COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
Full confession: studying through Romans for the Former Adventist Podcast with Nikki Stevenson has opened my eyes in so many ways that I didn’t realize I needed them to be opened. My biggest surprise has been studying through the chapters AFTER Paul’s first eight in which he outlines our sin and our need of a Savior, of the Father’s provision for us, and of being ushered into spiritual life and being indwelled by the Holy Spirit when we trust and believe in Jesus’ finished work.
Those first eight chapters were places I had spent much study in the past, and while everything took on new depth and richness as Nikki and I studied through them, it has been the chapters explaining HOW God asks us to live in this world as believers that have created paradigm shifts in my understanding. In chapter 13, for example, Paul talks to us about practical reality: how to live as good citizens, honoring human leaders, learning to love both believers and unbelievers, conducting our practical affairs with integrity.
Many of the concepts Paul discusses in these chapters are not new ideas to me—but I am realizing that my Adventist background established a different understanding of, for example, what it means to love God with all one’s heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. On the surface, these ideas seem straightforward, but I am realizing that Adventism bequeathed to me a decidedly secular understanding of the world and of how Christians interface with the world.
Skewed History
One of the biggest shifts in my understanding is my growing awareness of how Christianity actually impacted the culture of the western world. I had realized, even as an Adventist, that in geographical areas where Judaism and Christianity did not play foundational roles—think tribal Africa, for example, and much of rural South America where dark paganism originally shaped the indigenous people—there was a difference in the development of industry, democratic government, education, and commerce that contrasted with the development of what we have come to call “western civilization”.
As an Adventist, I saw myself as part of the world blessed with “Christianity”, but the implications of what actually happened in the world when the Lord Jesus became incarnate and broke our curse of death were just invisible to me.
My observation, however, stopped there. As an Adventist, I saw myself as part of the world blessed with “Christianity”, but the implications of what actually happened in the world when the Lord Jesus became incarnate and broke our curse of death were just invisible to me. The sovereignty of God over the nations was something I simply could not see because “free will” trumped God’s power. The significance of God sending the Son in the fullness of time seemed poetic, a lovely way to explain His unexpected appearance—and I simply couldn’t see that the “fulness of time” was predetermined by God. It wasn’t random, and it wasn’t dependent upon human readiness: it was the time God established from eternity. Jesus came exactly on schedule, and no human free will was involved in facilitating or hindering His appearance.
Now, though, after podcasting through Daniel, Revelation, and now Romans, I see more clearly than ever that God is 100% sovereign over the nations. In fact, He revealed to a pagan Babylonian king—Nebuchadnezzar—His own predetermined plan for the gentile nations that would rule the world until the Son of Man Himself will surprise the unprepared and establish a kingdom not of this world—a kingdom that will destroy the pagan powers that have gripped the world with an evil, invisible hand.
Furthermore, He revealed to His own exiled prophet Daniel exactly how these evil, invisible powers would impact Daniel’s own people—Israel—until their true King would finally appear and establish His kingdom.
Enter Paul. This apostle chosen by the risen Christ as “one untimely born”, as he described himself in 1 Corinthians 15:8, was given a special grace from God: the assignment to explain “to everyone” (Ephesians 3:9) how the administration of the mystery of the church would work. Paul is the one who explained how gentiles, who were never part of Israel and were strangers to the covenants and the promises of God, were nonetheless brought near to God through the blood of Christ.
In Christ, both Jews and gentiles who believe God and trust the Lord Jesus and His completed atonement, are created into one “new man”: the church, the body of Christ, the born-again who are indwelled by the Holy Spirit of promise! (See Ephesians 1:13, 14 and Ephesians 2:11–22.)
The church—the body of Christ over whom Jesus is the Head (see Ephesians 5:22–33)—is something completely NEW in the world. The Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit first indwelled believers in Jesus, birthed something that had never been seen in the word previously.
As an Adventist, I knew that Pentecost was “the birth of the church”, but I believed “the church” was simply a group of people who intellectually understood that Jesus had come and had more enlightened insights to share with people darkened by paganism. I believed the church had better knowledge and more humane worship than did ancient people—and I also believed that the church had an updated, more civilized understanding of God than the Israelite Bible writers had.
We knew, as the “modern church”—the true “spiritual Israel”—that God’s character wasn’t really vengeful or demanding of the death of entire nations. Whatever those Old Testament stories were about, I believed that they were recorded according to the understanding and worldview of the primitive people who wrote them down.
Today, I realize that my Adventist worldview was arrogant and just plain wrong. To think that “modern humans” could reinterpret God and His word and make it more accurate is shameful—and I have had to repent of my Adventism and of the lies that warped how I understood God.
God has always been God, and His word is as sure and eternal as He Himself (see Hebrews 4:11, 12). His word has power over US—it reveals our own hearts to ourselves and shows us the truth about our sovereign Creator who reveals Himself to us and shows us that we need a Savior!
So—how have these new understandings about God, His word, and the church changed my view of how a believer interacts with the world?
Jesus Brought True Love
As I have studied through Romans, I have been grateful for a gift from Nikki: a pair of commentaries on Romans by the late Donald Gray Barnhouse. His insights into God’s sovereign acts in history and how the church interfaces with the culture have shifted my understanding of so much of Paul’s teaching that used to seem like moral advice. Now I see his straightforward admonitions about things such as paying taxes, owning no monetary debts, and caring for one’s neighbor as the fruit of something new in the world—something that did not exist here before Jesus came.
Let me back up. A couple of years ago I realized that the Law had given Israel a strong sense of justice. Unlike the nations surrounding Israel, God’s people had Yahweh’s word that He was just, merciful, loyal, and gracious. They knew that Yahweh Himself would demand justice of them as a nation—and also that He would demand justice of all humanity.
The law was just and detailed; Israel had legal requirements that kept them from exacting personal revenge on those who wronged them. The law dictated that punishment had to be proportional to the crime, but punishment was mandated.
Furthermore, the law prohibited the killing of human sacrifices. Firstborn sons were set apart for God—but unlike the pagan nations, no Israelites were allowed to sacrifice their firstborns. Instead, they were redeemed. The Levites as a tribe were dedicated to God’s service at the tabernacle, and they were God’s provision for the redemption of the firstborn. Israel also had laws for the redemption of indentured servants and of property—and these laws were detailed and fixed.
Israel’s Judaism, in other words, was a JUST religion—and the justice Yahweh demanded along with His presence in their midst in the Most Holy Place of their tabernacle set them apart from all other nations. Yahweh was righteous, and Israel was to reflect His righteousness and justice to the world. But Judaism as a system lacked provision for forgiveness. Even today, Judaism has laws for justice but has no provision for forgiveness.
The Lord Jesus, however, brought something new into the world. Through His propitiation for sin, His burial, and His resurrection which broke our curse of death, Jesus brought love and forgiveness into the world.
The Lord Jesus, however, brought something new into the world. Through His propitiation for sin, His burial, and His resurrection which broke our curse of death, Jesus brought love and forgiveness into the world. Donald Gray Barnhouse says this about Jesus’s new revelation:
Jesus Christ brought true love into the world. This is not astonishing, for Jesus Christ is God, and God is love. It cannot be said that there was love in the world before the time of Christ, in the sense we know love today. There was affection between man and wife, although most marriages were made by the fathers, and the role of the girl was to obey and submit. There were rare examples like the bond between Damon and Phintias, usually called Pythias; but in the ancient world true philanthropy and neighborliness were unknown. Gibbon declares that one half the population of the Roman Empire lived in slavery, and later writers consider this figure too conservative. They believe that during the reign of Emperor Tiberius Claudius, (A.D 41–45), there were three slaves for every freeman and more than twenty million slaves, most of them white men, lived in Italy.
The Lord Jesus came into a pagan world and operated from a completely different foundation than that of a natural man born dead in sin. Jesus was born without a trace of sin because He was born spiritually alive. Conceived by the Holy Spirit, He never had a spirit dead in sin as all of us have who are born in Adam. As a man who was spiritually alive, He never resorted to being a victim, to self-protection. As God the Son He knew that the people He came to serve were helpless and frantic, like sheep without a shepherd.
The Lord Jesus threw traditional Judaism into a panic—but those few who never gave up hope that their Messiah would come followed Him. Jesus brought them hope—the message that they were sinners and needed to be rescued—and He Himself was their rescuer.
When the Lord Jesus came, God’s own love entered the world in a person who touched thousands of lives. The crowds flocked to Him because no man had ever spoken as He spoke. He declared the kingdom of God was among them, and He called them to believe.
Then, when Jesus was crucified and “became sin for us” (2 Cor. 5:21) as He hung on the cross, enduring His Father’s wrath that we deserved but that He took before dying our death, being buried, and then shattering the curse into which we were born, Jesus revealed something no human could have foreseen. He opened a new and living way to the Father so we can approach our holy God without fear on the basis of Jesus’ sacrifice. Here is how Hebrews explains this singularity:
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh, and since [we have] a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.—Hebrews 10:19–22 LSB
Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection brought something completely NEW into the world: the reality that dead-in-sin people can be literally born of God and pass from death to life! John put it this way:
But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, [even] to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.—John 1:12,13 LSB
We Carry God’s Love
Now, when we believe in the Lord Jesus and trust His finished atonement for our sin, we receive His eternal, resurrection life. The resurrection is the evidence that Jesus’ blood satisfied the Father; sin has already been fully atoned! When we believe and trust Him, that eternal life—that reversed curse of death—is granted to us.
God gives us a new heart and a new spirit, and on top of that—He places His own Spirit in us:
In Him, you also, after listening to the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation–having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, unto the redemption of [God’s own] possession, to the praise of His glory.—Ephesians 1:13, 14 LSB
And here is where we understand what Barnhouse was saying: as believers, we literally bear the presence of God into the world. We are placed in Christ, and as His body, we bear His personal love and compassion into the world as He did when He was here. He loves the world through us.
This literal presence of God, the expression of His personal love ministered through His own people, was not in the world before Jesus atoned for sin and opened the way for us to approach the Father directly.
Before the Lord Jesus redeemed us from our enslavement to sin by His own substitutionary death, real love was not in the world.
Now we who are born again bear Jesus’ presence in the world. He teaches us to recognize needs and to minister to one another and to our unbelieving neighbors with the compassion and mercy of God Himself.
Because we have Christ in us, our marriages are rescued from the power struggles of Eden’s consequences. Because we have Christ in us, we can love our families with selfless love when we trust God in our temptations and struggles.
Because we have Christ in us, we are also able to set boundaries of protection when people blaspheme our Lord Jesus and His gospel. Because we love our Savior and those for whom He died, we protect hardened unbelievers from increasing their sin. We can shake the dust from our feet in the face of blasphemy, allowing the Holy Spirit to deal with the unrepentant while we protect them from hardening themselves by resisting our confessions of Christ.
Because we have Christ in us, we have been freed from fear. No longer can people’s disrespect and anger silence us if the Lord directs us to speak. We are safe in Him, and His love in us equips us to speak for Him when He asks us to speak.
Because we have Christ in us, Jesus’ promise to us is certain:
“Now when they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and the authorities, do not worry about how or what you are to speak in your defense, or what you are to say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.”—Luke 12:11, 12 LSB
By God’s sovereign will, He has placed us on earth at this time, in the communities in which we live, and the churches in which we worship, and with the work He prepared in advance for us to do—all for His glory.
We live our mundane lives, walking through the obligations of work, families, homes, and food prep with joy instead of despair, because we have God’s Spirit in us. Because of the Lord Jesus, we are able to love those around us for God. He has given us our lives to make His love tangible to the world. We bear Him and His truth in a dark world—and His love reveals what is hidden in darkness.
I now understand better than before what Jesus meant when He said,
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor does [anyone] light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”—Matthew 5:14–16 LSB
Jesus now loves the world through our interactions with those we encounter. We have been born of God, and we know that the He is faithful. He loved us so that we can love the world. In Barnhouse’s words:
Because we are so loved by Christ, our thoughts of love must turn toward Him, and as a result our love will radiate to all members of the race, especially to those who are in the body of Christ.
We are part of Christ’s body, and He has given each of us a role to play in making His love known in the world. †
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