May 17 2020
Acts 15:1-21
I really enjoy professional football in spite of all its problems and controversies. The NFL draft came at a time when I was getting really tired of the never ending Covid-19 news so I decided to watch a little bit of it.What I enjoy about the draft is trying to figure out why certain teams pick the players that they do. Everyone knew Cincinnati would pick a quarterback because they desperately needed one. Their pick of Joe Burrows just made sense. Then there were other choices, like the Green Bay Packers picking a quarterback when they already had one of the leagues best quarterbacks in Aaron Rodgers that made a lot of people scratch their heads. What people wanted is for the General Manager and the coaching staff of Green Bay to justify their using their pick in the draft on a quarterback instead of using it to pick a wide receiver that they needed a lot more. This is the part of the draft that intrigues me, the reasoning behind the choices that the teams make. You see, their choices are a judgment call. The teams do their homework, they scout all the players and then the time comes when they have to make a decision. Now, once they announce that decision then they have to justify their decision, they have to explain why they made the choice that they made. For some weird reason, I find the reasons that the teams give for who they pick in the draft fascinating. The reasons for their choices have to be able to be defended and understandable when on the surface they don’t appear to be either.
It might be hard to believe but the NFL draft has a lot in common with what the Bible calls salvation. Here is why this is so. When the Bible speaks about a persons salvation, like in the letters of Paul, Paul often writes about justification. A good example is in the third chapter of Romans where Paul writes “we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the Law”. So, often when we read this we want to make this word “justify” into some theological word but in all reality it is the same language used by a team after the draft. To justify is to merely give the reasons for a choice that was made. What Paul is writing about is the reasons why God chooses the ones he chooses and that reason is faith. God’s choosing of the ones who have faith is what the Bible refers to as salvation.
Many of us when we hear the word “salvation” have a certain idea of what is meant by that word. To some it is a decision that one made through a prayer, or through a confession where we gave our life to Jesus, we surrendered our life to Jesus or we put Jesus on the throne of our heart. As important as this moment was though we should not assume that this idea of salvation is exactly what the Bible is speaking about. If we take what we understand salvation to be and project it back into the scripture story we will find that the story stops making much sense. You see, in the first century when the people of Israel would speak about salvation what they meant is Israels rescue when God would return at the end of the age and at long last destroy pagan oppression. So, yes this is a very different idea of salvation then what most of us think about when thinking about salvation.
In order to have some degree of certainty that God would rescue them, the people of Israel relied heavily upon their covenant with God. Only those who had a covenant relationship with God here in the present could be assured of salvation by God in the future. This covenant for the men of Israel was entered into through the rite of circumcision. Every male child in Israel at eight days of age was given this mark of the covenant just as their ancestor Abraham had done thousands of years before them. This is how the covenant with God was entered into and this covenant relationship was maintained through study of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible which teach the right way of living with God. So, membership in this covenant was demonstrated rather than earned. The importance of this covenant membership was that when the end of the age came those who were faithful to the covenant would be the ones who would be victorious united with God the ultimate victor. To be faithful to the covenant though did not mean that the people of Israel had to keep the Law completely as God in his grace provided a system of sacrifices to deal with the sins of his people. The question in the first century people had about their salvation is just what were the marks of membership that marked out the people who were really safe, the ones who would be on the winning side when God showed up at the end of the age? There were many answers to what these marks were depending on which Jewish sect one belonged to. So it isn’t all that surprising that there was some uncertainty as to who it was who would be present at the victory party in the future.
Now, the reason we have to understand this idea of salvation is so that we can figure out why in the fifteenth chapter of Acts that a group of Pharisees who had came to believe in Jesus were insistent that any new Gentile, non-Jewish converts had to be circumcised and they had to keep the law of Moses. These Pharisees were insistent upon these requirements because this is the only way that they knew that people would be safe, would be on the winning team when God came to rescue his people. Yes, they believed Jesus was the king who would rule in the new age after God stepped in and set things right but for them the resurrection of Jesus did not alter the fact that only those who were covenant members would be saved by God. So, it wasn’t that the Pharisees thought that one had to earn ones salvation as much as they believed that the marks of a right relationship with God were the mark of circumcision and the mark of devotion to the Torah or way of God.
Once this group of Pharisees had stated their position, the apostle and elders gathered together to consider whether this was the way things were or not. Peter who had an amazing experience with Cornelius, a Roman centurion, a Gentile, who did not have a covenant relationship with God. Peter conveyed how God had chosen him to take the message of Jesus Christ to Cornelius and his household. Cornelius and his household believed in the gospel and God, who knows the hearts of people bore witness to Peter of his acceptance of Cornelius by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he done with Peter and the Apostles at Pentecost. God did this to show that he made no distinction between the Jews and the Gentile having cleansed their heart by faith. This was Peter’s experience which seemed to be very different than the doctrine held by the Pharisees. The experience of Cornelius was also different than what we in our modern times believe is necessary for salvation because Cornelius had not been baptized, Cornelius had not come to the altar, Cornelius had never signed a decision form or said a Jesus prayer. In fact Cornelius had never even made any kind of public confession. Yet it was pretty evident that Cornelius was accepted by God because the Holy Spirit was poured out mightily upon Cornelius and his household. It was this experience that led Peter to have a new understanding of salvation. This is why he chided the Pharisees asking them why were they putting God to the test placing a yoke on the necks of the disciples that neither their fathers nor they have been able to bear ?” Peter brings up a pretty serious charge against the Pharisee believers when he charges them of putting God to the test even though to our modern sensibilities putting God to the test seems like an odd saying. In the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy Moses instructs the people of Israel that they were not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah.” To understand what is meant by putting the Lord to the test we have to understand what happened at Massah. This incident is recorded in the seventeenth chapter of Exodus. There we read of the how the people of Israel were moving through the wilderness at the command of God. They came to a place called Rephidim and our story records that interestingly enough there was no water for the people to drink at this location. Now, we have to stop here for a moment and consider what we just read. God is leading his people and he has led them to a place where there is no water and we have to wonder why would God do such a thing. Well, what happened is that the people quarreled with Moses demanding that Moses give them water to drink. Moses replied “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord? So, here we learn that to test the Lord is the opposite of trusting the Lord. Testing the Lord is to question either the presence or the power of the Lord. The whole reason God led them to a place of no water was to test his people to see if they would trust him to provide even when the means to provide did not appear to be evident. God wanted his people to know him as the God who is the creator. What it means for God to be creator is to know the that he is a God who as Paul wrote about in the fourth chapter of the letter to the Romans, is a God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. This is what God did when he created the world. The Spirit hovered above the nothingness and God called forth the creation. God desires that we his highest creation might know him as the God who is able to make something out of nothing. This is what he was always trying to teach the people of Israel. When they were leaving Egypt and the Egyptian army was fast on their heels, God made a way through the sea for the people of Israel when there appeared to be no way to escape. In the wilderness, God led his people to a place where there was no apparent water to demonstrate once again that he is a God for which nothing is too great and in the end God had Moses gather the elders together to go and stand by a rock and when Moses struck the rock with his staff out flowed a gusher of water.
Now, that was a long explanation for such a short phrase that Peter used in saying that the Pharisees were testing God however when we know what the term originally meant we can know that what Peter was accusing the Pharisees of was not trusting in the power and presence of God. The Pharisee contention still clung to their old understanding even though the death and resurrection of Jesus had changed everything. What the Pharisees had not comprehended is that to know who is justified in their belief that they will be saved meant that one first had to understand the justification of Jesus. Jesus went to the cross having faith in his Heavenly Father who he believed is able to give life to the dead and to call into existence things which do not exist. Jesus put no hope in the power of his flesh but allowed the powers that be to use all of the power of their flesh to bring about the ultimate end that flesh can bring which is death. Where the Jewish realm declared Jesus guilty and the Gentile realm represented by Rome declared Jesus guilty, God declared Jesus not guilty by rising him from the grave three days after his death upon the cross. The resurrection then is God’s justification of Jesus, that he truly is the righteous holy Son of God. The resurrection being the justification of Jesus is our justification also.What the Pharisees missed is what had changed when Jesus was raised from the dead. On the cross Jesus condemned sin in the flesh meaning that all of us are held by the power of sin and in our present state apart from God we walk about in bodies of death. What we need is resurrection, the resurrection that comes about by faith in the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence those things that do not exist. Through faith, God through the Holy Spirit hovers over the nothingness of our life and creates in us a new heart, a new spirit free from the power of sin. When the Pharisees insisted upon circumcision and adherence to the Torah as the marks that would justify a persons claim of future victory they were in effect stating that God was not able to make a people for himself by his own power. The Pharisees were dead wrong. God justifies who he calls his own people in the same way Jesus was justified as the Son of God, through resurrection. We know we are God’s people when we have a personal experience of God’s power which takes the nothingness of our life and creates something of beauty out of it. This is the experience of the new covenant that Jeremiah wrote about in the thirty first chapter where he prophesied that no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying “Know the Lord” for they shall all know me from the least to the greatest.” We know the Lord, that he is a God who is able to give life to the dead and who calls into existence what does not exist because this is our personal experience. Jesus teaches us in the fifth chapter of Matthew that those who are pure of heart will see God and this is our experience of faith. Our hearts are pure when they are undivided in their faith in God knowing that only God can raise us from our dead life under the slavery of sin. When our hearts our pure in their devotion to God this is when we see God through the movement of the Holy Spirit. This was what Peter witnessed to in his experience with Cornelius and his family. Cornelius believed God with his whole heart and when he did the Holy Spirit came upon Cornelius and his household; everyone saw God move in an unmistakable way.
The church council when it had heard the testimony of Peter decided that the resurrection of Jesus had changed everything even what they believed about their salvation. It would not be necessary for the Gentiles nor even the Jews to rely upon the actions of the flesh but instead they were to rely upon the actions of the Spirit. There was only one thing that needed to be clarified and that would be just what would be the mark of those who were justified of future victory? The answer is found in the new life free from the enslavement of sin. This is what Jesus was speaking about in the twelfth chapter of the gospel of John where he teaches “ if anyone hears my words and does not keep them I do not judge them; for I did not come into the world to judge the world but to save the world. The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word I have spoken will judge him on the last day.” And just what is this word that will judge us? It is the word that is God’s commandment that we love one another just as God first loved us we also are to love one another. Now that we have been set free from our body of death through faith in the God who is able to raise us to new life, now we are able to love as God has always intended us to do. This is why John in his first letter, the third chapter can tell us “this is how we know we have passed out of death into life because we love one another.” This then is our salvation, not merely some hope of winging our way to heaven when this life is over, not some safety against the flames of hell but the real life experience here and now of living the life God has always intended us to live. Through the power of God the life where loving each other, treating others in the same way we want to be treated, this life is finally a reality. So with every act of love we do we grow more certain of our future victory. In this way our future victory becomes our present victory when we live out this victory today, loving others more and more to the glory of God. Amen!
No comments:
Post a Comment