Yes, Virginia, there is. The true church is made up of all those churches that confess the true faith. We can divide the true church into the visible church and the invisible. The former contains all those who have a credible profession of faith. The latter includes only those who have actual possession of faith. The visible church, until the end, will always be a corpus per mixtum, a mixed body consisting of wheat and tares. That is true of the individuals therein but also the doctrine confessed. That is, when we say the true church confesses the true faith we do not mean she does so perfectly. We all have errors in our thinking, and they, like tares in our hearts and minds, will be there until the end.
Typically, however, those looking for the one, true church are looking for a visible institution, an entity with an address. The problem is, of course, that there have been competing institutions making this claim for thousands of years. Do you suppose that when the Jerusalem Council made their declaration against the Judaizers in the first century that the Judaizers all repented? Do you think those who didn’t repent converted to some other religion? No, they continued on, claiming that they would faithfully pray for that schismatic group in Jerusalem and would welcome them back with open arms if they would simply repent and be circumcised.
That wasn’t the last split either. There were many more long before the Reformation, and have been more since then. The one-true-church buffet offered a long and heavy laden table filled to the brim with options. Eastern or Western rite? Pre or post Vatican II? Pope Snap or Pope Crackle or Pope Pop? The Reformation may have expanded the menu but it was already quite a tome.
Which ironically is what so often makes people go off in search of the one true church. It’s confusing, disheartening and more than a little scary to not know which group has it all together. The defining quality, however, of the one true church, is that it is made up of all those who know they have nothing together and know their only hope isn’t the one true church but the one true Savior.
The one true church, like every pretender to the title, has within its walls areas of disagreement. Those who baptize babies and those who don’t can’t both be right. Those who say the cup is literally the blood of the Lord and those who say it is not cannot both be right. They can, however, be a part of the same body. For the body is the body of Christ. The one true church is that place where there is liberty on secondary matters and immovability on the primary, where we confess that we are sinners whose only hope is in the God-Man, Jesus Christ who died for our sins, was raised again and is seated at the right hand of the Father. Where we confess that He will come again to judge the quick and the dead. Where we confess our belief in one, holy and catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting..
We move too fast over God’s Word. We skim lightly over the very voice of God, and so miss its thundering, reverberating tones. We are too hurried to allow the tension to build, the drama to heighten to just the right pitch. And so the fireworks fizzle. It might slow us down, it might help us enter into the story if we would enter into the telling of the story. Imagine then that you are in the desert. You have just witnessed the all powerful hand of God most high bring down your former master. He is taking you to a land flowing with milk and honey. You are on the other side of the drama, just the turn of a page away from “And they all lived happily ever after.” As you sit with your family, free, around a fire at night. Moses begins to tell you the beginning of your story. He describes that power that freed you as it first freed the light from the nothingness. He explores not just the power of God, but His wisdom as God separates day from night, land from sea.
Moses paints the picture of God painting His garden, and setting His children therein. Eden has all the glory of the Promised Land. And you are almost there. Almost there. Moses sips from his wineskin, takes a deep breath, and continues the story- Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the beasts of the field. Wait. What?! You are jolted, alert, your attention focused like a laser. A cloud has passed over, chilling your bones. An owl in the distance hoots. All the portents have come out to play.
This changes everything. Would you be tempted to rush on to the next verse, or would you stay a spell? What is this serpent, slippery, slithering into paradise? And what is his crafty craft? Therein lies the tail. The serpent’s goal is less crafty, more crass. He is at war with God. He seeks to topple Him from His throne. His seething hatred of God drives him to a seething hatred of man. His rage at the grandeur of the power of God’s Word, that has just fashioned the whole of the universe leads Him to speak his lie to God’s truth.
His enemy, ultimately isn’t obedience. His weapon, ultimately, isn’t pleasure. It is indeed a part of his craftiness that we think his strategy is to set before us illicit pleasures to tempt us away from the living God. But pleasure is God’s gift so even illicit pleasures are anemic evils. The great evil is when we fail to believe God. The first temptation in the garden wasn’t the fruit. That, after all, would have eventually been given to Adam and Eve. Indeed the serpent didn’t begin his beguiling by talking up the fruit. Instead he began with a question- has God indeed said? The serpent invited Eve to do something truly evil, to doubt the truth of God’s Word. And so he has been doing ever since.
This is why Satan is called the Father of Lies. It isn’t merely that he lies a great deal of the time. It isn’t that he isn’t shy about lying. It is that lying is essential to what he is; it is part and parcel of his nature. It defines him. We must remember, however, that he is crafty. A crafty liar doesn’t tell us black is white, up is down, evil is good. That’s too direct an approach, to ineffective a strategy. No, the craftiness of the devil is that he melds together just enough truth to get us to buy into the lie.
Consider his name. Satan means the accuser. His delight is to remind us of the depth of our sin, to fill us with discouragement and doubt. His accusations hit their mark, they sting, precisely because they are true. The devil tells us we are guilty of this, that we are tainted by that. He shows us the sins we have committed and reminds of the terrible truth that we are apt to commit them again. Here his failure to tell the truth isn’t because he is overstating his case, but because he is understating it. His error is because he doesn’t know us well enough. We are far, far worse than he says.
He accuses, however, not to get us to believe the truth that we are guilty, but to get us to believe the lie that we are not forgiven. The unspoken lie, the one he is so desperate to persuade us of is- God could never forgive and love someone as vile as you. The first premise is true – we are wicked, wicked people. But the second, but unspoken premise, that God could never love and forgive wicked, wicked people, is false, which leads us to the false conclusion, God could never love and forgive me. The devil doesn’t want us to doubt our guilt, but to doubt His grace.
The solution then to fighting the devil is less resolve not to fall into sensual sin, but resolve to believe God, beginning with His promises to us in the gospel. It is to embrace the totality and immutability of our forgiveness in Christ. It is to rest in, give thanks for our adoption as His sons. It is resting in His grace that quenches his fiery darts. How then can we believe? It begins with heeding what God says. When our diet is His Word, when we feast upon His promises written in His book, our faith grows stronger. When we read account after account in the Scripture of God rescuing His own, forgiving His own, delighting in His own we not only have no reason to fear the devil, but can laugh in his impudent face.
Our Father has given us food for our strength. When we come to His table we feel the weight of the accusations. When we behold the broken body and spilled blood of our Lord we remember that we crucified the Lord of Glory. But we do not go to our Father’s table to be condemned but to be welcomed. We are the olive plants that adorn His table (Psalm 128). His table is a place of welcome, of peace, of family. It is a foretaste of eternity, a look forward to the marriage feast of the lamb. He prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemy. There we see and taste all that we have been promised. There he sees all that he has lost. We rest; he rages.
With His first step out of the tomb, our Lord crushed the head of the serpent. The glorious truth is that for all of his bluster, all of his fury, the devil is defeated. He is Hitler in his bunker as the allies descended on Berlin. He’s already dead; he just won’t admit it. The serpent is more crafty than any of the beasts of the field. He was a liar from the beginning. And he will lie to the end. Then however, through clenched teeth and bitter tears he will speak the truth with all of creation- Jesus Christ is Lord.
This “Ask RC” goes back twenty years. This question was asked of me by a friend with a preternatural gift of asking what he calls “diagnostic questions,” questions that slip into ordinary conversation that end up, before we know what has happened, exposing our souls. I, having known this friend for some time, had learned to be on my guard when he asked it. I took a minute or two to think it through and answered this way- “I know what I would want on my tombstone, but I also know what I ought to want on my tombstone.” He gave me liberty to give both. “Well, I said, “were I completely honest, when I consider the kind of reputation I long to have, my answer would be this- I’d like my tombstone to say this of me, ‘Courageous.’ But, a good portion of that desire is born out of my pride. Looking at the question objectively, what I ought to want on my tombstone is this, ‘Righteous.’”
The great thing about a good diagnostic question, the real power comes in the hard reality that we’re not on our guard, and we don’t have much time to come up with a pious answer. Instead we usually give an honest one. The second great thing is that they really do get to the heart of the matter, our own hearts. These kinds of questions, however, if we do allow them to percolate, have the potential over time to change our hearts. They reveal our sin in the short term, giving us time to repent and believe in the long term.
Which brings me to my current answer. I still love and long for courage, love and long for righteousness. As time goes on however I come to know more and more how much I fall short. And thus my current answer would be this- repentant. If I could be known for one thing, to friends, family, and even to the broader world, I pray it would be that I am a repentant man. When I die I pray that those who speak good words about me at my funeral would have just this to say about me, “He was a man who was quick, and deep to repent.”
Given that the first time I was asked I was given wiggle room to give two answers, one more honest, the other more pious, I want again to plead for a second answer. Right under repentant I would hope I could have another descriptive for my life- grateful. The good news isn’t merely that His Spirit gives us the power to repent, but that if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Repentance is that which brings us to forgiveness, to adoption, which ought, of course, to lead us to gratitude. I don’t repent with a vague hope that I might somehow be forgiven. I repent in the joyous certainty of this faithful and true saying, that Christ came into this world to save sinners, of which I am chief.
My prayer is that insofar as I am remembered in my death, it will be for that which defines my life. I’m a sinner, saved by grace.
We are all mirrors cracked. Man, as man, was made to reflect the glory of God. Adam and Eve were put into the Garden to reflect their Maker, to show forth His glory. In defying Him and eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil the mirror that we were shattered.
While we rightly mourn over this destruction, we would be wise to note that it is not, at least yet, total. A shattered mirror isn’t something we want to use to help us shave, but it retains some of its former features. That is, a shattered mirror is part mirror, part cracks. The image may indeed be hideous, but it is still an image. God made us to worship Him, and to exercise dominion over His creation for His glory. In our fallen state we worship the creature rather than the Creator, and exercise dominion for our own glory. That we worship is a sure sign that there is mirror left in us. That we worship creatures is a sure sign that there are cracks. That we exercise dominion is where we see the mirror pieces. That we do it for our glory is where we see the cracks.
But God. When we are born again, when we embrace the work of Christ for us, we are declared to be whole, righteous, all mirror and no crack. When our Father looks at us He sees Himself, because He sees His Son, the express image of His glory (Hebrews 1:3). Sanctification is that process by which we are being remade into what He has already declared us to be. The scars, the cracks in our mirrors are healed over time such that we more accurately reflect who He is. We become over time more and more mirror, less and less crack.
The process, however, moves in the opposite direction as well. Those who are outside of Christ, who have not been given the gift of new birth, instead grow more dead. They yet have slivers of mirror, out of which they may love their children, help those in need, exercise dominion. Those slivers, however, are becoming smaller and smaller. In us cracks become mirror. In them mirror becomes cracks. Glass is ground into dust from which we all came. C.S. Lewis, as he is wont to do, said it better in The Weight of Glory:
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which,if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
May we learn to show more to mirrors cracked the One who makes us whole.
The Bible teaches, from Genesis 3 onward, the antithesis. Antithesis is a rather fancy theological term that simply affirms that the people of God live their lives in the context of the battle between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. While we are called to love our enemies, we are called to recognize them as enemies. Though the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, we are at war. We are called to be set apart, distinct, separate from the world around us. One could even translate ekklesia, which is usually translated “church” in our English Bibles this way, “the called-out ones.” We seem to have forgotten the antithesis in our day, strategizing that if we will become more like the world we might make a difference, that the way to be salt and light is to mask our savor and cover our light. We are of the light, and they of the dark. We are of our Father in heaven, they children of the Father of lies. We are, by the grace of God, the friends of God. They are, by nature, His enemies.
There is, however, sundry points of contact. However mangled and distorted, those outside the kingdom still bear the image of God. Conversely, however, there is this point of contact- we are still sinners. Though we have been regenerated we yet struggle with sin. Though we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, we are still tempted by the spirit of the age. This point of contact, however, the ways in which we sin, is not designed to serve as a bridge to the lost world. It is instead designed to be direction away from itself. That we sin, usually in the same ways that they sin tells us how we can better recognize our sins, that we might flee those sins.
The culture then, serves as a “culture,” a way to discern what ails us. If we want to know the kinds of sins we are tempted toward, we ought to be watching the sins of the world around us. Chances are we are tempted in the same direction. This, sadly, is something too many that are wisely conscious of the antithesis miss. We are so intent on the differences between us and them that we fail to see us in them. They murder their babies, while we avoid ours. They steal from their god by cheating on their taxes. We rob our God by failing to tithe. We rant and we rail against the world’s sin x, and miss the fact that sin x comes in camel size at our favorite buffet. Is the world shallow and greedy? I probably am too. Is the world hell-bent on self? I probably am too. Is the world deaf, dumb and blind? I probably am too.
The difference, the antithesis, between us and the world isn’t that they have sin issues while we do not. The difference is two-fold. First, our sins have already been covered. Jesus died for them, and the Father is not angry with us. Second, we are committed to finding them out, rather than hiding them. Isn’t it gracious of God then to give us the glaring shamelessness of the world to make our own sins more known to us? May He in turn give us eyes to see.
