Grace Upon Grace

By lovingkindness and truth iniquity is atoned for, and by the fear of the Lord one keeps away from evil.  --Proverbs 16:6

Last week I wrote about sanctification and purity.  We should live our lives in such a way befitting children of God.   1 John 2:1 says, "My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin..."  Wait a minute, hold the phone!  Doesn't Paul say in Romans 3:23 that "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God"?  I know.  That's why John goes on to say in 1 John 2:1b, "...and if anyone sins we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous."

Remember the scene described in Zechariah 3:1-5?  I wrote about it last week--you can read my prior post, or you can look up the passage for yourself.  Jesus is our Advocate, the One who stands with us before God and counters the accusations of Satan that we are sinful and undeserving of grace or mercy.  We are made of base metals, but Jesus covers us with pure gold.  More on that later.

Here's a thought I had in the shower this morning.  How many of us tend to be overcome by guilt and shame?  I do.  We become so overwhelmed that we stop being of any use to anyone.  We can be totally shut down and shut off from others while we wallow in guilt and shame.  So here's the deal.  Guilt and shame are God-given emotions that act as brakes to our sin.  Those emotions are designed to make us stop sinning, until we can turn around, correct our course, and move on.  But sometimes we fail to move on with our lives, even if we are now pointed in the right direction.  It's like Satan has applied the emergency brake in our lives, and moving forward is a strain to our engine.  We've got to recognize that our guilt and our shame have done their job--they have stopped our momentum to keep us from driving headlong into hell.  It is only when we let Jesus correct our course and take our guilt and shame away that we can be useful again.  We must disengage the emergency brake that Satan has set, so that we can continue to move as God intends us to go.

Last week I also talked a lot about gold.  Gold is good.  Gold is valuable.  Gold is precious.  Gold represents the goodness of God in our lives.  Fun fact: of the elements that make up the human body, over 99% are non-metal: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etc.  However, in the less than 1% that are metals, there are 11 distinct metals: chromium, cobalt, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, silicon, tin, vanadium, and zinc.  Think about these base metals as being your flesh.  Better yet, think of them as sins.  There are 10 commandments, and a bunch of other sins listed in the Bible; maybe one of them is a habit or a hangup for you. 

So the activities banned in the 10 commandments and one "secret sin" make up the real you.  God wants to infuse His character in you, so let's imagine Him represented as gold.  Now, the way to purify metals is to heat them up.  So let's suppose that you are a Christian, and god has given you a gold plating (referenced in Scripture as the righteousness of God in Christ, something that we are encouraged to put on like a robe--kind of like the clean robe that Jesus commanded to be put on Joshua the high priest in Zechariah 3:1-5.)  But He wants you to have more of Himself.  More "gold" in your make-up.  So He turns up the heat.  You are put in a situation that shows your true mettle (see what I did there?  "Mettle" is what we are made of; we're talking about base metals in the human body.  Keep up, will you?)

The melting point of tin is 450 degrees Fahrenheit.  Maybe "tin" is using the Lord's name in vain.  With a little effort, you can clean up your language, and not distract from your testimony.  A little more heat is applied.  The melting point of zinc is 787 degrees.  Maybe "zinc" is coveting.  With a bit more effort, you can learn to be content with what God gives you day by day.  The melting point of iron is 2100 degrees.  Maybe "iron" for you is lying, or adultery, or your "secret sin" that is not listed in the Top Ten.  It takes a lot of heat to get that out of your system.

Here's what I am trying to get at:  every time God points out a sin in your life, and prompts you to get rid of it (by applying heat or whatever), He adds a layer of gold to replace the base metal that was lost.  His desire is to make us full of Himself, pure and holy and set apart.  The more of ourselves we lose, the more grace is applied to our lives.  "For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace." (John 1:16)  When there is more gold and less base metal, we become more pure.  Like we learned last week, the karat weight gets closer to the perfectly pure 24 k when there is more pure gold and less metal alloy.

I am reading a book by Athol Dickson entitled The Gospel According to Moses: What my Jewish friends taught me about Jesus.  There is a chapter on forgiveness.  He talks about a three-fold process involving faith, repentance, and restoration.  I thought this analogy was thought-provoking:

Suppose I have jumped into a deep well.  If I refuse to admit that I am down in the well, how can I be convinced to grab a rope?  Similarly, if I refuse to admit I am disobedient to the Lord, how can I hope for reconciliation?  But I am embarrassed to find myself down here and frustrated that I cannot climb out on my own.  So although God has dropped a rope and stands at the top ready to pull me up, I go to unusual lengths to ignore Him.  I pretend there is no rope.  I pretend there is no well.  I pretend I can climb out anytime I like without His blasted rope.  I pretend I am supposed to be exactly where I am.  Sometimes I even pretend that God is not really up there or not really willing and able to pull me out.  Anything seems preferable to the humiliating admission that I am in a situation beyond my control.  But until I admit that, how can I grab the rope?  So this is why forgiveness first requires confession: to grab the rope, I must first realize that I need the rope.  Confession is admitting that I have foolishly fallen into a bad situation.  I am in trouble.  I am helpless.  I am wrong.  Only then can I accept the help God offers.  Now, having confessed, I have the rope in my hands.  But a question comes echoing down from the top of the well.  God wants to know, "If I start to pull, will you hold on tight?"  The words translated "repent" in both the Hebrew ad the Greek Scriptures carry the connotation of "turning," that is, facing away from my past sinful behavior and back toward God.  I cannot hold the rope yet continue to simultaneously splash around in the muck and mire.  Experience has shown that people who try to do both lose their grip and fall right back down.  So repentance is agreeing to stop messing about.  It is abandoning my sinful ways in order to give God and His rope my full attention.  Fortunately, there is a benefit to all those ridiculous excuses I offered prior to grabbing the rope.  It is this: now that I have admitted where I am, my pride is well and truly shattered, so when I look up at the small patch of sky and promise, "I won't do this any more," the promise rings true.  The rope tightens and, repentant, I ascend.  I used to believe the sole purpose of confession and repentance was to instill humility, as if God only cares about being in charge, like a bully demanding I "say uncle" before He lets me up.  But I have come to understand that confession motivates me to grab the rope and repentance inspires me to hold on tight.  They are for my benefit, not God's.  Remembering that even the Lord cannot make sense of nonsense in a logical universe, I suddenly see that even God cannot lift a person who does not grasp and hold the rope.  But of course, it is not really that simple.  The truth is, I have muddied the water with my floundering about below.  I am covered with the muck and mire I stirred up.  I have even swallowed some of the filthy stuff in my desperate attempts to escape on my own.  So as I am drawn closer to God a second question comes echoing down the shaft.  "Can you leave this well the way you found it?"  It is a fair question.  If someone pollutes a well, the only just and proper remedy is to restore the water to its former state of purity.  It is not good enough to dig another well someplace else, and certainly not good enough to provide a new bucket and rope while leaving the water muddy down below.  This is why the Hebrew Scriptures define justice as "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth."  The only real justice is perfect justice--returning things to exactly the way they were before.  So I dangle here, midway between disaster below and delivery above, wondering how in the world I am going to leave the well the way I found it.  One thing is for sure: I must find a way.  Since "the soul who sins is the one who will die," (Ezekiel 18:4), apparently my life depends upon it.  --Dickson, Athol The Gospel According to Moses, pages 165-167

That verse in Ezekiel speaks to the fear that God would visit judgement on His people "to the third and fourth generation."  The Prophet gave the people hope, in that each person's sin was his own to deal with.  Further, there was hope in a system of substitutionary sacrifice: in the Old Testament, it was redeemed through the blood of bulls and goats.  Yet even this was a shadow of a greater sacrifice to come. 

"I shall take no young bull out of your house nor male goats out of your folds.  For every beast of the forest is Mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.  I know every bird of the mountains, and everything that moves in the field is Mine.  If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is Mine, and all it contains." --Psalm 50:9-12

 No animal sacrifice is sufficient for our atonement to a holy God.

With what shall I come to the Lord and bow myself before the God on high?  Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings, with yearling calves?  Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams, in ten thousand rivers of oil?  Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?  He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of  you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? --Micah 6:6-8 (emphasis mine).

This goes back to restoring the well to its former state.  Can it be done with burnt offerings? No.  Is there anything else I can possibly do?  I can know justice and love mercy and walk humbly before God, but I am powerless to fix what my sin has broken.

Given the absence of a perfect human being to balance the scales, I believe God accomplished the impossible on my behalf, reentering human history as Jesus and accepting all the mortal limitations of Adam except for one: Jesus never sinned.  Because I cannot be blameless before the Lord, Jesus became my surrogate, my substitute perfection on the universal scales of justice, providing the perfect life for perfect life that perfect justice requires.  Adam went down to death a flawed, divided man.  Jesus rose up from death a perfectly whole man.  The cosmic scales of justice were balanced.  The divided physical and spiritual selves were reunited, and nakedness once again forgotten.  And somehow--only God knows how--just as Adam bequeathed his imperfect spiritual condition to Seth and through him down to me, Jesus bequeaths his spiritual perfection to all who accept the gift of His sacrifice in our place.  I believe the annual sacrificial deaths at Yom Kippur prepared the way so that Jesus might show me the salvation of God, the perfect balancing of the scales of justice that was yet to come.  I believe in Jesus because I can see no other possibility.  Like a Jewish shepherd searching through his flock for an unblemished animal to take to the tabernacle altar, I realize I have nothing to offer God in return for the wrongs I have done.  Everything I have is flawed.  Moreover, everything is already His.  Like any Jew sincerely longing for teshuvah (repentance), I confess my sin and I repent--I grab the rope and hold on tight--but cleaning up the mess I have made of this well is beyond me.  Just as that Israelite shepherd must have known he had no hope of finding a truly unblemished lamb, I also know that everything I can offer has been damaged while in my possession.  Even the promise, "I'll be good", is doomed to be broken from the instant it leaves my mouth to echo up the shaft.  If the animal sacrifices of Torah teach anything, it is first that death is required for death, and second that a substitute death is acceptable to God.  Still, I suspect the shepherd of Moses' day approached the altar with fear and trembling, knowing the flawed animal in his arms was not enough, but bringing it anyway because God had so commanded, bringing it anyway because he believed his Lord was a loving God who would somehow find a way to mend their broken relationship in spite of his pitifully insignificant offering.  I believe the sincerity of that shepherd's humility and the depth of  his faith was adequate because it was well placed.  The Lord is indeed merciful.  He did indeed find a way to mend their relationship in spite of the fact that the shepherd could never pay the price for his sins.  That way was not Micah's firstborn child, and certainly not the shepherd's pathetic little lamb; it was the Lord's only begotten Son, Jesus, the man who is God, sliding down the rope to take my place because He knows I cannot leave this well the way I found it.  (Dickson, pages 179-180)

 In every popular Twelve Step Program, steps 8 and 9 have to do with identifying those people you have wronged, and as much as possible making amends.  The caveat is there because it is not always possible.  Jesus said, "All things are possible to him who believes."  Well placed faith is not in ourselves, not in our "higher power", but in Christ alone.  Only He can make all things new.  Only He can leave the well like it was when I found it.