Sanctification:
Law versus Spirit
Romans 7, 2 Corinthians 3
Open
your Bibles to 2 Corinthians, chapter 3. While you are turning there I
thought I would just mention someone that some of you know. About 15
months ago a good friend of mine, a pastor we ordained at Berachah Church last
century, a couple of decades ago now it seems, by the name of John Hite, just
dropped off the radar. John and I were very close and we communicated a
lot. Then all of a sudden I just couldn't get a phone call returned; I
couldn't get an e-mail returned. John had been doing various things to
help us with the ministry. Then John called me tonight. I looked down at my
phone and saw John was calling me after 15 to 16 months and hundreds of e-mails
and phone calls. I thought, “You know if John is calling me, I better
answer.” It turns out that right at the beginning of that time, he and his
wife were moving into a new house. His oldest son who's very bright and is
a professor of music in a small town in Wisconsin was at a movie theater where
there was a lot of activity going on behind him. It was a young couple,
the girl was 13, and they had been having sex during the movie. He
reprimanded them. The next day the police showed up at his house. The
girl had found out who he was and accused John's son of rape and kidnapping and
Lord knows what else. So John went up there as a good father and ended up
spending the next year and a half working to do the research to get the
evidence to help the lawyers get everything they needed to clear his
son. His son was acquitted. There was actually no physical evidence
other than the girls charge. So that's why I hadn't heard from John..
I
thought that was so remarkable and it's an example of how God prepares things
in our life. We never know what happens, why things happen a certain
way. Sometimes we get a glimpse of this. About three years ago John
started to drop off the radar about 50%. He is a retired Army sergeant and
he had been asked by two or three soldiers to help defend them in a court-martial
case where they were accused of forging documents for various things. I
forget the details now. In the military you can ask anyone to defend
you. It doesn't have to be a JAG officer, a lawyer, and so John did work
on that for two years and got them all off in the process. It exposed the
facts and I think a bird colonel and at least one general had to retire. I
think criminal charges were brought against a couple of other field grade
officers who were involved in this forgery cover up.
So
John wondered why is this going on and on and everything gets deeper and
deeper? It was preparation for what would happen with his son so it's just
really interesting to see how God works those kinds of the details out in a
person's life. Some of you think you have problems in your life or maybe you
don't. Your problems are better than other people's problems.
We're
in second Corinthians chapter 3 because I am taking the time to look at the
other key passages in the New Testament that emphasize the end of the
Law. This is important for several reasons. One is because there are
a group of conservative Christian scholars who go by the name of the Theonomous
who seek to resurrect the law of God as the normative standard for society.
That's what Theonomy means. theo, the first
part of the word for God, nome
from nomos meaning God's law. Their position
is that only the ceremonial part of the Law ended at the cross but the civil
part of the Law is what God expects all nations to come under and apply to all
civil society. That position is usually associated with a prophetic position or
eschatological position known as Christian Reconstructionism. Christian
Reconstructionism, in their view, is that the mission of the church is to
reconstruct society according to the norms of God's law, according to the norms
of their Theonomic position. They are post-millennial. They do not
believe, as is often misrepresented, that it's the role of the church to bring
in the kingdom not in an active sense. But that it is the role of the church,
as the Holy Spirit works through the church, to expand Christianity until it
brings in the kingdom. Then Jesus comes back after the kingdom is
positioned.
Tommy
Ice's first book, written with Wayne House, was a critique of theonomic post
millennialism. That's a lot of big words. Now and then just say that and you'll
impress yourself. Now that's one group. One reason that's important is
because there are a lot of people of an anti-Christian persuasion in this
country, a lot of liberals within the Democratic Party and some within the
Republican Party, who want to take that extreme position and spin it. It
truly is a minority position among conservative Christians; there are very few
who hold that position.
Two of
the men who are best known for their writings promoting theonomics are Rousas
John Rushdoony who most of you have never heard of before and his son-in-law,
Gary North, who is also well known as a conservative libertarian type
economist. Rushdoony is dead now but they didn't speak to each other for
years over some minor disagreement over the observation of the Lord's
table. That view is usually resurrected when you read certain articles dealing
with Christian evangelicals, the Christian right. That's what they go
to. This is like one half of 1% of all conservative Christians who would
even come close to holding their view. Very few people read Rushdoony or
Gary North or any of their material. They get a lot more play because of
their websites and they're on some of the libertarian websites, Gary North
writes a lot on Lou Rockwell and his economic advice is sometimes colored by
his theological viewpoints but I understand a lot of time it's not. At one
time Gary North accused me of standing naked in the public square and then in
Y2K he sold everything he had up in Tyler and moved to the deep dark backwoods
of the Ozarks and built a compound so his family could survive Y2K. If you
read him he's the most convincing writer. You just knew that the world was
going to implode at midnight. Nothing happened so that's the scary Gary as
we sometimes call him.
That's
one group who believe that God's Laws are for today. Then there's another group
of Christians who have held that the moral law of God is in effect for today.
They don't see a real distinction between the Old Testament Mosaic law economy
and the Church Age economy or administration of God or
dispensations. Often this group, usually just simply referred to as
legalists, are the ones who often try to observe the Sabbath but they do it on
Sunday. Somehow they switch the Sabbath from the seventh day Shabbat on
Saturday to Sunday.
I
remember some years ago a conversation with one of the better-known and better
respected Old Testament scholars who was the head of the Old Testament
Department at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School by the name of Gleason
Archer. He was a brilliant man, probably knew 30 to 35 different
languages. He observed the Sabbath on Sunday afternoon and when asked how
he did that he said, “I don't watch television or watch football.
I had
a retired missionary in my first church who was a Moody Bible Institute
graduate. See a lot of people pick up these ideas and she didn't think you
should work or do anything like that on Sunday which is the Sabbath. But
she and her three or four elderly friends who came to church every Sunday and,
of course, they are always there on Wednesday night prayer meeting, had a
ritual every Sunday of going to Wyatt's Cafeteria. And as I became aware of her
views on the Sabbath I asked her if she had a problem with the fact that
Christians who work at Wyatt's Cafeteria were having to come into work and to
serve for her Sunday meal. She quit going because the food never tasted
the same again. I believe she didn't quit right away but it just put such
a load of guilt on her. I'm not making fun of people like
this. There's a superficiality to it. I've heard other people like
Michael Berry go off on something about this. Yesterday morning he was
dealing with liquor stores not being open before 12. His arguments were
totally inane. Not that he was advocating for a legalistic position; he
was attacking it. His information was all wrong and that's usually the
kind of thing that happens.
Historically
since the first century, since the time of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15,
actually since Peter walked into Cornelius's house, the church has had a
problem with how to apply the relationship of the Mosaic Law to the
Christian. That is what Paul is showing in these passages, that there is
no relationship. The Law ended. The Law had a limited, temporary
purpose. The Mosaic covenant was a finite covenant that was only given for a
specific people for a specific length of time and that purpose was completed
and fulfilled by Christ on the cross. It's been replaced by the new
covenant and it's been replaced by a new factor in the spiritual life of
Christian believers in the Holy Spirit.
As
we've seen in our study in Romans chapter 6 what Paul emphasizes is that what
makes the difference for our spiritual life is what occurs in a judicial sense
at the cross instantly the moment we trust in Christ. We're identified
with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection. That identification is
known as the baptism by the Holy Spirit and in that identification with Christ
in his death, burial, and resurrection the sin nature is crucified with
Christ. It's not dead but its power is broken and we move from being the
old man we were before we were saved to being a new creature in Christ.
The
sin nature is still there. We still live in a mortal body. We still have
the corruption of the sin nature. But the authority and power of the sin nature
is completely broken. So when we feel those urges, when we feel those
seemingly overwhelming emotions that we really can't avoid responding to them
and going with them, the reality of Scripture is that yes, we do we have a
choice. And that's what Paul is hammering home in Romans chapter 6.
I
don't think, at least for me, that until we did this last study in Romans six
that I fully appreciated the fact that the Old Testament believer did not have
that kind of an ending for the sin nature. There is no identification
truth for the Old Testament saint. The sin nature's power is not broken
for the Old Testament saint. He has the Law which simply tells him what
the standard of God is but there's no internal empowerment or transformation to
enable the Old Testament believer to apply the Law and to do the Law. It is
truly a different dispensation in every single facet. This is why Israel
always has this negative spiritual trajectory even though there are high points
that we see in certain heroic individuals in Hebrews 11. They knew they
never have a positive trajectory and that is because the Law was not designed
to give them that. It wasn't designed to show them how to live but that
they really can't live that way and that there will always be failure.
I have
taken the time to look at Galatians 3. We'll probably come back to that
part in 2nd Corinthians 3 tonight to help us understand just these
dynamics because I think with this study in contrasts between what we have and
really understanding what every believer up until the day of Pentecost had, we
don't appreciate what it is that we are able to do as believers today. It
is absolutely remarkable. It is a complete renovation. This
terminology that Paul uses in Colossians and in Acts of a transfer from the
kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light is what happens.
There
is a metaphysical shift that occurs that impacts the entire universe with the
death of Christ on the cross. There really is a sort of a shadow, a veil of
darkness over the human race until that is broken at the cross. The power
of the sin nature is truly broken so that we do not have to be slaves to the
sin nature. That's what has brought us to this passage in 2nd
Corinthians, chapter 3. In this passage there are things that Paul brings
out that relate to the permanent aspect of grace and to the shift to the new
covenant in contrast to the limitations of the Old Testament.
Paul
starts off asking a couple of rhetorical questions. In verse one he is
just simply asking do they need to commend themselves again. No, they
don't because he truly establishes his credentials as an apostle in the first
epistle to the Corinthians. The backdrop for this is, as I pointed out
last week, these false apostles who had infiltrated the congregation in Corinth
claiming to be the true genuine apostles of Christ and claiming that Paul was a
fraud. They attacked his authority; they attacked his credentials; they
attacked his testimony; they attacked Paul's doctrine again and again and
again. So Paul has been put in a position of defending and validating his
claims to be an apostle.
So he
gives them an experiential argument in verse two, saying, “You are our
epistle...” In other words, everyone knows the transformative impact of
“the gospel that I preached among you when I was in Corinth.” When I came
and proclaimed the truth that Jesus was the Messiah and that by believing in
Him you would have life in His name, you changed from darkness to light, from
death to life, and that was manifested to everybody in the community in
Corinth. They saw the change that took place. It was a real change
that had a flesh and blood impact.
“You are
our epistle, written in our hearts.” Notice how he shifts. “You're
our epistle [our letter] written in our hearts.” I want you to notice this
contrast. He talks about “this epistle written in hearts and read by all
men.” See that's that visible testimony to all human beings. Then he
goes on to say, “Clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us,
written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God...”
So
there's this contrast between an epistle written with ink and an epistle
written not with ink but by the Spirit of God. “Not on tablets of
stone..”, which is in contrast with the Old Testament that the Law which
was written on tablets of stone but now this contrast is the present epistles
were written on tablets of flesh which is the heart, the inner life of a
person. So what he's emphasizing here is that what is new is this internal
dynamic transformative change that occurs in people's life when they are saved
because they instantly become a new creature in Christ. Then when there is
spiritual growth there is a transformation. If anybody here is
thinking, then one thing you should think about is that when you read first
Corinthians you don't really think there's a big change that's taken place in
the church at Corinth. Remember their divisiveness; they've got problems
with being judgmental toward one another; they've got problems with
licentiousness in the congregation. They've got problems with being
judgmental towards weaker brothers and eating meat sacrificed to idols. They've
got problems with mystics in the congregation who were speaking in
tongues. There are all kinds of divisions and problems and in the
church. Sometimes it's easy to sort of focus on that but that's normal
because every Christian and every church and every congregation made up of
fallen sinful believers is going to manifest different problems like that but
there is a radical shift that's taking place in their lives because of grace.
That's
what he's describing here and when he responded to their first letter with his first
letter he's saying that it had an impact. They changed to conform to the
instructions he gave them in that first letter. So he says you are an
epistle of Christ ministered to by us. As I pointed out last time, the
couple of words that we need to pay attention to includes this one
“ministered'. It's the verb on which the noun deacon, diakanos [diakonoj] is
based on. This is an important word because it has to do with this aspect
of Christian service, serving one another in the body of Christ. And so they,
as apostles and those who are serving with Paul, have ministered, have served
the believers in the congregation in Corinth. This is empowered by God the
Holy Spirit. It is not based on their power, their credentials, their
background, their intelligence, their achievements, their academics, or any of
those things.
When
we get into verse 4, the topic shifts a little bit and Paul begins to emphasize
the foundation of his trust. Actually that should be translated
confidence. On the basis of their confidence, this is a Greek word based
on the root of the word, a synonym for confidence, that is related to the word
for faith, pistis [pistij]. I think confidence is a much better concept
there. That's what we have here in Philippians 3:4 where Paul talks about
we are the circumcision who worship God, that is, the spiritual circumcision,
“We are the circumcision who worship God in Spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus,
and have no confidence in the flesh.” See this is the emphasis here that
he's bringing: where's your confidence, where's your strength, what do you
think enables you as a believer to obey God? He's saying that confidence
is not in the flesh, it's not in our natural abilities.
In
Philippians 3:4 he goes on to say, “though I also might have confidence in the
flesh” [this is the same word, pepoithesis
[pepoiqhsij], and then he lists all of his credentials. It's
not based on academic achievement; it's not based on native intelligence; it's
not based on past accomplishments; it's not based on the possession of certain
natural skills or talents but it's based on what God provides and that's true
for every Christian. It's true for you. It's true for every Christian
you know and not just for the apostle Paul, not just for pastors, but for every
single Christian.
Our
confidence has to be in God. He's the one who gives us that ability in
order to carry out God's mission. It's His work and He provides the means
for doing so. So in 2nd Corinthians 3:4, he uses that same word
that was used in Philippians 3: 3, “We have such confidence through Christ
toward God.” This is a radical departure from the kind of thinking that
dominated second Temple Judaism. This is a bold, brazen confidence but
it's totally based in God, not upon our works. It's a radical departure
from the kind of confidence that Paul had as a Pharisee where all the emphasis
was on his genealogy, his background, his training, and all these other
things. That's not to minimize those as unnecessary. It’s to say that
is not the focal point. The focal point is on the provision of God.
So we
come now to the next couple of verses in 2nd Corinthians 3: 5 and
6. Now Paul says, “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of
anything as being from ourselves.” That excludes anything we can come up
with, everything is excluded, nothing comes from our own abilities, our own
natural talents. Everything is excluded that comes from us, “but our
sufficiency is from Christ.” Now the word that's used here for sufficiency
versus the word that's used for sufficiency later on in 2nd
Corinthians, chapter 11, is a different word. It is the word hikanos [i(kanoj], meaning
enough or worthy. It's sometimes translated 'ability' or 'able' or
'competent' or 'qualified'. I think the idea of ability or competence is
what is emphasized here in 2nd Corinthians 3: 5 and 6. It's
not that we have the ability in and of ourselves to fulfill the ministry of
Christ. None of us can do that. We can't do that in our spiritual
life. The spiritual life is not a system of morality. This is the
problem with Theonomy; this is the problem with various forms of legalism; this
is the problem with all of covenant theology because covenant theology does not
talk much about the Holy Spirit as the centerpiece of the spiritual
life. This is true of reformed theology which is those theological systems
that have their root in John Calvin, one of the great leaders of the Protestant
Reformation. What day did the Protestant Reformation start? That's right,
it started October 31. I had a conversation with my chiropractor about
that today. He said you can come in next week and see me on October
31. He said, “Do you celebrate Halloween?” I said, “No, I celebrate
Reformation Day.” He asked, “What's that?” So you see you get an
opportunity to witness about all kinds of things. You just have to know
stuff. We had a good conversation and he asked me all kinds of
questions. He's a real sponge.
Martin
Luther was the father of the Protestant Reformation. He nailed the 95
theses as debating points on the door of the church at Wittenberg on October 31
because it is the day before All Hallows or All Saints Day, which was a
holiday. And on a holiday people would come to the Catholic Church, to the
Cathedral, and there would be discussion points that they could debate on that
day. The night before the event is All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, which is how
the name derives. It is the night before when all the spooks and goblins
and ghosts were running around. But that night, at midnight, they would
all have to go back to the grave because it was going to be All Saints Day,
just medieval superstition and mysticism.
Luther
led the charge. Calvin was the number two leader that came out of a
different geographical area. He was in France, southwestern Germany and
Switzerland primarily. His main service ministry came out of
Geneva. Out of Calvin's ministry you have Presbyterianism and
Congregationalism and several other different kinds of denominations. A
lot of the Anglican historic, not modern Anglican, beliefs were grounded on
Genevan Calvinism. In historic Calvinism there was no recognition of the
role of the Holy Spirit because they didn't see this heavy dispensational shift
between the Old Testament and the New. So it wasn't until the end of the
19th century and the 20th century when the charismatics
and Pentecostals began to emphasize the Holy Spirit a lot. Then some in
the Calvinist tradition began to wake up and to start spending some time on it
but in a strict Calvinist reformed theology view of the spiritual life, it's
all about just doing the right thing, just obeying Scripture. It's a 'pull
yourself up by your own bootstraps' kind of Christianity.
This
is not what Paul is saying here. Our sufficiency is not of
ourselves. We can't just go out and do what the Bible says to
do. That's the problem he's going to come up against in Romans
seven. That the more he tried to do the Law, the more he realized what a
failure he was. The more he tried to obey the Law on his own without dependence
on God or the Holy Spirit, the more he realized that he did what he didn't want
to do and he didn't do what he did want to do. He was completely,
completely frustrated so 2nd Corinthians 3:5 and 6 is emphasizing
this confidence that Paul has in God. God is totally sufficient. He
is the one who gives us our ability and our capability.
So as
we look at this we recognize that Paul isn't looking at the topic here of
contrasting legalism versus grace but Law versus grace. He is contrasting
the age of the Law as being insufficient. The Law is insufficient but now
because of grace and the provision of the Holy Spirit, our sufficiency is in
God. So he says, “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything
as being from ourselves but our sufficiency is from God who also made us
sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the
Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
Now
that brings in a whole other realm of doctrine that's very important to
understand. We went through this a lot in our study of Hebrews and we need
to go through it again just in terms of review as we go through this chapter
because understanding the new covenant is extremely important for our spiritual
life. It's emphasized in Hebrews. It's emphasized here but it's something
that is terribly misunderstood today. I'm not sure that even though we
have studied this several times that we have got a good grasp on the new
covenant. I want to review that to some degree as we go through this and
after I finish looking at these verses I'll come back and take a look at the
new covenant. What Paul does here is he connects the fact that under the
Law we were incapable; we were unable to do what God wanted us to do. The
Law was insufficient but in the age of grace, because we have been given the
Holy Spirit, our sufficiency, our ability comes from God because it is the Holy
Spirit who enables us, who gives us the strength and the ability to live a
spiritual life and to have true victory over the sin nature. Not just legally
in terms of our position in Christ but actually in terms of our day-to-day
experience. The sad thing is that there are too many of us who don't seem
to ever quite grasp how we see this applied in our own lives. The sin
nature still seems to be just as powerful for us now that we're saved as it was
before and so Paul emphasizes this distinction.
We
have to understand this. Paul says that the our sufficiency is from God in
2 Corinthians 3:6, “Who...” [that is a reference back to God], “who also
made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant..” So as I've taught
before, remember the new covenant doesn't go into effect until the
future. The new covenant, everywhere it is mentioned in Scripture, is a
covenant between God and the house of Judah and the house of Israel. There
is not a new covenant with the church. Well, wait a minute. It sure seems
like that's what Paul is saying here that we're ministers of the new
covenant. But this is what is known as a proleptic, a future type reference. Something's
not going to happen until the future. The new covenant between God and
Israel and Judah doesn't go into effect until Jesus Christ returns at the
Second Coming. What laid the foundation for the new covenant? The sacrifice
of Christ on the cross. That is the foundation of the new covenant.
We say
this once a month, “This is the new covenant of my blood which is given for
you.” That's the legal basis for the new covenant. The new covenant
doesn't go into effect until the Second Coming but because of the new covenant
and its future certainty we have a related application of it today. It's
not much different from the Old Testament. In the Old Testament God made a
contract with Abraham and God said, “I'm going to make this contract with
you and on the basis of this legal contract with you, I'm going to bless your
next-door neighbor.
Let's
just think of this real simply as a mortgage contract. You have one person
entering into a mortgage contract with somebody else and on the basis of this
contract he says, “I'm going to bless your next-door neighbor.” Is the
contract with the next-door neighbor? Not at all. The legal contract
between these two parties is the basis for the benefits that go to the
next-door neighbor. That's the Abrahamic covenant. God is the party of the
first part. He enters into an unconditional, unilateral covenant or
contract with Abraham and tells Abraham that “through you I will bless all the
nations.” That's the foundation for the salvation of Gentiles from that
point all the way through the Old Testament and all through the New Testament
and until human history ends and the last human being is saved. It's all
because God made a contract with Abraham, that through Abraham and his seed He
would bless everyone else. It doesn't mean that they are a party to that
contract. Now that's the Abrahamic Covenant.
The
new covenant is the same kind of thing. It has different
provisions. It's between God and Israel and on the basis of that
contractual arrangement God says, “I'm going to be able to bless with a new
spiritual life and a regenerative spiritual life, something that never was
experienced before. Now they had regeneration in the Old Testament but it
didn't come with all of the extras, all of the optional benefits that we get in
the Church Age. They were made a new creature but they weren't a new
creature in Christ. They were transformed from being spiritually dead to
spiritually alive but they didn't get all of the other accessories and assets
that you and I get as believers in the Church Age.
So
anyone who is involved in evangelism is a minister of the new covenant because
that new covenant, which goes into effect in the future, is the foundation for
all of the blessings that accrue to believers today. It doesn't mean the new
covenant's in effect. It means that because the foundation for that
sacrifice has been completed on the cross that certain benefits accrue today,
but not all. They're similar in many ways to the new covenant and this
goes back to some of those difficult things that we covered at the beginning of
the study of Acts.
We
talked about the promises of the kingdom to the Jews which is specifically
related to the establishment and the activation of the new covenant with the
House of Judah and the House of David. So these things are related but
what we get today is a confusion on the part of a lot of Bible
teachers. I'm not holding myself up today as someone who's
arrived. This is historic dispensationalism and it's been taught by
numerous people. It's just gotten muddied today. We've lost sight of
this and people are teaching that we're in this 'already but not yet view the
Kingdom' and its dialectics applied to Biblical theology so that we're
'something but we're actually not that' or 'we are in the kingdom but we're not
in the kingdom.' This kind of terminology is the foundation for what some
at Dallas Seminary are now teaching called progressive
dispensationalism. It's the idea that the kingdom is progressively coming
in today but those who are pre-millennial historically and dispensationalists
believe that the kingdom was postponed completely when Christ was rejected as
the King and the kingdom won't come into its own until Jesus Christ
returns.
Jesus
is not yet crowned as we saw in our study in Revelation. Jesus isn't crowned
until the Second Coming. He goes to heaven and in Revelation chapter 3
verses 18 and 19, He is seated on His Father's throne but He is not seated on
His throne yet. He does not become the King of Kings and Lord of Lords
until the end of the Tribulation. So there's no kingdom until the end of the
Tribulation. There's no new covenant until the King comes to establish the
new covenant. We become participants with Him with a new covenant by
virtue of our position in Christ, not our identification with Israel and
Judah. That is the point that comes out of Hebrews chapter 8. We’ll
get into that a little more in just a minute.
So
Paul emphasizes the fact that God has made us sufficient because of the Holy
Spirit as ministers of the new covenant. Here we have the noun form, diakanos [diakonoj]. This
relates to that verb earlier where he said they were ministering to the church
in Corinth. In verse three he says, “clearly you are an epistle of
Christ, ministered by us...” That's their role serving the body of
Christ.
And then he says, “It's not of the letter
but of the Spirit [Spirit is rightly capitalized] for the letter kills but the
Spirit gives life.” Now what in the world does this mean? I'm going
to try desperately in the coming weeks to work through this, not to confuse you
too much, but we have three different doctrines that come together in this
particular passage. It's really exciting when we can work our way through this.
The
first doctrine is this whole issue of the new covenant and the promise of the
Spirit that comes out of Old Testament prophecy. The second aspect that
comes out of this is the role, the unique and distinct role of God the Holy
Spirit, and the Church Age. Then the third thing that comes out of this
relates to the ending of the Law as it's replaced by this much superior
spiritual life of the Church Age. We can't understand what's going on in
this passage if we don't understand the role of the Law, if we don't understand
what's going on with the new covenant and its replacement of the Law with
something new and we don't understand the role of God the Holy Spirit.
So
let's look at just a couple of passages in the Old Testament. I don't want
to drill down as deeply in this study as I did in Hebrews. I covered it in
about 11 or 12 hours in Hebrews and that's a good sufficient study but we'll
hit some of the same high points. In Exodus 31:18, which is one of the
passages that would form a background to Paul's thinking as he's writing these
verses to the Corinthians, we read, “When He had made an end of speaking with
him on Mount Sinai [referring to God speaking to Moses] He [that is God] gave
Moses two tablets of the Testimony, tablets of stone written with the finger of
God.”
Now is
there anything negative about the fact that God wrote on tablets of
stone? Not at all. As I pointed out last time, this is one of the
negatives in this study that people have said, “Well, stone on the heart that
means it's got to be bad.” It's not that it's bad; it's that it's
insufficient but it was good because Paul says in Romans seven that the law is
good and just and holy. So I don't want you to forget that the law is
good. It's just not sufficient; it didn't provide everything. It had
a limited purpose, both in scope and time.
Now
the law was clearly seen to be temporary. This is the argument that the
writer of Hebrews uses when he cites the Jeremiah 31 passage in Hebrews,
chapter 8. As I pointed out when we studied that, even though he quotes four or
five verses from Jeremiah 31, the only thing that he's making a point about is
that because the writer in Jeremiah uses the term 'new' that shows that the old
covenant of the Mosaic covenant was always understood to be temporary. It
was never understood to be permanent. It was a temporary covenant and was going
to be replaced by a greater permanent covenant.
Now
this covenant is emphasized in several passages in the Old Testament. A
couple of these verses I'm putting up here before we get into a little more
detail. Ezekiel speaks of this in Ezekiel 11:19, “Then I will give them
one heart, and I will put a new spirit within them, and take the stony heart
out of their flesh, and give them a heart of flesh.” We have many of the
same kinds of imagery here that we have in 2nd Corinthians 3. A
stone versus flesh and the reception of a new spirit. What God says in
Ezekiel is that at the time [even though the word new covenant is not used
here, this is new covenant terminology] when the new covenant is put into
effect they will, in the future, have one heart. Is that true today? Is
that true in the church? No, we don't have one heart; we're not
united. We don't have one heart. I remember when I first went to
seminary getting confused because I would hear some professors say things like
in Acts this is the beginning of the new covenant because there was unity
there; they were all one heart. But it doesn't really fly; it's only a
superficial unity; it's not what is described by Ezekiel in Ezekiel
11. “I'll put a new spirit within them.” Did we receive a new spirit
at salvation? Yes, but it doesn't bring with it the same qualifications or
the same characteristics that we get in these passages in Ezekiel and
Jeremiah.
That's
what I want to pay attention to because there are similarities but there are differences
and it's the differences that tell us that what is happening in the Church Age
is similar to what will happen in the future. It's based on that future new
covenant but it's not the new covenant. We're not in the kingdom. In
Ezekiel 36:26 God says “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within
you. I will take a heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart
of flesh.” That's very similar to the kind of thing we have in the Church
Age where we are a new creature in Christ. Jeremiah 31:33 says “This is the
covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days says the
Lord. I will put my Law in their minds and write it on their hearts and I
will be their God and they shall be my people.”
Now
see that restricts the covenant to the house of Israel and the house of
Judah. It says that God puts the Law in their minds and goes on to say
that no one will need to teach their neighbor the Law because everyone will
know it. See that's not true today. If that were true then you wouldn't
need to be here and I wouldn't need to be here and I would not have needed to
go to seminary because we would just automatically know the Law. So that
tells us that whatever we're experiencing today, even though it has
similarities of regeneration, that we have become a new creature in Christ and
we have a new heart, but it's different because we're not given the innate
knowledge of the Law that is described in these passages.
We
have to understand that there is a new covenant in the future. That new
covenant will bring about certain spiritual transformative events in the life
of believers under that new covenant in the kingdom. While they are similar to
what's going on today, they are different. Actually what we have today is
even greater than what there will be in the kingdom.
Now
the other thing we need to do is understand a little bit about this metaphor
that Paul is developing here about the letter. If you look at 2nd
Corinthians 3:6 he says, “Who [that is God] also made us sufficient as
ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit...” So
he's contrasting the letter with the Spirit. Now the letter is physical
and that is related to an epistle written with ink or written on tablets of
stone and it is talking about something that is literal and is contrasted to
that which is written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God [verse
three], not on tablets of stone or papyrus but on tablets of the flesh.
Then
he says that the letter kills but the Spirit gives life, so how in the world
are we supposed to understand this? Is Paul talking about interpretive
methodologies? Let me rephrase that a little bit. Is Paul talking
about how to interpret and understand Scripture? Not at all but that's how
a lot of people take this particular verse so I've listed out here four
options. You've probably heard at least one or two of them for how to
understand this 'letter versus the spirit' analogy in this chapter. The first
is that the letter is the Law and the Spirit, of course, is grace in the New
Testament. But this is wrong. Under this view of what Paul would be
saying is that we're not ministers of the letter, that is the Law, but of the
Spirit for the letter kills. Now the Law didn't kill. The Law wasn't bad.
That's the implication here that the Law would be bad. The Law condemns
though and the Law puts us under the condemnation of death as a result of the
Law and so that is true. The letter kills, in that sense, but the Spirit
gives life. It is not saying that the letter is the Law and if we abide by
the letter of the Law we're not going to have life. That's the implication
of that position and that's what's wrong.
The
second wrong approach is to say that what Paul is saying here is that we
shouldn't obey the literal sense of what the Scripture says but a spiritual or
allegorical sense. This is very popular and became very popular in the
history of Christianity. It developed in the late second century or early
third century. It was developed mostly by an early church father by the name of
Origen. Origen bought us some good things and a lot of bad
things. But Origen, like many in that day, was heavily influenced by
what's called Neoplatonism.
Neoplatonism
was sort of an upgraded version of Platonic philosophy and in Platonic
philosophy the physical was just a shadow of the real which is in the realm of
the ideal. So the physical really wasn't significant or
important. It's the ideal, the spiritual, that's important.
So
there are two different levels of reality and material is inherently evil and
the spiritual is inherently good. What Origen did was he took it another
step further. He said there are three levels. Just as we have the
body, the physical, the literal; we have a soul which is somewhat immaterial
and spiritual, but then we have a spiritual. So there are three levels of
meaning in the text. There's the literal meaning. So if it says that Jesus
went to Cana in Galilee that would be the literal meaning.
Then
there would be a soul meaning that would have to do with something allegorical
and that slips off and becomes subjective so anybody could come up with any
meaning because it wouldn't be anchored to a literal walk to Cana of
Galilee. And then the spiritual meaning would be even deeper than that. So
it gets completely cut off from the literal, historical, grammatical
interpretation of the text. So there are those who see this terminology
“the letter versus spirit” as having to do with interpretation that if you
interpret the Bible literally according to the letter it will kill
you. You can't do that.
Then
that leads to the next meaning which is that kind of literalist interpretation
just leads you to legalism. So they then understand the letter to be a
reference to a legalistic interpretation, in contrast to a grace sense, based
upon the spiritual meaning which is an allegorical meaning which has no
relation to the grammatical, historical, exegetical meaning of the text. Then
there's the fourth way where letter refers to usually some sort of warped sense
of twisted interpretation, in contrast to whatever interpretation the teacher
is espousing at the moment. But that's in contrast to passages such as
Romans 2:27and 29 where letter refers in those verses to the possession of the
literal Law.
So
what Paul is really saying here is the letter kills, the Law written on stone
kills, not because of the hermeneutic issue but because the letter, the Law
tells us what to do but does not enable us to do it. So we're shut out
under the condemnation of death but it's only with the coming of the Holy
Spirit in the Church Age that we're enabled to fulfill the commands of
God. It's not talking about how you interpret Scripture at all; it's not
talking about legalism versus grace at all; it's talking about the limitations
of the law and the sufficiency of grace in the Church Age. That's what
this is emphasizing: “so we've been made ministers of the new covenant.”
Now we
have to connect this and I'm going to wait until next time so we can cover that
at one time. This is going to be very important, extremely important, because
it will connect some dots for us as we look at this and as Paul covers this in
the epistle of 2nd Corinthians, which is not taught that
frequently. He brings us to a point where it emphasizes liberty. Just
skim down to verse 17 in 2nd Corinthians, chapter 3, he says, “Now
the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
liberty.” There's true freedom.
Now
where does Paul end up when he goes to all this discussion on the Law versus
grace as you go through Galatians? Where does that end up? Galatians
chapter 5 verse one says that in Christ we have liberty. Christ died to set us
free. And in Romans 8 Paul ends up, “there is no condemnation now to those
of you who are in Christ Jesus” so it helps us to understand the foundation of
true spiritual liberty, not licentiousness. We're not free to do whatever
we want to do but we're free to do what God wants us to do because he has given
us the divine enablement to do so through the transformative power of God the
Holy Spirit who indwells us.
All
these passages mirror one another but they come at this from a completely
distinct viewpoint. We'll come back to this next time. I won't spend an
inordinate amount of time on the new covenant because I've done that in detail
in the past but just enough so we remember to focus on this in contrast to what
we had in the Old Testament before we're able to go forward in Romans seven.