The relationship among the members of the Trinity is beautiful, indeed the very font of beauty. Such hasn’t, however, kept us sinners from finding ways to take the beauty and using it to bring the ugliness of division into the church. The Great Schism, theologically speaking, centered around a single word, filioque. The western church affirmed the Spirit is sent from the Father and the Son. The eastern church affirmed the Spirit is sent only from the Father. And behold there became two one true churches. In our own day, though with not quite the dramatic results, bitter debates on the nature of the relationship of the Father and the Son back into eternity have become the most arcane twitter fodder in its brief lifetime.
The church for five hundred years wrestled over the two intertwined questions of the incarnation and the Trinity. They have given us guidelines, fences within which we move, outside of which lies heresy. There is, however, something almost as difficult to fathom about Jesus here on earth. God in the flesh is the granddaddy of all mysteries. But then there’s this- how it is possible for Jesus to be fully human, yet without sin? It is not a stretch to imagine that, touching His deity Jesus could be without sin. Touching His humanity, however, that’s a tough sell. Indeed many attack the sinlessness of Jesus on this very point, suggesting that were He truly human He could not be without sin.
The Bible, long before the ecumenical creeds came along, is quite clear on the sinlessness of Jesus. While we must affirm that Jesus is one person with two natures, we must also remember that each nature retains its own attributes. That is, touching His deity, Jesus was and is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. Not so touching on His humanity. Which is precisely why it was possible for Him to grow in wisdom and stature with God and with man (Luke 2:52). When Jesus dazzled the scholars at the temple when He was only 13 it wasn’t because He was tapped into the divine mind. It was because He was without sin. No total depravity to direct Him toward sloth. No noetic effects to misguide His own thinking.
It is a good thing to speak in defense of the deity of Jesus. In an age where He is respected as a great moral teacher we must remember and press the wisdom of CS Lewis who reminds us that great moral teachers do not claim to be God. Jesus does. We must also, however, speak in defense of the humanity of Jesus. He is what we were meant to be. He is the Second Adam, everything the first Adam was before the fall, though in a fallen world. He is what we will one day be, the first born of many brothers.
What Jesus accomplished is precisely why we will be like Him. Not God incarnate, no. We will not be deified. We will, however, become what we were meant to be. Indeed we are headed there even now, growing in grace and wisdom by His grace and through His wisdom.
You want to know what your problem is? You don’t love Jesus enough. I know this not because I know you, but because I know me. I’ve got the same problem. My wife has the same problem, as do my kids. The sheep in my flock suffer from the same problem.
Wherever there is a sin-problem, underneath it all, is this problem. Husbands don’t love their wives as Jesus loves the church, because husbands don’t love Jesus enough. Children disobey their parents, because they don’t love Jesus enough. Pastors soft-pedal the Bible because they don’t love Jesus enough. And people hop from one church to another because they don’t love Jesus enough. Politicians grow power hungry because they don’t love Jesus enough. Rich people suffer from greed, because they don’t love Jesus enough. Middle class people suffer from greed, because they don’t love Jesus enough. Poor people suffer from greed, because they don’t love Jesus enough. Find a sin and you will find there a heart that doesn’t love Jesus enough. Find Jesus, and you will find the solution to our problem. Which is just what Jesus has promised will happen.
It is a good thing when evangelical Christians wake from their pietistic slumbers. It is good and proper that we should be about the business of making manifest the reign of Christ over all things. That He is Lord has effects that stray rather far from our hearts. We fight the culture wars because they are simply a manifestation of the war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. But the serpent is more crafty than any of the beasts of the field. He took the biblical wisdom that argued that we ought to tend to our souls, and turned it into world-denying piety. And now he takes the biblical wisdom that argues that we must push for the crown rights of King Jesus, and turned it into worldliness, and a denial of the call to piety. Jesus, on the other hand, calls us to seek first two things, the kingdom of God and His righteousness.
How can we seek two different things first? We do so when we realize that the weapons of our warfare, that the very engine of changing the world, is changing ourselves. The reign of Christ will be manifest in the political, social, artistic, cultural realms only insofar and only through the manifestation of the reign of Christ within His people. We will only make known the great Gospel truth that this is our Father’s world, as we live as pilgrims, recognizing that this world isn’t our home, that we are just passing through.
It is because we are worldly that we embrace the culture’s engines of change. We think that we will change ourselves and the world only as we read more books, make more movies, elect more politicians, produce more widgets, and add more programs to our churches. We think sanctification is a doctrine to be studied, rather than a calling to be pursued. In truth, it is neither. We do not pursue a calling, but a person. Sanctification isn’t merely the means by which we become more holy, but is the means by which we become more like Jesus. Just as He, the Son of God, is the express image of the glory of the Father, so we, the bride of Christ, are the image of our eternal Husband. We glorify Him by becoming more like Him.
This is the promise of God, the end of our sanctification, our glorification: “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Do you see the connection? We don’t know what we shall be, but we do know we will be like Him. How will we be like Him? What means brings this to pass? We shall see Him as He is. This is the glory of our King, not that He labors faithfully to change us, not that He changes us by the Word of His power, but that He changes us by the power of His glory. Seeing Him makes us like Him.
Which brings us back to our troubles. Our sanctification is long and laborious simply because we do not seek His face. We do not long for His presence. We do not seek to behold His glory, because we are insufficiently impressed. It is the pomp and the power, the dazzle and the sizzle, the bright lights and the baubles of the world around us that have captured our hearts. We don’t find His glory glorious enough, and so we are not yet like Him. We do indeed see through a glass darkly, a glass darkened by our love affair with the world. If we loved Him, we would seek Him. If we sought Him, we would find Him. If we found Him, we would see Him. And if we saw Him, we would be like Him. And believing this, John tells us, will purify us, “and everyone who thus hopes in Him purifies himself as He is pure” (v. 3). So may it be said of us.
There is one tell-tale fruit, but it may take a long time for it to happen. And even then you likely won’t see it. But here’s the fruit nonetheless — if the sinner ends up in heaven, you will know they had truly repented. If not, they likely had not. I understand the desire to know the sincerity of another’s repentance. I’ve been in countless pastoral situations wherein it seemed like the answer to that one question — is this person truly repentant — determined the answer to every other question about what should be done. Trouble is, God has not been pleased to give us the means to peer into the souls of others.
So what do we do? Consider the case of adultery, an all too common grievous sin. Suppose I am unfaithful to my wife. Suppose I claim to be repentant. What ought she to do? The Bible says that she is free to divorce me, but is not required to do so. Many times her decision is bound up in this question — is he repentant? But that’s not really the question. If I am repentant, her duty is to forgive me. But her duty is not to remain married to me. If I am feigning repentance, and she decides to stay with me, but later determines my repentance isn’t sincere, even if I so confess, she is not free to divorce me. That’s why my counsel in these circumstances is to encourage thinking through this question- would you, knowing what you now know, marry this person? If not, forgive and divorce. If so, forgive and stay together. But you don’t need to know if the repentance is sincere.
One parenthetical thought. I consider it good evidence, though not compelling proof, that a person is sincere in their repentance if they repent before their offense is known, and if they repent of what would otherwise never be known. Such doesn’t mean, on the other hand, that only this kind of repentance is sincere. David was busted by Nathan before he came to repentance. But I doubt anyone would doubt his sincerity after reading Psalm 51.
A second parenthetical thought. Remember that repentance doesn’t undo sin. It merely acknowledges that it can’t be undone. In like manner, repentance doesn’t atone for sin. Jesus does. The inescapable conclusion is, how much repentance is “enough?” It’s never enough. All of us, no matter how deeply we might repent, ought to repent for the shallowness of our repentance.
The hope that time will tell is elusive. The unrepentant can appear repentant for a long time. The repentant, on the other hand, sin all the time, making it all too easy to doubt their repentance. In the end, therefore, all we are left to do is to exercise our best judgment, and I would argue, to practice a judgment of charity. Perhaps the best indicator I know of is this — is the sinner owning their sin, and standing ready to do whatever is necessary to make right, as much as is possible what they have done. Which is to say, the repentant are those who repent. Can the unrepentant fake this? Yes, but usually they do not.
We cannot go through our lives afraid that we might forgive the unrepentant. We ought to go through our lives afraid we have failed to forgive the repentant. With the former we may allow ourselves to be wronged, with the latter we are wronging others.
It is all too easy, when dealing with a rather crafty devil, to lose sight of the real battle. As we witness the broader unbelieving culture sink ever more deeply into foolishness we exhibit our own foolishness when we think this is the end game of our enemy. The devil has precious little interest in making an unbelieving culture more unbelieving. In the great war between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman we know this- the seed of the serpent is already blind, enslaved, dead. Thus the serpent has no need to blind them, to bind them, to kill them.
If we would rightly understand the end game of Obergfell we would understand this not as an issue of Republican versus Democrat, not even as an issue of just how far unbelieving Americans might sink. Instead we would see it for what it was, not an assault on marriage, but an assault on the church. The relationship of Jesus and His church is the reality of which human marriage is the reflection. Men who practice perversion in private taking their perversion public isn’t much of a victory for old Scratch. Getting Christians to give up on marriage, now that is something to crow about.
With each passing week we have one of Big Eva’s ladies in waiting kissing a biblical sexual ethic goodbye, some progressive evangelical bemoaning their friend’s deconstruction of their faith over mean traditional evangelicals, some Big Steeple People coming to a new understanding that just happens to jibe with the prevailing cultural winds. What the devil is exploiting isn’t our own feeble understanding of manhood and womanhood but our prancing, mincing lack of masculinity. He knows we are cowards who run from battle, and harlots in the pay of the world.
In the meantime we have respectable conservatives acting respectably conservative. Like politicians who say one thing to their base and another when on the world’s stage, we spit and pulpit pound at CPAC while we stroke our beards and write nuanced think pieces for the New York Times. We keep backing up and drawing new lines in the sand while the enemy marches unflinchingly at us.
I remember like it was yesterday “World” magazine insisting that the day the Republican party turned its back on marriage they would turn their back on Republicans and encourage us all to do the same. It was about three election cycles ago. I remember thinking two things- first, no you won’t. Second, I know you won’t because you continually support candidates who promise to work to protect the rights of some parents to murder some unborn children. Anyone willing to bend on the murder of babies will not stand in defense of marriage.
What has our reasonableness, compromise, kowtowing won us? Defeat after defeat after defeat. It takes Matt Walsh, a bold non-evangelical blogger, to stump the heathen with his simple question, “What is a woman?” We continue to offer incense to our patron saint, Gamaliel.
Our calling, however, is to do the right thing, the speak the simple truths that make God’s enemies hate us. The results are in His good hands. He has called us to be faithful, not successful. When we forget this we join the forces of evil. The good news is that God is able to bring to repentance even the worst of sinners.
Dunamis Fellowship and Sovereign Grace Fellowship continue tonight our weekly Bible study at 7 eastern. Tonight, pt. 2 of Meeting Jesus. All are welcome at our home. You can even come early (6:15) and we’ll feed you. You can also watch on Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you join us.
