Then Moses rose and went to Dathan and Abiram, and the elders of Israel followed him. And he spoke to the congregation, saying, “Depart, please, from the tents of these wicked men, and touch nothing of theirs, lest you be swept away with all their sins.” So they got away from the dwelling of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. And Dathan and Abiram came out and stood at the door of their tents, together with their wives, their sons, and their little ones. And Moses said, “Hereby you shall know that the Lord has sent me to do all these works, and that it has not been of my own accord. If these men die as all men die, or if they are visited by the fate of all mankind, then the Lord has not sent me. But if the Lord creates something new, and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, then you shall know that these men have despised the Lord.” And as soon as he had finished speaking all these words, the ground under them split apart. And the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up, with their households and all the people who belonged to Korah and all their goods. So they and all that belonged to them went down alive into Sheol, and the earth closed over them, and they perished from the midst of the assembly.

So how did God pass a sentence of condemnation on Korah and his people? He did so by publicly destorying them. But does this mean “condemn” is no longer a forensic word? Of course not.

Being called as a disciple of Jesus Christ does not absolutely guarrantee that one is elect. Judas was called and appointed and worked miracles by the Spirit.

But who would then deduce that being appointed and called by Jesus to be his disciple should not serve as assurance that one will inherit eternal life?

And what was Judas’ sin anyway? Did he not decide that Jesus was an untrustworthy master? Didn’t he line his private purse from the treasury because he couldn’t trust Jesus to provide for them. Didn’t he sell him out because Jesus was on an obvious “suicide mission” to Jerusalem.

Should Judas have been told that his place as a disciple was worthless or did he need to realize that it was a wonderful gift that he should receive in faith and grattitude? Judas decided his place as a disciple was worthless and therefore sold out.

Baptism appoints us as disciples of Jesus. That doesn’t automatically entail salvation because the unregenerate will reject the yoke of discipleship sooner or later. But that hardly makes baptism–being appointed a disciple by Jesus and the Spirit–of no use for assurance.

I wrote the majority of this back on September 25, 2004. I was reminded of this because the sermon today was about church government and the importance of character. A couple of passages were read describing officers:

Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty (Acts 6.3).

The report of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And a great many people were added to the Lord (Acts 11.22-24).

I can prove anything from this alone, but the description of good does comport with the idea that the ordinary churchman is righteous and those who are to be selected as leaders must stand out as good in some sense.

Because when the righteous are mentioned, the Bible is talking about the ordinary covenant member. Take James for example:

Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit (James 5.14-18).

I have assumed before that this passage refers to prayer in general, divorcing verses 16b-18 from the rest. However, I can’t help but wonder if the prayer and the rain and the fruit all refer back to praying for healing as you confess your sins. Still, it is interesting that James encourages his readers to pray by comparing them to Elijah.

Frankly, I think many people might think something like, “If only the prayer of a righteous man has great power, then mine must be weak.” We think of “righteous” in terms of moral perfection. It involves a perfect record of moral goodness, or (since we admit that is not possible) something closer to it than our record.

But if James is assuring people that their prayers will be heard, this hardly makes sense. He can’t be telling them that only moral heros have powerful prayers. So what is he telling them? Paul writes a great deal about righteousness in Romans and he informs us that being righteous does not involve superhuman moral effort. In fact, it is second rate to being good:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person–though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die–but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5.6-8).

Get it? It is thinkable to die for a good person but quite unlikely that anyone would die for a merely righteous person. Paul does point out that God’s righteousness is amazing because God knew he would have to send his Son to die for unrighteous sinners in order to keep his covenant–in order to be faithful to his promise and thus righteous. But, while righteousness can be displayed in moral heroism, it usually doesn’t require it–at least not in the case of sinners in covenant with God. It simply requires that they live as Christians.

Thus, righteousness can be attributed to people who sin, get sick, confess their sin, and pray for forgiveness. In doing this, they are meeting the obligations of their standing before God. To put it another way, while the word righteous has behavioral implications, it also connotes one’s positive status with others. Elijah was God’s prophet, so God heard him and he had access to God. Thus, Elijah was by definition righteous. We too are God’s prophets, priests, and kings. We have throneroom privileges as saints (i.e. those with sanctuary access). We are righteous whether or not we are good [see marriage illustration below].

The behavioral requirements to be righteous do not demand moral perfection. God’s relationship is with sinners, not with morally perfect beings. A believer who sins dreadfully and confesses and forsakes his sin is righteous without any qualification. He has met the obligations of his relationship with God and continues in right standing with him. (Likewise, God’s righteousness does not prevent him from forgiving such a person, but rather demands that he do so. God forgives and cleanses those who confess their sins because he is faithful/righteous–First John 1.9). If Christ died for us while we were unrighteous, how much more will God hear our prayers now that we have been put in right standing with him! God’s own righteousness demands that he listen attentively to our prayers.

And this is the point: You, whoever you are, if you are a believer in relationship with God through Christ: Your prayers are powerful. You should trust God to hear you. Assuming that James is telling you that someone else should pray is a lack of trust in the Gospel.

(Because there is a climate in Reformed pharisaical circles that considers it virtuous to twist people’s words and impute beliefs or denials to them simply because they don’t mention some truth in a specific piece of writing, let me clearly state that, without Christ’s death and resurrection no sin could be forgiven and no one could be counted righteous. Furthermore, we are justified by faith alone. The point here is that faith takes a covenantal shape because the Gospel comes to us in a covenantal shape.)

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“Covenantal Nomism” sounds like a description of tiny contract-loving creatures who live underground. But it is actually a recent term used to describe the pattern of religious belief and practice in first-century Palestinian Judaism. The idea is that God graciously establishes a structured relationship based on promises, a “covenant,” with undeserving sinful creatures. In response, those people are to gratefully follow God because they trust him. The law (in Greek: “nomos”) was given to Israel to mark them out as God’s covenant people and to give them a tangible way to show their trust in God’s promises. In the words of the famous hymn, Covenantal Nomism means “Trust and Obey.” To put it another way, Covenantal Nomism means “We love [God] because he first love us” (First John 4.19).

In Covenantal Nomism, it is understood that people continue to sin. The covenant includes the means for being forgiven of sins. These means are not ways to compensate for sins or win back God’s love. Rather, they are ways that God has given us, because he already loves us, to put us back on track and give us continual forgiveness. For Israel in the Old Testament, these means of dealing with ongoing sin often involved sacrifice. In the New Testament Jesus was revealed to be the true sacrifice who propitiated God’s wrath against sin so that now the means of forgiveness are simpler: “if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. … If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (First John 1.7, 9).

Covenantal Nomism can be contrasted with “Legalism” the idea that one must earn God’s favor by doing enough good works. Whether this means that one’s alleged good deeds must outweigh his bad, or that certain number of good must be done, or anything else, it is simply contrary to the Bible. According to the Bible we are sinners whose best works are deserving of condemnation due to the perversity of our hearts. The good news is that God freely bestows his love on us and brings us into covenant relationship to himself. He makes us part of his family, his covenant, by giving us faith–belief in the Gospel and trust in His promises. Only by faith are we righteous in God’s sight.

An example of Covenantal Nomism can be found in the parents of John the Baptist: “they were both righteous in the sight of God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and requirements of the Lord” ( Luke 1.6). There is no question that John’s parents were sinners like the rest of us. But they were counted as righteous and were blameless in their walk.

There is evidence that Covenantal Nomism was perverted at that time of Jesus. It was perverted because the actual content of God’s law had been twisted beyond recognition. For example, Jesus accused the teachers of the Law of setting aside God’s word in favor of their own commandments (c.f. Mark 7.8). Related to that, some were teaching that if one kept properly (as defined by rather rigid, man-made standards) certain ritual aspects of God’s covenant, one was safe from the wrath of God even though one was flouting the moral laws that God had given his people. Thus, John that Baptist preached, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore bring forth fruits in keeping with repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father,’ for I say to you that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Luke 3.7, 8). Interestingly, Luke calls John’s harangue, with it’s specific moral instruction, “the gospel” (3.18).

Once the Church was established after Pentecost, a new issue arose. Did baptized believing Gentiles need to become circumcised Jews in order to be full members of the Covenant people? At the Jerusalem Council, the answer was firmly “No!” God’s covenant people now included both Jew and Gentile without distinction.

Traditionally, some have tried to interpret the issue in Acts 15 as a debate over “legalism.” The problem with this is that the Jerusalem Council wrote to the Gentile Christians to do certain things rather than becoming circumcised. “For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these essentials: that you abstain from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication; if you keep yourselves free from such things, you will do well” (Acts 15.28, 29).

If the point of being circumcised was to earn God’s favor, then that would mean the Jerusalem Council simply came up with a different easier legalism. God forbid! The point was that one is no longer identified as belonging to God’s people by circumcision. Rather, one is identified by the gift of faith–responding to the Gospel by repentance and submission to baptism. That gift that is incompatible with idolatry or the commonplace rituals associated with paganism such as Temple prostitution or imbibing blood. (Notice that the prohibition on blood is not unique to Israel but was given to Noah [Genesis 9.4]).

The boundaries of the covenant people of God have changed, but the expectation of a life of continual repentance from sin has not. As the Apostle Paul wrote: “Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but what matters is the keeping of the commandments of God” (First Corinthians 7.19).