We talk about the rich young ruler a lot in my house. His problem is not, as is commonly thought, his unwillingness to obey. He came asking the wrong question in the first place. He did not come asking, “How can I inherit eternal life?” He came asking, “What must I do that I may obtain eternal life?”
Even so, you cannot mix grace and law. Like leaven, the law overtakes the whole loaf. If you mostly believe in the one-way grace and acceptance of God, but you still maintain that somehow there remains the remote possibility that our poor performance can persuade Him to reject us, you have the leaven of the Pharisees.
So the gospel declares a 100% scandalous free-for-all forgiveness through Christ’s blood. It says that everything: lax law, stringent law, my real and present guilt and shame, no longer define me. The love which God has expressed towards me in Christ defines me.
Cannibalism is the single most immoral human act. It is murder PLUS eating human flesh. Christianity takes it to the extreme. Cannibalistic cultures typically eat their enemies or their grandmothers who died naturally. Jesus is asking us to eat Him – the Messiah, God in the flesh. Kill and eat! Drink His blood!
Think about it like a normal person for just a second: how can you say He was sacrificed for sins and then say that if you sin, the sacrifice is no good?
If you live and breathe and think and exist in an environment where you believe in the power of Christ’s blood shed for sinners, you have escaped the two-dimensional prison. You really have come to believe, not simply that you alone are forgiven, but that there is a possibility of real lasting definitive forgiveness at all. You believe in substitutionary atonement.
In a recent post, Peter Rollins brings up an interesting idea about how many people base their relationships on what I would call false grace: … religion doesn’t simply offer a set of positions to conform to, it also offers the acceptable ways in which one can transgress these positions: it tells us both how […]
We live in a world where, if you are going to get your message across, you have to get hard and passionate and fiery. If you are trying to browbeat sinners and idiots and fools into right living, that would be the way to go. You’d be more like a football coach than an art […]
It seems that no matter how stringently I say so, people have trouble believing it when I say that grace and one-way unconditional love is the heart of the gospel. People think my main agenda is persuade them to agree with and conform to a traditional form of morality. Agreement with a traditional form of […]
This is a bit of a theological post, but I think it is an important topic. In the course of a discussion with some awesome guys on Facebook, this article by Michael Horton was referenced: http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2012/03/20/holiness-wars-what-is-antinomianism/ I found myself vaguely disturbed by it, so I wanted to work through its points a little more carefully. […]