Did Jesus come only to teach love and not God’s Law? Is it true to say “Christianity is not about rules, but relationships”? What did Jesus Himself say about it? (Continued from last week …)

What’s the Word?

One very relevant passage to explore ¹ is from Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount.” ² Many wrongly think Jesus only offers better ways to live, or moral encouragements for all who listen. But although His words may sound soft-spoken, the realities are much harsher.

Wow. Let’s be sure we don’t miss the profound truths buried in that paragraph. Nothing than less than an attempt at exegesis (my best, anyway) seems due here …

1. Jesus fulfills, not abolishes, the Law.

Lest anyone think Jesus came to offer anything different from the Law, He directly denied it. “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them,” He said. I wonder: if I had been Jesus (scary thought), and I had wanted to tell people for sure that the true Law was not dead and gone or unnecessary for anyone in the present day, how would I have communicated this more clearly?

If Jesus actually did abolish the effects of the Law, here He was lying or obscuring the truth.

2. The Law won’t end until the world ends.

In case we missed the point, He makes it even more clear: the Law is still in effect “until all is accomplished.” Not a nano-piece of it will expire until that time.

Might someone think that has already happened — that at some point before now, the Law’s effects have passed as He predicted? No, Jesus’ context makes clear what “all is accomplished” means: the time when “heaven and earth pass away.”

I just looked out my window. Earth is still here, so I presume Heaven is too. He hasn’t yet redeemed, remodeled and combined them (Revelation 21).

Therefore I presume the Law’s iotas and dots are still un-passed.

3. We should not downplay the Law.

These seem like very strong words: those who try to downplay the Law and its truths aren’t just misguided, naïve or doctrinally wrong, but they “will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.”

That just makes me want to wipe my brow and pray I won’t be too cavalier about the Law!

God’s standards are just as holy today as they were back then. Jesus hasn’t lowered the standard; here, He has just made it higher and more strict than ever. If He hadn’t made it clear here and elsewhere that He Himself was the fulfillment of that standard, and died and rose again to prove it, people might still be calling Him a “legalist” today.

4. If we follow the Law’s commandments, we will be called great.

I’d much rather be placed in this group. And why is that? So we can be called “great in the kingdom of heaven.” Christians ought not do as I once thought deep down, that the best and most “spiritual” Christianity is disinterested devotion to religious duties. Rather, I should want to want the best reward He can give — Himself — in the Kingdom when it comes here directly.

5. Want Christ’s Kingdom? Then out-obey the Pharisees.

We might not see Jesus’ impact here without comparing it with a direct-opposite view: a “cheap grace” that assumes we don’t need to consider God’s holiness, only His love.

But here, Jesus doesn’t mention a word about God’s love. He talks about His great love at other times, and it’s absolutely essential to remember that as we seek to know Jesus and all of His character. But here, His focus is His Father’s holiness and the Law. Its standard was in effect then, and remains in effect today for those who don’t believe Him.

6. Christians are not under the Law, because of Christ’s coming and personal faith.

Years later, Christians in the Galatian church were being told opposite ideas of the Law, by very “spiritual” teachers who claimed the Christians were still under its requirements. But Paul wrote:

So Paul makes things even clearer to Christians: they are no longer captive to the Law. But the essential ingredients for the status change are Christ’s coming, what He did, and personal faith that brings forgiveness of sins and adoption as God’s sons.

Next week: if it’s true that Jesus did not oppose the Law, but came squarely on its side, why then was He so often fighting with the Pharisees? Weren’t they all about the Law when He wanted them to understand His grace and love? What do you think?

Is it possible this myth heard ‘round the world is actually increasing in popularity? I wonder if even now it’s dead even with or even past the “Christians aren’t supposed to judge ever” myth?

Perhaps it’s best to leave this little lie alone. After all, it brings so many people together in agreement, doesn’t it? Many Christians want to be loving to their unsaved friends, or “worldly” Christians. Or they may want to correct for their legalistic backgrounds, and make sure they emphasize that God is all about love, not rules. The popular evangelical phrase remains, on a billion church signs: that “Christianity isn’t about rules, it’s about a relationship.”

So they present one side of a truth, to the point of half-truth: Jesus isn’t about the Law.

But that is not what Scripture says. This is clear not only from the epistles written by Paul and other apostles about Jesus, but from the words of Jesus Himself.

“Take a look, it’s in a Book …”

Ye have heard that it was said …

Jesus fought the Pharisees because they were all about the Law, and He was all about love.

AKA: Jesus wasn’t about rules, He was about love and personal relationship with Him.

AKA: “Christianity isn’t about rules, it’s about relationship.”

Figure A:

“The God of the Old Testament is a vengeful God,” says a popular professing Christian during a lecture circuit, named the same as his new book with a catchy, “outrageous” title. “He is all about the Law and following a system of rules. Then along comes Jesus, and His only law is the law of love! He accepts people just the way they are. He breaks down the barriers.” ¹

Figure B:

[After agreeing that boundaries are in the Bible] Jesus is frequently breaking through those boundaries, challenging what the OT purity laws say about dirt and cleanliness, Sabbath and love…which is why Christianity has always had a bit of an iconoclastic streak. Add to this Jesus’ acceptance of the Other, be they of an enemy empire (the Centuriion)², or heterodox (like the many Samaritans who held a different canon and worshiped at a different temple), or outright occult (the blessed Magi who visited the child Christ [. . .]), you see a relaxing of the boundaries and a universalizing of the Old Covenant’s YHWH into a God who brings “peace and glad tidings of great joy to all peoples[.]”

From an acquaintance’s Facebook post

Figure C:

All my religious training was in Sunday school, maybe 25 years ago, and the main thing I remember was that God was always smiting the Pharisees. At least I think it was the Pharisees[. . . .]

My wife, who has had bales of religious training, tells me that this was the Old Testament God, who was very strict, whereas the New Testament God is a genuinely mellow deity, the kind of deity who would never smite anybody or order you to smear goat’s blood on your firstborn son, which is the kind of thing the Old Testament God was always doing.

The otherwise hilarious author and humor columnist Dave Barry, from a 1985 column

What’s the truth in this?

While it is easy to make lovey-dovey Christians (or those who want or claim to be so) into easy villains, I hope to Heaven that Biblical Christians will not overcorrect the opposite way. We’re already needing to deal with overcorrection — from not-loving-enough views of God to a “love”-as-the-only-defining-attribute view of God. Let’s not swing the pendulum back again!

It is so true that Jesus came to Earth to exercise love. No informed Christian would deny this. He healed the sick, taught of His Father’s care for people, lived as a Man, comforted the hurting, and did not fight back when He was persecuted.

He did not specifically deploy punishments, like God the Father. At that point, it wasn’t His goal.

What’s the lie in this?

What Biblical Christians would disagree with is that “love” is so easily understood as simple healing from sickness, or acceptance of all other views, or especially making things easier for people who had suffered under the Old Testament Law for centuries. Rather:

1. Jesus doesn’t just release people from the Law’s burden. He increases it, by reminding us that true violations are in our hearts, not in our deeds! Only He Himself can remove its burden.
2. Jesus does not oppose the Law. He opposes false views of it. He decries the often-willing ignorance of some people, in particular religious hypocrites. Such people refuse to see that the Law pointed to Him as the One Who relieves its burden for those who repent and believe Him.
3. And Jesus did not come to overthrow the unfair, too-hard Law. He came to fulfill it.

(This topic is so incredible, deep and rich that it will take at least three parts of a new series to get through it. Watch for the next part coming Saturday. Meanwhile, a great way to study up on this topic is to re-read the Sermon on the Mount, especially Matthew 5: 17-20, and Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees in Mark 7: 1-13, and onward. What do you think?)

Listening to “emergent” Christians talk about their ideas on the internet is not very easy.

For me, that has proven especially true in the past couple of weeks, for at least three reasons.

The first is that they keep saying things about God that are not too Biblical, or imbalanced, even if they aren’t strictly heretical (i.e., something that keeps you from being a real Christian).

The second is that they keep assuming other Christians, such as myself, mainly believe as they do for certain reasons — they want to preserve power, they want to shoot homosexuals in the streets for sport, they’re all legalists, fundies, etc. They don’t give much leeway to those who believe “traditional” Christianity, and live their faith in love, because they really believe the Bible teaches this and God wants it.

The third reason is because these are not just philosophical issues that can be talked about over (insert trendy drink of your choice) while tapping out notes on your (insert i-Something of your choice).¹ I keep getting that impression from a lot of “emergent” advocates — and to be fair, from some “traditional” Christians too — that all this is just a bookish discussion.

Instead, this stuff is vital. It affects people’s lives. Believing wrongly about spiritual realities ruins marriages, families, churches. False doctrine (no matter which doctrines you believe are false) corrupts how one views God, morality, salvation, how to interact with the world.

And what if it’s true that Christians who still hold to the Biblical framework of man’s personal sin against God²), and eternal consequences for failure to repent and believe Christ? If so, those who claim or act otherwise are in a lot of trouble. Why? Because in their efforts to help the world, heal its hurts, etc., they’re stepping right over dead bodies — ignoring man’s true problem, deadness in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 1-2), in order to treat flesh wounds.

One month ago I addressed this issue in Part 1. It started with a fantasy-world analogy³ and actually dared to finish with a surface evaluation of the civil rights era. Now I’ll finally finish up, with some thoughts on Christians and others who could seem to prefer moral zeal but without Biblical knowledge, following a certain earthquake.

Do your paperwork

More than a month has passed since the earthquake that tore through the half-island nation of Haiti. Already afflicted with disease, death and poverty, the island is still suffering the aftermath of that near-apocalypse. The blighted country’s existing population of orphans undoubtedly swelled, and charity workers, Christian or not, are trying to figure out what to do.

They want to help the suffering people, they really do. They have great hearts, those charity workers. But what they also need to make sure they have is, um, the right paperwork.

This also goes for a certain group of Baptists.⁴ In early February, ten members of an Idaho church were trying to get into the Dominican Republic, crossing the border with multiple Haitian orphans in tow. Instead they were arrested and charged with child kidnapping.

More recently, eight of the Baptists were freed and returned to the U.S. in time for some to get on the Oprah show.⁵ But two of their leaders, Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter, are still jailed in Port-au-Prince. They hadn’t had the right documents, Haiti authorities said, and oh, by the way: some of the children weren’t really orphans. A World magazine story (on Feb. 4) further describes:

[Silsby] told reporters last week: “Our hearts were in the right place.”

[. . .]

The Americans, members of a group called New Life Children’s Refuge, said they planned to establish an orphanage for children in the Dominican Republic. CNN reported that the group has no experience running an orphanage, and that the group’s headquarters are listed as Silsby’s now-foreclosed home.

What I hope is that the missionaries (or missionary wannabes?) are not now thinking this is simple anti-Christian persecution. I hope they aren’t claiming “this was God’s will” for something that just wasn’t very good sense. I hope good intentions aren’t being held up over God-glorifying wisdom.

I also hope other Christians won’t pick on them too much. Rather, we should seek to encourage good-hearted Christians who could use some, well, wisdom too.

In Romans 10:2, Paul refers to non-Christian Jews who have “zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.” They don’t “submit to God’s righteousness,” the apostle says. In their case, having a “heart in the right place” was not enough.

The same is true of not only the Baptists in Haiti, or the social-gospel “emergent” folks, but any Christian. We should also be Biblical. We need to do the right paperwork. Otherwise, we risk making Jesus look bad, or else, have all these great intentions to help people but instead miss the real problems. ⁶

Rejecting society-prosperity “gospels”

Not having an actual orphanage to take the “orphans” to is a bad enough problem. Far worse is the issue described in Part 1: if you had a God-given “power” to give resurrection from death to some victims (though you don’t know who), why would you ignore it in favor of only treating not-quite-dead-yet people for surface wounds?

Yet many Christians, “emergent” or not, do this all the time.⁷

We get wrapped up in things like Natural Disaster Recovery, and Man’s Inhumanity to Man, and Addressing Injustice, and tend to neglect the far worse problems in man: the natural disaster of the Fall, man’s inhumanity to God, and the worse injustice of not constantly giving Him glory.

Many know the health-wealth-and-prosperity “gospel” teachers are an easy and rightful target for Christians who point out their heresies and/or greed.

But how is a society-prosperity “gospel” much different? It turns the Christian religion, or missionary work, primarily into trying to heal a society’s wounds, without the “secret power” of the Gospel that God uses to raise someone from spiritual death!

Though it sounds cliché, John 3 remains clear: Jesus told Nicodemus that unless anyone is personally, supernaturally, “born again,” he cannot even “see” the Kingdom of God. The Gospel, personal and life-transforming, powered by Christ’s divinity, sacrificial death and resurrection, is what raises people to life. It’s the secret power. It’s the only ultimate hope for humanity.

No one is saying all Christians should end their Haiti relief work, or any civil-rights work, so we can all only yell John 3:16 all over the place. Rather, Scripture is clear that helping the poor, feeding the hungry, addressing injustice, defending life, etc., are part of Christians’ Gospel-powered presence in the world. However, in combating civil-rights evils, or caring for the poor or orphans after the Haiti earthquake, shouldn’t Christians at least also spread the Gospel that Christ died to save sinners from their own spiritual deadness?

The choice is not “either we preach the Gospel, or we help the poor or fight injustice.” Christians throughout history haven’t seen this as a dichotomy (though a lot of people nowadays seem to force it into a black-and-white issue). Neither does the Bible.

By rooting everything we do not in our own society-prosperity work, but in that secret power of God to replace hearts of stone with living hearts of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26), we stay truly humble. We work out of gratitude to God, not confidence in our own morality or intentions. We still have zeal, but with Biblical knowledge. We do our paperwork — and hopefully have a little more common sense and hearts in the right place. Best of all, God, and not us, will get the glory.

(Continued from last week …)

“Jesus wept,” from John 11:35, is often quoted because of its well-known shortness, and out of motivations to highlight Christ’s humanity. As the onlookers in the passage themselves say in verse 36, “See how he loved [Lazarus]!” Thus, some Christians also say: He loves you too, just as much — then stop without going further.

I hope no one would argue Jesus was weeping for only any reason besides genuine grief. Still, it seems readers should instead be asking, along with the crowds: if He loved Lazarus so much, why did He not come to heal Him sooner?

This same question is repeated three times. Great preachers point out that repetition like that, especially with writing space limited to the ancient authors, should make us pay close attention.

The Apostle John does show Christ’s humanity in this account. But His deity, and the fact that He is the resurrection and the life, are meant to be the main theme.

Further in

In any teaching about this passage, I’d love to hear more about all aspects of His reaction.

Jesus was not only sad. He was sovereign. He was not only human. He was divine. He was not only “deeply moved in his spirit,” but “greatly troubled” (verse 33).

So why was Jesus troubled, if His reason was simply sharing His friends’ grief?

The answer lies in the chapter’s main theme. In His weeping, He not only empathized with Lazarus’s grieving sisters; He was also reacting to the crowd of Jews (also in verse 33). Why was that? Because they were not believing in Him.

This is made even easier to see from Jesus’ own given reasons for why He delayed in coming, first to His disciples, and later to Lazarus’ sisters.

What were the reasons He gave His disciples?

1. He wanted to glorify His Father and Himself — that’s the first reason He gives (verse 4).
2. He wished to show them His light (verses 8 to 10). When they stumbled over why He would walk into what could be a very dangerous situation, He illustrated their problem by suggesting it was like they were walking by night, outside of His light.
3. He wanted to encourage them to believe, for their own sake (verses 14 to 15). He even said He was glad He had delayed, so as to build up His disciples’ faith in Him.

What were His reasons for Mary and Martha?

1. It was because He loved them. Note what could seem a strange line of reasoning in verses 5 through 6! “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.”

   One might say: well, some kind of love that was. But who could accuse Jesus of being cruel? He loved Mary, Martha and Lazarus, and so He stayed away and did not heal Lazarus immediately. From our perspective, especially if we were there and did not know the ending, it could make little sense. But He knew better.

2. He would prove He was the resurrection and the life (verse 25).
3. He wanted Martha and Mary to show they believed in Him (25 to 26).
4. He wanted them never to die in an eternal sense — a more important issue than dying temporarily, as Lazarus had done (verse 26).
5. He would show them the glory of God — by implication in a way they would not have seen if He had merely healed a sick Lazarus (verse 40).
6. For the benefit of those around Him, He prayed to His Father and said He wanted observers to believe God had sent Him (verse 42).
7. And the greatest reason of all is implicit in verses 45 through 57. Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus, and the resulting faith of Mary and Martha and surely Lazarus himself, is merely a subplot in John’s main story. After Lazarus was brought to life, Jesus’ religious enemies upped the ante. That brought the Lord’s death even closer — the tension is increasing.

   Thus the same Lord Who resurrected Lazarus would later resurrect Himself, from a death He also planned, for the glory of God. This shows Who Jesus was, and why He came, so that you, gentle reader, may also believe in Him and have life in His name (John 20:31).

I wish I could hear an awesome sermon about all this. This feels like an outline for one.

And I can’t get over that first point in the above list: that Jesus delayed coming to Lazarus because He loved him, and his family. A greater goal was in His mind: His own glory, and the far more profound need for people to believe in Him as the resurrection and the life.

How often has the Lord delayed coming, delayed a healing, or not healed at all, for reasons that only He can know, because He loves us more than we would if we could decide what He did?

How often is He grieved, but still worked differently than we would, for greater reasons?

How often has He wept, not only because He empathizes with our losses (any non-Son-of-God person could do that), but instead because He wants us to understand that He is the resurrection and the life, sent from God the Father, Who will be glorified!

Some Christians have a kind of teaching method that is cute or helpful in small doses. But too often it is quite annoying: what I would call the Fun Fact About the Bible(!) style.

For example, who among us has learned, from just about any church or Sunday-school circular, this Fun Fact about the Bible? “Jesus wept,” in John 11:35, is the shortest verse in the Bible! ¹

Great. Wow, the shortest verse. Does that make it less important? Or maybe more important? Does it matter at all? Who divided those verses anyway? (Hint: not the original writers.)

But who among us knows why Jesus wept in the first place?

I hadn’t thought about it either, at all — that is, until a friend reminded me of the passage’s context. This illustrates well one of those little myths that gets about Christendom and needs to be set straight. Maybe, thanks to God’s grace, it doesn’t wreck a whole lot, and by itself it certainly won’t prevent someone from being truly redeemed. But what might we miss anyway?

Ye have heard that it was said …

“Jesus wept” (John 11:35) because He was very sad that his friend Lazarus had died.

Figure A:

In a Christian small group, someone shares her struggles with personal sickness, or conflict in her family. Perhaps a relative has died, or is about to die. In a sincere attempt at comfort, a friend pats her hand and reminds her, “Remember, ‘Jesus wept.’ He knows your pain.”

Figure B:

A devotional book, by a popular Christian author, is all about the humanity of Jesus. He was just as human as you and me, the writer says earnestly — Jesus felt all the emotions we do. Jesus got angry. He was tired. He was hungry, thirsty, loving, and He wept when a friend of His had died (John 11:35). Remember, Jesus may weep for your troubles, too.²

What’s the truth in this?

Jesus was certainly a Man, 100 percent — as well as being 100 percent God. I can’t fully get that, and sometimes (especially if we’re not wary of overcorrecting one excess with another) the comparisons can sound odd. He ate, slept, got sick, went to the bathroom, and best of all, suffered and died the cruel, physical death of a man — but with wonderful spiritual results.

What’s the lie in this?

Will anyone argue that Jesus was not really weeping because He was grieved? I doubt it — and I won’t! But to focus on His human nature in this, without also including the reasons He gives for His divine, sovereign actions and choices, downplays the main theme of the story.

The tension is breathtaking in the account of the death and resurrection of Lazarus in John 11. Jesus reacted in many ways like any person would in this situation. Yes, He felt their pain. But He had also held back from healing Lazarus for an even more important reason than to assuage someone’s grief. Rather than work a quick healing for His friend, He was planning to manifest Himself in a way that could have been His most publicly divine act so far in His earthly life.

What’s the Word?

The scene: After suffering through a long sickness, Jesus’ friend Lazarus has died. And oddly enough, though He was told in advance, He had already spent at least two days delaying in not coming to heal Lazarus. John 11 must be read in full to see this truth, but here’s an excerpt:

The reason for Jesus weeping? Based on the different reactions from the crowd, it is twofold.

Notice that John doesn’t leave the onlookers’ reaction at “See how he loved him!” There’s more.

Rather, the author’s paragraph ends with a question, which strongly implies the reader could be asking the same thing: “could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?” Their confusion reflects that of the disciples earlier (verses 5 through 16).

(Next, we’ll go further in — if Jesus wasn’t only sharing their grief, why else did He weep?)

Disunity is everywhere, and it seems many people decry it while holding to the very selfish views and actions that promote even more disunity. Is that always wrong? Sometimes it is. Yet in the case of the Church, what — or Who — is it we should be unifying around anyway?

In this continuing collection of sermon notes from Sunday messages, one of my church’s pastor answered why, based on the Apostle Paul’s encouragement to the Romans in Romans 12 …

01.31.2010 — Romans 12: 1-16 (Paul)

• In our church, we want to be committed to “living theology” as a community of believers. We are called by God, all of us, by Jesus and empowered by the Spirit to do the work of ministry (2 Corinthians 5: 17-21).
• Our unity now is found only in Christ, for the glory of God alone, making much of Him as His new creations, for the rest of our lives.
• But we still struggle because we wrestle with our sin natures. We do not always deal well with diversity, do we? Too often we think deep down like we are always right. If the world were a perfect place, we subconsciously assume, everyone would only act as we do! Such disagreements have done such damage, over insignificant things, to the cause of Christ. Yet we are called to love God, and each other as we love ourselves, and we know we do that.
• “God’s mercy is our motive and our motivation for growing together in grace. … The mercies of God make us family.” So we can call each other brothers and sisters in Christ, with affection He has given us, with God as our heavenly Father.
• The mercies of God give us a common purpose and move us through a common process. He has given all for us; let us be grateful and give all to Him. This makes rational, reasonable, right worship. We help each other in perseverance too, because we need each other. This is a lifelong community project, letting our lives be transformed.
• We must encourage one another to find our satisfaction not in the temptations of the world, but in Him (2 Corinthians 5:18). We need to want to be like our Heavenly Father, beholding His glory in everything. His mercy moves us from selfishness to being committed to others.

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