Our Goodness

Listening to Piper the other day brought out some interesting thoughts. If you are not familiar, there is a little book entitled, "The Passion of Jesus Christ" that really illustrates, in a refreshing way, what a passionate life, grounded in the truths of Scripture, should look like. It also gives the reader a good idea of who Piper is and what he is about. Chef recommends. Also hear a sermon on http://theresurgence.com/podcast

In this message, he is addressing the cross and addressing church planters on how they should preach the cross.

- In new, hip churches, don't eschew difficult concepts in favor of practicality. The full gospel needs to be presented. Lost in the culture (and even some newer translations) is the doctrine of propitiation - abating God's wrath through the cross sacrifice. Clearly, this is not a popular idea because God's wrath is not a popular subject.

It is always an interesting study (to me, anyway) to consider how this has changed historically. Pre-French Revolution Europe and even pre-war America had little trouble with this concept, arguably due to the despotic leadership under which they were accustomed. Perhaps it was simply that life was seen as a series of hardships, but for whatever reason, God as a just and holy and wrathful being was easy to handle, if we are allowed to use the Puritans as an example. Check out Jonathan Edwards’ iconic sermon on the subject and I’m sure you will be offended by the ease with which America’s greatest theologian plainly portrays this view of God.

http://www.ccel.org/e/edwards/sermons/sinners.html

It so flies in the face of modern evangelicalism and what is regarded as acceptable preaching that many cite it as the nadir of the church in America. V.R. Fr. George Morelli, PhD. goes so far as to classify this view as ‘unorthodox’ and right he may be. If orthodoxy has redefined itself in modern terms and along modern ethical boundaries. His Jesus-centric view of Scripture is typical of my observations of such churches who market, rather than deliver Bible teaching. In my estimation, Piper and Edwards are attempting to see God in all his facets, not merely the Christ, and not merely gentleness and kindness.

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles6/MorelliHumility.php.

One might remind Morelli and the like that Christ was God humbling himself to come to us. It would hardly serve the purpose of redemption for God to send his son, ready to unleash the power of retribution on his sinful and unrepentant creation. The very act of Christ was to bridge man back to God and in so doing, he acted in contrast to how the Holy nature of God might want to act. Again, propitiation.

My challenge to myself and to others in encountering orthodoxy or assessing orthodoxy as it conflicts with personal understanding of justice is to ask, 'Is God's system being accurately portrayed?' If so, 'Does God's justice need tweaking or does mine?' I admit, the Edwardian approach is not palatable, yet once I get honest, it is integral toward a complete understanding of the cross and propitiation. When is the last time you heard this from the pulpit?

…you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment…Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

Wow. Piper says he feels this way when he acts petty, that sometimes he wonders, obviously with this in mind about God, why God doesn’t strike him dead for the crappy way he acts. And while some critics may chop Edwards up over it, if you take it to the next level and you say, “If God sees me that way, how much then did he love me to withhold his judgment?” At any rate, during this historical period, God's wrath was firmly understood and entrenched if God's grace and love were misunderstood and under-represented. Modern egalitarianism leads us to false assumptions about God just as the old world monarchical stratification led to other incorrect emphases.

If this doesn't drive the point home, consider ancient religion. You have Egypt, who drew their idea of the sun-god from nature. In the Nile valley, god was just and provided the necessary ebb and flow from which all goodness comes. The fertile crescent (Mesopotamia, Babylon, Chaldea, ie) portrayed a nature, and thus god, as a temperamental being who could be violently angry at the people, demonstrated through the violent floods of the Tigris/Euphrates. Deep, deep ramifications when one considers this to be a pre-cursor to modern Islam. That is another subject.

- I like it when Piper offers, if you're in a culture that doesn't understand sheep or what a sheep is, teach them about sheep and then teach the Scriptures. Don't skip over things because they're difficult or inconsonant with culture.

- So then, the key of this message (sorry for all the introduction but it is all within the context of our distorted view of God due to culture) is do not preach that we are of such value to God that he sacrificed his son for us. Interesting because that’s basically what I’ve heard all my life. Piper says it isn’t that we are so special, worthy, chosen, etc that God loved us and wanted to demonstrate that for us. Yes, it is true in a sense, but this isn’t the main value or point of the cross. The value or point is somewhat the opposite. Yes, he loves us. Yes, he wanted to redeem us. But the fact is, we are so evil, so sinful, so far from goodness that it is an abominable travesty of God’s justice to NOT condemn, punish us. In fact, in order to do so required God to abate his justice to such an extent that he had to offer something in replacement. To even the scales, so to speak because justice has been grossly misappropriated on our behalf in the form of undeserved forgiveness, Christ had to be grossly and undeservedly punished to make it work for God. Again, the doctrine of propitiation is in view. The wrath of God was restrained, only to be poured out in the violent, UNJUST, and horrifying act of the cross.

Now that is at once humbling and I think a proper perspective on the cross. Piper rails on the self-esteem emphasis that our culture has today. Denying realities in order to preserve self-esteem in our children, in our co-workers, employees, and yes, in our churches. In sum, the cross does show us that God ultimately loves us and saw fit to redeem us. A Reformed perspective would go a bit further and say he chose a select group, be it Israel in the OT or Christians in the NT. But that self-view can only be properly framed within the understanding that the cross was more than the God of the universe loving us and making payment for us out of love. To provide that for us was so painful to Christ on the physical yet not to be missed, it pained the father to blatantly disregard his own justice and wrath, and take that justice and wrath and apply it to his son, who deserved only glory. In a way, God paid the ultimate price, that of denying his own character through the misappropriation of justice and how painful that must have been.

- So we go on just a bit more. Paul says in talking about our goodness, that our goodness, though very good indeed in some instances and persons, is a goodness that is limited. Our capacity for evil is in contrast, infinite. Therefore, the goodness is rendered meaningless. This just brought such clarity to me, remembering the basic principle of infinity in a mathematical way. Kids say, “blah blah blah times a hundred”. And the next one, “…times a million”. And so on until someone plays the trump card, “…times infinity”. And you can’t beat that. You can say “infinity times infinity” or “infinity to the infinite power” but it makes no difference. Likewise, the infinity concept is infinitely more than the highest number conceived. Back to man, you have a guy that is pretty good and we rate him at a 100. Then another guy is bad and he is a negative 200. All of these comparatively good/bad ratings are going to get buried in the fact that we are infinitely bad! So, your comparative good matters very little. I think about a guy who scrapes together nickels and after several years, he manages to save $20,000. But illness strikes and bills tally in the hundreds of thousands. No amount of thrift, savvy can dig him out of that hole, he just isn’t capable of operating on that scale. And then comes a wealthy individual. Bill Gates writes a check for the bills. To the man, the bills may have been infinite. To Gates, the bill was infinitely small.

- And so it is in our spiritual lives. The relative good we may do outside of God is obliterated, either by Satan’s finite, yet completely overwhelming power in us to cause bad, or by God’s infinite and available capacity for good. Either way, the 'relative good' we can manage on our own or as unbelievers matters very little and is powerless against a finite yet many times more powerful Satan or an infinite God. As Steve Brown says, “You think about that.”