Last post. I consider this extremely important, and if anyone wants to know what I understand to be my teaching, I’ve laid it out here. Remember the previous posts!
- What I teach as a pastor about obedience regarding the Mosaic Law and the Gospel, part 1
- What I teach as a pastor about obedience regarding the Mosaic Law and the Gospel, part 2
- What I teach as a pastor about obedience regarding the Mosaic Law and the Gospel, part 3
Holiness, concretely and practically pictured in obedience, is the means through which the fellowship involved in the covenant relationship continues to its fruition and consummation. This is the point (to name one example) of Leviticus 26. It is stated in both positive and negative terms–with both promise and threat: If you walk in my statutes and observe my commandments and do them, … I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people (Leviticus 26:3, 11, 12).
So we can sum up the issue by saying that
- God’s holiness demanded that conformity to that holiness,
- His holiness was itself the essential covenant privilege,
- Holiness was the condition of perserverance in the enjoyment of the blessings of the covenant,
- Holiness was the medium through which the covenant privilege realized its fruition.
- Holiness was exemplified in obeying God’s commands.
- Obedience was thus entirely fitting with the nature of the covenant between God and Israel as one of union and communion with God.
- Disobedience was entirely contradictory to the nature of that covenant.
In all these ways then, the demand for obedience in the Old Covenant under Moses was identical in principle with the same demand in the New Covenant under the Gospel.
The Gospel covenant also is expressed centrally in the promise, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” The new covenant as an everlasting covenant reaches its highest point here: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” (Revelation 21.3).
Yet we must ask: Do believers remain in this relationship and in the enjoyment of its blessing regardless of continuing in obedience to God’s commands?
The answer of the Bible (and Reformed theology) is clear: one of the most unsafe perversions of the doctrine of grace, and one that has produced the most dismal record of moral and spiritual devestation,is to assume that past privileges, nomatter how high they may be, guarantee a person’s security regardless of perseverance in faith and holiness. Under the Gospel, believers continue in the new covennant and in the enjoyment of the privileges of the covenant because they continue to fulfill the conditions of that covenant; they continue in faith, love, hope, and obedience. Real believers are preserved to the end, to final salvation; but they are preserved by the power of god through faith (First Peter 1.5). “For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end” (Hebrews 3.14). It is through fiath and patience we inherit the promises (cf. Hebrews 6.11, 12). We shall be presented holy and blameless and above reproach before God, on the condition that we “continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel (Colossioans 1.22, 23). The Apostle Paul could exult in his assurance that his citizenship was in heaven and that Christ would one day transform the body of his humiliation and change it into the likeness of his glorified body (Philippians 3.20, 21). Coordinated with this confidence, however, as the condition of it, was the claim that “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3.13, 14).
Paul knew quite wil that, if he were to reach the resurrection in glory, then all the resources of the power of Christ’s resurrection must be at work in him and all the energy of his personality recruited in the utilization of those means through which he would grasp that for which he was grasped by Christ (Philippians 3.10-12). In other words, the goal is never reached–the covenant’s consummation in blessing is not acheived in some automatic way, but rather by means of a process that fully engages the Apostle’s own committed devotion. It is not attaint regardless of perseverance, but through perseverance.
And this perseverance means zero if it does not mean committed obedience to the will of Christ as expressed in his comands. We easily realize, however, that reaching the goal does not depend on perseverance and obedience as the meritorious ground for it. Obedience, as the necessary and fitting expression of loyalty to Christ does not fit into the idea of a covenant or works or merit, but in a covenant that is pure grace from beginning to end.
The tendency to interpret the requirement of obedience in the Mosaic covenant as possessing a works principle rather than one of grace comes from a failure to realize that the requirement of obedience in the Mosaic economy is identical in principle with the same demand under the Gospel economy. When we take a second look at the demand for obedience in the covenant of Moses (cf. Exodus 19.5, 6; 24.7) in light of the relationship between law and grace in the gospel, we will discover that the related ideas are totally foreign to any theory that sees obedience related to works as opposed to grace. Obeying invovles no more the realm of legal merit than in the new covenant.
The New Testament believer is not deprived of the law of God, but is subserviant to Christ’s law. He delights in God’s law in the inward person, and he therefore repeats the cry of the Old Testament believer, “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day.” (Psalm 119.97). He is also mindful that the one who was the incarnation of embodiment of virtue, the one who is the ultimate and complete example, said, “I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart” (Psalm 40.8)
Div Tags!! You have 2 opening div tags before and after the sentence beginning, “In all these ways then,…” They look like this: [div align=”left” /] (except with arrows instead of brackets).
They have been improperly self-closed (that’s what the / in those tags are supposed to do, but divs aren’t the kind of tags that are allowed to use them). And I can find no closing tags for them.
I think, I hope those are what’s causing your layout to break. You should be able to safely delete them in your Write Post page without affecting your post layout, I don’t offhand see what good they were intended to do in you post. Unless you have some reason that’s not obvious, in that case maybe you could make the second instance a closing tag = [/div]
I’m guessing that possibly you use the Rich text editor in your wp, and you did some rewriting of the post that inadvertently left those tags behind when you changed some aspect of your post (maybe? – I don’t use the Rich Text format, so I’m not familiar with all its quirks), in that case you may need to go into the html edit mode to manually delete the tags.
I sure hope that helps!
Valerie, thanks for spotting that. It worked.
My pleasure! I’m glad it worked.