Sanctification: Law versus
Grace
Romans 7, Galatians 5
We are going to
start in Galatians this evening. We're still studying Romans 7. I want to
contextualize things for you just a little bit. In Romans 6, 7, and 8 we have,
I think, the greatest passage in the New Testament dealing with the spiritual
life. Romans 6 focuses on the fact that we are dead to
sin; Romans 7 focuses on the fact that we are dead to the Law.
There are some
important things brought out here. I think that we don't always grab their
significance. They don't shake us quite as much for a number of reasons. Number
one: we've been taught many times about the significance of the spiritual life
in the Church Age. I've emphasized this again and again. So in many ways and in
many aspects, this isn't new truth.
For Jews and
Christians in the early church, this was just phenomenal. This was
revolutionary in a tremendous way. It was a radical shift and a major paradigm
shift so that they had to think about their relationship with God and their
ongoing walk with God in a way that they had never thought about it before. The
whole dynamic of the empowerment of the Holy Spirit was new to them. I used
that word because I'm including both the indwelling aspects and the filling
aspects of God the Holy Spirit. These were something they truly wrestled with,
especially those who came from a Jewish background because they had been
drilled to honor and respect the Law so much. In fact, it puts us to shame because as Gentile members of the
church we don't seem to have the same respect in terms of knowledge and in
terms of memory and in terms of our thorough going understanding of what God
has revealed to us.
We don't emphasize
memory like the Jewish community has over the centuries, especially in many circles.
A young man was expected to have the entire Pentateuch memorized before he had bar mitzvah. He memorized the entire
Torah. If I just ask some Christians to memorize ten verses in a year, they
scream as if I'm a legalist. That wasn't done out of legalism, which is a
common misconception of many Christians who want to avoid responsibility in the
Christian life.
Legalism is
thinking that what God commands us to do somehow gets us approval from God, and
we get blessing. That's legalism. The difference between legalism and grace in
the life of an individual in relationship to Divine commandments often won't
look any different. The difference is the motivation and how it
is appreciated by the individual. One person prays, memorizes Scripture,
goes to Bible class and they think they're getting brownie points with God for
doing all that. The other Christian knows that God already gave him everything
and they need to learn about it. They're there as a response but in terms of
watching what they do on a day-to-day basis they're doing pretty much the same
thing. That's the difference between legalism and grace. We're going to get
into that a little later in one of the passages we're studying here.
Legalism is not
just a matter of obeying the Law. Otherwise, God would be a legalist because
God expected the Jews in the Old Testament to obey the Law. That wasn't
legalism. In the same way God expects believers in the Church Age to obey all
the commands and prohibitions that are in the New Testament. It is an expectation
of conforming our thinking to His thinking [Romans 12:2].
This has been a
problem ever since the beginning of the Church to understand the relationship,
first of all, of the believer to sin, and second, the believer to the Law. In
relation to sin, it's because we have problems with [I use 'we' as a broad term
for Christians in general] understanding how someone after they claim to be a
Christian, after conversion, continues to sin in certain ways just like an unbeliever,
and continues to live and act like an unbeliever in many ways. Usually these
are defined in overt terms rather than mental attitude sins. Nobody sees our
mental attitude sins so there's a lot of covert activity going on there and we
think we're fooling somebody, but spiritually it doesn't fool anybody.
We have to
understand that relationship to sin, that there's forgiveness because sin was
paid for on the cross, but we have to think now in the sense that we are dead
to sin. Nobody prior to the cross and the day of Pentecost could think of
themselves as dead to sin. Couldn't do it. That's based on
the Baptism by the Holy Spirit and because that didn't take place until
the day of Pentecost, that identification with Christ in his death, burial, and
resurrection, sometimes called retroactive positional truth, because of that
action, we're dead to sin. That's a hard concept to get our mental fingers
around. We're also dead to the Law and we have to understand what that means.
I put up this
little chart. The left hand part talks about Romans 6. The top part talks about
before we're saved. We're alive to sin and a slave to sin and we're free in
regard to righteousness. There's no righteousness in our life. The unbeliever,
the fallen, condemned “in Adam” individual, an unbeliever, can't perform
anything perfectly righteous. There's no positive righteousness in his
life.
He can do good
things. Jesus is the one who said to His disciples, “You, being evil [fallen,
condemned, corrupt] know how to give good gifts to your children.” You can do
good things, you can do wonderful things, you can do altruistic things but
they're just not the basis for your standing before God. So the top three are
our situation before we're saved. After we're saved, we're not alive to sin
anymore. We're dead to sin. We are justified from sin, Romans 6:7, translated
in most English translations as 'freed from sin' but it is justified, dikaioo [dikaiow], the
same Greek verb, used all through the justification passages. We are free from
sin, eleutheroo [e)leuqerow], in Romans 6:19 and now
we're to consider ourselves a slave to God and a slave to righteousness. That's
all Romans 6.
Then Paul advances
what he's explaining to help us understand that we're now dead to the Law. In
Romans 6:14 beings this statement of Paul's that “we're no longer under the Law
but under grace.” There's been a shift. The rest of that chapter deals with
this idea of being dead to sin and a slave to God and to righteousness. Now he
comes back to what he means when he says we're no longer under the Law in
Romans 7, where he says we're dead to the Law. We're free from the Law just as
we are free from sin. The tie to the Law is abolished so we can live now in the
newness of the Spirit.
I want you to look
at this verse very carefully because this becomes a foundation for some of the
things we're going to cover tonight; something that I hope I'll be able to shed
some light on in our thinking because this goes to a passage and a metaphor
that I think has been very confusing for a lot of people. It is terribly
misused culturally. The verbiage is drawn from the Scripture and you hear
cultural idioms related to it. It's misused in those idioms and it's misused by
a lot of Christians. In fact, I'm not sure if I've ever heard it taught
correctly. I haven't heard it really taught that much. That comes out of the
verbiage we find in Romans 7:6, “But now we have been delivered from the Law,
having died [that means we're separated completely] to what we were held by
[that is, the sin nature] so that we should serve.”
See the purpose for
that severing of that authority of the sin nature is for the purpose of
serving. That's the Greek verb, diakonia
[diakonia], also translated ministry. It's related to the noun,
'deacon', and it has that idea of serving God. Hold on to that. That is really
important. We're saved for the purpose of serving or ministering in or by the
newness of the Spirit. That is contrasted to the oldness of the letter. Spirit versus letter? Now what does that mean? Those of you
have been around a while and read your Bible more than once or twice know that
there's a development of that idea in 2 Corinthians, chapter 3, and we're going
to go there. But I just want to point out that this passage in context is not
condemning the concept of the 'letter of the Law'. When you get over to 2
Corinthians 3 that's how most people want to interpret that but I just want to
nail that down for you because there are only three or four passages that even
use this metaphor where it talks about the letter versus the Spirit. This is
not a condemnation of the letter of the Law.
First of all
because the letter of the Law was exactly what God expected the Jews to obey.
Secondly, Paul states in this passage in verse 12 that the Law is holy, the
commandment is holy, just, and good. So that means the letter of the Law has to
be holy and just and good. Nothing that is said in this metaphor about the
Spirit versus the letter implies that the letter is bad. Yet that's how a lot
of people want to take it. They want to interpret that phrase, the Spirit is
grace and the letter is legalism. But Paul is not talking about legalism in
Romans 7:1-7.
Legalism is not in
the context. What's in the context is that there's a change. We're not under
the Mosaic Law. Being under the Mosaic Law was not legalism. The Pharisees were
misusing and misapplying the Mosaic Law. That's why Jesus taught the Sermon on
the Mount. All through the Sermon on the Mount he uses this pedagogical
technique where he says, “You have heard it said that such and so.” What he
means by that is that this is what the Pharisees have told you. “But I say to
you...” What's he's doing is giving God's interpretation of the Torah, in
contrast to the Pharisees legalistic interpretation of the Torah. But they're
both interpreting the Law.
The Law is from God. The Law is good. Obeying the Law is not legalism.
Thinking that obeying the Law is your means of salvation or your means of
gaining God's blessing or getting God's approval is legalism; it's excluding
grace. That's an important concept to grasp because it is not clearly
understood. I think in the thirty-something years I've been teaching the
Scriptures and in the pastoral ministry that's something I've had to deal with with every group, every congregation. People get that
notion in their head that legalism is “thou shalt do something”.
There are all kinds
of 'you shall do this': pray without ceasing, giving, believe on the Lord Jesus
Christ. Those are all 'thou shalts' which are all through
the New Testament. There are 700 or 800 imperative mood verbs in the New
Testament plus many other ways you can express a command other than just
imperative mood verbs. I'm not including the Gospels in that number. That's in
the epistles between Romans and Jude. We see this contrast between being under
Law and under grace.
Under Law is
relating to the spiritual life under the dispensation of the Mosaic Law from
Sinai to Pentecost. I've looked at some other passages here and come up with
some other terminology. What we find is this phraseology 'under Law' meaning
that the Mosaic Law dictated through ritual and through moral mandate how a
person was to live. But the Law didn't enable the person to fulfill the
command. In the Church Age we still have commands but we're under grace and
we're given the Holy Spirit who enables us to fulfill the commands. That's part
of the difference.
Under the Law we
were still slaves to the sin nature. In the Church Age we're free from the
bondage, the tyranny of the sin nature. Not free from the sin nature, still
there, but free from the bondage and the tyranny of the sin nature. Under Law
everything was pretty much still functioning out of the flesh, the sin nature.
That raises questions for us because we think if everything comes from the sin
nature, how did Old Testament believers have things like divine good? Well, you
always had that problem but you just didn't know it.
When we get into
the New Testament we say the only way you can produce divine good is by walking
by the Spirit. You just excluded that from a possibility in the Old Testament
because if divine good, which is rewardable in Heaven
at the Judgment Seat of Christ...oh, that's right: Old Testament saints don't
show up at the Judgment Seat of Christ, do they? No. They don't get resurrected until the end of the
Tribulation. They have a different basis for accountability.
So the issue of
divine good is a Church Age issue. I just love it when I get everybody thinking
like this. If we're going to be true to our dispensational assumptions, not
because of dispensations, as Dr. Waldorf used to say to me, “Because that's
what the Bible says, Mr. Dean.” We have to be consistent and that means that
the basis for the spiritual life we have in the Church Age, and everything
related to it, is walking by the Spirit versus walking according to the flesh.
Walking by the Spirit is how you produce divine good, that which is rewardable as good, silver, and
precious stones.
None of that
relates to an Old Testament believer. They didn't have that. They had a
different dynamic. They were to obey God. God's teaching different principles
to them through that. God's teaching that you really can't do it on your own.
When I don't help you, you really can't do it. That's why you just have this
negative trajectory all the time in the Old Testament that they cannot pull
themselves up by their bootstraps. The purpose of the Law was not to show them
how they can live and be blessed by God, even though that's the theoretical
reality there, because they can't. They never do and they never are.
As we'll see in
these passages, the purpose of the Law was to condemn them, show them they were
condemned under death. They were in bondage to that sin nature and they just
couldn't do it. The Law wasn't given to enable them to live for God but to show
them they really can't do it. You can do some things but mostly you can't. So
you're either always in flesh under the sin nature but now under grace you're led by the Spirit.
We'll see that in
Galatians 5 and I'm front loading this so we get into the passage in Galatians
5 and 2 Corinthians 3. In these
passages you're going to capture this, see this right away that this contrast
is that we're no longer under the Law but we're under grace. “If you are led by
the Spirit,” Paul says in Galatians 5, “you're no longer under Law.” Well,
they're not under the Spirit at all in the Old Testament and they are under
Law. It was a completely different dynamic.
For us to go back
and understand that, it's like trying to understand what it was like in the
Garden of Eden before there was sin. We've got no frame of reference for it so
we can't do it. We can get a
general idea but not a specific idea. The result of living under the flesh is
hostility and deviousness which just summarizes the
work of the flesh. See Galatians 5:20. Love then summarizes the fruit of the
Spirit.
I pointed out
Sunday morning in case you weren't here and missed it, when it describes what
the works of flesh in Galatians 5:21 are and then you have a list of the works
of the flesh. Then it says but the fruit of the Spirit, a singular noun, not
the fruits of the Spirit, is love. Love becomes the topic in this section in
Galatians 5:13. The other characteristics that are listed there are not other
fruits. They are all related to
love in some way, some fashion. They are different facets of love.
So we have the
deeds of the flesh versus the fruit of the Spirit. The Law is engraved on
stones, and I'm not going to ask for a show of hands, but mine would go up,
that that is something often depicted as negative. It's not written on stone
but now it's written on the heart. Oh, amen, aren't we good? But, see, in the
Old Testament, they honored the fact that the Law was written on stone because
it was permanent. That brought glory to God. That was a good thing. Paul is not
saying that's a bad thing. He is saying that's characteristic of the spiritual
life that was temporary, that didn't get you life, didn't save you, but that
was characteristic of the Law in the Old Testament. But we're not under the Law
anymore. We're under grace.
It's a different
dynamic because the Law is written on the heart. It's embodied in the life of people. It's a different
dynamic. He's not contrasting one as bad and one as good. He's contrasting one
as characteristic of the old dispensation which doesn't
continue anymore and the other is characteristic of the new
dispensation. I know, we have to think this through a
little bit. It's really a fascinating deal. In the Old Testament the Law was a ministry of death. But
the Law was good and holy and just. Don't forget that verse.
I got into a
discussion with someone one time and they said, “You know the Mosaic Law was
terrible.” That's not what the Word of God says. The Pharisees distorted it and
made it terrible but it wasn't terrible. It had a purpose in the overall
progressive revelation of God.
Under grace we have life so that's what we're going to look at here. I
think it's great to study this because it really opens things up and helps us
to see things more clearly. Not that we're seeing things we haven't seen
before. It's just that we're going to connect the dots a little more
consistently.
Last time I took us
through Galatians 3. I want to go back there to touch on that as we begin and
continue our progression through these passages. Galatians was Paul's first
epistle and he lays out in sort of a seed form a lot of the main doctrines that
are in Romans. So these two different epistles help illuminate one another. In
Galatians 3:21, Paul says, “Is the Law then against the promises of God?” Of course not. The way he forms the question, the answer
would be no, it's not against the promises of God. “For if there had been a law
given that could have given life [the protasis],
truly righteousness would have been by the law.” What he's saying is that if it
was at all possible that people could get life by obeying commandments, they
could have done it by the Law. That means it's the highest and best, you
couldn't improve upon it in any way, shape or form to have given someone a law
code that would have gotten them life. It was the best
it could possibly be.
“If there had been
a law given which could have given life [if that were possible] truly
righteousness would have been by the Law, but the Scripture has confined under
judgment that all sin that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given
to those who believe but before faith came, we were kept under guard; we were
confined by the Law.” Was that bad? No. See, we have a tendency to think that
was bad. There was a purpose for the Law. It was holy and just and good. It was
designed to be a teacher, a divine teaching mechanism in the flow of
progressive revelation, the flow of history.
Paul uses the
analogy of the teacher, the pedagogue, in a Roman household. The pedagogue was
a slave who had a dictatorial type of authority over a child until the child
reached the age of manhood, at which point the pedagogue had no authority over
the child anymore. The analogy is to the Law. The Law had complete authority
and it was good. The Law's purpose was to teach us something, not teach us how
to be saved, but teach that you can't do it yourself. Your sufficiency comes
from God, not from your own ability.
This is what Paul
starts off with when he goes into this 'letter versus the Spirit' in 2
Corinthians 3. The first part of his argument is that his sufficiency is in
Christ. So that's the point of the Law, to teach that it's not in us, it's in
Christ. Now we're going to go over to Galatians 5:18. Paul says, “But if you
are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law.” The 'if'
there in Greek is a first class condition. That's one of three different ways the Greek language can
express a condition, and here it has the sense “if and it's true”. “If you're
led by the Spirit, you're not under the Law.” Now since those Galatians are just like us; they're Church
Age believers and they are led by the Spirit because when you believe in the
Lord Jesus Christ, you're led by the Spirit. So we're led by
the Spirit; therefore, we are not under the Law.
I want to take you
back to pick up the context of this. As I pointed out last time in Galatians
3:3, Paul lays out the basic question, the basic issue that he's addressing in
talking to the Galatians. The problem was that they had these Jewish
non-Christian Jews who kept following Paul. They would come in and say, “Oh,
it's great that Jesus is the Messiah. It's great to think that you're going to
get to heaven by believing in Jesus. But you still have to obey the Law. The
Law isn't over yet. Men have to be circumcised. You have to obey the Law and
it's still important. You can't do away with the Law; you still have to obey
it.” So they were called Judiazers.
That idea of the
Law was a legalistic use of the Law: that you had to apply the Law in order to
really be saved. It was 'believe in Jesus and obey the Law' to be saved. You
had to obey the Law to be sanctified. So Paul has already addressed the
confusion and the distortion of the gospel in the first two chapters saying in
very harsh terms that this was not the true gospel. This was another gospel of
a different kind and therefore those who proclaimed it are accursed.
Now he's going to
shift talking about post-salvation growth. He says, “Are you so foolish, having
begun by means of the Spirit [that is, you were regenerated, you were born
again by means of the Holy Spirit] are you now being made perfect, teleIoo
[teleiow], being brought to completion or matured by the flesh,
or the sin nature?” I pointed out last time that there are three key words
here… spirit, perfect, and flesh...which are not used again until we get to
Galatians 5:18. Everything between Galatians 3:3 and 5:18 help us to understand
his answer.
So sometimes if you
think I take side trips every now and then and it takes me a long time to get
to the answer of something, I'm not nearly as bad as the apostle Paul. In
Galatians 5:16 he says, “I say again, walk by means of the Spirit and you shall
not fulfill [make perfect or bring to completion] the lusts of the flesh.” Now
he's going to tell us how, if we began by the Spirit, we're not going to be
matured by the flesh. We're going to be matured by the Spirit. We have to begin
by the Spirit and continue by the Spirit.
Did they have the
Spirit in the Old Testament? No. They couldn't do this; it's completely
different. The precedent for the Church Age spiritual life is not in the Old
Testament. It's unique. It's absolutely, totally new. He leads to this in this
last chapter talking about the Law, the role of the pedagogue, the Law as a
covenant. He uses the analogy at the end of chapter 4 about Hagar and Sarah.
Sarah represented grace. Hagar represented Law. Law brings bondage. That's the
whole point at the end of chapter four. He says, “Nevertheless, what does the
Scripture say? Cast out the bond woman and her son.” He clearly says he's using
this as an allegory and he can do this because he's writing under the
inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
Scripture is not to
be interpreted allegorically, because the way we use allegory today denies the
literal meaning. What he means by allegory does not deny the literal
historicity and actuality of the original events. He's just saying I'm going to
use this as an illustration to make this point by analogy that you have to
completely cast out the Law in order to go forward. Otherwise, you're going to
get trapped and you're not free. Under the Law, you're not free.
That's why he then
says in Galatians 5:1, “Stand therefore in the liberty whereby God has made us
free and do not be entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” So the Law which is holy and just and good is also a yoke of
bondage. Not in its legalistic application, although it becomes that truly, but
it is a yoke of bondage because it doesn't give you the ability to do the
commands of the Law.
God tells them all
these things to do and not to do but he didn't infuse them with the ability to
do it, which is what He does in the New Testament. We get into this discussion
about liberty. In verse 4 he says, “You have become estranged from Christ.” You
believers in Galatia have become separated from Christ because you have
attempted to become justified by Law. You have fallen from grace. It doesn't
mean they've lost their salvation; it means they've departed from the grace
message. Verse 5, “For we, through
the Spirit, eagerly await for the hope of righteousness by faith, not by Law,
for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision
avails anything but faith working through love.”
Love is the key
word here, second to Spirit, that you have to trace down through this section.
So we're going to skip from there down to verse 13. Verse 13 says, “For you
brethren have been called to liberty [liberty doesn't mean you can do whatever
you want to whenever you want to; it means now you're free to serve Christ, to
truly love one another] only do not use liberty as an opportunity to the flesh
[to sin, or antinomianism or licentiousness] but through love serve one
another.”
Usually when we get
into this section of Galatians, no one talks about that verb but you have love
mentioned in verse 6; you have love mentioned here in verse 13 where you are
told through love to serve one another. He then gives an illustration of that
command in verse 14 where he says, “for all the Law is fulfilled in one word,
even in this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Look at that verse.
Is verse 14 there to tell you to love your neighbor as yourself? No. It's an
illustration of the command in verse 13, “In love serve one another.” The quote
that is there in verse 14 is from Leviticus 19:18. It's part of the Mosaic Law.
Remember when Jesus is asked what's the greatest Law, he says, “Love the Lord
your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor
as yourself.” That summarized the whole Law so all of the Law related to other
human beings are simply different specifics on how to
love your neighbor as yourself.
The term he's
emphasizing here is “through love serve one another.” Who's
the one another? Does that include your neighbor? Only if
your neighbor is a Christian. See Jesus said, “I give you a new
commandment that you love one another as I have loved you.” One another in
context is talking about the body of Christ. It's not
talking about outside the body of Christ. It's a higher standard. The standard
isn't love your neighbor as you love yourself. The
standard now is love one another as Christ loves you.
It's a much higher standard and it's restricted.
Does it mean we
don't love our neighbor as our self? No. Those mandates are still there but
that's not what Paul is emphasizing here. It's love again. Then he says, “If
you bite and devour one another [which is just deviousness and nastiness in the
congregation] be wary unless you be consumed by one another. What's the
solution? The solution is verse 16. “I say then walk by means of the Spirit and
you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.”
What you've been
trying to do, Paul is saying, is try to live the Christian life and grow up and
mature as a Christian by obeying the Law. Where has that led you? It's led you to internal squabbling and
deviousness and biting and devouring one another. That's because you're not
trying to complete or mature by the Spirit. Did you begin by the Spirit and now you're trying to be
completed by the flesh? So, he's back to that now and he says the solution is
“Walk by means of the Spirit and you will not fulfill the lusts of the
flesh.”
There is a contrast
between the flesh and the sin nature on the one hand and the Spirit on the
other hand. That's the contrast of “under law” and “under grace”. “For the
flesh [sin nature] lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh.”
That's the warfare that constantly goes on in the believer's life because when
we're in fellowship we're walking by the Spirit and when we're out of
fellowship we're walking by the sin nature or flesh. They're contrary to one
another. They're mutually exclusive. “...so you do not
do the things which you wish.” Now I'll come back to that when we get into
Romans 7. That's what Paul says, “I tried to grow as a Christian using the Law
and I did what I didn't want to do and I didn't do what I wanted to do.” That's
the whole frustration of Romans 7 trying to do it yourself
without the Spirit is that it doesn't work. We don't have the capability within
us to fulfill the Law.
Then Paul says in
verse 18, “But if you are led by the Spirit, you're not under the Law.” We're
not under the Law anymore because as Christians in the Church Age, the Law is
no longer operational. It's been
fulfilled in Christ. And then so you can understand whether you're walking by
the flesh or by the Spirit, he gives you some manifestations. He says, “The
works [plural] of the flesh are evident, which are adultery, fornication,
uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, hatred, contentiousness, jealousies, outbursts
of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envies, murder, revelry,
these and the like.” Those are all manifestations of the sin nature.
Then in verse 22 he
says, “But the fruit [singular] of the Spirit is love..”
What are we talking about in chapter 5? We're talking about liberty, love, and
it's only realized by walking by means of the Spirit. This is your next dot to connect. In your Bible you can
circle love in verse 6, love in verse 14, love in verse 15, and then love here.
This connects the dots. He's asking, how do you have
this love that he's talked about in all these verses? It's the result of
walking by the Spirit. That ties it together for us in those verses and
connects back to Romans 6:14.
In Romans 6:14,
Paul said, “For sin shall not have dominion over you for you are not under Law
but under grace.” In Galatians 5 terminology, the flesh shall not have dominion
over you for you are not under Law but under grace. So we're trying to understand the dynamics of what these
mean, that we are under grace. It doesn't mean we can do whatever we want to.
It doesn't mean there are no absolutes, no mandates, that there aren't
stipulations. It means that in this dispensation God has gone above and beyond
the call of duty by giving us what Paul talks about in Ephesians 1:3: “blessing
us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies”.
It's already done. He's given us every conceivable capability and asset to obey
him and to walk with him. That's how Galatians 5 fits into this whole sort of
mosaic in terms of these different patterns.
Now what I want you
to do is turn to our next passage in 2 Corinthians, chapter 3. This is a great
passage. 2 Corinthians is one of those books that is
rarely taught. What are your five favorite books? Nobody lists 2 Corinthians. What are your ten favorite
books? Nobody lists 2 Corinthians. It just seems to be overlooked. It's overlooked
in the Commentary tradition as well. There are not that many great commentaries
on 2 Corinthians because it's one of the last epistles that someone writes on.
You get a commentary series that comes out on every book in the Bible. One of
the last commentaries that gets published is 2
Corinthians.
Its almost like a spiritual stepchild but
there are great things here. These things are hard to understand. Often when
people read Peter saying that Paul wrote some things that are hard to
understand they're thinking about election and predestination. I think Peter
had 2 Corinthians in mind. One of the chapters that is
very difficult for people is this particular chapter. I want to go through
about the first nine to eleven verses just to help us understand it. I want to
do a little flyover first of all. The context here is this ongoing correction
of the Corinthians. The Corinthians were the bad boys
of the early church and they lived in a community of Corinth that had been a
Roman colony and was settled by a lot of retired Roman soldiers. It was a
seaport, not unlike Houston.
Back in the day if
you hung out down by the ship channel in Houston a lot you really understood
what that meant, I think. There were just so many different dives and bars. I
don't know what all was down there. It was just nasty. That was Corinth all
over. Anything went in Corinth. It was proverbial in ancient Rome that if you
were driven by lust, were homosexual, were licentious,
a party-boy, you were a Corinthian. That's what it meant. That's where that
idiom came from. If you felt like anything went, if you were basically a
typical American college person who had no values and no absolutes, then you
did whatever you wanted to do, however your sin nature drives you, then that's
what a Corinthian was. They had no moral background.
The Corinthian
converts had to learn all this from scratch, as it were, because they weren't
even taught good establishment morality prior to being saved. So they were
divisive and in the first part of 1 Corinthians Paul is
having to correct all of these different problems that are going on
inside the congregation. They're saved but their sin natures are running away
with them. After he dealt with several of those problems, there was apparently
another epistle that was not going to be preserved in Scripture that is the
true 2 Corinthians and then there was a response and then there's this one.
There was also some correspondence from Corinth.
They tried to
straighten some things up as so often happens with people who are learning and
growing. They made more mistakes in trying to straighten things out. One of the
mistakes they continued to make was this sort of people worship. They got
focused on the messenger and not the message. I've heard a lot of people say,
“I believe it's the message, not the messenger.” Let me tell you one thing.
Their focus is so much on the messenger it's unbelievable, their self-denial.
Ninety percent of the people I've heard emphasize that had their eyes on the
messenger.
Paul is saying:
quit following Apollos, and Cephas
and me. It's not about us; it's all about Christ. Quit making a big deal about
this but they continued to go after anybody who came along who had a winning
smile, a popular personality, and a pleasing message. They would run after him
sort of like Americans and their current president. They were consumed with the
surface and not the content. They
would have fit in very well in our television, superficial image-focused
culture that cares more about what somebody looks like than their message.
This was evidenced
by one of the first television debates between Nixon and JFK. Everybody is pretty familiar with that. Nixon didn't
want to put his makeup so he came on looking like he was coming off a 3-day
drunk with a heavy dark beard and that made him look negative. It was just a
false image. That's why Paul's writing.
He's got these false apostles that are coming with all their made up
credentials and he says in the beginning of this third chapter, “Do we begin
again to commend ourselves?” Are we puffing ourselves up? Are we blowing our
own horn? Are we the ones making ourselves significant? Or do we need some others'
epistles as commendations?
Apparently they were showing up with
made up credentials. Then Paul says in verse 2, “You are our epistle written in
our hearts.” He says the evidence of the genuineness of our ministry, the
authenticity of our ministry, the veracity of our
message is that when they believed it and applied it, it changed their lives.
Then in verse 3 he says, “Clearly you are an epistle of Christ administered by
us.” God worked through Paul and it was on the basis of that divine work of God
that the gospel was taught in Corinth and the church was founded. He says, “You are an epistle of Christ
administered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the Living God,
not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh.” See, this is where we get
into that stone versus flesh, which means heart. It's not the sin nature; it's
talking about a human life.
Now skip down to
verse 9 so we get the overall view here. One other thing, when he says you are
an epistle of Christ administered by us, that's diakonia
or service, ministry. That's that verb which shows up several times going
through here, either the noun or the verb form. We see it again in verse 9,
“for if the ministry of condemnation...” What's the ministry of condemnation?
That's the Law; one purpose of the Law was condemnation. You didn't get life by
the Law; you learned you could not live up to God's standards so the Law was a
ministry of condemnation and a ministry of death.
He says, “For if
the ministry of condemnation had glory [and it did] the ministry of
righteousness exceeds much more in glory.” It's not that the Law didn't have
glory but we have greater glory in the age of grace. “For even what was made
glorious had no glory in this respect because of the glory that excels. For if
what is passing away was glorious [the Law]; what remains is much more
glorious. Therefore since we have
such hope...” This isn't hope and change; this is real Biblical hope which means a certainty, a confidence of a future
reality.
Now let's go back
and just look at this a little bit. In verse 3 Paul gives four characteristics
of this epistle. First, you are an epistle from Christ. An epistle is not the
wife of an apostle; it's a letter. You are an epistle from Christ. So the
letter is from Christ. But it is mediated through the human writers of
Scripture. Second he says, “… ministered or served by us”. In other words, God doesn't
work directly; He works indirectly through the leaders of the church and the
apostles. So the word here is diakonia and it should be translated “being
ministered by us.” The New King James probably has the better translation of
it. Some others try to use service or other circumlocution to let it come
across in English a little better but that's the main focus there. The idea of
ministry here implies that the ministry of Paul, the apostle, and his
associates is crucial and foundational to producing
the letter. Remember, the letter is really their life. It's embodied in their
life and the impact the gospel has had on them.
The third thing
Paul says here about the letter is that it's inscribed or written by the Spirit
of the Living God. Written not with ink but by the Spirit of the Living God.
Now let me ask you a question. This is a hard question. He's contrasting
writing something with ink and writing something by the Spirit of the Living
God. Is there something wrong with writing with ink? No. Now the analogy of writing
with ink is analogous to writing on stone. Neither one of those was wrong. The
point wasn't that that is wrong and this is right, which is how this idiom
through here is often misinterpreted. The issue here is that writing in stone
is past; that was right and good but we're not in that dispensation any more.
We're in a new dispensation. So he says, “written not with ink but by the
Spirit of the Living God.” Of course, how did Paul write his epistles? With ink
on papyrus so we can't say that writing with ink is wrong. He's just using this
as an analogy of the dispensational shift that is taking place, which is
exactly what I've been emphasizing in Romans 6 and 7. Paul is saying we're not
under Law anymore; we're under grace. We're in a new dispensation, new
realities, new dynamics, new empowerment because God
is taking the human race to the next level because He can now that salvation is
completed on the Cross and the authority of the sin nature is crucified. It had
never happened before.
The point of this
contrast, not that writing with ink is wrong but that the impact now is that
the Holy Spirit drives the doctrinal truth embedded on the page to be embodied
in our life. There was no Holy Spirit, no God given dynamic in the Old
Testament to enable them to apply the Law. They had the standard but God didn't
give them anything to make it happen. In the Church Age we have the Spirit to
make that happen. So he goes from that point in the first part of verse 3 to
the second point in verse 3, which is the contrast between what is written on
stone and what is written on the heart. “Not on tablets of stone but on tablets
of flesh.” He's just contrasting that the Mosaic Law was written on tablets of
stone and there was nothing wrong with that but it didn't give the people the
inner ability to apply it. Now it's written on the heart. Now there's language
that comes out of this that's related to the covenant passages in Ezekiel.
We'll get into that next time. But that's the main idea.
Now we'll just have
a little survey of the next three verses. Verse 4 he says, “and we have such
trust through Christ toward God, not that we are sufficient of ourselves to
think of anything being from ourselves but our sufficiency is from God.” What
did I say the point of the Law was? To show that we had no
sufficiency. That's what he's coming back to here, this concept of
sufficiency that our sufficiency is not anything we've done. It doesn't mean we
don't have a responsibility to teach and to explain the Word and the gospel but
we know that everything we do, if it's to have any success, it's because God
does it. We're not relying on human techniques.
We're not going to
go out and learn the twenty-five points of the Purpose Driven Church so we can
build a church. We're not going to go to any of these other churches that are
exploding so we can imitate their technique. We're going to make sure that when
this church grows it's because people come because they want to know the Word
of God. A lot of people don't want to know the Word of God today. They want to
have the trappings of knowing the Word of God. They want, perhaps, to have a
pastor who seems like he knows the Word of God or uses the right verbiage but
they really don't want to know the Word of God.
I, and some of you
as well, have been around Christians and Christianity long enough to recognize
that that is true. If you think back to the kind of people that were adults in
their twenties and thirties and forties in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they had a
hunger to know the Word of God, so much so that in some cases, they went to
church 4, 5, 6, 7 times a week to study the Word. You don't find young people
today doing that. They're not willing to give up all their night
life and their iPads and iPods and computer
games and everything else in order to come to church to learn the Scripture.
They think Sunday is good enough. Well, Sunday is not good enough. Once a week
never has cut it and never will cut it.
Scripture has to
become embedded and embodied in our hearts, our thinking, and our souls. That
doesn't happen once a week. It doesn't even happen once a day. It has to be
part of our life, day in and day out, and everything else in life, somehow is
secondary. I know that becomes challenging because we have to live and work and
all those other things but we have to make the Word of God that primary passion
in our life to live for the Lord Jesus Christ and to have our life changed. So
Paul says the sufficiency isn't from us, it's from God who also made us
ministers of the new covenant not of the letter but of the Spirit.
Is there something
wrong with the letter? You've heard this for years...saying we're not going to
follow the letter but the law. Somehow they think this is legalism versus
grace. Paul still wrote with letters as far as I can tell. It's not about a
style of interpretation. Often this verse is taken out of context, ever since
Origen in the 3rd century ripped it out of context to justify
allegorical interpretation. We're not going to follow the literal interpretation…we're
going to follow the spiritual interpretation. That's not what Paul is talking
about here. This is not a discussion of interpretation. This is a discussion of
what changes a person from the inside out. Is it the letter which doesn't give
you the ability, or is it what happens in the New Testament era where you have
the internal indwelling of God the Holy Spirit who is the one who give you the
ability to fulfill the letter? That's what he's saying.
We'll get into
those details a little more next time. You're going to have to hear this four
or five times just as I've had to study it several times to grasp what it's
saying. The conclusion isn't really anything different from what you've heard
before. It's just that I'm telling you this passage isn't
telling you what you've heard before. It's talking about some other things you
have heard before and it's going to make a lot more sense when you understand
that's what Paul is talking about.