Sunday, April 17, 2011

The Great Purge

who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. (Hebrews 01:03-04, NKJV).
Christ, alone, once for all and for all time, made Himself the expiatory sacrifice, the final payment, that cleansed forever our sins.
We were lepers. He made us clean, curing us of the incurably fatal disease that would slowly rot us to eternal death from the inside out.

He had no help, no supporting ritual or law, no backing, and received no mercy. Upon Him was heaped all God's righteous and unsparing wrath against evil and rebellious mankind. The judgment that we deserved, He voluntarily took upon Himself, and by doing so, made us clean for all eternity, if - and this is crucial - we, by faith, confess with our mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in our hearts that God has raised Him from the dead.

The word, translated purged, depicts what happens when some defiling filth is completely obliterated, as if it were never there in the first place. This is important, because without that understanding it is possible to think that Christ's shed blood in payment for sin can somehow, and in some way, be undone. We can mistakenly and tragically believe that once saved, we can render Jesus' work on the Cross moot and ineffective.

That is blasphemy.

Think about it. How can we mere mortals, created beings, negate an act of God? If we, collectively and individually, are powerless against natural phenomena deemed acts of God, like earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, hurricanes, volcanoes and the like, how could we possibly attribute to ourselves the ability to undo the Crucifiction of Christ?

Granted, we human beings have a distorted species self-image. We think we are something. Even those of us who ironically believe that humanity is the scourge of the earth, do so because they operate under the illusion of human power. Their misguided notion is that humans control the destiny of the planet, despite the fact that all history indicates otherwise.

Here's what humanity willingly denies: God is in control. Even most Monotheists, excluding Biblical Christians, believe that humans actively impact ultimate destiny. This is absurd. It would be like a person standing on the shore of the sea as a tsunami approaches, thinking that they could stem the tide.

Now there are two mistakes that can be made regarding Divine Determinism (an academic label for God's absolute Sovereignty). The first is that nothing we do actually matters, and the second is its converse, we can do anything we want once saved.

The first proposition would only be true if God chose not to use human beings to further His divine purposes. This is clearly not the case. One of the miraculous competencies of God is that He carries out His plans in the midst of human free will, and He does so by orchestrating trillions of threads of activity in order to bring about the outcome He desires, and has purposed before time began. And He does so while still maintaining His gift to us of free moral agency. You try that for even a half-hour a see how far you get.

That He has condescended to allow us, His creatures, to participate in His foreordained outcomes is a gracious gift. Our prayers, our actions, our intentions have impact. Often, it is those very activities that bring about His results. And then He rewards us for them as if we did all the work. The Book of Esther brings this point home beautifully. Mordecai says to his niece, in effect, if you don't approach the King, God will raise up someone else to save His people, but it is likely that your entire life was orchestrated for such a time as this.

The second propositional error, that we have liberty to do whatever we want once saved because we are secure no matter what, is based on faulty logic. By definition, salvation involves regeneration, being made a new creation in Christ. We are changed existentially, meaning that we are no longer of the same nature we were before. The Bible describes this as our old nature having been crucified with Christ, with our new nature reborn in Him.

Our essential being is different as Christians. The thoughts and intents of our hearts are no longer the same. What was obscured before is made clear. What seemed natural before is now alien. That which was right in our own eyes, we now judge through His eyes, having His wisdom. And we are fundamentally different.

If we don't act according to our new nature, if we continue consciously, arrogantly, joyfully, pre-meditatively, practicing sin, then the evidence indicates that we are not changed, and are not His. If the old ways are our preferred ways, then simply put, we are not saved, and we have no reason to be assured of anything except damnation.

In other words, we have not been purged. We have rejected the only remedy for our incurable affliction, and we will die in our sin.

Christ did what He did on the Cross out of love. He was able to accomplish that work because of who He is, the magnificent, beneficent Savior. 

To reject Him is to reject life and embrace death.