DIVINE PROVIDENCE
This is Part 5 of an 8-part series that was originally developed for a 13-week adult class, with some of the parts taking more or less than a 45-minute class period. I am starting to post the series on SermonCentral, and plan to post the remaining parts over the next few days as time permits.
I developed a set of slides on PowerPoint for use with the series and will be happy to share the PowerPoint files. The prompts reminding me to advance slides and activate animations are embedded in the sermon below. If you want to request the slides send me an Email at sam@srmccormick.net specifying what part(s) of the series you are requesting. Be sure to include the word “slides” in the subject line of your message; otherwise I am likely to miss it. I would find it interesting to know the location and a few words about your personal ministry if you will include it in your message. Allow several days for me to respond.
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Outline of the series:
I. Introduction to the series
II. God’s Plan from the Beginning
III. God’s Plan Now and Our Problem with It
IV. Justice vs Mercy and the Plan of Salvation
V. The Only Way to Eradicate Sin
VI. Providence – What God Provides in Earthly Life
VII. Providence and Civil Governments
VIII. Providence, Miracles and Phenomena
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V. The Only Way to Eradicate Sin
*Click for title of series – DIVINE PROVIDENCE
*Click when ready for outline
Sometimes the bible offers difficult truths, and the superior place of mercy, both in God’s actions and ours, in a mindset that very properly values justice, is one such difficult truth.
But as justice is truth, mercy’s superiority over justice (judgment) is also truth.
James wrote it concisely:
James 2:13 (ESV) For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
Why are we uncomfortable with anything other than the original plan that Adam and Eve failed in keeping, and that same plan that everyone else has failed in keeping, excepting only Jesus?
Why do we feel that there might be something wrong about this—that we might be understating the importance of choosing right and obeying, and overstating the power of mercy?
Or if we talk about God’s grace and mercy, do we feel we must join a caveat to it, lest those who hear it believe in it too firmly, or depend on God’s mercy in a calculated, manipulative way?
Let me suggest some reasons and we’ll discuss them:
*Click for James 1:15
James 1:15 ESV Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.
*Click for 2 Cor 5:10
2 Corinthians 5:10 ESV For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.
*Click for Romans 6:23
Romans 6:23 ESV For the wages of sin is death…
Serious business!
Is this why we’re uncomfortable thinking of God’s plan as larger than those and other verses convey?
Are we uncomfortable talking about mercy at all in the presence of such dire warnings?
It’s tragic when a person’s failure to see the larger plan is an impediment to the very thing God wants from us and for us, and in fact gives to us.
Let me tell you what I mean by impediments, and you’ll see why I say they’re tragic:
“I’ve been too bad. I can’t be saved.”
“I don’t believe I can lead the life I would have to live in order to go to heaven.”
“I’ve got to straighten up some things before I can get into that lifestyle and meet God’s requirements.”
“I know some Christians who do worse things than I do.”
“I don’t have to be associated with so-called Christians to live right.”
People often reject the gospel because they don’t understand--or don’t accept as truth--that God is both a just and merciful God.
And that our only hope to be free from our sins is God’s mercy.
If we haven’t yet visualized how we can “do” one and “love” the opposite, let’s let Christ illustrate it. It’s a great Christian principle--though difficult to grasp--demonstrated when Christ met the demands of justice that he did not owe and yet showed mercy to an adulterous woman who was brought before him.
John 8:2-11 - tell it quickly
In this story, we are not only those holding stones, anxious to throw them, needing the poignant lesson Jesus taught the Pharisees.
We are also the woman.
Justice demanded that she die according to a specific dictum in the law.
Should we not spend some time in deep thought that Jesus did not answer in favor of the God-given Law’s plain requirement?
“Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”
Jesus himself would meet the demand of justice for that sin of which he did not condemn her!
How does God fasten my sins to Jesus so he can pay my debt? I do not know.
But that is his providence, and however it is accomplished, the choice to do so belongs to God, and he has made the choice in your favor.
How do we do justly and love mercy as Micah said God requires?
God wants us to render to others what is justly due, pay our just debts, and yet to not demand justice for others.
No one can lay claim to mercy from another, including God’s.
Mercy must be given undemanded, or it is not mercy.
God expects us to render to others better than their due. Jesus showed us that principle in action when he told the woman “Neither do I condemn you.”
Since God’s mercy has been revealed and is available to us, what does God now require for us to obtain it?
Does God’s plan of salvation consist entirely of what WE must do?
Or – since salvation can be nothing other than a gift given in mercy - did God do the whole thing himself, requiring nothing of us?
The “plan of salvation” has often been presented as a collection or sequence of actions we are required to pass the turnstile and be “in Christ.”
*Click for FRCB slide
It is often presented as a group of responses – in this order –to the hearing of the gospel of Christ as collected from the cases of conversion recorded in the book of Acts, consisting of Faith, Repentance, Confession, and Baptism.
Occasionally you may see variations like “Hear and Believe” in the place of “Faith” or “Be Faithful” or something similar following the sequence.
But most often, the plan of salvation is shown as the FRCB sequence, which almost everyone in the fellowship I’m most familiar with would easily recognize by seeing only the first letter of each word.
I have no argument against a single one of these eminently biblical doctrines.
However, the New Testament sometimes seems to say that faith is the essential factor, if not the sole requirement in salvation. One such example (of many that could be cited) is in perhaps the most familiar verse in the bible:
John 3:16 ESV “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
Can the two points of view be reconciled, that (1) our faith is the channel of our access to God’s mercy, and thusly our salvation; or (2) the turnstile doctrines (FRCB) are the path to salvation which believers must complete to become heirs of salvation?
Yes, if we abandon the notion that for one perspective to be true, the other must be untrue.
They are not in opposition to one another. The answer lies in the recognition of faith as the essential driving force for every action that follows in those conversion stories in the book of Acts – some mentioned in one conversion story, and others mentioned in another person’s conversion.
*Click to move Faith below the other three
True repentance – certainly a requirement to be pleasing to God – cannot occur in the absence of faith.
Neither can one confess that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God except by faith. The first disciple to openly declare it was Simon Peter at Caesarea Philippi in response to Jesus’ question “Who do you say that I am?” It was upon that profoundly important truth, and the belief of it, the Jesus said, “I will build my church.”
Baptism would be meaningless, and in fact absurd, if not done in faith. But as an act of faith, it is perhaps the most meaningful action a human being can take, in which the core doctrines of the gospel (death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus) are re-enacted in a highly symbolic, watery form.
Faith is the driving force for the changes and actions it spawns.
Faith is the driver, and collectively these responses to it--consummated in baptism--are the turnstile into the body of Christ.
It is faith drives conversion, or conversion does not occur.
While this process is often called the “plan of salvation,” I prefer to think of it as the means by which we gain access to God’s plan of salvation, accomplished by Christ and spelled out in one of those “nugget” passages:
*Click for 1 Cor 15:3-4
1 Cor 15:3-4 ESV For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.
*Click for DBR slide
God’s plan of salvation is spelled out here as of first importance – the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.
We gain access to God’s plan of salvation through faith - the engine of repentance, confession, and baptism and every “faithful” action that follows.
It is worth noting here that the gospel does not consist only of information to be intellectually believed. The gospel is to be obeyed, and the consequences of failure to obey it are shown with chilling certainty in several scriptures, including 2 Thess 1:8 and 1 Peter 4:17.
Having borne out the “turnstile” doctrines in action, we who have answered the call to obedience to the gospel, we are “in Christ.”
Rom 6:3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
*Click on “In Christ” slide
“IN CHRIST” is one of the great themes of the New Testament.
In one form or another, the expression occurs well over 200 times-- “in Christ,” “in him,” “in the Lord,” or “in the Lord Jesus,” or other variations meaning “in Christ,”
Here are only a handful from the hundreds of NT occurrence of this great theme.
*Click to start quotes
Now what’s the plan? I have met the entrance requirements, and my sins have been washed away in the cleansing water of baptism.
But I sinned again.
The time of one’s entrance into Christ is a critical time for new Christians and those Christians responsible for nurturing them with the tender care such as a newborn baby needs.
One of the first and most vital questions the newborn baby in Christ faces is the necessity of change—sometimes very difficult behavior modification—in order to be suitable company and a good influence, pleasing to God.
We must be concerned with the newborn’s need for nurturing care, with and patient understanding of the changes the newborn is not yet capable of making.
We don’t bring a newborn baby out of the delivery room and try to teach it proper grammar and table manners, or other things the infant will later learn to treat with an appropriate degree of importance.
A newborn must be granted the time and freedom a new Christian needs to develop the values and qualities manners we all strive for as we grow into Christ’s likeness.
We who are seasoned in the faith can overwhelm the infant Christian by expecting too much too soon, demanding conduct that is strange and indecipherable to the Christian newborn.
But even for the infant, the question must emerge and be answered,
Now that I’m a Christian, what is expected of me?
Among the broad spectrum of those who claim allegiance to Christ, a quagmire of inconsistent, incompatible, and sometimes incoherent answers are offered.
If you took all the pages of all the books that have been written with the intention of clarifying biblical guidance, and spread the pages side by side, you could probably paper the earth with them.
Somewhere in that morass is the truth of what God requires.
The bible, of course, is the source of our KNOWing the true requirements.
But for the newborn Christian – the KNOWing part can be a daunting challenge that sometimes turns some newborn Christians back to their familiar and comfortable way of life.
It’s outside the purpose of this series explore and resolve all those differences.
We hope to, on a plain and simple level, understand where divine providence directs us, and what help God provides to the Christian in making the choices he intends.
The crucial question now is:
How will future sins I may commit, in spite of my best efforts, be eradicated? Be baptized every time I sin?
What does God’s providential plan now require?
Are there any requirements? Many say no - that we are free from sin, so sin no longer matters, being covered by God’s mercy.
Therefore, no rules and regulations restrict our choices and our conduct.
The bible gives us plenty of evidence that we believe that lie at our peril.
What then? Back to the original plan?
*Click for KNOW, CHOOSE RIGHT, OBEY
We never got off that plan!
It continues to be the standard of conduct.
Since we’re still on this plan--is the answer that we must try very hard on this plan?
*Click for animation of Know, Coose Right, Obey - Try
and …if at first we don’t succeed try, try again?
Then try, try harder and ever harder.
Is that God’s providential solution to man’s sin problem?
*Click to start Yoda vidclip, let play, then click to Yoda still
Yoda was right that there is “do or do not.” That’s binary—no third path.
When our lives have ended, we will be on the not do side of that line.
But Yoda, you were wrong. We’re not Jedi warriors.
There is “try and do not.” We’re all living testimony.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t try--we should–God deserves the very best we can give, and even that falls short of his glory as seen in Christ.
*Click for black screen
Move quickly through the following questions without elaborating.
Does divine providence allow more latitude now than Adam and Eve had under the same plan then–more wiggle room?
Is the requirement that we be more good than bad?
Some kings of Israel were accounted as righteous kings if they did part of what God required but not all. I’ll give one example, although there are several:
Amaziah - 2 Chronicles 25:1
Amaziah was twenty-five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem ... And he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, yet not with a whole heart.
The record of his reign in 2 Kings gives a little more information – 2 Kings 14:3-4
… he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, yet not like David his father. He did in all things as Joash his father had done. But the high places were not removed; the people still sacrificed and made offerings on the high places.
High places were where idols were worshipped—where people had other gods before the God.
Is it like that with us--reckoned as doing right if we do right except for a thing or two here and there?
Have we yet learned what God requires of us who are “in Christ,” beyond simply the fact of being “in Christ?”
*Click for In Christ, What Now
*Click No rules
No rules? No--Paul swats that idea down in Rom 6
*Click for slash circle and Try hard
Try very hard?
*Click for slash circle and Leniency
No, we found that our objective and standard must be nothing less than the standard we have espoused for the last few weeks, as demonstrated by Jesus.
A more lenient standard for what is and isn’t sin?
*Click for slash circle
No. Careful reading of the scriptures leaves that doctrine undiscovered.
Amidst all these questions--or we might say--heresies, the thought rises to supreme importance:
How will we be judged by God who is both just and merciful?
Let’s look to the description of judgment as revealed to John on Patmos Island.
*Click for Rev 20:11-15 – read it
These verses show what happens at the judgment, where justice is rendered.
The one on the throne, from whom earth and heaven fled away, is our judge.
John tells us books will be present.
*Click for “At the GREAT WHITE THRONE”
(1) The book of deeds will be there. I know that my book has many erasures in it where I have often asked for and received forgiveness.
Those removed records are in the bottom of the sea, no longer in the book of remembrance.
You know what’s in your book of deeds, and you know what has been erased from it.
*Click for “another book” animation
But there is another book!
(2) Another book was opened---the book of life.
What is in the book of life?
Names.
Sometimes ancient cities kept a running record of living people in the city. When a baby was born, the baby’s name was entered into the book of life. When someone died, that person’s name was blotted out of the book of life, or book of the living.
*Click for The Book of Life slide
The book of life with slight variations, is often mentioned in the bible as a book of names:
- Whosoever sins against God will have their name removed from God’s book; Exodus 32:33,
- David asked God if his name is not in God’s book; Psalm 56:8,
- David asked God to blot the names of his enemies from the book of the living; Psalms 69:28,
- Daniel said that everyone who is found written in the book will be rescued in a time of great tribulation; Daniel 12:1,
- Fear the Lord and have your name written in a book of remembrance; Malachi 3:16,
*Click for second group of scriptures on slide
- Those who serve the Lord have their names in the book of life; Philippians 4:3,
- He that overcometh will not have his name blotted out of the book of life; Revelation 3:5,
- Those not in the book of life will worship anti-Christ; Revelation 13:8,
- Those whose are not written in the book of life will admire the beast; Revelation 17:8,
- Those not in the book of life are cast into the lake of fire; Revelation 20:15, and
- Those in the book of life are allowed to enter New Jerusalem, Revelation 21:27
Have we now really answered the question?
If I haven’t murdered, or committed some other highly visible sin, I may have been
infected with the concealable and deniable sins of pride, envy, unresolved anger and hurtful words, and --- I may have unforgiveness in my heart.
I might be like the Pharisee who went up to the temple to pray, proud of his generosity in tithing, fasting, and superiority to lesser people.
A friend of mine once said, tongue in cheek:
“I’m not proud. Pride is a fault, and I have no faults.”
In John’s first general letter, he wrote:
1 John 1:8 If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
Whether we admit it—even to ourselves, we are flawed.
We all want to go to heaven, but we’re wearing stained garments!
How can we gain entrance to the wedding feast wearing these soiled clothes?
Can we--with soiled garments--now make ourselves fit for habitation in the presence of God’s absolute holiness, with our names appearing in the Lamb’s book of life? We cannot.
Does providence only give us an unsolvable puzzle?
In Christ, God requires the same standard we failed at before coming to Christ, and our book of deeds will be inspected when we stand at the Great White Throne.
How can we untie this Gordian knot?
If I emphasize God’s grace and mercy very much I may be regarded as too liberal.
If I emphasize obedience too much I might be called legalistic.
The church has wrestled and warred over those perspectives my entire life and long before, producing disunity worldwide in the church.
It’s why some of these 3 and other positions have been taken--seeking a way to bridge the two points of view or adopt one--to the exclusion of the other.
Can this tension between the two sides ever be resolved?
Yes, it can.
The book of deeds and the book of life--are evidence that is brought before the one on the great white throne, who will render judgment according to the evidence in the books.
*Click for 2 books
What is changed “in Christ” is that—though we see nothing less than know, choose and obey as our standard, we don’t see our book of deeds as the foundation upon which our justification and salvation rest.
My obedience is too weak and imperfect to save my soul from death.
*Click for SIN to appear
My book of deeds is stained, just as I am.
I can’t take my book of deeds before the great white throne unless the sins have been removed from it.
*Click for SIN to fade
God erases sins when you confess them, as 1 John 1:9 says:
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
With sins erased from our book of deeds, something wonderful happens.
*Click for Your Name to copy to the Lamb’s book of life
The removal of sins places the name on the book of deeds into the Lamb’s book of life.
That is the connection between the two books.
Our justification resides in the means by which our sins are removed from our book of deeds.
The means for excising the sins from our lives and our book of deeds is the saving work of Jesus Christ.
The judge will be looking to the books for evidence of faith, or absence of it--for without it, it is impossible to please him.
The Book of Deeds you write yourself.
The Book of Life is Christ’s testimony.
In fact, in the next chapter John calls it the Lamb’s book of life, Christ being the Lamb.
It’s Christ’s book, and all we see of its content is names--specifically, the names of those who are to enter the holy city, new Jerusalem.
There is a connection between the two books. Both appear as evidence at the judgment scene.
In a few minutes we’ll talk about the connection between the two books.
The presence or absence of our names in the Lamb’s book of life is what determines the verdict.
The book of life being Christ’s book, the names appear there are those who are “in Christ.”
Doesn’t this tell us that Christ himself the final arbiter of salvation?
The parable of the sheep and goats in Matt 25 shows the son of man doing the separation based on which people will go to the left and which will go to his right hand. Note: these are people (v32), not sheep and goats. They are merely separated as a shepherd divides sheep and goats.
How important then, is Christ’s role as our intercessor, when he stands before the great white throne and tells the one on the throne about you!
Whatever he says about you and the deeds you do in this life will be accepted by the one on the throne. In effect, then, Christ is the judge.
The book of life is never overruled.
2 Cor 5:10 ESV For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.
Notice that the GREAT WHITE THRONE judgment in Rev 20 accounts only for those whose names are not in the book of life.
What about those whose names are recorded there?
The answer follows the great white throne scene immediately in the next chapter.
Rev 21:9-11 Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues and spoke to me, saying, "Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb." And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.
John describes the city’s foundation, gates, and walls, dimensions, and materials – jewels and gold.
Then he says:
Rev 21:27 …nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life.
If the book of life is a figure of Christ’s testimony before the GREAT WHITE THRONE, I want him there saying,
This one belongs to me, and I have taken his sins away.
I want my name to appear in the Lamb’s book.
*Click for God’s providence
God’s providence
Divine providence is what accomplishes the removal of sin from our books of deeds.
And that is the nucleus of this series of studies.
How does it happen?
I cannot explain the inner workings of God’s mind, but we can trust what he has told us--
and what he has told us is this.
*Click for animation changing God’s Providence to God provides
There’s only one way for our sins to be extinguished, and it goes back to the garden of Eden, where God told the serpent,
You will bruise the heel of the seed of this woman, but he will bruise your head.
The story moves to Abraham.
Genesis 22 tells the story of how he was commanded to take his son Isaac to a place he would be shown and offer his sin as a burnt offering.
God spoke to Abraham and directed him to take his son Isaac to a place God would direct him and offer him as a burnt offering. We pick up the story in Gen 22:6:
Read Gen 22:6-14 (read)
*Click for Yahweh-Yireh
Mt. Moriah was renamed Yahweh-Yireh, or in the Anglicized pronounciation:
*Click
Jehovah-Jireh
*Click
The meaning: The Lord will provide
Moses goes one step further and spells out the prophetic statement:
*Click
On the mount of the Lord it will be provided (v14).
The writer in 2 Chronicles sees a connection between Mt. Moriah where Abraham built an altar, and the mountain where – centuries later - Solomon would build a temple with an altar for Israel’s sacrifices to be offered to God in the distant future:
2 Chronicles 3:1 Then Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to David his father, at the place that David had appointed, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.
The Lord’s appearance to David refers to the event recorded in 1 Chronicles 21:18 –
Now the angel of the Lord had commanded Gad to say to David that David should go up and raise an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.
Those scriptures connect the place where three events occurred:
-Mt. Moriah, where Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac
-Mt. Moriah, the place the temple would be built by Solomon, with its altar busy with the people’s sacrifices
-The mountain now called Mt. Zion, on which Pontius Pilate would wash his hands in the Antonia fort adjacent to the temple, effectively rendering a death sentence for Jesus, who would be crucified nearby for the sins of the human race.
From Alexander MacLaren: This is the deepest meaning of all the sacrificial worship. Even in Jerusalem, the sacrifices offered on the earthly altar were nothing more than God provided. As it was of Israel, God Himself provides the wherewithal for our sacrifice. We have nothing to give to God that he didn’t give us first.
Abraham’s devotion was attested to by “the angel of the Lord,” who was no other than Christ himself, saying:
I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.
And God did not withhold his Son from us.
So this name—The Lord Will Provide--that came from a very grateful Abraham’s mouth holds true in every region of our needs, and are an outline of the latter part of our series:
On the lowest level, the outward supply of outward needs
On a higher level, the means of discharging hard duties and a path through sharp trials
On the highest level of all, the unblemished sacrifice which alone avails for the world’s sins
This is providence. This is what God provides.
We know--because the angel said--that Abraham would have gone through with it and sacrificed Isaac as God commanded. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews reveals Abraham’s thinking.
Hebrews 11:19 ESV He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.
Abraham, knowing that God COULD raise Isaac from the dead but not knowing that he WOULD do so, met the challenge.
But would we have? If you have a child, think about the command Abraham received.
If you don’t have a child, think about whoever is most precious on earth to you.
I’m not sure I could do it--
Because God requires far less of me and I haven’t even done that very well!
That’s why there was a providential saving action by God!
But even we who are in Christ have sinned!
And all sin must be accounted for at the bar of justice.
What will the accounting be when we who are in Christ face the court of justice?
*Click for Rom 8:33-34
Rom 8:33-34 Who will bring a charge against God's elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is he who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.
Who are the elect who enjoy this absence of charges before the throne?
*Click for Rom 8:1
The same as those about whom Paul opens the chapter by saying:
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Romans 8:1
*Click for “in Christ” animation
These are the ones for whom there is no condemnation.
If neither God nor Christ will bring charges against them in the pursuit of justice, no one will!
This passage captures the gospel’s essential truth in a few words:
V33-God is the one who justifies.
V34-Christ is the one who intercedes.
When we are justified by God through the intercession of Christ, the demands of justice are met.
God and Christ are not the accusers!
*Click for vs35-39
Paul continues, as before he is talking about the elect – those who are in Christ Jesus:
Rom 8:35-39 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
*Click to animate “in Christ”
To be in Christ is to have your name in his book. The shepherd knows his sheep.
John 10:27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.
Christ will not make any mistakes in his book of names. He knows those who are in him.
“In Christ” is the key—not just getting into Christ but being in Christ.
Are we back to “No rules—just get into Christ and final judgment is settled and sealed?”
Certainly not. “No rules” amounts to a sin license.
If we are to untie this Gordian knot we must take all that the bible says on any subject.
As part of his defense against the rhetorical objection to the gospel that we ought to sin because grace covers it (the No Rules argument), Paul says in Romans 6:
Rom 6:1-2 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?
A little further down, in v16 he says:
Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
Are we then back to “try very hard?”
Certainly we should try with all our heart and should to please God, but no, that is self-justification. Which is not merely foreign to the gospel, but is the antithesis of it.
Romans 8:33 told us “It is God who justifies” – not trying hard.
There’s only one way into heaven:
GOD FORGIVES OUR SINS AND JUSTIFIES THE SINNER.
God provides it, and that is divine providence.
Providence offers no other way, and “In Christ” is the only place forgiveness exists.
Nowhere else.
There’s no other plan.
Sound too good to be true?
Is divine providence then a plan that anyone can monkey around with? Game the standard?
I think not. When we try to outwit God, we find ourselves in the same position as the scribes and Pharisees who tried to lay traps for Jesus.
Jesus saw them coming and he had their number.
He tied them in knots.
To the churches in Galatia, Paul wrote:
Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. Gal 6:7-8
It is foolish to think we can sow to the flesh and reap spiritual rewards.
Names can be blotted out of the Lamb’s book of life.
But name of the one who conquers will never be blotted out of the book of life.
Rev 3:5 The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess [what!] his name(!) before my Father and before his angels.
The fact that we have faith and are “in Christ” and ransomed from the curse of sin, does not alter the reality that sin is a blight on the soul.
We don’t live the life of faith because it helps God.
We live it because it helps us in this life and prepares us—not only for judgment—but for heaven.
Notice that in John’s description of the new Jerusalem, John sees it:
…coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
What John saw comes down out of heaven.
It’s down, out of heaven, and it’s here.
1. We’re heaven’s citizens today, while this earthly life is both a trial period and preparation for our eternal home.
*Click for Mount Vernon photo
Robin and I used to live in Alexandria, Va, a short distance from George Washington’s Mount Vernon home. Nellie Custis, Martha Washington, granddaughter, grew up in the care of George and Martha after the death of Nellie’s mother.
*Click for photo of Nellie
This photo is of Eleanor Parke Lewis, better known to history as Nellie Custis – Martha Washington’s granddaughter.
*Click for Nellie’s grave w/mauseleum
There is a beautiful monument atop Nellie’s grave, just outside the small mausoleum where George and Martha Washington rest in sarcophagi.
*Click for side panel on monument
On this marker – worn by time – are perhaps the most lovely words I have ever seen or heard about a person’s readiness for heaven.
*Click to animate quote
If the possession of every virtue that adorns or dignifies her sex could have warded off the stroke of death she would have been immortal and those who mourn her untimely end are consoled by the reflection that those virtues seemed better to fit her for the abode to which her spirit has fled than for that which it has abandoned.
You may have loved ones who have crossed over who are equally well described by these words.
I don’t know who wrote these words, or how well they describe Nellie’s state of preparation, nor is that mine to say.
But where these words are true, they describe a person who is already, while in the mortal state, living the life that is fit for heaven.
My point is that even while we live in this earthly life in the assurance that our salvation is secured by Christ’s redeeming work, and because of it, we are to live in a manner fit for the soul’s eternal abode.
*Click for full Divine Providence screen
However well we may do in living such a life – as we should, if we are not to make a mockery of God’s mercy and trample on is grace – when all has been said and done…
There’s only one way into heaven:
God, in divine mercy, forgives our sins and justifies the sinner.
*Click to animate God’s forgiveness/Justification
Leading to salvation and eternal life.
*Click to animate salvation and eternal life/God’s object
The essence of God’s requirements has not changed since Adam and Eve were innocent in the garden of Eden. What is different is that he has now revealed the rest of his divine providential plan.
