Exploring the Well

Wandering the savage garden...

Context! Is! Everything!

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I was reading Romans 7 today, after one of our pastors did a study on Romans 6 last night, and something stood out.

In Romans 6:15-23, Paul is talking about being slaves to righteousness; no longer are we slaves to sin, but we are slaves to righteousness, to which we are indebted and from which we derive obedience.

15 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!

(Romans 6:15 ESV)

Yet the law has not passed away, because it is the baseline from which we can determine righteousness, even though we’re not justified by the law. It serves to condemn us (Romans 1) and inform us (Romans 7:7).

And there we proceed to Romans 7:

7:1 Or do you not know, brothers — for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? 2 For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. 3 Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.

4 Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. 5 For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. 6 But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.

(Romans 7:1-6 ESV)

Okay… whoa. The thing that stuck out to me was the freedom from law because we have died to it.

I’ve mentioned before the whole concept of freedom in Christ, and here we have it yet again, expressed as freedom from the law as opposed to “freedom in Christ.”

It’s a little more forceful here, though.

Yet the law still has meaning to us, does it not? Or does it? I say it does, because, again, it’s the measure for proper behavior and feeling. (If one has no desire to murder, or steal, or covet, this is good…)

Paul, however, is still thinking like a Hebrew and writing for a Greek audience, using the polemic invective of the day. He is overemphasizing his point, to “scare them straight.”

Scaring Them Straight

“Scaring them straight” is what the anti-drug commercials of Reagan’s presidency were trying to do; overemphasize a point, in the hopes that some of the point remains.

The logic seems to be something like this:

If, for example, someone retains only 10% of a message, we can help them retain 100% of the message is we emphasize it ten times.

This ignores diminishing returns, but it seems to fit the mindset.

Where is Sparta?

Sparta is in Greece, of course. But the declaration – from Zach Snyder’s “300” – of “This! Is! Sparta!” was so … comical that it seemed to fit.

The thing about Paul’s declaration of death to the law – such that we’re free from it – is based on context.

Paul is writing to the Romans; he is explaining the theology to people who may or may not be theologically sound – as shown by his constant references to those who know the law, as a subgroup of the Roman church.

That means that he has two missions for his invective.

One is to connect to those who study the law, who expect the invective and passion. (If you’re not willing to fight for it, you must not believe it very much.)

The other is to overemphasize his point through passion, so that some retention was achieved.

Yet the law does not pass away; we still consider the law the metric for sin.

The key is to remember that Paul’s statement of death to the law is not a final word. It exists in context; it co-exists with everything else said about the Law, which is that it’s the standard by which we are able to judge behavior, and that it communicates to us part of God’s Will.

Shalom.

Romans 6:1-14: Dead to Sin, Alive in Christ

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The Bible study this week in Romans focuses on the first part of chapter 6 of Romans, a pretty well-known piece of scripture if memory serves. (It was one of the parts of Romans I could quote before I really started getting into the New Testament, which is the best barometer I have for such things.)

It contains an interaction Paul had with a hypothetical question in response to the closing of the previous parts of the letter to the Romans, in what we see as chapter 5, in which Paul says that “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” (Romans 5:20, ESV).

You see this a lot in Christian circles, especially in affluent circles, where people point out the spirituality of oppressed people in third world countries: “They trust in God and see His work among them! Even in their oppression, they are blessed!”

The problem with this expression isn’t that it’s not true – it’s that it tends to engender a question of why the one offering that expression hasn’t gone to be oppressed themselves, such that they can experience God more authentically.

“Should we not also consider ourselves oppressed, such that we can force ourselves to depend on God all the more?”

…except the answer is, typically, “No, of course not.” We might want the hand of God in our lives, but we are rarely willing to offer ourselves suffering in order to see that hand.

Is that proper? I don’t think so – I think the key is to remember to thank God for our circumstances, even in our pleasant circumstances. We feel guilty that we do little to alleviate the suffering of others, and that’s probably a good thing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we are to punish ourselves for the riches that God has granted us… as long as we remember that God has granted us those riches.

So: back to Romans 6! Paul offered a statement that where sin was multiplied, grace was multiplied also, creating the question of whether one should sin more such that grace would grow even that much more. (“Grace is a good thing; if sin increases grace, is sin therefore not ‘good’ as well?”)

We don’t know if Paul was literally asked this question or not. He may have been, but the form of Romans is as a letter, not as a series of responsum. Paul was a thorough and rather nitpicky thinker (I don’t have any experience with this, personally! Oh, wait…) and more likely anticipated the question as a logical extension of his previous wording, so responded to the potential question.

And what was the response? The response goes back to a condition, a status. Paul says in the first part of Romans 6 that we are dead and raised with Christ:

5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For one who has died has been set free from sin. (Romans 6:5-7, ESV)

We are united with Christ in His resurrection, and united with Him in His death as well.

The metaphor is one of baptism: baptism, or the mikveh (מִקְוֶה), is given as a picture of death to what wasis.

It’s a transition: the mikveh is a transition from impurity to purity. Baptism is a transition from a former state to a new, pure state. We enter the water as Yona did, in defiance of God and dying in our sin, to enter the great fish, the דג גדול, which symbolizes death. We leave death behind, and enter a new life of obedience.

(A crucial difference is that a mikveh is a continual immersion; an Orthodox adherent to Judaism undergoes a mikveh regularly, and women use it based on their menstrual cycle, as it’s part of the purification post-menses. Few Christians undergo repeated and/or constant baptism. Your mileage may vary on the metaphor’s appropriateness; personally, I see the mikveh as part of repentance.)

So Paul constructs the picture of death and life, with life freeing us from the bonds that held us before our deaths to our old selves: as those bonds are sin and the result of sin, we are to act as if we are no longer held to our sinful natures.

Does that mean we never sin? No. Yet it means our master is Christ, and we should strive to let Him lead our lives, repenting our trespasses and living in such a way that we honor Him, and not sin.

Comparing sins among people

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I had an argument with someone recently over the severity of sin. This person took great offense to the suggestion that she was no better than someone upon whom she looked down, and my assertion was that no, sin was sin – and a whole lot of little things fell out of the rather heated discussion.

For one thing, it took me a while to remove my emotions from the argument – and it was an argument, not just a heated discussion. That was probably wrong of me; I normally try to keep my emotions out of it, but just like the assertion offended the other party, her assertion that she was better than someone else offended me.

The thing is: I understand her point. It’s easy for us to say “I’ve never murdered; I’ve not stolen; I’ve not coveted another’s wife; I’ve not done this, I’ve not done that.”

Compared to someone who has done those things, whatever they are, it’s easy to say to yourself that God approves of your actions more than he approves of theirs – if He approves of theirs at all.

From a human standpoint, from the standpoint of the individual, this is probably true. If there’s a scale, and for us there is a scale, then yes, one who’s murdered another is “worse” than one who has not, all other things being equivalent.

But my point was that our scale does not matter. Here on Earth it does, I suppose; I’d not suggest the same sentence in jail for one who’s shoplifted and another who’s killed in cold blood.

Yet to God, there is no scale. I’m one of those people who hates litmus tests for people, but God uses one as the criteria for salvation, and praise be to His Holy Name that it’s the lightest burden to carry Man has ever known.

The test God uses is not: “Have you sinned?”

The test God uses is: “Have you accepted redemption through Christ’s death on the cross for your sins, and His resurrection?”

If you can say “yes” to that question, then everything you have ever done apart from that decision is irrelevant. God removes your sin from you, as far as the east is from the west. (See Psalm 103:12.)

Further, God tells us that there’s no gradation of sin – James says that if you’ve broken any of the law, you’ve broken all of it (James 2:10).

So we can see here two points of view: one is human, and says (correctly) that some sins are worse than other sins. This isn’t a new consideration; the rabbis held that anything short of murder was reparable.

The other point of view is God’s, and it says that all sin separates Man from God, and that all sin is reparable through Jesus Christ.

What, then, should we use as our perspective?

Well, it depends.

It’s understandable that we’re repelled by certain sins. Child abuse, for example, is horrible; once someone has shown that they’re an abuser of children, skepticism towards their rehabilitation is understandable (even if they are rehabilitated.)

That said, if one is a brother or sister in Christ, then… they are a brother or sister in Christ.

The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32) hits this head on.

In this parable, a son wanders away from his father, entering into a wasteful life; he returns, penitent and regretful. (He asks to be treated as if he were a hired servant, not a son, in verse 19.) The father instead treats him as a treasure, once lost but now found, celebrating his return.

The story concludes with the older son, who resents the acceptance and celebration of the return of his brother.

28 But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, 29 but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’ 31 And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.'” (Luke 15:28-32, ESV)

The older brother’s perspective is understandable, in my opinion; he’s wondering why nobody celebrated his continual obedience while this wayward brother’s return is seen as a wonderful thing.

He’s focused on the wrong thing; he’s still looking at the sin, the leaving of the son from his father’s household, where the father is focused instead on the son’s return.

What a wonderful picture of the forgiveness of Christ, and how we should see those who turn to Him, no matter what their past has been! The brother is using the human perspective; the father is using the perspective of our Father in Heaven.

Clearly, we should strive with all of our being to see others as God sees them, and not as we in our human frailty and pride see them.

Shalom.