches some false gospel: ‘God wants everyone to be healthy by faith!’ we can instantly respond with: ‘That just smells funny; Timothy was sick but Paul’s instruction was for him to drink some wine.’

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Proverbs 1:17-19

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Continuing from last week’s study of how we should not walk with sinners, Solomon continues:

‘For in vain is a net spread in the sight of any bird, but these men lie in wait for their own blood; they set an ambush for their own lives. Such are the ways of everyone who is greedy for unjust gain; it takes away the life of its possessors.’ (Proverbs 1:17-19)

Quick recap: what are we talking about?

The ‘for’ at the beginning of this passage should cause us to ask what came before, and we’ve basically just been warned not to allow our attitudes and actions to be affected by non-Christians’ attitudes and actions.

Setting a trap

Solomon’s picture here is a little silly, and that’s intentional. He says that if you set a trap for a bird where it can see it, you won’t catch the bird. In contrast to this, sinners set their own trap! It’s a bit like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon where he feels the need to test the trap he’s set for Road Runner. Solomon is basically saying that committing sins is foolishness. If I break one of God’s laws, I’m setting myself up for a fall. The apostle Paul catches onto this truth in his letter to the Romans 1:18-32 (I’m just picking out the key phrases here, but I’d encourage you to read the whole thing:

‘…the wrath of God is revealed from heaven…his invisible attributes…have been clearly perceived…So they are without excuse…Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves…For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions…and [they are] receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.’

In essence, Paul is saying that sin, in part, is its own punishment. Committing adultery against your wife is sin, and common sense tells us that it’s simply a bad idea. It could mean the loss of your marriage, it could have impacts on your finances, on your relationship with your parents and children, and on your emotional state. Only a fool would do such a thing. That’s Solomon’s point. Sinners are setting their own trap, blinded by Satan’s lies about sin to the immediate consequences, whether obvious or more subtle.

The ultimate consequence

The argument back (from the very fools Solomon is warning against) at this point would be that the adultery in itself didn’t cause the bad consequences. In reality, if no-one ever found out about your unfaithfulness, your marriage could very well continue. But that’s not where the passage ends. Solomon says that chasing after sin in this way ‘takes away the life of its possessors.’ Again, Paul talks about this in Romans 6:23: ‘For the wages of sin is death.’ So sin has bad effects on our earthly lives, but sin has bad effects eternally as well. Solomon’s warning is a desperate scream to a child who is about to jump off a cliff to see if she can fly: ‘STOP! STOP!’

All of Scripture points us to Jesus of Nazareth, the man who was God, the man who took upon himself that ultimate consequence so that we might live. I’ll close with the words of a song by Matt Redman called For The Cross:

When you were broken, you were beaten,
You were punished, I go free
You were wounded and rejected
In your mercy – I am healed

Proverbs 1:10-16

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‘My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. If they say,

“Come with us, let us lie in wait for blood;
let us ambush the innocent without reason;
like Sheol let us swallow them alive, and whole, like those who go down to the pit;
we shall find all precious goods, we shall fill our houses with plunder;
throw in your lot among us;
we will all have one purse”—

my son, do not walk in the way with them; hold back your foot from their paths, for their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed blood. (Proverbs 1:10-16)

Don’t walk with sinners

Solomon’s words here are grave, and sincere: Don’t walk with sinners, because the path they’re walking is, as The Message interprets it, ‘racing to a very bad end’. But what does Solomon mean when he says, ‘sinners’? Don’t we all sin? To answer this question we must return to the concept of fools and fear of the LORD, which we encountered back in week one of this series. True, all of us sin. But if we are Christians, it is incorrect to take the title ‘sinner’. Our identity should not be found in sins we have committed, but in Jesus of Nazareth, who never committed a single sin yet took the punishment for all of ours. The title we should take is ‘saint’.

So ‘sinners’, in effect, are non-Christians. Is Solomon saying we shouldn’t spend time with non-Christians?

Walk: verb

The key to understanding this passage is in what the ‘sinners’ say. Their list of things they are inviting the reader to do is not a pleasant list: ‘let’s kill, ambush and steal, then share the booty!’ The phrase ‘to walk with’ is used throughout the Bible to essentially mean ‘live in the manner of’. This means that this passage isn’t telling us not to hang out with non-Christians, it’s telling us not to become like non-Christians in their attitudes and actions. The apostle Paul touches on this as well when he talks about not being ‘unequally yoked’ (2 Corinthians 6:14).

The alternative

Paul presents an alternative to walking with ‘sinners’: ‘…let us also walk by the Spirit.’ (Galatians 5:25) This instruction comes after his description of the fruit of the Spirit: ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.’ Compare that list with the enticement offered by Solomon’s sinners; which do you think is the best?

What does this actually mean?

It’s all very well talking about walking along this spiritual path, and growing in spiritual fruit, but what does that practically mean? Well, it doesn’t mean suddenly deleting all your non-Christian friends’ numbers from your phone book. We have been called to be light in the darkness, and we can’t do that unless we’re intentionally hanging out with those who are in darkness. What this text is telling us, however, is to be careful what habits we catch from non-Christians. I work for a secular organisation so I spend more time each day in a non-Christian environment than at home. It’s actually quite hard to prevent myself from simply picking up swear words and crude jokes as part of my everyday vocabulary.

What’s your biggest weakness? Perhaps you don’t spend any time with non-Christians, being a visible witness of God’s gospel to them: that’s your challenge for this week. But perhaps you’re like me and find it easy to take on coarse language without realising it. Maybe you’re more deeply impacted by the level of sexual immorality that’s present in secular culture. Maybe it’s an attitude towards money or possessions, or the lower (or higher) classes, or those of a different cultural background. Have a look today at where your vulnerabilities are, and take care to guard yourself against them, or else we may find that we too are ‘racing to a very bad end’.

What is the church?

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I read an article recently about martyrdom. I’m odd like that.

I’d always taken it as read that martyrdom was fertiliser for the gospel – John Piper’s teaching on this had always been encouraging, Paul’s words about ‘filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions’ (Colossians 1:24) as well as testimonies from all over the world had underlined this assumption. Not to mention Tertullian’s famous quote, ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church’.

But this article had a slightly different take on the whole issue of martyrdom, and pointed out that:

the membership of the Evangelical Christian Baptists (registered and unregistered) in the Soviet Union had dropped from approximately 1,000,000 in 1926 to just under 249,000 in 1993…The Communists almost succeeded.

So on this occasion the size of the church actually shrunk due to persecution.

Or did it?

I have no doubt whatsoever that the number of church members shrunk, but I wonder whether our definition of the church needs to be rethought for this – does the fact that you’re a member of a local church mean that you’re a member of the global church?

I think that the author of this article is talking only about the visible church. Even after seeing these statistics I’d still say that the church was potentially growing under persecution, because those who left the church would most likely be those who attended without having submitted their entire lives to Christ.

Not trying to be controversial, just a thinking point – if the church you attend was subjected to persecution would you leave?

Can you be a part of the global body of Christ without being part of the visible church?

Why suffering

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I’m currently listening to an audiobook by Randy Alcorn – it’s very good. I’m sure the review will be up soon at my book review blog.

Anyway, in this book he asks the tough question: why does suffering exist? He answers the question in a number of different ways but for me one of the highlights was when he looked at Romans 8:

‘I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us…For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.’

If the apostle Paul were asked, ‘Why suffering?’ he would answer in one word: ‘Glory.’

Suffering is real. Suffering is bad. But the result is glory. F. F. Bruce explained that glory is not compensation for suffering, but the result of it; suffering is actually necessary for our future glory.

This is ultimately seen in the cross of Christ. The resurrection is not there to make up for Jesus’ suffering on the cross, it could only happen because of his suffering on the cross.

Paul’s picture of childbirth is perfect: without the pain, there would be no new life.

Let’s not imagine that somehow Satan is thwarting God’s plans by making us and others suffer; it’s all part of God’s ultimate redemptive story, and the future glory is surely going to outshine any suffering anyone has experienced while on this earth.