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Understanding the Conquest of Canaan
On Monday night we took some time to consider the conquest of Canaan in the book of Joshua, and the nature of the commands God gave which initiated it. Here are the notes:
Understanding Joshua and the Command to Destroy the Canaanites
This Summer on Monday nights we’re going to study the book of Judges together. To understand the book of Judges, you really need to understand some of the major things that happened in the book of Joshua–because the background to Judges is what happens in the book of Joshua. But there’s a major issue that people today often have with the book of Joshua: it’s the history of the military conquest of the land of Canaan, including the expulsion or killing of its inhabitants, by the people of Israel, in response to a divine command. Critics of the bible throw around words like “genocide” when they talk about the book of Joshua.
Here’s a typical comment from an author from a few years ago: “The Bible story of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler’s invasion of Poland, or Saddam Hussein’s massacres of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs. The Bible may be an arresting and poetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should give your children to form their morals.”
So what’s going on? Did God really command or do something evil in the book of Joshua?
To answer that question, let’s walk through the scriptures from the beginning, and then consider some important considerations that arise from pondering the evidence.
First, in at the beginning of the bible, we see the foundational truth that God created everything. Therefore he owns everything, and he’s king over everything. Next, in Genesis 1:26-28 (a key passage for understanding this issue) we see that God gave Man dominion. Humanity rules the earth. God wants to exercise his rule through and with humanity.
Now, see Genesis 9:6. Two big things happen before Genesis 9:6. The first is what Christians call “the Fall,” when humanity chose to obey and serve creation instead of God, sinned, and incurred God’s judgment. After the Fall, the dominion of Man is messed up, and can’t be ultimately successful in the current state, but it’s not revoked. Most noticeably, what Genesis 9:6 shows us is that when something goes wrong in humanity, God’s plan is never just to throw humanity away and start over, but to redeem humanity by allowing us to be the central part of the process to destroy evil. In other words, God wants humanity to triumph over evil, and thus to preserve itself—he doesn’t want evil to overcome and destroy humanity.
The second big thing that happens before Genesis 9:6 is the Flood.
Now see Genesis 6:5-7, 6:13, 7:21-22, and 19:24-25. In both of these situations (the Flood and the judgment on Sodom) God shows that he does retain the right to judge himself, not using Humanity, but judging directly, and on a large scale. Notice though, in both circumstances it was because the numbers were so overwhelming that the righteous people could not possibly have fixed the situation (in both situations only one family was left faithful). And in both situations the destruction is total, because the evil is so great. The impression God communicates in these accounts is that both societies had passed some point of no return, and could only grow in evil, harm, and misery from here on out.
But still, we can basically tell from Genesis 9:6, and from the rest of the story onward, that God prefers to not do it like these like he does it in these situations—he prefers to have enough people in the situation who know him and obey him that he can direct and empower them to take care of business, and thus Mankind can continue to fulfill its original mandate of ruling on behalf of God.
Here’s a key point: In the book of Joshua we’re looking at a time when God judged a whole geographic area, a whole culture, with this kind of total judgment. But this time he didn’t do it with Fire or Flood, but with other people. Before we balk at the judgment in Joshua, we need to ask ourselves: do I agree that God has the right to judge the earth and sweep evil off the face of it, and to determine when the only way to get rid of evil is to wipe out an entire civilization? If we don’t think God has that right, we are in fundamental disagreement with the Bible. At that point, Joshua isn’t our problem. Genocide is not our problem. God is our problem. We don’t believe he is the creator, or we don’t believe he is the king. And right there, if that’s the case, we’re simply not in any position to evaluate what happened in the time of Joshua. We have other, bigger things to talk about, farther back than any army and any war.
Because if you grant that God has the right to judge humanity in keeping with his righteousness, and that the penalty for sin is death, then it isn’t any great leap to acknowledge his right to use any means he deems appropriate. And when you see that his purpose all along was to rule the earth through humanity, it makes total sense that, when possible, humanity would be the instrument to destroy evil and bring righteousness to humanity.
Now read Genesis 15:7-20. This brings us to God’s promise to Abraham. The land will be his. But not now. Why? It will be his descendants’, later, because God knows that in a few hundred years the place is going to be inhabited by a culture so evil that it will require judgment. But God won’t act until then. This brings up an important sub-point…
In the book of Jonah, there’s a similar situation. God declares that he will overthrow the city, because “their wickedness is great.” When the prophet walks through the city and yells out that the city will be overthrown in 40 days, the king declares a city-wide show of repentance, and the people really do turn from evil—just from the message that God’s going to overthrow their city (3:10). And God accepts their repentance, and decides not to bring the judgment. The prophet gets mad because he wanted God to judge the city, and God’s response is incredibly helpful. He says to Jonah: “Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left– and much livestock?” (4:11) In other words, God didn’t want to judge Nineveh, he’d rather they just turn from evil. And he specifically mentions children in this—God didn’t want the children to suffer if there was another way. In fact, he didn’t even want animals caught up in it if it was possible to avoid. That’s the kind of God we have in the Bible, and the prophet Jonah is a perfect contrast to him in this case. Jonah wants judgment. God would rather have repentance, and for life to be spared.
Read Exodus 23:20-24, 27-30. All these years later, the time has come. The evil of the Canaanite culture was complete. God must have known that they would not have had anything like the national repentance Nineveh had. He knew that the culture needed to be ended. And after he’s freed the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, he announces that he will drive the inhabitants of the land out, and give the land to the Israelites.
Read Numbers 33:50-56. God says it again: “Drive them out.” Notice, the first announcement is not that they must all be killed, but that they must all be driven out, and that the shrines of their evil worship need to be destroyed. And, if Israel is disobedient, and falls into the same practices, they will suffer the same fate.
This brings us to some of the passages that say some more difficult things.
Read Deuteronomy 7:1-11, 16; 12:29-32; 20:16-18; 31:1-8. Notice this Big Point keeps getting repeated—“do not worship their Gods.” It is this demonic spirituality that has so corrupted the culture. The Israelites can’t do this work of justice and surgery if they have the same evil infection. God will only use holy people to judge this sin.
Here’s another main point: The sin of this culture, and these people, was extraordinary. The adults were all guilty of death for what they had done. It had even progressed to the level where the children couldn’t grow up without being twisted. The animals were messed up too. The culture needed to go. Definitely read Clay Jones’s article, We don’t Hate Sin So We Don’t Understand What Happened to the Canaanites. He catalogs archeological evidence of what their culture was like. The main things he lists are:
- Rampant, degraded idolatry—worshipping statues in the most degraded matter.
- Rampant sexual perversion as modeled by the gods they worshipped, including incest, adultery, homosexuality, ritual sex in their temples, and bestiality. These things seem to have been main features of their culture.
- Probably the most egregious of all—child sacrifice. The culture of Canaan was unique in the world for the use and frequency of child sacrifice. They had statues of their gods they would heat red-hot and then place their children as old as four in the statues’ outstretched arms to cook to death in front of them. They had live music playing so you couldn’t hear the sounds of the screaming.
Read Joshua 1:1-6; 6:16-21. One of the times when everything died. But even here, repentance is possible. Rahab is saved. Also read Joshua 10:28-40. So, for many of the cities, judgment was total. Evidently, if people ran away or repented, they were saved. But if they stayed, the only solution was total destruction. Of course, when we come to the first few chapters of the book of Judges, the problem facing the Israelites was that that they did not drive the inhabitants of the land out. It never says that God was angry that they didn’t kill them, just that he was angry that they did not drive them out. It wasn’t the death of individuals God was after, it was the expulsion of a culture from the land, and the overcoming of any people who wanted to entrench themselves and make a stand to keep the culture in the land.
What do we take away from all this?
- This wasn’t genocide, or simply mass-killing or war. It was justice. The Canaanite culture promoted evil that was harmful to all of humanity, and would not go away by itself. So God commanded a judicial sentence to be carried out by His chosen servants. It was the execution of a justly imposed penalty. In this way, the conquest of Canaan was also preventative. It was to purge the evil from the earth, so that it can’t continue. It wasn’t directed against anyone because of their race, but because of their culture and their practices.
- Joshua and the Israelites were only justified in carrying out their conquest because they were divinely commanded to do so. To authenticate his approval of the conquest, God did extraordinary, huge, public miracles, starting in Egypt, and continuing on through the entire campaign. So it’s not just that Israel had the power to conquer (like the Nazis in Germany), or that they said God was with them (like ISIS)—it is that God actually was with them. In fact, it’s pretty clear, they couldn’t even have won the war if God had not divinely intervened. They were by far the weaker people in the equation. And if God had not commanded and empowered them to conquer Canaan, they themselves would have admitted they had no claim on the land and no justification for anything they did.
- Last year, during my own bible reading, I started to wrestle with the account in the book of Joshua for myself. I spent some time praying about it. One surprising set of thoughts that came to me in that time was this: Our culture has no moral authority to stand in judgment of the book of Joshua at all. Why? We love violence. We love killing and cruelty. We pay to watch it and even enact it (in video games) for entertainment. Therefore, we have no right to turn around and act squeamish at these stories. And this brings up another the most likely reason we are so offended at the record of Joshua is not that we are such a righteous, peace loving culture, but actually it is that we are so much like the Canaanites. Not only do we love violence, we love dark spirituality. And we love dark and sinful sex. So of course we take offense when God announces that a culture like that needs to be destroyed. Maybe, what we’d find if we looked through history is that the closer a culture is to the culture of Canaan, the more the story of Joshua seems outrageous, and the further a culture is from Canaan, the more it will make sense. Maybe our reaction against it is actually just defensiveness, and not some sense of justice. If we love justice, let’s stop loving violence!
- This brings up one of the most hypocritical parts of common objections to the book of Joshua. I said that child sacrifice was one of the most horrible things going on in Canaan. When later, the Israelites themselves started getting into it, God singles it out as something beyond evil. And of course, we too are a culture that kills our own children. More than 50 million have died in the last 50 years—children we murdered with abortion. So we totally mimic the Canaanite culture in that respect, and then, when we want to object to Joshua’s conquest, we say—“Yeah, but what about all those children? They were innocent!” And I think God must reply: “The Canaanites were themselves killing their own children, so they have no moral authority here. And, if you care about children dying, stop killing your own.” And like we saw in the situation with the prophet Jonah, we know that God cares hugely for children. Jesus taught the same thing. So if a situation arises where the death of children is unavoidable, it must be that God knows it is both a necessary tragedy which will prevent further, bigger tragedy, and that it is actually more merciful to the child than to allow them to grow up in the culture, and be lost forever. I believe the Bible indicates that children who die have eternal life, and a place in his kingdom forever. That alone would never justify the death of children—which is why this situation required God’s omniscience and his direct command, as well as the verification of huge, public miracles, over the course of years (and the miraculous victory of a weaker people over a stronger people because of divine intervention, as is the case right from the beginning, at Jericho). Over the long haul, God wants as few people as possible to have to die. And everything he does in the bible works towards that end. He is the one who is always restraining and minimizing our murderous instincts. When he does it by overthrowing some cites, we cry that he’s not being fair.
In other words—humans have no right to indict God. Followers of Christ are people who reached that realization personally. We get to some point in our life and we realize—God’s not the problem. I’m the problem. And when I blame him, I’m being a hypocrite. That sense that I’m the problem—the bible calls that conviction. No one can truly believe in God or follow Jesus without passing through the door of real, down-to-the bone conviction—I’m a sinner. I deserve God’s judgment. But God is so big-hearted, that as soon as we let ourselves admit that and feel the weight of it, and we cry out for mercy from Jesus Christ—he grants us mercy!
The book of Joshua turns out to be about what God’s doing with the whole world, today. He’s calling people to follow him. He’s got a leader he’s using to eradicate evil from the earth. Anyone can repent, like Rahab, and be spared. And so all this talk of justice and mercy on a societal level is really supposed to boil down to each of us, individually, here tonight. Where are you? God is inviting every man and woman to own their own sin, turn away from it, and embrace God’s grace and love. It’s extended to you.
But the bible is very clear that what happened to Canaan is going to happen to the whole earth. Right now, like Rahab and her family, the opportunity is there for people to repent. The call is going out—you can escape the coming judgment. Because, like I said, there’s another man, who, actually his Hebrew name is Joshua—we call him Jesus. As the culture of the whole world starts to look more like the culture of Canaan, soon God will decide we’ve passed some point of no return, and he will send Jesus Christ to conquer the earth and totally cleanse it of evil. That’s the real message of Joshua. In Jesus Christ, a Man will conquer sin forever.
This might not seem like the most uplifting message on the surface. But think about it. What kind of help do we really need in this world? If we’ll face God’s Word head-on, he’ll give us real answers, answers that are big and solid enough to handle the actual lives we’re going to have to live. In the story of the bible we’re seeing that evil won’t last forever. One day all the killing and darkness will be gone. And even better than that, God’s doing it in such a way that we can be preserved through the process. In order to clean the earth, he’s not going to wipe us away too. Humanity will win, in His name. What Jesus started on the cross, he’s going to finish on his white horse. Everyone will see his greatness. And everyone’s invited to share in his victory.
That Cool Teacher, and the Church…
You gotta read this. At first I thought was a parody, but really, it’s an alternate history of Acts 18:24-28–
24 Now a certain Jew named Apollos, born at Alexandria, an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures, came to Ephesus. 25 This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things of the Lord, though he knew only the baptism of John. 26 So he began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Aquila and Priscilla heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately. 27 And when he desired to cross to Achaia, the brethren wrote, exhorting the disciples to receive him; and when he arrived, he greatly helped those who had believed through grace; 28 for he vigorously refuted the Jews publicly, showing from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ.
Enjoy:
The Oppressive Church Has Tried to Get Independent Teachers Under Their Authority Since the Beginning
Ephesus – AD 52 – Darkest Timeline
Caius and Nikola linger in the front room, waiting for Justus to finishing tidying up. The house church had just finished their Sunday meeting, and they needed to get home before dark.
“So, are you going to the ZEON Conference this Saturday?” said Caius.
“Yeah, for sure! I love Apollos, man, he is, like, totally my role model.”
“Dude, me too. I just love how real he is,” said Justus, cinching up his sandals.
“Excuse me,” said Priscilla, walking in with her husband, Aquila, from the kitchen, “who is Apollos?”
“Oh, hey Pris,” said Caius as they left the house together. “Yeah, Apollos is this Egyptian dude, super spiritual, and just really cool and real and like totally loves God.”
“He holds this conference in the synagogue every Sabbath,” added Nikola.
“That’s cool. So is he a Christian?” asked Aquila.
“I’m pretty sure he is. I mean he definitely talks about Jesus and God and stuff,” said Caius, hesitatingly. “Still though, I just love the way he speaks and the conference is super fun. I always just feel really validated after hearing his stuff.”
“Does he ever come to this church?” asked Priscilla.
“Nah, he lives in the Greek district,” replied Justus.
“So he meets with the brothers and sisters at Titius’s house,” said Aquila.
“I don’t know. He never mentions it so maybe not. It’s not a big deal though,” said Caius, and he and his brothers turned left toward their home, leaving Priscilla and Aquila alone to wonder about this Apollos character. They were still pretty new in town, but Paul had sent them as deacons to help the Ephesian church get some solid grounding. If there was squishy teaching in town, they needed to know about it.
The next Sabbath, Aquila and Priscilla made their way to the synagogue. Many fashionably dressed young people were lined up down the street to get in. A large banner emblazoned with “ZEON Conference, featuring Apollos!” hung over the entrance. Inside, they found a seat near the front and waited while the Rabbi called the attendees to order. The youths were restless. It was clear whom they had come to hear, and it wasn’t this old fogey. Finally, the conference organizer got on stage to hype the crowd.
“Here it is, adelphoi, with an eloquent and competent word, all the way from Alexandria, Apollos!”
The crowd cheered, and a tall, handsome young man took the stage. For the next hour, he expounded the scriptures and taught accurately concerning Jesus. But Priscilla and Aquila noticed something odd. Apollos seemed to know that Jesus was baptized by John, and that he had taught a lot of good things. But he never mentioned Jesus’s death or resurrection, never mentioned the Holy Spirit, never mentioned the new covenant or the Lord’s Table. It’s like he knew the set up, but not the climax. But could he ever hold a room. Priscilla glanced around and was amazed at the rapt attention of the young people. Clearly, Apollos was extremely gifted, but he needed some training up.
After Apollos had finished, Aquila stood in line to meet him, while Priscilla talked with some of the conference attendees.
“So, what did you think of Apollos?” she asked one young woman.
“He’s so cool. He just really speaks to my specific felt needs.”
“I love this conference; it’s young and fresh,” added one of her friends.
“Did you know that Jesus actually died and was raised to life by God to forgive our sins?” Priscilla asked some young men.
“Yeah I heard that at some house church gathering my mom dragged me too one time,” answered one.
“Me too, but I haven’t been back to that. Too stuffy. ZEON Conference is all I need for my spiritual health,” chimed in another.
Aquila finally got to the autograph table and introduced himself. “Hello, Apollos, my name is Aquila and my wife, Priscilla, and I are deacons in the Ephesian church. We’re wondering if you’d like to grab coffee sometime this week? We’d love to get to know you more.”
“Yeah, man, that sounds great!”
They worked out a date, then Aquila found Priscilla, and they left the synagogue.
On Wednesday morning, they went to the cafe and met Apollos. They made small talk over coffee and breakfast gyros, then Aquila said, “Apollos, you are a gifted speaker, undeniably devout and knowledgeable about the scriptures. It was incredible to see you keep the attention of young people for that long on a Sabbath. We would love if you would join the church here in Ephesus. There’s a faithful body of believers, elders and deacons here that would be very blessed by your gifts. We think that we could help you as well, especially with some theological stuff. There’s a couple things we think you may not have heard about Jesus that would really help your ministry be full and complete, and we would love to explain to you the way of God more accurately.”
Apollos looked thoughtful, but his eyes darkened, and eventually he replied, “Aquila, thanks for the offer, but no thanks. I really don’t need some stodgy old church men to have authority over me. Did you see how many people I drew to ZEON? I’m bringing in the young people that you can’t hold in your living room churches without putting them to sleep. I’m surprised no one’s fallen out of the window yet!”
Priscilla pleaded with him. “Please reconsider, Apollos. We can help each other here. We learned the gospel from the Apostle Paul, who has seen Jesus! The full truth of the apostolic faith is being taught in the Ephesian church, and we want you to be a part of it!”
“I’m not interested, Priscilla. I’m turning the ZEON Conference into the ZEON Tour and taking this bad boy on the road, and I can’t be tied down to some local church, worrying about orthodoxy.” And with that, he paid for his meal and left.
Priscilla and Aquila were disappointed. How could Apollos be that flippant about the truth? Did he not understand that the very unity of the Church was on the line? Did he not realize the grave consequences of capitulating to the spirit of the age? Why was he not willing to come under the authority of the people who wanted to give him even more beautiful material to teach? They pondered this during their long days at the tent shop. One day, the three young men from their church came into their store.
“How come you tried to put Apollos under your thumb like that?” demanded Caius.
Aquila was surprised at the question. “I’m sorry, what?”
“You told Apollos he couldn’t teach anymore because he wasn’t in your church!” said Nikola.
“You’re just trying to silence him because he’s popular!” piped in Justus.
“Guys, we didn’t. We just asked him if he would join our church so that we could teach him everything about Jesus and then support him in his ministry,” replied Priscilla, warily.
“You’re just jealous because he has way more followers than you or Paul!” screamed Nikola.
“Orthodoxy is really just code for having the right body, and he’s Egyptian so he must be out, is that it?”
“This is just like the church, always trying to oppress and silence and erase and marginalize independent and popular speakers, just because they’re communicating outside the traditional structures that you set up to stay in control,” said Caius. “And by the way, Priscilla and Aquila, I have talked to dozens and dozens of church leaders who told me they’ve changed their minds on these issues too. Leaders of some of Asia Minor’s largest churches, preachers in Philippi, Galatia, and Thessalonica, and episkopoi with widely circulated letters. But they avoid these issues or lie about them because they’re afraid of what people like you and Paul and the rest of the Apostolic Mafia will do to them!”
And with that, the brothers stormed out of the tent shop. Priscilla and Aquila wrote to Paul, pleading with him to return to Ephesus. Meanwhile, Apollos set sail for Corinth, where he taught alongside the Christians in the synagogues, creating much confusion amongst the young people there. Paul returned to Ephesus to find the church greatly diminished in size and morale, and found that the young people following Apollos eventually fizzled out of any kind of faith at all. Paul left for Corinth, and found that the same had happened since Apollos had arrived. Apollos preached and taught all throughout Asia and Greece, and the presence of two similar, but markedly and irreconcilably different teachings about Jesus confused and put off any potential new converts, either Jew or Gentile. Eventually the Christian movement fizzled in the Roman Empire, and Western Civilization never happened.
Being different to be powerful (and faithful).
This is a very interesting, helpful post by Trevin Wax. I’m going to repost it in full here, and I encourage you to take a few minutes and read the whole thing:
The Future of Christianity May Be Different Than You Think
What if you could travel back in time a hundred years?
The early 1900s were a time when technology was progressing by leaps and bounds. The age of science and reason had stirred up a sense of optimism across North America. New methods of studying the Scriptures had become popular, with critical analysis now applied to the Bible.
Let’s say you dropped in on a meeting with a pastor and a theologian discussing how the gospel would best spread in the 20th century.
As you listen in, you hear the theologian say something like this:
“Christianity is in trouble. The Bible is full of supernatural events and miracles, and we can’t expect people in our scientific age to believe in these stories without question. The idea of the virgin birth is simply astounding to educated people in our time.”
The pastor responds:
“What are you saying? That we should abandon these truths? Christians have always believed these things.”
“No, no,” comes the reply. “I’m not saying we deny these miracle stories altogether. But surely we could downplay them. Why not avoid aspects of the faith that may embarrass educated Christians in our time?”
“Are you sure this would help our mission?” the pastor asks.
“I believe so,” says the theologian. “After all, the miracles aren’t the center of Christianity. What is truly breathtaking about our faith is its emphasis on bettering the world—the moral truths that show God as our father and all mankind as brothers. Let’s focus on the morality of Christianity, not the miracles. Otherwise, we are causing unnecessary offense and hindering our mission.”
Conversation That Made Sense
This conversation from a hundred years ago made sense to a lot of people. The Christians in that time wanted to reach as many people as possible. They wanted to faithfully embody the gospel. It makes sense that some would think the best way forward was to avoid the unpopular aspects of Christianity, such as its emphasis on the miraculous.
If I could travel back in time, I’d interrupt the conversation between the pastor and the theologian. I’d tell them:
“A hundred years from now, people will be talking about how the fastest-growing movement within Christianity is Pentecostalism—a movement of Christians who emphasize miracles and healings in the present. And the churches that downplayed or denied the supernatural claims of Christianity are now in a massive numerical freefall.”
I can imagine their surprise. You mean the groups that didn’t downplay but actually reveled in the supernatural grew the most? And the groups that downplayed the miracles have nearly disappeared?
It’s easy to think that the best way for Christianity to grow is to emphasize the palatable parts for a culture and avoid the offensive. But surely the last century shows us that the very claims that were most embarrassing to a scientific age became the most attractive elements of Christianity.
From Controversy Over Miracles to Morality
Today, pastors and theologians are in a similar conversation. Miracles aren’t under the spotlight. Christian morality is. The goodness and beauty of Christianity’s sexual ethic reserves sexual expression for a man and woman within the covenant of marriage, and says no to all other sexual behavior and lust, whether it be pornography, or sex before marriage, or adultery.
A hundred years ago, some said we should focus on morality apart from the miracles. Today, some say we should focus on miracles apart from Christian morality.
It makes sense, doesn’t it? I have single friends in their 30s and 40s who have chosen to live according to Jesus’s teaching and pursue chastity. They say people think they’re strange, backward, and repressed for their views. Sexual abstinence is harmful in the eyes of a society that sees sexual expression as the pinnacle of human flourishing.
Strategically, it would make sense to shift the Christian vision of sexuality and marriage, wouldn’t it? Why focus on these embarrassing aspects of our faith? Why not deny the historic Christian teaching (as many revisionist theologies do, to align with the ideology of the sexual revolution), or at least downplay these teachings (as many pragmatic ministries do, to keep people from turning away)? Wouldn’t that remove obstacles that hinder Christianity’s flourishing?
No.
If the lesson from the last century is any indication, ground zero for explosive gospel witness is the place where we are most likely to run afoul of the cultural authorities.
Ground Zero for Explosive Gospel Witness
What if, a hundred years from now, the Christians who have exploded in growth and passion across the world are the ones that sought to reaffirm and embody the historic Christian teaching on sexuality and family? What if we are on the verge of a 21st century of attractive Christian witness because of our morality, not in spite of it?
One of the chapters in This Is Our Time is called “Sex Rebels” because it makes the case that Christians in our generation will be known for dissent. In the 1960s and ’70s, the sexual rebels were the hippies who wanted to throw off moral restraints in favor of “free love.” In the 21st century, the sexual rebels will be Christians who dissent from sexual revolution dogma.
But even in dissent, there’s no reason to be gloomy about the task we have before us. If we’re going to be outcasts and dissenters, let’s be the kind of rebels that don’t just expose the lies of the sexual revolution. Let’s answer the longings of our society by offering an entirely different vision of sex and marriage. Let’s declare what God is for. And let’s trust that a hundred years from now, the Christian truth will be as solid as ever, even if the cultural challenges have changed.
Visit this site. Read these books
Last week I posted some thoughts from A.W. Tozer, and in looking for those thoughts online, I stumbled onto an excellent website dedicated to educating people about his life and work.
You should check it out: awtozer.org
If you’re not familiar with Tozer, really you should be. In my own life, his writings have been so helpful that he ended up with four of the books on my list of nine books that shaped my early twenties. Few modern authors have written with the combination of power and depth, typically in concise, short books, which Tozer consistently produced. I hope you discover him too, and benefit from the discovery.
God will not do our repenting for us.
More on repentance, this time from From A.W. Tozer‘s excellent little book, Paths to Power:
In the things-which-God-cannot-do category is this: God cannot do our repenting for us.
In our efforts to magnify grace we have so preached the truth as to convey the impression that repentance is a work of God. This is a grave mistake, and one which is taking a frightening toll among Christians everywhere. God has commanded all men to repent. (Acts 17:30) It is a work which only they can do. It is morally impossible for one person to repent for another. Even Christ could not do this. He could die for us, but He cannot do our repenting for us.
God in His mercy may “incline” us to repent and by His inworking Spirit assist us to repent; but before we can be saved we must of our own free will repent toward God and believe in Jesus Christ. This the Bible plainly teaches; this experience abundantly supports. Repentance involves moral reformation. The wrong practices are on man’s part, and only man can correct them. Lying, for instance, is an act of man, and one for which he must accept full responsibility. When he repents he will quit lying. God will not quit for him; he will quit for himself.
When stated thus frankly everything seems obvious enough, and we may wonder how reasonable persons could expect someone else to relieve them of their personal obligation to repent. In practice, however, and under the pressure of strong religious emotion, things are not so plain as one might suppose. The fact is, the “all has been done, you can do nothing” emphasis has caused no end of confusion among seekers everywhere.
People are told they must surely perish because of what they are, not because of what they do; what they do does not enter into the picture at all. And furthermore, they can do nothing in the direction of salvation; even to suggest a thing is to offend God: is not the horrible example of Cain enough to prove that? So they are tossed helplessly between the first Adam and the last Adam. One did their sinning for them and the other has done everything else. Thus the nerve of their moral life is cut and they sink back in despair, afraid to move lest they be guilty of sinful self-effort. At the same time they are deeply troubled with the knowledge that there is something seriously wrong with their religious lives.
The remedy is to see clearly that men are not lost because of what someone did thousands of years ago; they are lost because they sin individually and in person. We will never be judged for Adam’s sin, but for our own. For our own sins we are and must remain fully responsible until they have been brought for disposition to the Cross of Jesus. The idea that we can delegate repentance is an erroneous inference drawn from the doctrine of grace wrongly presented and imperfectly understood.
Are you fighting the Holy Spirit?
I just read this very interesting thought:
A man who has no self-control is fighting the Holy Spirit whose fruit always produces it.
That’s so insightful. Because, think about it: Galatians 5:23 does say that the fruit of the spirit is self-control. Which means, self-control is what the Spirit produces in our lives when we’re yielded to him. I yield, I obey, He produces self-control. (And that alone is a very interesting thought about how God’s sovereignty works in connection with our humanity.)
…which means, yes – -if I don’t have self-control, I must be actually, actively opposing the Holy Spirit’s “desire” (Galatians 5:17) and His active power to produce self-control.
When we don’t have self-control, the story about it that can run through our heads is the opposite of this. “I have no self-control because I can’t help it.” Or something like that. But that’s the point, right? The Spirit is fully able to grant me the ability to control myself and point myself towards God’s glory. There’s no lack there. He can help it. And he is actively giving me the power to help it.
So if, as a Christian, I can’t help it, it can only mean one thing. I don’t want to help it. I’m actively deciding not to be able to help it, and I’m opposing the Spirit’s work to make me be able to help it.
A lot to chew on there.
Practical Spirituality: How to Repent
Last night we continued our study in Practical Spirituality, this time looking at how to repent. Here are the notes:
What is repentance? When we talk about repentance, we’re talking about turning away from sin. We’re talking about a change of heart and mind and a change in lifestyle. When someone repents they change—they stop loving things God calls sin and they stop doing those things too. And then they begin to do other things God approves of.
Repentance is a huge, awesome gift. You actually can change. Your past doesn’t have to define you. You can get free.
How does someone repent? Back in the second study in this series we looked at how someone actually becomes able to live the Christian life. And it’s the same process when it comes to repentance. We hear and learn what God says about life. First we realize that a change needs to be made. Then, while we’re consciously and actively relying on the power of God’s Spirit, we do the practical things we need to do in order to make the change in our lives.
How do you get to the place where you can actually make that change? What kind of heart and mind do you have to have to really see a difference in your life? If you’re not a follower of Jesus yet, this is a totally crucial question for you, whether you know it or not. And even for those of us who are followers of Jesus right now, sometimes even we get into this routine where we do something, feel guilty about it, kind of want to change, but then just get tempted again and do it all over again. The process just keeps repeating. And then what usually happens is that people either get more and more guilty and spiritually powerless, or they get more and more deadened in general to spiritual things. Sometimes at that point it’s kind of hard to tell them apart from a non-believer. So how do we break out of those patterns?
Tonight we’re going to look at that question from this angle—how does a person who experiences repentance think? What kind of thoughts and feelings does God want to lead us to which will help us be able to experience the awesome gift of repentance?
We’re going to get into this by studying Psalm 51, because it gives a pretty detailed answer to our questions.
David, who was king over Israel, wrote this Psalm after a pretty horrible sequence of events in his life, and after his friend, the Prophet Nathan, had confronted him. It’s recorded in 2 Samuel 11-12, but the short version is, he stole someone’s wife (a friend and soldier in his army), got her pregnant, and then arranged the battle so the man would die before he found out. Psalm 51 (along with Psalm 32) is what David wrote when he realized God had pardoned his sin.
Psalm 51 – The Mindset that Enables Repentance
v.1 Admit you don’t deserve anything, but that you want (undeserved) mercy.
Everything really starts here. We see this all through the Bible. It’s sort of like the baseline, starting point for any spiritual growth. Part of our distorted thinking as human beings is this sense of entitlement, that, because I exist, God owes me a certain life, and a certain set of comforts and privileges. But when someone asks for mercy, they’re admitting that they don’t have any claim on the person they’re coming to. The person’s not obligated to help them in any way. In fact, when you ask someone for mercy, you’re admitting that you actually deserve something negative—you deserve not to be helped, and even to be punished or excluded or something. So what do you have left then? Nothing—except an appeal to the person’s big heart or generous nature.
v.1 Depend on God’s good character.
That’s what David does. He knows that God is big hearted, hugely generous, and full of this thing called “hesed”—it’s this faithful, loving commitment that never fails the person God’s committed to. And so he doesn’t plead any goodness of his own, he just says “God I know you’re really merciful. So I’m asking for you to be merciful, in this case, to me.”
v.1-2 Desire to be clean. (“blot”, “wash”, “cleanse”)
David knew that his sin wasn’t just something God randomly got mad at, but that it was really dirty. God hated it because it was evil. And David wanted to be free and clean from that. Before he could repent, he had to not think of his sin like we sometimes think of sin—as something beautiful but forbidden, as something he wants really bad but it just happens to be off limits—he had to admit that it was dirty, beneath someone made in the image of God, and it was shameful. And he had to want to be free from it all so he could be clean.
v.3 Call sin sin …don’t hide it or make excuses for it.
This goes with the last point. For David to experience real change, he needed to just be honest—what he did was just sin. Just to admit, in our hearts and with our mouths, that what we did is sin, and that we’re the ones who did it—it’s our fault—this is huge. And sometimes it’s the thing standing in our way. But David’s honesty here is the pathway to blessing and repentance.
v.4 Know that your sin is really against God.
This is where David really helps us get to the heart of the matter. It’s a pretty shocking verse, since in his case, he had clearly sinned against someone’s wife by committing adultery with her and by her husband by using a battle to get him killed so he couldn’t find out about it. But David presses even deeper than that. Because who gave David life? Who made him king, so he had a palace with a tall roof, and the power to summon whoever he wanted and command their obedience, and command over the army? Who gave him breath in his lungs and strength in his body so he could carry out his plan? And then, who was there, at every step of the way, with David, seeing and hearing everything? One of the most powerful deterrents for sin in a believer’s life is to learn to always remember that when we’re alone, we’re alone with God, and when we’re other people, He’s there too. We always sin right in front of him. And that’s what David’s saying. To sin where someone can’t see you is one thing. But to sin right in front of them while they’re watching is another level of disrespect. And David’s admitting that level of disrespect towards God. To really repent, we’ve got to admit that our sin is a personal affront to God. Really feeling this leads to the kind of realization David expresses in verse 5 and 6.
v.5 Know that your problem is total and incurable.
v.6 Know that the issue is inward, in your heart.
When you really hurt someone you love, and you realize that it wasn’t just an accident, it’s one of those things that can make you almost despair. You can think thoughts like—I’m just messed up. And not in an excuse kind of way, but in that have an honest look in the mirror kind of way. When David says, I was born this way, he doesn’t mean it as an excuse, he means something more like—this wasn’t just an accident, or some random anomaly in an otherwise good life, no…this is who I really am.
This is really big, and I think all I can say here is that I’ve come to suspect that no one can really begin on the path of following Jesus until they’ve had this horrible experience. It’s the experience of really owning your sin, as an identity—I really am that big of a jerk, or I really am that selfish, or that egotistical, or that perverted or that calloused or that sadistic. I did that thing because that’s who I am. To own your sin feels like death, but I think that’s the whole point. I think it’s part of what Jesus meant when he talked about taking up your cross, and what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote about crucifying the flesh and dying with Christ. So in some sense it is a death. It’s the death of my old inflated views of myself, and then, when I repent, it’s the death of my old life and the old me. But the Bible is clear that this is a death that actually only kills all the things that were killing me, and that if I’ll undergo this death, I’ll find the new life that repentance leads to.
v.7-10 Desire the cleansing only God can give…
When we realize that the problem we have with sin is a problem on the level of identity, and that it’s an inward thing, we’ll start asking God to do a work in us that’s that deep. If our problem is that deep, we need him to grant us a cleanness that goes way beneath the surface.
So repentance is deeper than trying to make amends for the past. It’s deeper than just trying to change our behavior, even though it always does result in changed behavior. But like David here, to truly leave our sin behind, we’ve got to ask God for a real cleansing and change in our hearts. Or as he says it here, we’ll realize that we actually just need a new heart.
v.11 Care about your relationship with God more than you want the pleasures of sin.
This verse starts to get us to the heart of why David was asking for cleansing in verse 2 and 7 and 10. Why does David want to be clean? Because he knows, by experience, that the kind of cleanness he’s talking about, which is holiness, is cleanness in terms of being right in our relationship to God. It’s like when you and a friend are cool with each other because nothing’s in between you. David knew how great it was to have friendship with God. And he knew that his sin had messed it up.
But when David stood on the roof and watched Bathsheba bathe, what he wanted, was her. In that moment for him, he decided he wanted to be with her more than he wanted to be with God. And in every moment like that for us, when we sin, we decide we want whatever fulfillment or release or experience temptation offers more than holiness (what David calls cleanness here)—which amounts to wanting sin more than we want friendship with God. If we live our life like that, or engage in patterns of sin over time, then that amounts to a life that wants sin more than God. And to repent out of that situation—to really experience change—we have to get to the point where we want cleanness, and the connection to God it offers, more than we want sin.
v.12 Acknowledge that Joy only comes from friendship with God.
We’re ready to repent when we stop believing the lie of temptation that true fulfillment can come apart from God, and especially, that it comes from dishonoring God through sin. We come to want the joy we get in our connection to Him more than the joy that connection to sin offers.
v.13 Desire to help others know God and follow Him too.
Before we repent, we use other people to feed our sin. To get to the place where we can truly repent, we have to care more about people than that. We have to want them to know the joy of knowing God. In other words, we have to love people more than we love sin.
v.14-15 Desire to praise God.
David knew, by experience, how great it was to be in the presence of God, singing his praises, whether he was alone or with a crowd. He wanted it again. And we have to desire to praise God in order to be delivered from the deceitfulness of temptation.
v.16-17 Allow yourself to be humble.
Pride thinks that it has something to pay God back with. And it’s afraid of humility, because humility feels like death to pride. But if we’re going to repent, we have to be willing to humble ourselves. If I can’t know humility, I won’t escape sin.
v.18-19 Desire God’s will to be done in the world.
When we love sin, and we don’t repent, we can’t really care about what God wants to do in the world. We can’t care about justice and renewal and the right orientation of human beings towards God and each other. Because before we repent, what we really care about is using the world and people to feed our own desires. To repent, we need our desires changed. We need to become people who care more about God’s holy and loving desires than our own selfish destructive desires.
And this last point gets us to something that’s important to say before we end this. If you’re a follower of Christ, then in some sense, this study is already past tense for you. Verses 10 and 11 all refer to something that’s already happened to us. They say, “Create in me a new heart” and “Don’t take your Holy Spirit from me.” And if you’re born again, you’ve received God’s Holy Spirit, and you’ve experienced this inner washing, and God’s given you a new heart, and he’ll never depart from you.
So for all those of us who’ve already experienced this, what we need on a daily basis is to experience the parts of this we can sometimes get lax in. Sometimes we find sin hanging out in our lives. And we need to go through what David writes about here. We need to get honest about sin, and then get ruthless with it. We need to call it what it is and ask God to set our desires straight. And then we need to get up and obey what we know God wants, trusting him to give us the power every step of the way.
Eat this. Not That.
Here’s an interesting Bible study for you to do yourself.
First, read what Jesus says in John 6:50. Notice the context too (6:41-58.) Ponder 6:50 again. Maybe even write it out. Then look up Genesis 2:17. Notice also the context leading up to it, 2:8-17. You may want to write 2:17 out too, underneath the verse from John.
When you have both verses written out, take some time to notice the connections between the two verses. Notice what Jesus is saying in relation to the statement from the Lord in Genesis.
Now, think:
How does the statement in John 6:50 tie Jesus and His work all the way back to what God said Genesis?
What was the consequence for disobeying God’s word in Genesis 2:17?
What were the two special trees in the Garden?
What was God’s specific instructions regarding each tree?
Based on Genesis 3:22, what was the effect of eating from the Tree of Life?
How does this relate to what Jesus is offering in John 6:50?
Now, for even more exploration, think about what the Tree that caused death was related to.
Now look up Proverbs 1:7 & 3:13-18. Notice 3:18 especially.
How is all this related to the two trees?
How is it related to what Adam was seeking when he bit the fruit? …to what happened to him as a consequence?
And, finally, how is all of it related to what Jesus offers in John 6?
Now, just to blow your mind, read Revelation 22:1-2.
How does this tie back into all the verses you just read?
How does this relate to your destiny as a believer?
…Isn’t God’s word amazing?
Watch this, and then go do what it says!
Oh, this is so good…
…and, I’ve personally found this to be utterly true. I have been looking at the Bible for more than 20 years now, since the Spirit of God saved me at 16 and made me love it. And as I’ve kept looking, I’ve found more and more. And there’s still more to find. There are more mountains to climb and leaves on trees to examine. Big things and little things. Things about life and the whole world and why I get impatient and human society and animals and my family and my work and the kingship of Jesus Christ and the purpose of Man and sin and lies and hope in the future and every good thing coming true… and what else might you need?
God’s word has it. Let’s go find it.
Practical Spirituality: How to Handle Stress
Last night we continued our series on practical spirituality, taking some time to think about one aspect of how a Christian handles stress. Here are the notes.
First, we looked a point in King David’s life when I he got some very stressful news, and how he responded. See 2 Samuel 15:30-34. Then we turned to a Psalm that many people think was written by David in response to that news. Psalm 55. We especially looked at Psalm 55:22.
Psalm 55:22. Notice the logic. “Cast your burden on the LORD, And He shall sustain you; He shall never permit the righteous to be moved.” (For context and connections with the episode in 2 Samuel 15, see see also 55:1-14 and 55:20-22)
So…do you have a burden? Cast it on the Lord. And then God will sustain you. How? He won’t permit you to be “moved.” That is, you won’t “be moved,” as in you won’t be “shaken,” you won’t “slip or slide” away from the path where you’re supposed to be. Allen Ross says it this way: “God will sustain the faithful in their integrity so that they will not waiver or move from the path.”
Finally, we turned to 1 Peter 5:6-7. In this passage Peter quotes from the Greek translation of Psalm 55:22: “Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.”
So…Do you have cares or anxieties? Cast them on the Lord. And then leave your situation to him. (In other words, things that stress us make us feel like they’re going to ruin our life, but Peter tells us that “we’ll be exalted in God’s timing.” The idea of being “exalted” is the idea of being lifted up or honored. It’s kind of what we mean when we use the word “success.” In other words, our life won’t be a wreck if we refuse to let stress or worry dominate us, because what we’ll be doing is refusing to think we have to run our lives and make sure they’re successful all by ourselves.
One note. How are we supposed to cast our burdens or stress on God? These verses imply it, and almost expect us to know, that we do it in prayer. Philippians 4:6 says it directly—“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.”
What I realized about my own tendencies.
When something’s bothering me, my natural reflex is to talk about it with someone. For me, that someone used to be friends, but after I got married, my go to person to talk to became my wife.
So, you know, something’s stressing me, and I talk to her about it. It seems totally innocent. We talk about everything, so why wouldn’t we talk about this negative-feeling stuff too? But what I’ve discovered is that sometimes in these situations, maybe even most of the time, when I “get things off my chest” or just “talk it out” what happens is, I can leave the conversation feeling better, but she leaves it feeling worse. She might feel bad for me or angry at the situation, or just agitated by the stress I was describing. So what just happened? I took the agitation I was feeling and I used my words to unburden myself onto her. I just handed the burden or the stress to her with a conversation.
I kind of knew that I did this. Pieces of this realization had already been slowly coalescing in my mind, but recently they came together for me. I love how God does this when we’re actively following him. He’s really good at using all kinds of ordinary things to create this sort of daily school where he’s teaching us. In this case it was the “speaking” aspect of both conversation with other people and prayer that provided the connecting point for me, and gave me my light bulb moment.
Like I said, when I talk about my stress to my wife, I’m using words to unburden myself. And the Lord brought these two verses to my mind, from Psalms and 1 Peter, and I realized—this language of “casting my burden” or “casting my cares” perfectly describes what I do to Veronica. And of course, what do these verses invite me to do instead? They invite me to cast my burdens on God. In other words, God Almighty is asking me to use my words to talk to him about my stress. I think it has to mean, literally, in the same way that we might tend to use other human beings to unload on, God says, “Unload on me.” And when we see that, I think we have to also see that there’s probably an unspoken, silent acknowledgement of the other side of this coin. “Unload on me, and not so much on other people.”
And this leads us to a couple more insights. Both David and Peter tell us things about God’s ability to handle our burdens that show us why he’s really a superior burden carrier than anyone else.
David says, “Cast your burden on the LORD, And He shall sustain you; He shall never permit the righteous to be moved,” and we might add, “and remember, whenever you’re talking to other people, they can’t sustain you, and they have no power, ultimately, to make sure you won’t be moved. Only God can do those things.”
And Peter says, “Cast all your care upon Him, for He cares for you,” and we can imagine him saying, “No one else has the same kind of love and concern for you that he does. His love is actually big enough to handle all of your stress, and his desire to help you isn’t limited by any human limitations.”
It’s not negativity; it’s just realistic to finally notice that no one around me can handle the stress of my soul. I can’t. So why do I keep expecting other people to be able to? In fact, what realizing this actually does for me is free me up from being disappointed with people all the time. It frees me up from feeling like people have let me down if I make them handle my stress and then (surprise, surprise) I don’t actually feel sustained and strengthened afterwards. Because you know what it’s like, at some point the stress comes rushing back and then you’re just looking for a few more minutes to make someone listen to it all again. And when I’ve relieved others of the duty of carrying my stress, it actually frees me up to love them with much more realistic expectations for my relationships.
The fact is that God did not make my wife to handle all my stress. That’s not why he led her to marry me. And it’s not what she’s for. And that’s the craziest part of this whole thing—God says that that’s what he wants us to use him for. God presents himself as Someone who understands that we live in a world filled with things that overwhelm us. And what he says to us, really through the whole bible, is that his solution for that reality is himself. It’s like he’s saying, “you were never meant to face the world without me. Come talk to me about that world that’s stressing you out.”
And so that’s it. The follower of Jesus learns to handle stress by telling God—unloading on God—about everything. And then we leave it with him. We get up from telling God about the situation, and we let the words of David and Peter shape our thoughts. We think things like, “Ok, I told God. He won’t let this destroy me. He’ll get me through. He cares about me.” And then we go about our day with that confidence.
This way of operating becomes our becomes our go to. God becomes the main person we think: “I can’t wait to talk to him about this. And think about it—he will never get tired of listening. We never have to worry about gossiping if we’re alone with him. He loves everyone else we talk to him about. He knows everything about us and about any situation we’re in, and he has total power and wisdom to do whatever should be done about the situation. And none of those things are true about any of our friends or family.
Does this mean we shouldn’t talk to each other about our problems?
Now, I’m not saying that any of this means we can never talk to another person about something that’s messing with our heads. That would just be weird. And of course, God does use other believers to bring his grace to us, and to help us with all kinds of things. That’s why Paul writes to the Galatian church, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” And if we love each other, we want to help each other out with hard things. That’s not the issue. The issue is what I do when I’m feeling stressed out. Yes I want to help other people. And they want to help me. But that doesn’t dictate what to do when the issue’s mine.
I think the key to see how all this goes together is to understand that, if we let Psalm 55:22 and 1 Peter 5:7 do their work on us, and we learn to use prayer as the way we handle stress, it’ll enable us up to use our relationships the right way. We will be the kind of people who can talk about difficult things, when necessary, without loading the burden on others. We won’t expect them to do things they could never do or bear weight they could never bear. We can ask for prayer, or advice, or help, and do it in a way that we’re actually asking people for things God will enable them to do for us. We’ll use the community of Christians in the right way. Our relationships will be healthy. We can go through hard things with each other, and, when we each let God be God for us as individuals, we can then be the body of Christ to each other.
I suspect that nailing this down early in life will save us a lot of relational pain down the line.
And there’s one more thing here. If you’re not a follower of Christ, can we just say to you that we’ve found that it’s better to live in a world where there’s someone who knows and cares about all our stress, and has the power to help us, than in a world where there’s no one like that, really, anywhere to be found. And it’s not only better to imagine that kind of world, but we’ve found that that world is the real world. There’s no such world where men and women are left to fend for themselves against cold hard impersonal reality—except where ignorance and evil have separated people from friendship with God. So we’re people who go around spreading a different message. God’s here. He’s close. Only our sins have blocked us from knowing him. And that’s the real source of our stress.
And we see that in both of these verses we’re looking at in this study.
In Psalm 55 it says, “He shall never permit the righteous to be moved.” Only “the Righteous” have this promise. Psalm 1 says that to be in the opposite state (there it uses the terms “ungodly”) is to be like chaff, which is just like a weightless plant husk. And chaff totally gets moved. It gets blown away by the wind.
In the bible, one thing it means for a person to be “righteous” is for them to be totally aligned with God’s purposes for the world. God is in the process of undoing every lie and all evil and sweeping it out of the world. Those who want and work for the same thing are called “righteous.”
But the bible is also clear that none of us actually think and live that way. We have this problem where we love evil. So God’s solution is that Jesus Christ came and lived this way. For his entire life. And then he died by being nailed to a cross like someone who hadn’t been righteous. So he took the penalty for our unrighteousness in that way. And then God raised him from the dead. So now, even though you and I, and everyone else, haven’t been righteous, anyone who places their trust in Jesus as the only hope for humanity—God grants them the status of “righteous.”
No matter how evil you’ve been, when someone turns away from evil and puts their faith in Christ, God calls that person “righteous.” And what happens next is that we consciously begin to let God actually make us people who someone would call “righteous.” When we start to follow Jesus we begin a lifelong process of having God make us actually good. We become people who want to align themselves with God’s purposes in the world. And those who have aligned themselves with him are invited to give their burdens to God, so that difficult things won’t ultimately move them.
Peter is actually getting at a similar thing from another angle in the first part of verse 6, when he says, “humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God.” To really begin to know the peace of having God himself be your burden bearer, you first have to humble yourself before him. You have to acknowledge his presence in the world, and his total goodness and authority. You have to acknowledge that you’ve sinned and dishonored his authority, and so you don’t deserve a place in his kingdom. And you have to acknowledge that Jesus is the king, and that he’s God’s solution. You have to pledge allegiance to King Jesus. That’s what’s going on when someone humbles themselves before God.
And when you orient yourself toward Jesus that way, this is the word to you: “now cast your cares on him. He cares for you.”
You’re invited into a life with this kind of confidence and hope. It’s a life that nothing can ultimately ruin. And it’s a life God wants everyone to know.
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