Endorsements

Cosmos Reborn may be the most accessible theology book I’ve seen in my lifetime. This is the theology book the average person will read and love. If you’ve thought theology is hard to understand or even boring, this book is about to rock your world. John Crowder has distilled the thoughts of numerous great historic and contemporary theologians and blended them with what the Spirit has taught him through the Scriptures in a way that has the potential to transform you.

How thrilling it is to see the foundational tenets of faith held by the early church find increasing momentum among many who have been trapped in doctrines rooted more in religious traditions than Sacred Scriptures! I predict that Cosmos Reborn will fuel that forward momentum of grace in a way that honors our Triune God, builds up His Church and brings unbelievers into a conscious embrace of the One who has held all of us in His heart even before time began.

- Dr. Steve McVey, Ph.D.

Author of Grace Walk & Founder of Grace Walk Ministries

www.gracewalk.org

If you suspect that we could have possibly underestimated Jesus Christ, then Cosmos Reborn is singing your song. With the insight of the mystics, the way with words of the poets, and the thinking of a real theologian, John Crowder ushers us into the New Testament’s vision of Jesus and the One in whom all things, and all peoples have been gathered together forever—even as it was eternally planned by the blessed Trinity. This vision is as breathtaking as it is straight from the early Church, as full of the Holy Spirit’s joy as it is challenging to our natural minds. Crowder writes with an irrepressible determination that we all know the staggering reality accomplished in Jesus himself, and experience his liberation.

- Dr. C. Baxter Kruger, Ph.D.

Author of Across All Worlds and The Shack Revisited

www.perichoresis.org

There are not many people I know who give voice to this message with such joy, freedom, boldness and accuracy as John Crowder. All our pet doctrines, whether atonement or election, are simple reflections of who we believe God is. In Cosmos Reborn John introduces us to a colossal Jesus – infinitely more intriguing and beautiful than what we’ve been told. A very compelling read indeed!

- Andre Rabe

Author of Imagine & Founder of Ginomai Course

www.hearhim.net

Cosmos Reborn explores the absolute beauty of God. Crowder elatedly dances around the throne of glory, grace and goodness. There seated within the love-life of Abba, Jesus and Holy Spirit is the transfiguration of humanity and creation. Wonders will flow in the slipstream of this book—predestined to be a classic.

- Dr. Eric Wilding, Ph.D.

Grace Communion Seminary & Founder of Eric Wilding Ministries

www.ericwilding.org

COSMOS REBORN

BY JOHN CROWDER

Sons of Thunder Ministries & Publications

Portland, Oregon

Cosmos Reborn by John Crowder

Ebook versions by Ten10 Ebooks

www.ten10ebooks.com

Printed version published by:

Sons of Thunder Ministries & Publications

P.O. Box 40

Marylhurst, OR 97036

www.thenewmystics.com

Phone: 1-877-343-3245

Email: info@thenewmystics.org

This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise – without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

Copyright © 2013 by John Crowder

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013909520

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-928200-00-0

Printed in the United States of America

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For God was in Christ, reconciling the cosmos to Himself, not counting men’s sins against them. And He gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation.

- II Corinthians 5:19

Acknowledgements

My long-time admiration of C.S. Lewis and a scandalous enjoyment of Fr. Robert Capon first led me down the road of Trinitarian theology. Accelerated by conversations with some of my best friends in the world – Benjamin Dunn, David Vaughan and Joanne Gravell – I found myself being catapulted toward the unavoidable all of the Gospel.

There have been invaluable resources along the way: Dr. C. Baxter Kruger, who graciously contributed a theological audit of this book; Dr. Steve McVey; Bible translator Francois du Toit and Andre Rabe. Ultimately, Thomas F. Torrance, his family of theologians and their predecessor, Karl Barth, are due credit for so many of these ideas. Their Trinitarian thought has flourished through many modern theologians. Dr. J. Michael Feazell and the folks at Grace Communion International as well as Dr. Elmer Colyer, Dr. Paul Molnar, Dr. Andrew Purves, Dr. Trevor Hart, Rev. Robert Walker, Dr. Robin Parry, Dr. Daniel Thimell and Dr. George Hunsinger are a few who have blessed me and indirectly contributed to this work. Thanks for explaining Barth for me boys … I have no letters behind my name.

A seminary professor friend Dr. Eric Wilding noted a remarkable thing. His background in Trinitarian theology eventually pointed him to mystical Christianity – whereas my own background in Christian mysticism eventually landed me into Trinitarian theology. I would not be where I am without drinking deep of Dame Julian of Norwich, Brother Lawrence, Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton and many other wild-eyed mystic wanderers. Thanks Eric for the recommended reading.

I should also give a word of credit to my accusers. A protestor once came to my meeting with a large placard he had diligently painted the night before. He angrily shouted, “You preach a cosmic Jesus!” I found this a profoundly accurate observation – it inspired the naming of this book. Percy, beloved thorn in my flesh, you remind me that His grace is sufficient.

Finally, thanks to all our friends and partners who make our ministry possible and encourage us beyond measure. Above all, I thank my family for your amazing love – my wife Lily and four children: Maile, Jonas, Nova and Ezekiel. Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori.

Contents

Author Note :: Apologia …

Foreword :: By Francois du Toit …

Translation Index …

Introduction :: I am and I am not a Universalist …

1 - Contemplating the Mystery :: Lost in the Theological Fun Factory

Happy Theology & its Marriage to Contemplative Experience …

2 - The Case for a Loving God :: The Lie of Penal Substitution

Did Jesus Really Save You From an Angry Father? …

3 - The Vicarious Man :: Christ as the Last Adam

Incarnation, Christology & Original Innocence …

4 - Hell is Sort of Real :: But Heaven’s Door is Always Open

Stop Blaming God for the Bad Place …

5 - The Faith of God :: And Why You Should Give Up

Faith: The Effortless Connector to the Supernatural …

6 - The Case for Divine Complacency :: Fully Satisfied in the Gospel

Resting in God & Driven by Divine Pleasure …

7 - Born From Above :: Regeneration, New Creation & the New Birth

What Does it Mean to be Born Again? …

8 - The Divinity of Man :: Adoption & Immortality

Remembering the Divine Origin of our Sonship …

AUTHOR NOTE

APOLOGIA

This book could cheer up your perspective on the Big Guy. He’s in a good mood. God actually thinks He accomplished something in His atoning work. I invite you to catch a glimpse of the massive, exhilarating, cosmic scope of the Gospel.

The Gospel is the divine laughter at the problem of the ages that was solved before it ever began. The Gospel is a joke. Luther said it is nothing less than laughter and joy. Said Robert Capon, when asked God’s whole point in the Gospel … It’s fun.

Let me warn you upfront: yes, this is a theology book. I am taking a risk. My largely Charismatic audience balks at theology as if it’s the slutty stepsister of religion. They like tongue talking and miracles, but theologize too much and they’ll run you out of town. Well they are not entirely wrong. Theology has long been pimped out to cold intellectualism, divorced from experience and love. Rest assured, although this book is a bit academic at times, I am not an academic. I won’t be whipping out words like ontology just to show off. I try my best to convey deep concepts in plain talk for regular folks.

I am more a benevolent troublemaker than a legitimate theologian. On the opposite spectrum, there are the self-fashioned blogosphere academics whose heads are shoved so far up their hubris they will be able to review this book by its cover. I don’t expect to be taken seriously by them. This book is not for them. It’s for you. Devotional theology for the average reader who is willing to Google a five-syllable word every now and then – but only if the revelatory pay-off is worth it.

Everyone has a theology – a knowledge or perception of God – for good or worse. As go our perceptions and beliefs of God, so go our lives. If you’ve been raised to think all theology is mere soulish drivel, well that’s still a theological viewpoint. I have an admitted love affair with theology – and my soul doth magnify the Lord.

I spend the first chapter giving a bit of a disclaimer for theology, while keeping it firmly in its place. I show how it must always be wed to intimate, contemplative experience. Theology – the Logic of God – is a Person. After that I aim to actually unpack a bit of the stuff – firstly showing that God is a pretty decent guy, despite what His employees may have told you. And once you see that He’s a rather nice character in the story of the universe, I may just convince you that He strategically planned a party on behalf of the whole wide world – the kosmos that is – the entire created order.

By that point, you’ll want to talk about hell, divine wrath and a whole shipyard of rusty theological junk you left lying out in the rain for a few years because none of it ever seemed to work properly. All sorts of scary verses will start popping up in your head and you will begin taking inventory of all the doctrinal skeletons in your closet. Take your time with this. If you go slow and stay teachable, this book could flip your world upside down. We tackle some pretty deep topics (atonement theory, penal substitution, faith, incarnation, the Trinity). If any of those topics sound difficult or confusing to you, believe me when I say you already have a theological viewpoint on them all (whether you realize it or not). But if your current system of belief does not put a smile on your face, you may be in store for a much-needed dose of divine Prozac. And that’s exactly why this book is in your hand. By the end of it all, I hope to have you retired from your religious self-efforts … resting and relaxing in the reality of your divine, supernatural sonship – and all the while bearing more fruit. Kick back and enjoy the sweet, healing balm of the Gospel as we dismantle a few dry, depressed belief systems that may have unwittingly made you a boring person.

We will cover a lot of ground. But through it all, you will begin to see a theme emerging of God’s irresistible goodness and the radical inclusion of humanity in His divine plan.

FOREWORD

by FRANCOIS Du TOIT

Cosmos Reborn!

My first impression when I received the draft text of this exciting new book by John Crowder was the title, which in my imagination appeared to be luminous with large neon lit exclamation marks!!!

In a time where many so-called “prominent” leaders in the modern Christian context warn against “extreme grace,” here is a clear and happy voice echoing the context of a gospel that has always been more extravagant than what man’s theological perspectives have allowed the masses to see.

The mystery is revealed!

God’s love dream for the entire cosmos fulfilled in Christ beats humanity’s best guess and most eloquent aspirations to live life confined to their sincere efforts to overcome the “devil” and promote their chances to win the attention and possible approval of a moody deity, hiding out there in outer space somewhere!

The gospel celebrates the amazing and genius initiative of the triune God to rebirth the fallen mindset of mankind; we are given the grace to discover the mystery of the incarnation as we witness scripture fulfilled in Christ the image and likeness of the invisible God of Creation; both their image unveiled in human form as well as their likeness in the dance of their triune oneness, mirrored in us!

Tangible human life gives ultimate context to salvation! Just as the man Jesus Christ can never distract from God the Father and the Holy Spirit, the incarnation celebrates our eternal union, where the one reveals the other (John 14:20)!

The exact life on exhibit in Christ is now repeated in us. We are being co-revealed in the same bliss; we are joined in oneness with him, just as his life reveals you, your life reveals him! (Col 3:4, Mirror Bible)

The romance of the ages concludes in a consciousness of oneness.

This book is going to shock you and romance you. Its gonna make you laugh and cry! You will not be able to put it down or put out the fire that it lights within you!

TRANSLATION INDEX

The translations used in this book can be identified by the following codes:

AMP – The Amplified Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House and The Lockman Foundation, 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987). Translated mostly by Frances Siewert.

BAS – The New Testament in Basic English (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1941).

BCJ – The Heart of Paul: A Relational Paraphrase of the New Testament (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1976). Ben C. Johnson.

BER – Berkeley Version of the New Testament From the Original Greek With Brief Footnotes (Berkeley: James J. Gillick and Co., 1945). Verkuyl Gerrit.

CAS – God’s New Covenant: A New Testament Translation (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1989). Heinz Cassirer.

CON – The Life and Epistles of St. Paul (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1978). W.J. Conybeare, J.S. Howson.

DIS – The Distilled Bible: New Testament (Stone Mountain, GA: P. Benjamin Publishers, 1980). Roy Greenhill.

DRB – Douay-Rheims Bible 1582-1609 (Fitzwilliam, NH: Loreto Publications, 2007).

ESV – The English Standard Version Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

GBS – The Epistles of Paul in Modern English (Wheaton, IL: Verploegh Editions, 1980 ed.). George Barker Stevens.

GSPD – The New Testament, An American Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923). Edgar J. Goodspeed.

GWT – God’s Word Translation (Holiday, FL: Green Key Books, 1995, 2003).

INT – The Interlinear Bible (Visit www.interlinearbible.org).

KJV – The Holy Bible King James Version: 1611 Edition.

KNOX – The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (Springfield: Templegate, 1945). Ronald A. Knox.

MB – Mirror Bible (Visit www.mirrorword.net). Francois du Toit.

MSG – The Message (Colorado Springs: NavPress Publishing Group, 2005 ed.). Eugene Peterson.

NASB – New American Standard Bible (La Habra, Ca.: The Lockman Foundation, 1977, 1995).

NEB – The New English Bible: New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1961).

NIV – The Holy Bible, New International Version (Grand Rapids: The Zondervan Corporation, 1973, 1978, 1984). International Bible Society.

NLT – New Living Translation (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, 1996, 2004, 2007).

NOR – The Simplified New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1961). Olaf M. Norlie.

PHI – The New Testament in Modern English (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1962). J.B. Phillips.

RSV – The Holy Bible Revised Standard Version (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1952).

SEPT – A New English Translation of the Septuagint (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Albert Pietersma and Benjamin Wright.

TCNT – The Twentieth Century New Testament (New York/Chicago/Toronto: Fleming H. Revell Company).

WEY – The New Testament in Modern Speech (New York: Harper and Row, 1903). Richard Francis Weymouth.

Verses listed without translation references may be partially quoted, inferred or we just got lazy with citations.

INTRODUCTION

I am and I am not a universalist

Christ has cured the human condition in one righteous act. The good news is not that God needs our assistance at self-improvement or that His work in us was left incomplete, lacking or unfinished. We are light in the Lord. Grafted into divine bliss. Holy and without blemish before Him in love. Absolutely flawless and restored to His perfect image. The offering of His own body was enough to regenerate all of mankind. Our defeated foe no longer has any inherent substance. The existence of darkness rests only in the power of a lie. Men are in bondage only by living in the insecurity, fear and despondency of a false identity that never truly existed from God’s perspective. Alienated from God in their minds, because no one has told them they’ve already been reconciled to Him. But the lights have now been turned on. From the apostolic age until now, who has clearly articulated to them who they really are … that the old self – the fallen Adamic era – was completely crucified with Christ before the world began and they have been liberated from decay?

Across the globe, a blazing grassroots movement is spreading as people awaken to this ecstatic, happy message of grace. No longer struggling to please God, get closer to God or become Godlike. Lives are being transformed by the simple, clear revelation that Jesus did it all. The simple Gospel message of “it is finished” is disarming religion and strife. We are mystically united to God through Christ. No more patronizing attempts to re-accomplish what Jesus did … there is merely a faith realization of His victory that brings radical manifestation of this truth into everyday lives. Extravagant, supernatural joy is exploding as people drink the new wine of the New Covenant! Miracles, healings, prosperous lives and healthy relationships are seen as normative Christianity these days … effortless byproducts of our inheritance as sons of God. Stuff is happening. Testimonies are pouring in. The simple Gospel message is disarming religion and strife – and it is bringing supernatural change. This is really beyond a movement or revival – mankind is smelling the coffee and waking to Reality.

There is a growing interest in authentic, mystical Christianity: a mysticism rooted in Person (Him knowing us and us knowing Him), not in human attempt at spiritual disciplines or mental ascent. The Lord is opening our eyes to what various streams and tributaries have tasted in part throughout the Church age. Several important themes are converging at the moment: finished work theology; the miraculous; a revelation of the Trinity and happy, creative daily human existence in the incarnational life. All of these concepts are intrinsically woven together. A new, reformed Christ-centered mysticism is on the rise. Rather, a rediscovery of something ancient. It is bridging many streams. Relevant is its cultural approach. Radical is its charismatic fervor. Liberating is its theology of the Triune God of grace.

We have resolved to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified. All revelation and experience flow out of this fountain. O the depths and the riches! God has forever poured Himself out in a concrete act of assuming our human nature and redeeming mankind completely from depravity, decay and alienation. This was not a limited act for a select few. For God was in Christ reconciling the cosmos to Himself (2 Cor. 5:19). There is no limited atonement any more than there is a limited incarnation. Fully man for all of humanity. Christ plunged headlong into the human condition. Sinless though He was, He assumed fallen flesh like ours at its most corrupted level. He baptized that same humanity in His death and brought it back to life in the will of the Father and the power of Holy Spirit. Such a mystical connection we have! Christ wove mankind into the Trinitarian life – there is forever a resurrected human being sitting in the middle of the Godhead. And there we sit in Him, fully united to God in heavenly places. In assuming the human form, He assumed and included all of humanity into Himself. As early Church father Gregory Nazianzen says, “the unassumed is the unredeemed.” And we know from the apostle Paul that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22).

Is this merely a “positional” or theoretical place of divine union? Something we’ll never see or experience in our actual daily lives? Just theological mumbo jumbo or a philosophical ideology? Far from it! As we hear this good news, an ecstatic response of joy and faith leaps up within us, making manifest these realities. He swallowed up the cosmos on that cross, but He also swallowed up every last drop of individual me! His faith conclusion is my connector to this radical inclusion of my life into His. As I hear, I trust. As I trust, I begin to enjoy and experience this union, whereas before it was always hidden and unrecognized in the hellish blindness of my unbelief.

You have been vitally and concretely grafted into the tangible bliss of the Godhead. Miracles. Healing. A flourishing, prosperous life. The daily enjoyment of His intoxicating presence. This is ours. Absolute freedom from sin as you recognize your true God-given righteousness. Not holy in theory alone … your entire old corrupted self was co-crucified with Him, as you shared a death with Him.

I have been co-crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me (Gal. 2:20).

As a new creation, you have been liberated from the struggle of self-improvement. Absolutely flawless, our old fearful, sinful, blemished selves have been eradicated once and for all. Perfected once and for all by His sacrifice, we can drink daily from the fountain of our union with Him, no longer expecting defeat. As our mind changes regarding the truth of our identity, our outward lives bear corresponding fruit. No longer believing the false humility pop mantra of our times that we are “still sinners” bound to decay, poverty, disease or addiction. We are sons and daughters – our true identity shines from the inside out chock-full of inheritance. Right here. Right now.

The centrality of the new birth and new creation is found in the saving act of Christ - not in our feeble attempts at mustering faith. Our faith response to that saving act - however important - relies for its validity on the act itself. Our response is merely a recognition and experience of the facts. Francois du Toit has noted: Gold does not become gold when you discover it. We’re awakening to the truth of our value and redemptive origin in Him. Humanity is the lost coin that never lost its value in the eyes of God. He found us worthy of redemption – forever intending to place His own worth upon us. His work is the substance of a new birth for the entire created order, whether we have eyes to see it or not.

The scriptures paint a broad picture of something accomplished at the cross on a massive, universal scale. Something happened there to all of humanity – in fact, to the entire cosmos. Here in the world of Western evangelical Christianity, people have a strong penchant for tradition over Biblical accuracy. To suggest that the impact of the cross reaches out to the entire created order … well, that could get you burned at the stake. People struggling within their own existing theological framework often assume you’re talking about Universalism simply because you’re conveying the all-encompassing catholicity of the atonement.

This is not a book about Universalism. Rather this is a Trinitarian message – that a loving Father embraced humanity by fully assuming it in the Son, enabling us to participate in the divine life by the power of His Holy Spirit. I don’t particularly care for labels. As Søren Kierkegaard said, “Once you label me you negate me.” I align not with Universalism, yet there is a very real universal aspect to the atonement that Western evangelicals frightfully deny. The Trinitarian approach to scripture recognizes the all of the Gospel. Trinitarian thought bridges a broad spectrum of scholars and theologians in various denominations, though many outside the camp of academia are unfamiliar with it. As for any knee-jerk assumptions that I am a bald-faced Universalist, allow me to share a thought from one my favorite modern theologians, Robert Capon (whom I plan to quote incessantly throughout the course of this book):

I am and I am not a Universalist. I am one if you are talking about what God in Christ has done to save the world. The Lamb of God has not taken away the sins of some — of only the good, or the cooperative, or the select few who can manage to get their act together and die as perfect peaches. He has taken away the sins of the world — of every last being in it — and He has dropped them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. On the cross, He has shut up forever on the subject of guilt: “There is therefore now no condemnation. …” All human beings, at all times and places, are home free whether they know it or not, feel it or not, believe it or not. But I am not a Universalist if you are talking about what people may do about accepting that happy-go-lucky gift of God’s grace. I take with utter seriousness everything that Jesus had to say about hell, including the eternal torment that such a foolish non-acceptance of His already-given acceptance must entail. All theologians who hold Scripture to be the Word of God must inevitably include in their work a tractate on hell. But I will not — because Jesus did not — locate hell outside the realm of grace. Grace is forever sovereign, even in Jesus’ parables of judgment.[1]

CHAPTER 1

CONTEMPLATING THE MYSTERY

LOST IN THE THEOLOGICAL FUN FACTORY

HAPPY THEOLOGY & ITS MARRIAGE

TO CONTEMPLATIVE EXPERIENCE

False doctrine makes joy in the Lord impossible. …

- Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

This book is all about fun theology. Did you know those two words fit together?

Theology, for starters, is “God knowledge.” For some reason in our Charismatic circles, theology gets downplayed – or at least pitted against personal devotion as if it should be frowned upon. Everyone has a theology. Theology is not a problem … it’s bad theology that’s problematic. Good theology always enhances your joy, fuels the party and guards you against religion, legalism, condemnation and self-destruction! Ultimately, your theology consists of whatever you believe to be true about God. Since He is pure, incalculable Goodness – it benefits us to have our theology consistently cheered up. If there’s any area you consider yourself to be in a better mood than God, you may want to re-evaluate that part of your theology. Good theology is never boring … nor is it a waste of time. Karl Barth said, “Theology is a peculiarly beautiful discipline. Indeed, we can confidently say that it is the most beautiful of all disciplines. To find academic study distasteful is the mark of the Philistine. It is an extreme form of Philistinism to find, or to be able to find, theology distasteful. The theologian who labors without joy is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this field.”[2]

Theology should never be divorced from intimacy with the Person of Christ. True revelation always contemplates God in the place of Mystery. For me, theology is never separated from contemplation, silence, soaking or saturating in the practice of His presence. There is an inseparability between theology and devotion, just as there is an intrinsic connection between Spirit and Truth.

The aim of theological teaching should be to have our hearts engaged by the presence of God. Did you know theology is actually a form of repentance? Repentance, or metanoia, means to “change your mind.” As we change our mind about the things of God – renewing our thoughts about His goodness and character – His beauty continually manifests in our daily lives.

In the following chapters, there are deep concepts that threaten to change your entire perception of Who He is. How you see God affects your entire life, health, marriage, relationships – even how you raise your children. But we must be teachable and always growing in our limited understanding of God.

Let us disperse with the notion that theology has no place in the field of devotion. Many argue that theology benefits only the mind, rather than the heart. Of course there is always the peril of cold, nominal intellectualism. But most of the Church – either for laziness or disinterest in exploring her own treasures – draws a false dichotomy between so-called “head faith” and “heart faith.” In fact, the same Greek words for heart and mind are consistently interchangeable!

Theology and Devotion

In truth, I no longer see a real distinction between theological and inspirational material. Doctrine and devotionals. Either can be infected with grace, or on the contrary, legalism. As long as we remember that theology must always stay on a measured leash. It must always stop short at the door of Mystery. Good theology can drip with the substance of freedom, just as easily as bad devotionals can shackle on religion. C.S. Lewis writes, “I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.”[3]

I have always pulled from an eclectic spectrum of writers … contemplatives, theologians, early Church fathers, medieval mystics, modern grace teachers – Reformed, Catholic and Charismatic alike. I have always wanted to extract gems from their respective works in order to contribute to a full, robust experiential interaction with the Person of God. I could never stomach theology books merely to accumulate knowledge. I never went to seminary. Heck, I can’t even read fast! I have always soaked in the word slowly – in order to digest it as I take time to enjoy the radiant glory of His Presence.

A Contemplative Journey

Being “theological” in its own right doesn’t impress me. C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce says there are even theological societies in hell. But before I was an armchair theologian, I was a makeshift contemplative. I was first drawn to the contemplative, mystical stream many years ago as a result of frustration. The wooing of His presence pulled me away from the shallow waters of incomplete pat answers and into the depths of Mystery.

I had an insatiable hunger to simply be with Him.

… where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. … For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love (1 Cor. 13:8-13, NIV).

It is impossible to see Him as He is when our minds are muddled with our own distorted ideas about Him. But man’s thoughts are silenced in the awe of His tangible majesty and splendor. He’s bigger than our mental roadblocks, and opinions are irretrievably altered by His real presence. We learn to let go. We transcend the limitations of human understanding, which give way like a wet tissue under the enormous weight of Mr. Reality Himself. Robert Capon says this about theology:

Christian theology, however, never is and never can be anything more than the thoughts that Christians have (alone or with others) after they have said yes to Jesus. Sure, it can be a thrilling subject. Of course, it is something you can do well or badly – or even get right or wrong. And naturally, it is one of the great fun things to do on weekends when your kidney stones aren’t acting up. Actually, it is almost exactly like another important human subject that meets all the same criteria: wind-surfing. Everybody admires it, and plenty of people try it. But the number of people that can do it well is even smaller than the number who can do it without making fools of themselves.

Trust Jesus, then. After that, theologize all you want. Just don’t lose your sense of humor if your theological surfboard deposits you unceremoniously in the drink.[4]

The contemplative and the theologian must be one interchangeable man. For the contemplative – virtuous as he is for his refusal to settle for lifeless answers – need not stay in a perpetual state of hunger and unknowing. Nor should he foster a distaste for knowledge, simply because imperfect knowledge has run him up many a blind alley in days past. The fact is, we shall one day know fully. True Knowledge is more than data – He is a Person. And our life of discovery is a life of feasting as the scales of unknowing are stripped away in experiential, face-to-face communion by the end of Emmaus’ road.

The Mystic Secret

Paul never says we will fully, intellectually grasp the Mystery here on God’s green earth. He says we have fellowship with the Mystery (Eph. 3:9). It’s a relationship with the Mystic Secret Himself. You may not have all the answers, but the Answer has you. The Mystery is a Person with whom we forever interact. A Mystery whose very goal was to expose Himself – to be stripped bare and plainly published. In fact, the apostle Paul uses the word musterion more than any other New Testament writer, and almost exclusively in the sense that the Mystery has been revealed. Here in Ephesians 3:9, he wanted to “explain” or “make plain” and “bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.” Paul was entrusted with an “administration of this secret,” saying also “we are guides into God’s most sublime secrets, not security guards posted to protect them” (1 Cor. 4:1, MSG).

The Secret does not exclude. It is self-revealing. Even the pagan King Nebuchadnezzar was amazed, saying to Daniel, “Surely your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you were able to reveal this mystery” (Dan. 2:47).

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not complex, shrouded or veiled in any sense of the imagination. Children are quickest to recognize it. Yet its simplicity does not truncate its eternal depths. Easy enough for a child to understand is this Gospel, which is searched out as the glory of kings. We grow in depth as we grow in simplicity.

Deepening into Simplicity

The Church is obsessed with her own transformation, evidenced by a mountain of self-help books. The contemplative journey is not a path of becoming. It is a path of realizing what we’ve already become in Him. We are awaking to a transformation that has already taken place. Our journey is a discovery of the True Self. And this is but a byproduct of something much greater – the discovery of Christ in us – the only means by which we ever know ourselves anyway. Self-discovery in itself is vanity. A chasing after the wind. What self? He is your Life. “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me … ” (Gal. 2:20). Beyond simple – the Gospel is an absolutely effortless unveiling of the truth of the Godhead in you.

We are not arriving into Him, but realizing He arrived into us. This is the drastic difference between a process of frustration and a process of never-ending fun.

Frustration, as a helpmate, may be a catalyst to leave former, unfulfilling things behind, but our journey is not one of continual hunger and futility. No, that is the fruit of an unrevealed mystery. If frustration was a starting point, it is surely not the goal. On the contrary, our journey is a continual plunge from satisfaction to satisfaction for we realize that we fully possess the One our heart desires. Rooted in union, yet leaving open the door of intrigue. Two things brought about our former frustration: either never knowing this Gospel or being bored spitless in thinking we knew it all.

But frustration has given way to the fun of having it all now, yet forever discovering.

Paul desired that we “may become progressively more intimately acquainted with and may know more definitely and accurately and thoroughly that Mystic Secret of God, [which is] Christ (the Anointed One)” (Col. 2:2, AMP).

And so here, we find a journey into the knowledge of the Gospel. Not a never-ending chase for the elusive carrot. Our journey, instead, is the never-ending Disneyland of exploration. Theology becomes a friend of discovery – serving the Word – though she is easily hijacked by foreskin hunters. And contemplation finds her true calling as well – not as an endless, sweaty ladder of mental ascent – but as an enjoyment of the One who has forever been right here reclining within us with His feet kicked up on the couch.

Intimate Knowledge

Be clear that our growing in knowledge (gnosis) is never to be divorced from intimacy. That’s the primordial slime religion came from. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Knowledge does not save us; Jesus did. The Secret is not a mental accumulation of concepts. The Secret is a Person. The Secret doesn’t teach us to be saved, but saves us. He is our very Union with Himself. The One we’re attached to and the Attachment itself. No tactics for catching Him through study or prayer. He is the God-Man Bridge, who in His very being and substance is Connectivity. He is Relationship. Love that binds Lover and Beloved. This is why salvation is not simply something He did as an action … salvation is the very person of Christ Himself. The essence of His very being is incarnation – oneness between Heaven and earth. He mediates not as a mere action but simply by being God and humanity in the same package.

As Bill Johnson says, “Jesus Christ is perfect theology.”

Truth is a person. Truth is not changing. It is not relative, but it is alive. Our theological foundation must be solid – but it is not cold, stoic, lifeless dogma. We have a living Foundation. In the world of theological complexity, we can rest in two things for sure … that God is Love and that Jesus Christ is the Word of God. Rest solid in these two pillars, my friend, and you will never be swayed by confusion. In fact, herein lies the very unfolding of the scriptures.

Dividing the Word

The recognition that God is in a good mood thoroughly overhauls our theological approach. A taboo notion called joy begins to creep into our perception of God. Rather than the grueling study of a torture master, we begin to discover the colorful, radiant playfulness of the divine dance of scripture. “Theology, therefore, is fun. The inveterate temptation to make something earnest out of it must be steadfastly resisted,” writes Capon.[5] “You need to play with Scripture, or else you get it all wrong.”

Keep in mind that theology is a different discipline than Biblical studies. In Biblical studies, you are working through individual passages. Studying out Noah’s ark or whatever. Theology, on the other hand, steps back and looks at the whole counsel of scripture – it is concerned with how we approach the whole story, rightly dividing its entirety from beginning to end to delve comprehensively into the nature and person of God.

For instance, the man who never learned to rightly divide the word may pick up a Bible, flip open to Leviticus and automatically assume God wants him to chop the tip off his private bits with a flint knife. This man has no revelation of the New Covenant – or the good news that Christ already fulfilled the Levitical law. In fact, the average Sunday Bible Belt Christian flips open to the Sermon on the Mount and assumes he has to accomplish the whole thing to be saved! He doesn’t realize that Jesus was still preaching law, prior to the cross (preaching it hotter than Moses). They don’t know that Jesus even fulfilled the impossible legal demands laid out in His own sermons!

Instead of rightly dividing scripture, for centuries man has been divided over scripture. How often do you hear someone militantly say, “I don’t need theology. I only believe what’s in the Bible.” What they are really saying is that they only believe their interpretation of the Bible. Everyone has a theology – a perception of God. Again, let us not vilify theology – only let us see its valid role and its limitations. It can be a dark angel or a fun drinking partner. How we approach the whole story is hugely significant.

A Happy Theological Approach

I have greatly gleaned from Trinitarian theology over the years. This is not about simply believing in a doctrine of the Trinity. It is more of an entire way of seeing God and the scriptures through the lens of a loving Father manifest in the Son through the power of Holy Spirit. For the sake of simplicity, I will boil down this Trinitarian lens into four main points to serve as our guidelines – our approach toward a happy theology:

Jesus Christ is the Word of God.

God is Trinity.

God is Love.

We should embrace the tension of mystery.

Each of these is vitally important for a right perspective on God, and we will discuss them below.

Christ the Ultimate Text

Scandal number one: The Bible is not the Word of God. Yes, the Bible is fully inspired and it’s the means by which we see Jesus. But Jesus Christ – not the Bible itself – is the Word.

First and foremost, Trinitarian theology is Christ-centered. Every scripture must be read through the lens of the person of Jesus. He said, “You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about Me, yet you refuse to come to Me to have life” (John 5:39-40). Here is the deal: Christ is the ultimate text.

Jesus is the full and final revelation of who God is. Only by looking at Him can we see the true nature of the Godhead. The Father chose to make Himself known through the Son, and the Spirit constantly points us to Him. Scripture may very well be infallible, but your ears are extremely fallible. As a minister, I never fail to be amused at the stark contrast between what I say and what people actually hear. Similarly scripture can be twisted and perverted in any number of ways. But when I see the scriptures through the lens of Christ and His accomplishment, it all falls into place.

In other words, when I read Leviticus, I don’t see a big legalistic finger pointing at me, condemning me for my failure at upholding the law. Instead, I see every scripture pointing its finger at Jesus Christ and His finished work. He is the lens through which I read every other text. Now even Leviticus cheers me up.

Centering everything on Christ changes all our other doctrines. Consider the doctrine of predestination for instance. As soon as we take our eyes off Jesus, we start orchestrating a big theological lotto in the sky where God randomly chooses some people to torture, and others for Disneyland. But when we realize that Jesus is the ultimate text – that it was all pointing to Him – we see Jesus was always God’s predestined choice for all of humanity. Christ is both the Elector and the Elected. We will cover this topic in detail later.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. … The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:1-3,14, NIV).

We do not read that “in the beginning there was the Bible,” but “in the beginning was the Word … and the Word was God.” Christ is the Word of the Father. The Person of Christ is the Text by which we read everything else. I must see Him and His finished work in every passage. In the scriptures I can no longer see regulations and legalisms that seem to come “in addition” to Him. For even the regulations placed upon me were ultimately designed to be placed upon Him who took my place as my substitute. Grace must become the lens through which I see all else. I begin to see Him – the fulfillment of the law – jumping off every page of the most obscure passages. Every verse ultimately points to Him and His cross.

God is Love

The next lens, which should filter all our theology, is the rock solid truth that God is Love. When we read the scriptures through this lens, we can never go wrong because love never fails. In every instance I must see His love – even in the most difficult, traumatic, genocidal passages. It is there, even if only in a hidden way. I may only see a glimmer of grace in some Biblical passages – but it is enough to sanctify the whole. His love and wrath are not separate, diametrically opposed aspects of His nature. His wrath is but a hot extension of His love for me. A wrath that has always been positively for me, and always against the sinfulness that was destroying me. Love is bigger than Heaven and hell and everything in between. Love is the victor.

The Trinitarian approach does not see a moody Father who was personally offended by our sin, requiring the death of His Son to appease His own bloodlust. The cross did not “satisfy” His anger, but His love. Jesus entered into our own self-imposed “experience” of separation from God – our own psychological calamity we encountered as a consequence of sin. But He was not purchasing the Father’s love. The Father has positively always been for us – even when we were running from Him and setting ourselves up as His enemies.

Such a revelation dismisses the idea of a schizophrenic, narcissistic god – a god who only loves sometimes – as long as that love is conditioned by blood sacrifice. The blood was not to pay off an angry god. The blood was an ultimate manifestation of love to redeem us from the corruption of sin. Even God’s wrath is not a separate, dark side of His personality. His wrath is a hot extension of His love – a hatred of the sinfulness that destroys His children.

God is Trinity

The next lens that is most under-appreciated in theology is the special relationship between the Father, Son and Spirit. Most evangelicals think of this as a no-brainer, “Of course there is a Trinity.” But in all practicality, their doctrines are corrupted with religious self-effort because they don’t really grasp what this means. To other people, the idea of a Trinity seems so foreign. They don’t see the word “Trinity” explicitly in scripture, so they miss the fact that scripture is completely bound together in this special relationship between the Father and Son in the Spirit.

Unfortunately, most “Christians” are unitarian (God is solitary – not three-in-one). Of course they wouldn’t admit it. Sure, they give lip service to a Trinity in their doctrine, but in all practicality, they have unitarian tendencies. Maybe He is “three in one” in theory, but deep in their minds, He’s still a single, conglomerate “out there” entity in the sky.

Christians fail to be Trinitarian by thinking, “He is over there and I am over here. Worship, faith, obedience, etc. are all things that I must do in order to have a personal relationship with Him.” As theologians Thomas and James B. Torrance most clearly articulate, Christ’s vicarious humanity have woven us into the life of the Trinity.

The Gospel was never about your own direct personal relationship with the entity we call “God.” That would not be good news, because the relationship would ultimately be based on your flimsy performance. You don’t have a direct relationship that depends on your faith, prayers and worship. No, the good news is that you have been grafted into Jesus’ relationship with the Father! It’s all based on Christ and His performance!

Woven into the Trinity

He is not over there. Jesus vicariously stepped into your humanity, united you with His Father, and now enables you to participate in the Trinitarian life by the Spirit. You will either religiously attempt to please God, or recognize that all your acts of worship are a gift of grace as you are participating through the Spirit in the Son’s unbroken communion with the Father.

Although they would not verbally deny the Trinity, most folks see relationship with God as ultimately depending on their human effort (“their” decision, “their” faith, “their” repentance). However important these things are, they are not the substance of salvation. The substance of salvation rests solely in Jesus’ relationship with the Father. The truth is that we have been woven into the Trinitarian life through Jesus’ union with the Father by the Spirit. Salvation rests solely in His decision, His faithfulness and His vicarious repentance and baptism into our death. The Spirit now enables us to participate in His completed work, not re-accomplish it. The good news was never about your human response to God. It was always about Jesus responding to the Father on your behalf. Our response is merely a response to His response! It is our “amen” to a prior completed act.

The two-dimensional unitarian view throws us back upon ourselves to make the appropriate responses to God. Jesus is merely a “potential savior” if you make the right response. It denies the incarnation and work of Christ as being the very substance of our union with God. He is our true Mediator and High Priest continually offering intercession before God. Even our worship is merely a glorious echo of the perfect worship of our High Priest before the Father.

Sharing His Sonship

The non-Trinitarian view always puts the burden of relationship back into our lap: “Jesus did His part, but you’ve got to do your part!” The focus ultimately denies Christ’s substitutionary work on our behalf – and instead it becomes “what you do with Jesus” or “how you get to Jesus.” This approach ignores the entire purpose of the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ.

On the other hand, it can also reduce Jesus to becoming merely a man like us – denying His deity. Painting Him simply as one of many brothers showing us how to climb up to God. He becomes primarily an “example” of what we must do (in our acts of faith or repentance) to reconnect with God. So many see Jesus as the one we must “imitate” (What Would Jesus Do?), rather than our Substitute who accomplished all things pertaining to salvation on our behalf.

Jesus was not just modeling a pattern of sonship for us. It is His very own Sonship that we were grafted into! We must see that Jesus has a special relationship with the Father. The Only Begotten. We have been fully brought into this union. However, to deny the supremacy of that Father/Son relationship will throw the burden of pleasing God back upon us.

Jesus not only embodied the God-humanward action of God toward man. He also embodied the human-Godward action of us toward God. God never expected us to fulfill our side of the covenant relationship. He embodies our full human response to the Father.

Acceptance in the Trinity

The Reformers saw clearly the significance that God in Christ freely accepts us, not because of our “good works,” but by God’s grace. He vicariously took on our humanity and offered our human response back to the Father. So now, evangelicals rightly recognize that salvation is not about striving toward “good works.” However, there is still a focus among evangelicals on “how you must believe.” And faith has subtly become the “one good work” by which we gain acceptance with the over there god. This mindset denies the prior act of Christ accomplishing our union with God in His incarnation, death and resurrection. It still throws faith back upon us as something we must accomplish. But we are not saved by our own faith – we are saved by the faithfulness of the Son of God.

Reformers like John Calvin even seemed to anticipate this error.[6] He explained the difference between what he called “legal repentance” and true “evangelical repentance.” The first is based on repentant efforts we make to legally procure forgiveness from God. The second, however, is a spontaneous response of love flowing out of the revelation that we have already been forgiven in the atoning work of Christ. In Calvin’s model, forgiveness precedes faith and repentance!

At the core of all doctrine must be the revelation of a loving Father who freely gave His Son to reconcile us back to Him and engage us in the life of the Spirit. All doctrine built on legal efforts or human belief systems to ascend the mountain will ultimately deny this Father-Son relationship which rests at the heart of the Gospel.

Is your faith response important? Of course. But it is not your faith that cleanses you – rather it is the Christ in whom you believe. You’ve been woven into the life of the Trinity totally apart from your decision. “God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba! Father!’“ (Gal. 4:6) Taking our eyes off of Christ’s relationship with the Father degenerates our worship into meaningless, idolatrous rituals. Consider the following by Thomas F. Torrance:

(The Trinity) means that God is not some remote, unknowable Deity, a prisoner in His aloofness or shut up in His solitariness, but on the contrary, the God who will not be without us whom He has created for fellowship with Himself, the God who is free to go outside of Himself, to share in the life of His creatures and enable them to share in His own eternal Life and Love. It means that God is not limited by our feeble capacities or incapacities, but that in His grace and outgoing love He freely and joyously condescends to enter into fellowship with us, to communicate Himself to us, and to be received and be known by us. Moreover, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity means that God does not surrender His transcendence in condescending to be one with us in Jesus Christ, but it does mean that the more we are allowed to know God in Himself in this way the more wonderful we know Him to be, a God who infinitely exceeds all our thoughts and words about Him, but who in spite of that reveals Himself tenderly and intimately to us through His Son and His Spirit.[7]

The Tension of Mystery

So far, we have covered three of our original points toward happy theology: Jesus is the Word; God is Love; and God is Trinity. There is a fourth point I mentioned to cultivate a healthy theological perspective – embracing the tension of mystery. Many theologies engage in analytical debate against one another with the aim of “winning” when scriptures seem to present contradictions. Look at Calvinism versus Arminianism for instance. That has been a dog chasing its own tail for centuries: Do we choose God, or does God choose us?

The Trinitarian approach is more mystical – perhaps postmodern in that sense. Rather than debate, it lives in the dialectical tension of mystery. It is okay with embracing paradox.

For instance, there are a plethora of verses on hell and eternal torment. But there are also a plethora of verses on universal salvation for all mankind. Which of these verses do you throw away? Be careful taking scissors to your Bible in any direction! Rather than drawing hard lines of debate, Trinitarian theology holds these things in the tension of mystery, keeping hope for mankind without jumping into dogmatic assumptions about the afterlife. We must look at all sides of scripture to arrive at honest answers. But there are places where your logic (even your best “theo-logic”) will not provide answers.

Problem or Answer Oriented?

In addition, the Trinitarian approach is not “causal” or problem oriented. It does not start with problems like “Why do some not believe?” Instead, it begins with the identity of Jesus Christ and His work which was sufficient for all men. It is answer oriented.

Our rationalistic Greek culture is obsessed with figuring out everything logically. “Why do some not believe?” How am I going to explain logically something as illogical as the sin of unbelief? You cannot explain evil. It is not logical. God never gives us an explanation of evil – he only gives us the answer to it. All we have before us is the mystery. If there were no bottomless pit of evil, then Christ’s cross was pointless. He would not have come to be the atoning sacrifice for sins. No He doesn’t explain evil; He just deals with it. He deals decisively and completely with darkness by entering that dark, hopeless void that separated us from Him and bridged the gap in His own life, death and resurrection.

He doesn’t say: Why no faith? He says: Here’s the Answer.

He doesn’t say: Why are you sick? He says: Here’s the Answer.

He doesn’t say: Why are you poor? He says: Here’s the Answer.

He doesn’t say: Why is your marriage broken? He says: Here’s the Answer.

Having spent years in healing ministry, I’ve seen the whole machine become obsessed with looking for roots and causes to the problems of sickness, rather than resting in the simple reality that by His stripes we are already healed. The Gospel is always the antidote. Let’s start with the answer, not the problem. It is the higher reality to which we continually appeal, even when circumstances fly seemingly opposite.

The Who

Far more important than the logical “how” is the relational “Who.” The Who must always be given priority in our system of belief.[8] In every unanswered question, “Why does my child have cancer? Why do natural disasters happen?” ultimate solace is only found in the person of Jesus Christ. The Who. Just as the people of Jesus’ day wanted to know the problematic cause for the man’s blindness, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus refused to succumb to their demand for a root cause. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:2-3).

“In our pragmatic Western society in this technological age, our starting point so often is the problems of this world,” writes Scottish theologian James Torrance. “We can too readily assume that Christianity is meaningful, useful, relevant, even true, only if it is seen to offer solutions to those practical problems.”[9]

Spirit and Truth

We are ultimately called to trust Jesus, not figure Him out. Scripture is a springboard for experience. There is interdependency. For how would we know the Christ of the scriptures except by the scriptures? And how would we understand the scriptures apart from knowing Him? The Spirit and Word – Grace and Truth – are inseparable. The letter left alone can kill, but the letter finds its true consummation in the one who fulfilled all things – among them the law. No theologian is worth his weight in paperclips as a theologian unless he is also a contemplative. And no contemplative is really a lover without a ravenous appetite for the Word.

Revelation comes as the word is breathed upon. Not merely memorized – a parrot can do that. Paul depended for the validity of His divine knowledge on a vital mystical union with the living Christ. He did not spout Torah. Christ embodied True Torah and spoke through and beyond Paul’s own comprehension. The theological mind must live beyond itself. Paul tells us of an ecstatic encounter in Paradise, which he records as an “incomprehensible” experience. Some wrongly translate the passage to indicate it was “illegal” for Paul to discuss his third Heaven encounter. But it is never illegal to reveal God’s heart … it was just impossible for Paul to describe it. He saw things too great for human language to convey. Beyond mental comprehension.

Fourteen years ago I was the subject of an incomprehensible ecstasy, in which truths too great for human language were imparted to me. I will base my boast on such experiences, in which I was but the dependent, passive instrument of the Lord (2 Cor. 12:2-5, GBS).

Paul was undoubtedly well studied. But He encountered the reality of the Good News in such an experiential way. He was radically overmastered by love. This transcended his mind, yet quickened the mind. What he saw in this place of ecstatic union was more than he could describe. But in a simple word, I can tell you what he saw … he saw the Gospel. Gripped to the core of his heart, it took all his earthly language, all his life of teaching and proclamation, every letter he wrote in attempt to somehow articulate that simple message.

God on Human Lips

Human language is insufficient. Yet humanity is His chosen vessel. Scriptures, divorced from the God of those scriptures is impotent. No … they are deadly. We do not question the infallibility of the text, but we must realize it is a “dependent” infallibility. When Christ is given His place, then the scriptures fall into place. Otherwise, you’re looking at an impossible, conflicted and illogical rulebook of haircut patterns and genital mutilations.

Human language, no matter how inspired, can help you apprehend God … but not fully comprehend Him. You may catch the football, but you’re not going to fully wrap your hands around it. We know the unknowable. Search the unsearchable. The Spirit guides us into all Truth. The words themselves are not the ultimate revelation of God. Christ Himself is the revelation of God. His life, work and existence are the clearest portrayal of the heart of the Father we will ever know. Moses wrote five books of scripture - the Torah - but Paul says to this day when that law is read, a veil covers men’s eyes. The scriptures beyond majestic in their inspiration. Scripture is the means of grace by which we see Him. And yet, when improperly handled, it becomes an object of “biblio-idolatry” that blinds us to its very Author.

Augustine said, “The supreme excellence of the divinity exceeds the capacity of our customary speech. For God is more truly contemplated than spoken of, and exists more truly than He is contemplated.”[10]

James Torrance puts it this way, “More important than our experience of Christ is the Christ of our experience.”[11]

In your highest experience of enjoying Him, He is still more real than the experience itself. Language is insufficient to communicate His incommunicable nature. Yet God is breathed through human lips. Oh the joys of articulating the Mystery!

So our contemplative journey is not the impossible task of pulling Him down, but unraveling the glorious word of faith that is already on our lips – forever inexhaustible, incalculable Mystery!

Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade, to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry. Nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.[12]

Christ is the object of our contemplation. Our intersection between the seen and the unseen, the finite and the infinite. Our contemplation does not consist of navel-gazing our way to salvation. Drinking, soaking, meditating, contemplating, being “Spirit filled” – whatever you want to call it – is not a price tag for divinity. It is an addiction more than an obligation. It is a mistake to think, “I need to be more like Mary.” The whole deal with Mary was that she let go of statements like “I need to” … she was lost on the object of her affection.

One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek Him in His temple (Psalm 27:4, NIV).

Your eyes will see the king in His beauty and view a land that stretches afar (Isa. 33:17, NIV).

Creed and Contemplation

The rich history of contemplative Christianity has rightly sought to bridge us outside the limitations of dry, formal creed. And the creedal, confessional Church has always reminded us there is only one Truth by which He is truly seen – the Christ of the scriptures. Without creed, we are lost in an elusive, fleeting cloud of unknowing. Creed – detached from Presence – quickly becomes the dusty breeding ground of lifeless hypocritical recitations. Contemplation - detached from creed - becomes lost in itself, forgetting the True Object of its delight. Spirit and Word are inseparable – this is the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.

Contemplation – as a mode of enjoyment – is never an end in itself. It does not exist if it is detached from the Person who is contemplated or enjoyed. This is where theology – creed – holds our joy secure. C.S. Lewis put it this way. To enjoy something or someone as an “object,” we focus solely on the object. We become lost in the object itself. But if we begin contemplating the enjoyment itself that we derive from the object (i.e. focusing on joy, rather than the object of our joy) then we lose both the object and the joy. And so if we are to enjoy an object – a friend, a song, a party – we must focus on the actual object itself. Lewis writes, “… one essential property of love, hate, fear, hope, or desire was attention to their object. To cease thinking about or attending to the woman is, so far, to cease loving; to cease thinking about or attending to the dreaded thing is, so far, to cease being afraid.” And again, he writes, “In other words the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning around to look at the hope itself.”[13]

Christ is our Joy. Christ is our Life. The fountainhead and incarnation of all that is truly lovely and all that we truly long for. Forever without end. Amen.

CHAPTER 2

THE CASE FOR A LOVING GOD

THE LIE OF PENAL SUBSTITUTION

DID JESUS REALLY SAVE YOU

FROM AN ANGRY FATHER?

For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship.

And by Him we cry, “Abba, Father.”

- Romans 8:15

The fundamental flaw in all our distorted thinking is the haunting idea that deep behind the curtain, God is not really good.

The greatest scandal the Gospel preacher faces has nothing to do with convincing the masses of their wickedness, motivating them to fear or guilt or cajoling them toward some insurmountable pile of charitable works. Society itself is perfectly capable in those departments. The true scandal is that the good news sounds too good to be true.

As the angel of the Lord said in Luke 2:10, “Don’t be afraid! … I bring you the most joyful news ever announced, and it is for everyone!” When the true Gospel is articulated, it is the most resoundingly happy news to hit the planet – better than hitting the Powerball Jackpot. How could it bore us? If we are bored with the Gospel, we have either never really heard the Gospel, or we’ve surely forgotten it.

In this chapter, I will deal with one of the most demonic TV dinner doctrines microwaved up every Sunday – the idea of penal substitution. This cheap substitute for good news is accepted as fundamental truth in the Church today. But it has caused us to perceive the Father in a twisted, perverted way – more akin to Vlad the Impaler than a loving Creator. And your concept of who God is will ultimately affect your entire life and your ability to “play well” with others.

Despite the droning mantra that “God is good” and that “God loves you,” there is lurking in the back of our minds some other god of our own making … that twisted, false perception of a distant, aloof and inflexible god. The dread god of man’s own invention who sits alone in some intangible cloud of unknowing light years away. Sure we say He is good and loving, but we think it is an other kind of love. Unfamiliar and inaccessible. Perhaps good for you, like cough medicine, but not the warm, generous, benevolent kind of goodness that even earthly fathers can demonstrate.

God’s glory, His tangible, manifest presence, will only be experienced to the degree we can recognize His sheer, fifteen-billion-volt goodness. Any area in which we have not seen that God is truly good – in the deepest, fullest, richest, realistic sense of the word – we will miss His glory. Moses prayed, “Now show me Your glory.” And the scriptures tell us that it was the “goodness” of God that passed in front of Him (Exod. 33:18-19). God’s glory is His goodness. His presence is goodness itself. Jesus Christ is pure pleasure incarnate. To miss His goodness is to experience a glory deficit.

Allow me to correct one of the most fundamental inaccuracies taught in the Church – one of our most perverted yet unquestioned doctrines that attempts to tarnish God’s goodness at a foundational level in our minds. In order to do this, I must return to the beginning – back to the Garden of Eden to revisit the human narrative from its conception.

A Different Version of God

We were taught in Sunday school that God created mankind, Adam and Eve, placing them in the Garden of pleasure. This, we were told, was Plan A … that God always intended to hang out in a garden with a couple of naked vegetarians.

Everything was going fine. All was perfection until one day – lo and behold – mankind did the unthinkable. He ate God’s apple!

Now nobody does that! You can’t just disobey God and get away with it. Somebody has to pay the price. God became fuming angry. God, in His holy narcissism, suddenly became enraged. Spitting mad, God’s holiness had somehow been offended. He was personally peeved. The scales of balance had to be set aright. “God is love,” we are told, “but forget not His wrath!” Justice had to be paid. That apple had to be accounted for. Somebody would burn over this. Someone was going to feel the full force of His raging, maniacal fury!

Bloodthirsty, God’s anger had to be appeased. He had to wreak vengeance and destroy. “I’ll teach you to eat another apple!” And so, with purple veins bulging from His temples, His wild eyes red hot with destruction like Thor swinging His lightning hammer from the sky God was about to open a can of destruction … give you what you deserve! Filled with bloodlust, He reared back His arm … about to unleash the hot kraken of hell on mankind. …

But wait! Suddenly Jesus steps in (good cop, bad cop), jumps in front of you … And instead of God hurling His bloodlust upon you, He unleashes it upon His own Son … satisfying His rage by brutally murdering His own Child.

This is the part where we are supposed to stand up and cheer.

Here is the good news, “God really hated you, but since He savagely massacred His own Child, He’s decided to love you as long as you pray this prayer. …”

How convenient, to make a god in our own image. A god of our own making who is conveniently less moral than we are.

Obviously, in order to forgive someone, God needed to kill someone first, right? Isn’t that what forgiveness is all about? Killing somebody? In order to forgive someone, you have to first make them pay! That’s not mercy, that’s law. Even our own twisted legal systems on planet Earth would not allow you to murder an innocent bystander in place of the one who actually committed the crime. Yet this is how we’ve been taught the justice of God works. “God is merciful,” they say, “But you better believe He is just!”

The Lie of Penal Substitution

I hope you’ve noted the sarcasm in my remarks. I now want to defuse this entire scenario of theological garbage that is commonly known as penal substitution. It is the idea that Jesus came to “pay off” an angry Father.

Theologian James B. Torrance makes it clear: Jesus did not die in order to condition God to love you. His love is unconditional. Jesus did not die to condition God to be gracious toward you. His grace is unconditional.

Although this is taught as rock-solid, fundamental truth in the evangelical world today keep in mind that hardly anybody believed this stuff prior to the Middle Ages. The early Church did not teach that Jesus came to save you from God. This line of thinking virtually didn’t exist prior to the writings of a man named Anselm in the 1100s (even Anselm did not believe Jesus was punished on our behalf – but merely that he balanced the scales of justice for God’s honor). The Church historically thought of the Gospel as God saving us from the effects of sin … not God saving us from God.

Liberation from this angry, Thor-god-in-the-sky mentality has taken me years; and I am still growing in this area. Why? Because this completely backward way of thinking has been indoctrinated within us from the very beginning of our lives. It is not a Biblical doctrine of God but the core fabrication of the fall. It is a doctrine engineered to confirm our fearful suspicions that God is naturally prone to be against us.

Did the Father Forsake the Son?

Here’s the deal. Look at the life of Jesus, and we see that the poor guy was working Himself to the bone. Preaching, preaching, preaching. Avoiding angry mobs. Fasting. Fending off the devil, getting betrayed, angering the religious elite and generally facing difficulties every which way He turned. But we were taught that the one thing He really dreaded – the thing that caused Him the most sorrow and had Him sweating drops of blood – was this: the moment He would eventually take upon Himself the sins of the world and the Father would turn His back on the Son.

For that, we learned, would be the greatest horror of all … to be utterly forsaken by His own Father.

We are told that this event culminated in Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46: “About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’” My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?

Let me make this point absolutely crystal clear. The Father never, ever – under any circumstance – even came close to abandoning His Son.

The Father doesn’t abandon anybody.

Jesus never once said the Father had abandoned Him. Instead, He asked a question. He asked your question: Why?

Stepping into Your Blindness

Jesus did not step into the incarnation simply as some kind of superman. He wasn’t clicking His fingers and turning the oceans of the world into Kool-Aid. Although He is fully God, He also became fully man. And not some other kind of man – He came “in the guise of sinful humanity” (Rom. 8:3). Jesus was a man just like you and me. He never sinned once in His life. Yet He did live within the same limitations as a fallen man would live. He didn’t know calculus at age two. He chose to grow in wisdom and stature. He set aside the fullness of His celestial glory and stepped willingly into our limitations. He experienced the depths of everything you feel as a fallen human being.

Jesus on the cross was not declaring that God had abandoned Him. He was stepping into the full psychological calamity of our fallenness … He was asking your question. Feeling exactly what you feel when you believe you’ve been abandoned by a Father who never abandons anybody.

Jesus stepped fully into the horrid depths of our twisted human existence, experiencing our feelings of separation, alienation and abandonment, violently beating back those strong dreaded emotions and inner scars that overwhelm us with the lie that God has forsaken us. That God is against us. That God is our enemy.

The Father never abandoned the Son. Jesus simply stepped into your blindness to the Father’s love.

Empathizing with Your Condition

One of the Church’s favorite lies is that God is the enemy of sinners. He didn’t need coaxing into loving you. God was never your enemy.

Jesus fully empathized with our crippling sense of separation – feeling the consequences of the lie, fully tasting the trauma of sin – in order to be a fully sympathetic High Priest. But He never committed the sin of doubt. He asked a question. Why? Just like we ask the question. After someone has been brutally raped. When we see children starving to death in the gutters of an impoverished landscape, molested and abandoned by the natural fathers they never even met. He asked the question we ask, when we struggle with the problem of evil, or wonder why bad things happen to good people. Why?

It is conveniently self-justifying to have a child-abusive God who is less moral than us: “Johnny I don’t want you to go to hell, but God does, so better say your prayers!” We were told something that only bolsters this existing fear of a child-abusing, indifferent God. We were told that in His bloodlust, He really did turn against His Son (obviously we wouldn’t do that – so it feels good to know we are a bit nicer than God).

We’re rightly taught that Jesus became sin for us. He absorbed our curse. But then we’re told that since the Father’s eyes are too pure to look upon evil, at that moment He turned His back on the Son. We are told that the Father is too holy to look upon evil … that He couldn’t even bear to look at us in our sinfulness.

The Father is too holy to look on sin … but Jesus was not? Jesus who not only cavorted with hookers and drunks and Mafioso tax collectors but became sin on our behalf … He was somehow able to handle our sins, but the Father was too pure to even glance at us? So what you’re saying is that the Father was a little bit “more holy” than Jesus? A little bit “more God” than Jesus? So you are saying Jesus is not really God. Which is to say you’re not a Christian.

The Trinity is Inseparable

The problem we have with this line of thought is that it is absolute heresy. Jesus said in John 10:30, “I and My Father are one.” This was never temporarily suspended on the cross. He said in John 6:46, “No one has seen the Father except the one who is (from/with) God; only He has seen the Father.” The word in this verse implies that Jesus was both from the Father and currently with the Father at all times. Just like you, He was simultaneously in Heaven and on earth (Eph. 2:6).

In John 16:32 He says, “You [disciples] will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for My Father is with me.” In this He was speaking of when the disciples would abandon Him as He went to the cross … yet He was not alone, for the Father was with Him.

The Father did not turn His back on the cross, missing the culmination of human history – the greatest light show in the universe, the central apex of all time and space. No, He was remarkably close. Better than front row seats. “To wit, that God was in Christ reconciling the cosmos to Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).

Finally, when Jesus spoke of going to the cross, He often spoke of being lifted up. “When I am lifted up, I will draw all to Myself” (John 12:32). “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14). So keeping this in mind, consider the following verse:

When you have lifted up the Son of Man (up on the cross), then you will know that I am He and that I do nothing on My own but speak just what the Father has taught Me. The one who sent Me is with me; He has not left Me alone … (John 8:28-29, NIV note added).

The cross was not an example of the Trinity imploding upon itself. No, the cross is the full demonstration of the love of the entire Trinity. Unfortunately, most of the Church does not believe in the Trinity. Again they give lip service to a Trinity. But really they believe in Demon, Son and Holy Bible. The true Trinity is a loving Father, manifest through the Son in the power of a very real, tangible Holy Spirit.

God Was Not Your Enemy

God never abandoned His Son, just as He never abandoned you. Not once. God from the start was never your enemy. The truth is found in this, that “once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation” (Col. 1:21-22, NIV).

The only enmity between you and God was in your fallen mind. We set ourselves up as His enemy, but He never made Himself to be our enemy.

The fact is that “God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). God has always been on your side. He’s always been positively for you.

We read that, “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). But surely if Jesus became sin, the Father had to reject the Son in this legal exchange? Doesn’t the Bible tell us that the Father is too holy to look upon sin? Sure it does. Why don’t we look at that verse for a moment? It’s found in the book of Habakkuk:

Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; You cannot tolerate wrong. Why then do You tolerate the treacherous? Why are You silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves? (Hab. 1:13, NIV)

Did you catch that? Habakkuk is essentially saying, “God, You’re too pure to look on evil … So why are You doing it?” What we are dealing with here is Habakkuk’s own fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of God. The god of his own making. Habakkuk expected a destroyer, a legalistic god to come wipe everyone out – just as Jonah did. Just as Adam fundamentally misunderstood the nature of God, so did Habakkuk. Adam ran straight for the bushes, hiding away in guilt, shame and a sense of alienation. Nothing stopped him from running right into His Father’s lap. Sin caused mankind to pull back. To withdraw. To become warped and hard headed, missing the very graciousness and goodness of Mr. Love Himself. It was actually the grace of God that He sent Adam away from the Garden in that condition. Because God loved Adam and was for him, He could not bear to see Adam living forever in that decayed state of inward isolation and corruption. Not eating forever of the Tree of Life while still containing the fruit of the Tree of Law inside him. God never planned to renovate the old Adam. He chose to annihilate and rebirth him in Christ.

We think the Father’s eyes were too holy to look upon the Son on the cross. Like He couldn’t handle it. God was not a sissy, running from your sin. Your sin was causing you to run from Him. God hates sin not because His own personal holiness was impugned. He hates it because of the way it hurts us. Spiraling us into shame, insecurity and rejection – pulling away from relationship in fear.

It has been laid out in our minds like bedrock that God required the death of His Son in order for Him to get over His own personal grudge and be reconciled to us – to bridge the separation so that we could be in relationship. These kinds of ideas fuel the false, legal relationship of religion. This philosophy is alien to the Gospel.

Bridging the Gap

It is quite true that a separation was bridged between God and man … but separation had nothing to do with God’s grudge toward mankind. The only separation was between our ears and in our own withdrawing hearts.

But doesn’t sin separate us from God? Indeed! Sin separated you from Him. But sin never separated Him from you. This is not just word play. More than mere semantics, this is vital to understanding the heart and nature of the Father. What you believe about the Father will positively or negatively affect every area of your life. We get our grid for this in the book of Isaiah, where the prophet writes:

Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor His ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear (Isa. 59:1-2, NIV).

Do you see? Sin has caused separation only in that it has blinded us and deafened us to the sweet truth of who God really is. God is not the deaf one. God is not the blind one. It is sin that blinded us. Separation was an illusion – a figment of our fallen imagination – that we could run and hide from a God who is everywhere. A God who takes up all the space! Who is all in all. David said, “Even if I run to the depths of hell, there You are!” (Psalm 139:8) He’s everywhere. The Bible never says that the death of Christ was to reconcile God to us. The death of Christ was to turn us back to God.

Someone taught you that at the height of the Father’s revulsion at Jesus on the cross, He turned His back on the Son, and that the sun went dark in the sky in the middle of the day. We were told God couldn’t look at it. That He was blind. But if we continue to read in this exact same passage in Isaiah 59, we begin to see who the blind ones really are:

Like the blind we grope along the wall, feeling our way like men without eyes. At midday we stumble as if it were twilight; among the strong, we are like the dead (Isa. 59:10, NIV).

Yes, the sun went dark at the height of our blindness. It had nothing to do with God turning away from anyone. If God turned away from us or from Jesus, the world would vaporize in less than a second! No, God wasn’t blind to us. Jesus stepped into our blindness. He moved fully into our darkened state of mind and turned the lights back on. Not turning His Father toward us, but turning us back to His eager loving face that had always been set like flint to redeem us. “All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ …” (2 Cor. 5:18).

God didn’t need reconciling. We did. Our perspective was tweaked. We were hiding in the bushes. The cross didn’t coax God into being inclined toward sinners. God “condemned sin in the flesh” so we could be released from condemnation of the law (Rom. 8:3). “He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all – how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32)

Does God Hide His face?

All this is not to say that God does not occasionally hide His face. But even then, the end goal is for mercy. In fact, He handed us all over to our blindness and disobedience only that He might ultimately have mercy on us all (Rom. 11:32). Usually the passages that speak of Him hiding His face are geared toward the religious crowd who thought they could climb up into His countenance through their own dead works and performance orientation. He cannot bless such a false, do-it-yourself relationship based on law and regulation. If they approached Him by law, He had to deal with them accordingly by law, only that they might see the futility of that law. Catch that principle and you’ll understand the whole of the Old Testament. Every religious tower of Babel crumbles under a gracious, God-given spirit of stupor.

God is too good to let us succeed in pleasing Him in our self-willed independence. But He graciously blinded our religious minds and hardened our religious hearts that He might become our very eyes for us. So that like Saul we would be led by the hand until our eyes were truly opened. For in Christ, we now behold Him with unveiled faces. “I will no longer hide My face from them, for I will pour out My Spirit on the house of Israel, declares the Sovereign Lord” (Ezek. 39:29).

God is not blind to sinners. They are the blind ones. God even accelerates their blindness, for the purpose of having mercy.

Why the Blood?

So what is the point of all this? We must know the heart of God. The point of the cross was not about a legalistic exchange – but about love. The cross was not about some mythical pagan deity demanding a blood sacrifice – destroying his own son like Molech. Someone may ask … but wasn’t blood required for the forgiveness of sins? Yes, but not in a paganistic Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom sort of way.

Yes, blood was needed for the forgiveness of sins. Not because the Father needed it, but because we did. We were running from God; He was never running from us. In Hebrews 10:22, Paul writes, “let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience. …” The blood was for us. The sure solid proof and substance of God’s love. God did not need the blood for Himself. It was His blood. He poured it out for us.

We have this idea that lurking behind Jesus’ back somewhere is a dark side of God that Christ is holding back from us like a pent up storm. Some other God. The schizophrenic, mean side of God.

Jesus was not crucified in order to purchase the Father’s love for us, or to change God. God does not need changing. On the cross, Jesus was not changing God; He was changing you.

“The Gospel is not the news that in dying Jesus dealt with the dark side of God for us. … It was our disease, not the Father’s; it was our dark side, not the Father’s; it was our alienation, brokenness, corruption, and the whole web of our guilt and wrongness that necessitated the cross,” writes Dr. C. Baxter Kruger who has championed this revelation for years, in the tradition of Trinitarian theologians such as Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth and others.[14]

We have clinically reduced the Gospel to a mere legal exchange. The cross was not about law; it was about love. Yes, the demand of the law of our own self-destruction was satisfied, but we have improperly labeled our loving Father as the chief prosecutor.

Ultimately, what is at stake here is the entire doctrine of the Trinity. Get the person and nature of God right, and everything else falls into place. To see Jesus on the cross is to see the love of the entire Godhead. To be faithful to the Trinity, we must be Christocentric. We need look no further outside the person of Jesus Christ in order to see the love of the Father and Spirit. The entire Godhead chose to represent Itself through Jesus – to show how passionately God is for us! Consider this simple but profound explanation from Kruger:

The doctrine of the Trinity means that, strictly speaking, God is not alone. Within the being of God there is a relationship -- three persons united in mutual love and communion without any loss of personal distinction. Anything less than “one” betrays the very depth and closeness of their relationship. Yet the Father does not become the Son or Spirit and the Son and Spirit do not become one another or the Father. This is a relationship of oneness, yet not of absorption.[15]

The cross was not the Trinity turning upon itself. Rather, the cross was the full expression of the other-giving love of the Father, Son and Spirit restoring us to the divine family relationship.

Jesus introduces us to the Father. We hear in His words and actions that our Father loves us unconditionally. He did not send Jesus out of anger to be His whipping boy, but rather out of His infinite love and rock-solid commitment to redeem mankind. God does not love on some days and hate on other days. God does not love. God is Love. He is capable only of love.

What About God’s Wrath?

To depart from this commonly held idea of penal substitution – that Jesus saved us from an angry, legalistic Father – is often met by the accusation, “You are watering down the wrath of God!”

I would retort to such a person that, “You are watering down the love of God!”

For starters, only modern evangelicals believe this idea of penal substitution – Jesus being punished for us by a Father who had to get the venomous bile out of His system. The early Church would overwhelmingly disagree that Jesus was “saving us from God.” Nor has the Orthodox Church ever believed it – there are millions and millions of believers to this day who never took this idea onboard.

The wrath of God is merely an extension of His love. It is a big, fat “No!” to sinfulness, because of how it destroys and molests His children. God’s wrath has nothing to do with hating us or being ill tempered. It has to do with hating the sinfulness that was eating us like a disease.

Religion builds a false dichotomy between love and wrath. Between justice and grace. But there is no separation. I am not making light of what Jesus suffered on the cross simply because I do not blame the Father for being a child abuser. You will ultimately have to decide which version of God you wish to serve. I’m done with the mythical, pagan version that slaps a fish on its bumper.

Another View of Wrath

Am I watering down God’s wrath? By no means! God’s wrath is fiery and hot beyond human comprehension. But know it is not some separate schizophrenic side of God that must be balanced in opposition to His love. His wrath violently destroyed sinfulness as He consumed it into His own servant body. Sin, hamartia, is a noun – it was the governing entity that owned and diseased us. Jesus attacked sin in His own servant body – absorbing it, violently cleansing the temple of it in His own flesh.

“The biblical doctrine of God’s wrath is rooted in the doctrine of God as the good, wise and loving creator, who hates — yes, hates, and hates implacably — anything that spoils, defaces, distorts or damages His beautiful creation, and in particular anything that does that to His image-bearing creatures,” writes Anglican Bishop of Durham Dr. N.T. Wright. “If God does not hate racial prejudice, He is neither good nor loving. If God is not wrathful at child abuse, He is neither good nor loving. If God is not utterly determined to root out from His creation, in an act of proper wrath and judgment, the arrogance that allows people to exploit, bomb, bully, and enslave one another, He is neither loving, nor good, nor wise.”[16]

Wright points out that there is lots of room for various theories of atonement, because the atonement is much larger than we can comprehend. I do not deny that in a very real way, God’s wrath against sinfulness itself was abated on the cross. One could call this a “form” of penal substitution, but it must be taken in proper context. Along with Wright, I agree that even this idea must always be viewed as a byproduct of His love for us. Christ is our Substitute, but not in a truly “penal” way of averting God’s anger toward us. He was averting the sin and its host of ramifications that destroy us. This is what Wright is expressing when he says:

On the cross, as an expression of God’s love, Jesus took into and upon Himself the full force of all the evil around Him, in the knowledge that if He bore it we would not have to; but this, which amounts to a form of penal substitution, is quite different from other forms of penal substitution, such as the mediaeval model of a vengeful father being placated by an act of gratuitous violence against his innocent son. In other words, there are many models of penal substitution, and the vengeful-father-and-innocent-son story is at best a caricature of the true one.[17]

Even God’s wrath is for you, not against you. The Trinitarian approach sees all scripture through the ultimate grid of the Father’s love. The Trinitarian approach does not see a moody Father who was personally offended by our sin. He hated sin and chose to absorb it in His own death because it was an obstacle to love that had set His children on a course of self-destruction.

When discussing wrath, we must see that God has always been a God of grace. To take away the dark side of God makes religious people mad. They want to kill somebody, so they want their god to kill somebody. But God has no desire to inflict pain or agony on anyone. He came to rescue you from sin, death and self-destruction.

Who Killed Jesus?

If we can no longer blame the Father for the evil that befell Jesus, perhaps we should think down another avenue? Have you ever considered that perhaps someone else killed Him? I have just a flicker of an idea who that may be. Here are a few verses to help us piece together the picture:

– In Nazareth people wanted to throw Him off a cliff

(Luke 4:28-30).

– Jesus healed someone on the Sabbath and people wanted to kill Him (Matt. 12:14).

– Jesus healed a lame man and they wanted to kill Him

(John 5:16-18).

– The people wanted to kill him because He claimed to be the Christ (John 7:19-44).

– He claimed equality with God, so they wanted to kill Him

(John 8:37-59).

– He was making Himself to be God, so they wanted to kill Him

(John 10:31- 39).

– Many were believing in Him, so people wanted to kill Him (John 11:45-57).

Behold, the hour is at hand and the Son of Man is being betrayed into the hands of sinners (Matt. 26:45, KJV).

For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart (Heb. 12:3, NASB).

Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of Man will be delivered up to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn Him to death, and will deliver Him up to the Gentiles to mock and scourge and crucify Him … (Matt. 20:18-19 NASB).

Are we starting to get the picture here?

Finally, the Father allowed the Son to fall into the hands of lawless men, to be arrested, mocked, beaten and crucified. But make no doubt about it. Jesus says clearly in John 10:18:

No one takes (my life) from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from My Father.

What command did He receive from the Father? The ability to lay His own life down.

But wasn’t the Father pleased in the bruising of the Son? (Isa. 53:10) Yes, very much so! But not in a sadistic way to appease His bloodlust. As Kruger clarifies: the Father was pleased because He saw in the death of Christ the adoption of the nations. He saw our inclusion into the life of the Trinity. He was pleased to turn our dirtiest water into the finest wine.

Look a few verses earlier in Isaiah 53:4, “Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered Him stricken by God, smitten by Him, and afflicted.” Jesus took our curse … the ramification of all our sinful consequences onto Himself. But in our mind, it was God who had turned on Him … we considered Him stricken by God. Little did we recognize it was not God’s vehemence being poured onto Him, but our own! Ultimately, Christ was bearing not God’s wrath but ours.

Psalm 22

If you really want to dive into this beautiful mystery, you must truly plunge into Psalm 22. Jesus, as He is hanging on the cross, opens His mouth and cries out the first line of the first verse of this psalm, which is a song of deliverance:

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Why are You so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? (v. 1)

Let me give you some cultural background. It was a regular custom of those days in Israel to sometimes recite only the first verse of a psalm. Why? In doing so, you were essentially conveying a summary of that entire psalm. If I sing the first verse of “Amazing Grace,” most of you would get the vibe and idea of the entire song simply by hearing the first lyrics. Just that first verse alone, and you’ve already got that old familiar concept of “Amazing Grace.”

Jesus, as He hung on the tree, quoted this first lyric of Psalm 22. He was articulating the theme of the entire Psalm, simply by speaking out the first verse. In fact, you can see the entirety of Psalm 22 playing itself out as He was being crucified. Jesus did not quote the entire psalm – He couldn’t do this anyway. He was dying of thirst as all His liquid – all His blood – poured out of His body.

Just as you know most of the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” by heart, so would the people of Jesus’ day knew all of the lyrics of Psalm 22. They would have heard it at Synagogue and memorized it. In a largely illiterate society, people are good at memorizing things anyway. They didn’t have a Bible application on their smart phone. Also Psalm 22 would have been on the Top 40 at that time. It would have been very popular. How do I know that? Because Psalm 22 is specifically a Messianic Psalm, and everybody had Messianic fever in those days! There were Bar-Jesuses popping up everywhere! Everybody was looking for Messiah. He came in the fullness of time – it was so clear from the records that His time had arrived even the wise men from the orient knew how to track down His star. Jesus came right on the scene at the perfect time, and His own people almost missed Him. Let’s look at the rest of Psalm 22:

My God, I cry out by day, but You do not answer, by night, but I find no rest. Yet You are enthroned as the Holy One; You are the one Israel praises. In You our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and You delivered them. To You they cried out and were saved; in You they trusted and were not put to shame (v. 2-5).

Here as He cries out to the Father, Jesus remembers the faith of His forefathers – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. All the while He never commits the sin of doubt. He trusted the Father for us.

But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people (v. 6).

Not a bone in His body was broken, but as He hung on the tree, His bones became dislodged and He writhed like a worm.

All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads. “He trusts in the Lord,” they say, “let the Lord rescue him. Let Him deliver him, since he delights in Him” (v. 7-8).

This is exactly what His mockers said as He hung there in Matthew 27:43.

Yet You brought me out of the womb; You made me trust in You, even at my mother’s breast. From birth I was cast on You; from my mother’s womb You have been my God (v. 9-10).

Here you see His mother. Even as He hung on the tree, He spoke with her, handing her over to John, dealing with natural relationships before He parted.

Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help. Many bulls surround me; strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. Roaring lions that tear their prey open their mouths wide against me. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; You lay me in the dust of death (v. 11-15).

This passage speaks for itself. Notice as He hung there, He said, “I thirst.” He was thirsting for your love.

Dogs [unbelievers] surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet. All my bones are on out of joint; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment (v. 16-18).

The piercing. The dislodged, crucified body. The gambling for His garments. Now imagine, as you are standing there, after you heard Him quote Psalm 22 – one of the biggest pop songs of the day – and the lyrics are going through your head. Every single line of this song is happening right here, right now.

But You, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me. Deliver me from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dogs. Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen. I will declare Your name to My people; in the assembly I will praise You. You who fear the Lord, praise Him! All you descendants of Jacob, honor Him! Revere Him, all you descendants of Israel! (v. 19-23)

Suddenly, yet silently from the Lord, we are hearing His cries for deliverance turning into inner shouts and declarations of praise! Now catch the next part … here comes the kicker:

For He has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; He has not hidden His face from him but has listened to his cry for help! (v. 24).

Boom! The Father never hid His face from the Son! Jesus experienced what you feel when you assume God has abandoned you. But Christ pierced right through our own blindness to God, that our own eyes may be opened to the truth: He’s been smiling at us all along. The psalm concludes in verses 25-31 as he asserts an accomplishment affecting all men in all times:

From You comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly; before those who fear You I will fulfill my vows. The poor will eat and be satisfied; those who seek the Lord will praise Him – may your hearts live forever! All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before Him, for dominion belongs to the Lord and He rules over the nations. All the rich of the earth will feast and worship; all who go down to the dust will kneel before Him — those who cannot keep themselves alive. Posterity will serve Him; future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim His righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has finished it.

It is finished! Now imagine again that you’re sitting there. You hear the psalm, “My God, My God … Why?” You see the piercing of the hands, the mocking, the mother, the writhing, the thirst, the dividing of the garments, and now … “It is finished.” You look up at Him. What have we done? … He’s the one!

It is such a mystical thing to enter the mind of the Lord through this psalm and hear His innermost thoughts during that most epic moment. To know He plunged through the cloud of our blindness and trusted in the Father’s love when it counted the most. It is such a breathtaking revelation to know that the Father has loved us from the foundation of the world. He was never against us. It really is too scandalously good to be true. Before we were lost in Adam, we were already found in Jesus Christ. He is the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world.

Another View of Atonement

The dominant view of Christ’s atoning work in the Western, modern, evangelical Church is that twisted concept of “penal substitution” wherein Christ was punished and abandoned by His Father because of our sins. But different theories of atonement dominated early Church theology. For 1,000 years, theologians held to something more akin to what’s called the “ransom view” of atonement or Christus Victor. There are different variations to it, but essentially, the focus was on Christ coming to purchase humanity at a price.

Jesus said, “… the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

Who gave Himself as a ransom for all men – the testimony given in its proper time (1 Tim. 2:6).

You were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies (1 Cor. 6:20).

The dominant idea was that Christ came to redeem us, to win us back. He came to destroy our sinfulness, our old nature. He wiped out the ramifications of what sin itself was doing to corrupt us. This idea has long been held in the Orthodox Church, but is being rediscovered in recent days. It was a primary thrust of the early Church father Athanasius. Consider the following, which he wrote in the 4th century. In describing man’s fall, he says that God’s motive was none other than love, for what more could a loving God do?

The thing that was happening (at the fall) was in truth both monstrous and unfitting. It would, of course, have been unthinkable that God should go back upon His word and that man, having transgressed, should not die; but it was equally monstrous that beings which once had shared the nature of the Word should perish and turn back again into non-existence through corruption. It was unworthy of the goodness of God that creatures made by Him should be brought to nothing through the deceit wrought upon man by the devil; and it was supremely unfitting that the work of God in mankind should disappear, either through their own negligence or through the deceit of evil spirits. As, then, the creatures whom He had created reasonable, like the Word, were in fact perishing, and such noble works were on the road to ruin, what then was God, being Good, to do? Was He to let corruption and death have their way with them? In that case, what was the use of having made them in the beginning? Surely it would have been better never to have been created at all than, having been created, to be neglected and perish; and, besides that, such indifference to the ruin of His own work before His very eyes would argue not goodness in God but limitation, and that far more than if He had never created men at all. It was impossible; therefore, that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because it would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself.[18]

It was unworthy of God’s goodness to let man suffer and decay. For Athanasius, this was a no-brainer. God is good – what other choice did He have than to step down in the incarnation and restore us to our incorruption and immorality? He was wholeheartedly committed to the human endeavor He launched, and He crossed time and space to meet us in the far country of our fallenness.

This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.[19]

Christ our Substitute

It is very much accurate to say the Christ died as our Substitute. But He was not saving us from an angry God. He substituted Himself for our own hellish depravity and destroyed our own corruption in His servant body.

N.T. Wright says, “This, I think, is as clear as it gets in Paul — in Romans 8:3, where Paul says explicitly that God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus Christ? Paul does not say that God condemned Jesus; rather, that He condemned sin; but the place where sin was condemned was precisely in the flesh of Jesus, and of Jesus precisely as the Son sent from the Father. And this, we remind ourselves, is the heart of the reason why there is now ‘no condemnation’ for those who are in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:1). …”[20]

Wright says the deepest truth is not that God’s wrath at sin was satisfied, but that His love for us was satisfied on the cross.

Some of the confusion in theology on these two drastically different perspectives is rooted in the Greek word hilasterion found in Romans 3:25, translated in various ways, wherein God put Jesus forward as a “mercy seat” or “sin offering.” The word has been a source of debate for many years. One of the words used here in English is propitiation. Propitiation implies that Christ’s death appeased the divine wrath called for by sin. But another more fitting concept is the idea of expiation. Expiation is radically different. Expiation implies the obliteration of sin through Christ’s atoning death!

“Hilasterion as implying expiation still allows us to understand the death of Christ as a necessary expression of God’s holiness in dealing with human sin, yet not to deny that judgment is at once an expression of God’s love, because the Son of God is the one who suffered the curse for the sins of all people as God’s agent of the reconciliation of sinners to God,” explain the authors of Dictionary of Paul and His Letters.[21]

Folks who are hell bent on having an angry God have difficulty swallowing the idea that God doesn’t want to destroy sinners. Another proof text for them would be Romans 5:9, “Having now been justified by His blood, we will be saved through Him from the wrath. …”

“But that still does not mean that Christ’s death propitiated God,” continue the authors. “For Paul the wrath of God is God’s judgment which destroys all unholiness and sin. In the light of the threatening wrath of God, the need of sinners can be said not to be the transformation of God’s attitude toward them but the transformation of their sinful existence before God.”

This accurate understanding that God’s wrath is against sinfulness and not sinners, helps us to get a clearer picture of what is going on. It is more like a doctor fighting a patient’s disease, or a freedom fighter liberating slaves from bondage. That God’s wrath is redemptively aimed against sinfulness itself finds solid Biblical support. “The wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18).

And so the focus of the atonement was less about averting wrath than it was removing the cause of our alienation, defilement and inward enmity toward God. The atonement was not about God’s “punishment” but about redemptive love.

“It is quite correct to say that the necessity of the atonement arises from the justice of God. But it was not some abstract legal justice which required sufficient punishment before there could be forgiveness,” writes Kruger.[22]

Why the Cross?

Many people are left confounded by this. If the crucifixion was not about satiating the wrath of an angry God, then what was the point of the cross? The point of the cross was not to change God, but to change you!

It was ultimately about adoption and deliverance from the molesting evil of sin. He came to violently cleanse us of everything that defiled us. He stepped into our estrangement, our brokenness and false humanity – destroying our sickness and poverty. Where sin had perverted and marred our true and original identity in Him, He recaptured the lost coin that still bore His Image.

Have you begun to comprehend what a radical shift in thought this calls for? Can you see how humanity has been so viciously infected with an idol god of our own making? A vengeful taskmaster? Religion has fed us a hate god from time immemorial.

It is understandable that when folks are not versed in the New Covenant, that they would think God hates sinners. In fact, there are dozens of Old Testament verses that tell us this! But when we rightly divide the Word, we see that His actual hatred was against that false identity, the old man – the sinful nature with its passions and its lust. His hatred was against the man of sin, the old nature, not our True Selves. But we just assume that God literally hates sinful individuals. Westboro Baptist Church embodies an extreme of what most Christians actually believe deep inside! Take the following for example. Look at how the King James Version translates Psalm 7:11:

God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every day.

Translation errors are understandable, but when they get this bad, you must seriously question whether the scribe is a psychotic that should be trusted around children and pets. The entire phrase “with the wicked” was simply added into the verse; hence the reason KJV puts it in italics. But the verse actually just reads:

God is a fair judge, a God who is angered by injustice every day (GWT).

God hates injustice because He is good. My point is that most people wouldn’t think twice about accepting the KJV on this one, because it fits right in with their schizophrenic idol god mentality.

Our Wrath, Not His

One of my favorite mystics is Dame Julian of Norwich, whose visions and writings contain some of the most breathtakingly beautiful encounters with the Lord and a revelation of His love. Consider her thoughts on the wrath of God:

I thought I needed to see and know that we are sinners who do many evil things that we ought to avoid, and leave many good deeds undone that we ought to do. So that we deserve both pain and wrath. But notwithstanding all this, I saw truthfully that our Lord was never angry, nor ever shall be, for He is God: He is good, He is life, He is truth, He is love, He is peace; and His power, His wisdom, His Love, and His Unity do not allow Him to be angry (For I saw truly that it is against the character of His Power to be angry, and against the character of His Wisdom, and against the character of His Goodness). God is the goodness that cannot be angry, for He is nothing but goodness. Our soul is one-ed to Him, who is unchangeable goodness, and between God and our soul is neither anger nor forgiveness, as He sees it. For our soul is so completely one-ed to God by His own goodness, that there can be absolutely nothing at all separating God and soul.[23]

This is pure truth, but the rabid religionist cringes at such words. He gets so stuck on individual texts that he never sees the forest for the trees. Even the most difficult texts about wrath and judgment must ultimately be seen through the lens of “God is Love” – there is a silver lining of grace behind them all. When Christ is our ultimate lens for understanding scripture, He is also our lens for seeing the unconditional love of the Godhead.

From Shadow to Substance

Many of our misunderstandings about God’s wrath come from shadowy Old Covenant perspectives. We are not dealing with two different gods between Old and New Testament. We’re dealing with two separate ways of God dealing with mankind – His “No” that points to His “Yes.” There is no separation in the full counsel of God between the two covenants. But we must see the New Testament purpose behind the Old Testament witness. There was always a prolepsis, a “looking forward” into our day, even in the most bizarre or sickening passages.

What do you do with certain Old Testament texts – like the one where God orders genocide in Canaan? I could pretend that passage is not inspired, but that would be intellectual dishonesty. I know He gave them 400 years to repent (Gen. 15:16), and according to the apostle Peter, their fate in the afterlife could be a whole different story than their earthly judgment (1 Pet. 4:6). But even these are pat answers. Put a Band-Aid on the text and folks will still come away with all sorts of perverted conclusions about God.

We simply cannot major on these isolated texts written by men who only saw in part and knew in part. We must understand the Father properly, based on the clear revelation we have today. Consider Hebrews 1:1-3:

God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature. …

Ultimately, we have to know the heart of the Father based on what we see in the Son, not by shadowy Old Testament passages that, on the surface, seem to show us a different version. Only Christ is the “exact representation” of His Father’s nature and the “visible image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15, NLT). We have, what Paul calls “a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:24).

You will fry your brain trying to patch up the apparent inconsistencies between God’s two résumés in the Old and New Testaments. So theologize all you want … at the end of the day, I would recommend you just give up and look at Jesus. All of the Father’s loving plan for humanity is wrapped up in Him – the Author and Finisher of our faith.

CHAPTER 3

THE VICARIOUS MAN

CHRIST AS THE LAST ADAM

INCARNATION, CHRISTOLOGY

& ORIGINAL INNOCENCE

For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.

- I Corinthians 15:22

The Trinity always intended to bring humanity into its circle of “other-giving” love. This was the very reason the Son of God became flesh. In the incarnation, God’s identity is forever merged with humanity. As Karl Barth boldly declares: God has chosen not to be God apart from humanity. Behind all of history and creation lies His eternal purpose – the Gospel.

The incarnation is not simply a past-tense event we celebrate on Christmas. The incarnation is a present reality. Jesus did not evaporate into smoke when He ascended. There is forever a flesh and bone human being seated mystically in the middle of the Trinity. And we are seated right there, woven into the Trinitarian life in the humanity of Christ.

Jesus did not dread setting aside His celestial glory to step into our fallen world. It was always His ravishing desire to take a bride. Rather than a grueling task – a last ditch effort to come clean Adam’s mess – His advent into our skin was more akin to a plunge into Candyland. As Catherine of Sienna said, “You, high eternal Trinity, acted as if You were drunk with love, infatuated with your creature. … You, Sweetness itself, stooped to join Yourself with our bitterness. You, Splendour, joined Yourself with darkness; You, Wisdom with foolishness; You, Life with death; You, the Infinite, with us who are finite. What drove you to this?””[24]

Not caught off guard by Adam’s sin, it was always His prior intent to redeem us from it. “He planned that we would be woven into the fabric of Jesus’ existence,” writes C. Baxter Kruger. We cannot work our way into that circle of the Trinity. This is why Christ attacked our side of the covenant. He invaded our side of the divine-human relationship. He violently cleansed us through His death. He never intended us to fulfill our side of any agreement. He never for a moment entrusted His plan to us or expected us to be in charge of our own spiritual destiny.

Christ and Adam

Humanity was created as God breathed Adam to life from the dust of the earth. The Last Adam, Jesus Christ, entered that very same earth – into the cold locker of the grave – and stepped out again, recreating humanity.

Romans 5 tells us that sin entered the world through the one man Adam, and in this way death came to all people because all sinned. But Paul tells us “Adam was a pattern of the one to come” (Rom. 5:14).

But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!

Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom. 5:15-21).

Our relationship with Adam is not our primary, true, original nature. We have read the book from left to right. We thought first came Adam, and then came Christ. But the opposite was true. Before Adam ever was … I AM! All of us, Adam included, were made in the image of God. Jesus Christ preceded Adam. When He stepped into our world, He came to His own, and His own did not recognize Him (John 1:11). Jesus came to all sinful humanity – we who had identified with a false father, the devil, simply because we did not grasp our true origin. We forgot our authentic Father and Maker, the Rock from which we were cut.

Adam was not the authentic blueprint for mankind.

“In Adam we can only find it prefigured. Adam can therefore be interpreted only in the light of Christ and not the other way around,” writes renowned theologian Karl Barth. “Our relationship to Adam is only the type, the likeness, the preliminary shadow of our relationship to Christ. The same human nature appears in both, but the humanity of Adam is only real and genuine in so far as it reflects and corresponds to the humanity of Christ.”[25]

Christ is the Original – the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. He was before time and space, and above time and space. He did not bring an end to the fallen Adamic era 2,000 years ago. The end of the Adamic era happened mystically before Adam ever sinned. The cross was the conclusion of that predetermined act. Adam’s sin was forgiven before he ever committed it. “Before you ever fell in Adam, you had already been found in Jesus Christ,” states Francois du Toit.

“In His own death He makes (mankind’s) peace with God – before they themselves have decided for this peace and quite apart from that decision. In believing, they are only conforming to the decision about them that has already been made in Him,” adds Barth.[26]

There are a number of strong parallels between Christ and Adam. Like Christ, Adam had no earthly father. But only Christ bears the distinct status as God’s only begotten Son become man. Neither was born of human choice or willpower. Christ’s birth is an act of grace. John 1:13 tells us He was not born of a “husband’s” will, represented by Joseph, but of God. In fact, Joseph’s name means “Jehovah increases.”

Your order of knowing Christ is the same as His order of being – both are gifts that come from above. No human willpower involved. Your new birth is merely an identification with His incarnation from above.

Adam only served as a “type” of the One who was to come. How was Adam a type? Only in the sense that the one affected all. Adam and Christ both came in a representative capacity. One is under the lordship of sin and death, which affected all men. The other is under the lordship of grace and life, which also overflows to all men. Both were vicarious men.[27]

As death came through one man, so also the resurrection came through one man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Cor. 15:21-22).

How many died in Adam? All. We see the exact same all as recipients of Christ’s resurrection life. How quick we are to believe that Adam can bring death to all … but how we balk at the notion that Christ can bring life to these same dead men.

The Shadow and the Substance

We must see again that Adam was merely a shadow of the one to come – only Christ, the true Alpha, has substance. The guilt and punishment we incur in Adam have no independent reality of their own – they stand to highlight the opposite reality of the grace and life we find in Christ – the One who would affect all, apart from their own choosing.

This vicarious, representative way in which these two men embody the entire human race is the final extent of their similarity. We can compare them no further. There is a massive disparity between them regarding how each one affected the many.

“But the gift [grace] is not like the trespass [sin]” (Rom. 5:15). Here the parallel stops. The one affects all, but in a radically different way. The sin-effect of Adam cannot compare to the grace-effect of Jesus Christ. Paul tells us here that infinite grace “overflowed” to all (eperisseusen) – how much more! The difference between the two is as radical as the difference between what God can do and what man can do. In comparing the ability of Adam to bring death and the ability of Christ to bring life, the two are diametrically opposed.

The first man is of the earth, earthy, the second man is from Heaven (1 Cor. 15:47).

“Paul is not denying that Adam’s sin still brings death to all men, but he is affirming that the grace of Christ has an incomparably greater power to make these dead men alive. He is not saying that there is no truth in Adam, but he is saying that it is a subordinate truth that depends for its validity on its correspondence with the final truth that is in Christ,” says Barth.[28]

Adam brought no substance to the table – even by introducing us all to death, this was merely withdrawing from the substance of life. Death is not so much God’s direct action toward sin, as it as man’s attempt to evade life.

Yes, we all experience original sin in Adam. But the greater reality is the original innocence graced to us in Jesus Christ. Christ is your first nature. Kingship is your first nature. “Our former existence outside Christ is, rightly understood, already a still hidden but real existence in Him,” notes Barth.[29]

We cannot generate this true identity anymore than we can climb into Heaven.

“Adam has no power to identify himself with Christ, Christ has the power to identify Himself with Adam (by His saving act),” writes Barth. We cannot move from left to right – we cannot move from Adam to Christ. It is a dead end of religious frustration. You can’t move from man to God. It is impossible. The only connection between the two men is that Christ stepped in and died for Adam.

Christ the True Human

Adam is a shadow; Christ is the Substance. Adam is only a true man in that he points to Christ and therefore becomes a witness to the glory of Christ. We have to look at Christ to see what is truly human.

“For Christ who seems to come second, really comes first, and Adam who seems to come first really comes second. In Christ the relationship between the one and the many is original, in Adam it is only a copy of that original. Our relationship to Adam depends for its reality on our relationship to Christ” adds Barth.[30]

This entire Romans 5 passage clearly connects and includes all of mankind as recipients of life in Jesus Christ – a fact that is fundamentally sidelined by the Western evangelical Church. Paul here is most clearly not talking about Christians only.

“Paul does not limit his context to Christ’s relationship to believers but gives fundamentally the same account of His relationship to all men,” adds Barth. “Our relationship to Christ as believers is based upon our prior relationship to Him as Adam’s children and heirs … What is Christian is secretly but fundamentally identical with what is universally human.”[31]

Original Innocence

For years, we have taught the fundamental truth that we have been co-crucified with Christ – that we have complete victory over the sinful nature. The old man has been buried with Christ. The sinful nature was circumcised away. This was the apostolic plumb line for all of the Apostle Paul’s teaching. Despite the fact that some isolated passages are manipulated or taken out of context to prove otherwise, Paul is crystal clear on this matter. In every one of his letters, he gives us our death certificate. The old man is dead.

We hammer on this foundational Gospel truth because people have been religiously brainwashed into a false identity. They think they are still sinners, will always be sinners and that they will always have to struggle with indwelling sin and temptation.

But as folks begin to encounter this core truth of their identity – that they are holy, righteous and perfect before Him in love – their outward lives will see a radical transformation. When you know who you really are, you start to act like it. No longer believing the lie that they are bound to a false existence of fallenness, they will see that they were only sinning because they didn’t know by faith who they really were in Christ. Religion teaches a continual human struggle against a sinfulness we will never shake in this life. But the Gospel says it is finished.

It is a huge thing for a believer to comprehend that Christ died our death and that the sinful nature no longer exists for a Christian. But it is a whole other thing to see a Christ who died as humanity … “we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died” (2 Cor. 5:14).

Is Everyone Clean?

Surely unbelievers must clearly still have a sinful nature? Just look at them! It has taken us years to convince churchmen from the scriptures that Christians don’t have a sinful nature – but they still think it only disappeared when they responded to the altar call.

The scriptures declare that the work of the cross affected the entire cosmos – not just believers. And it happened before the foundation of the world. So are we saying that nobody has a sinful nature anymore?

Here, we must not think of a timeframe – when I lost my old nature. It’s not about “When I lost it” but “Who I’m identifying with.” A similar question has been posed, “If two new creation believers had a child, shouldn’t the child be born without a sinful nature, without original sin?”

For starters, you don’t save your kids (God doesn’t have any grandchildren). Moreover, the child is human and was “in Adam” who was before us – but she was also “in Christ” before she was in Adam. We don’t deny the reality of Adam affecting all, but the greater reality is the Truth of Christ that liberated the child before she was born.

But this is all missing the point … your righteousness is not a state you entered at a point in time. He’s a person.

He included everybody, yet we also know it all has to become personal through faith. But even that is His faith – His conclusion about who you really are that manifests your liberation.

This subject is only confusing when the sinful nature is not clearly defined. In fact, some would think we’re saying that there is no such thing as original sin. But that is the heresy of Pelagianism. Indeed, all of creation experienced the decay of original sin. No one could be faithful to the scriptures without acknowledging this corruption. However, the greater truth is that of our original innocence in Jesus Christ.

Total Depravity, Total Wholeness

I do not totally believe in the doctrine of total depravity. On the one hand, the doctrine finds strong Biblical support. All men are born with a sinful nature in Adam (morally corrupt, enslaved to sin, enemies of God in their minds). There are a host of verses to back this up. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Rom. 3). Just Google “total depravity” and you’ll find scores of verses along with all sorts of depressing stuff.

Yet even in this there is paradox, because the thing which was depraved was our old man – the false self. Think of it as a fictional alter ego you believed to be true. We all had one. But the old man is based on an independent existence apart from Christ - which is an impossibility. It is a lie existence, a false reality.

It is impossible to exist apart from Christ. You cannot exist apart from Mr. Existence. Even unbelievers are united to Him in their existence in a hidden way. On Mars Hill, Paul says to the pagans, “In Him we live and move and have our being, even as your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring’” (Acts 17:28).

Since it is impossible to exist apart from Christ, the old man (the sinful nature or independent existence) is all based on a falsehood. And a lie only has power to the degree that we believe it.

If I believe I am a sinner, doomed to hell … I could potentially manifest that forever. It may be “reality” for me, but it is not truth. However, if I realize the truth – that on the cross I am already reconciled to God – then I begin to manifest that reconciliation.

Believe you’re a sinner and you’ll sin. Believe you’re a new creation in Christ and you will manifest holiness! But the objective fact is you’ve been made holy, whether you believe it or not. Your total depravity was totally eradicated.

Martin Luther and others hammered out the doctrine of original sin in the Reformation for a good cause. But they did not follow through enough in their consideration of what Christ accomplished to liberate us from it. Luther knew that since all his own efforts were corrupt, he could not rely on his good works to save himself. He could not even rely on his own faith. He based this notion on Genesis 6:5 where God saw that “every inclination of the thoughts of (man’s) heart was only evil all the time.”

Luther was indeed right in that we could never do anything to please God or even believe on our own. But he was wrong when he asserted that our entire lives we will have this stain of sin in us, and that everything we ever do is an offense to God. Yes, works for righteousness offend God. But joyful new creation works that stem out of our righteousness are glorious!

Luther knew that God covered our sinfulness as a free gift. He did not understand that God removed that sinfulness completely from the inside out – also as a free gift. Luther pioneered a revelation of grace, but the rabbit hole goes much further than he realized. Luther did not go far enough – the Reformation has not yet ended.

Unbelieving Image Bearers

So here’s a big question: Can good things come out of unbelievers? Of course they can!

A man who holds unflinchingly to total depravity would disagree. But Christ is hidden and latent even in the unbeliever – just like the Good Samaritan. Keep in mind that Jesus’ use of the Samaritan parable was hugely offensive to His Jewish listeners! This would have been like the “Good Mormon” or the “Good Jehovah’s Witness” by today’s standards, because Samaritans were full of theological mixture. In fact, Jesus often used seedy characters (the shrewd manager, Mafioso tax collectors, etc.) as the positive examples in His parables!

The original image of God lies latent within everyone. More specifically, Christ, the restored image of God, is that very original seed that’s latent within all humanity. He poured His Spirit out on all flesh (Acts 2:17). People can have their True Self popping up all the time, without realizing it. Who do you think Paul’s hypothetical Romans 7 man is? It’s the man who “knows” the right thing to do … but he’s powerless to do it. He’s not a trusting believer, but Paul says he’s a religious person “under the law.” He’s got a moral war going on, because he knows the right thing to do but is powerless to overcome that old sinful nature on his own. All sorts of people can still produce “good” and God is in that – even though they are still in an identity crisis. No one can generate “saving” goodness, but Christ can still work through them in a hidden way.

On the one hand, unbelievers are called sons of the devil. On the other hand, scripture repeatedly calls God the Father of all men (Mal. 2;10, Eph. 4:6). Or consider Peter’s words in Acts 10 when he is sent to the pagans … he is told “not to call any man impure or unclean.”

There is original sin in Adam, but there is original innocence in Christ. He preceded Adam as the Lamb who was slain before the foundation of the world. Consider the following translation and commentary from Francois du Toit:

“Everyone who realizes their association in Him, convinced that He is their original life and that His name defines them, in them He endorses the fact that we are indeed His offspring, begotten of Him” (John 1:12). The word often translated, to receive, lambano, means to comprehend, grasp, to identify with. This word suggests that even though He came to His own, there are those who do not grasp their true origin revealed in Him, and like the many Pharisees they behave like children of a foreign father, the father of lies (John 8:44). Neither God’s legitimate fatherhood of man nor His ownership is in question; man’s indifference to his true origin is the problem. This is what the Gospel addresses with utmost clarity in the person of Jesus Christ (Jesus has come to introduce man to himself again; humanity has forgotten what manner of man he is by design!)[32]

So here are two corresponding realities for every man: “in Adam all have died. In Christ all have been made alive.” We don’t deny the problem of the first Adam, but the Truth of the second Adam is far, far greater.

This is not a syncretistic way to blend the two men together. We were all children of Adam and sinners. But in Christ – the greater truth – the first Adam finds its end. We are not saying that original sinfulness doesn’t exist, but let us define what original sinfulness was … we were owned, occupied and living according to a “lie existence.” A lie has no substance. It is not reality.

So in this sense, I can say, “Yes I believe that all men are born under and have acted according to Adam’s lie.” But the Truth predates the lie. Your existence was in Christ long before Adam. The problem was overcome before it ever emerged.

Impossible to Sin?

Since we teach that in Christ we’re no longer sinners, some people may think, “Oh it’s impossible for me to sin.” After all, 1 John says, “He who is born of God does not continue in sin.”

Of course it is possible to sin … but it’s not your true identity. Committing a sin is one thing, but those who realize their new birth do not continually do it – nor should we have to expect to ever again! Sin has consequences – if I put my hand in a meat grinder, it will hurt. But sin does not “re-separate” you from God. Forgetting your identity causes you to flippantly disregard the benefits of being “free from sin!” Grace is not license to sin, but freedom from it. If you sin as a Christian, you’re just acting like Christ never died to begin with. It doesn’t mean you’re “still a sinner,” but you had a momentary identity crisis.

Many feel condemned because they think, “I must not really be a new creation.” Or they think, “I’ll always struggle.” But your actions don’t dictate your identity. Let the opposite be true. What the scriptures are saying is that you don’t have to sin anymore … it holds no power over you. Your actions – good or bad – do not dictate your status as a new creation. It is sourced and rooted in the finished work of the cross. Recognize the truth, and you will bear fruit.

The first man Adam was created from the dirt. The Last Adam entered the dust of our grave and recreated mankind by rebirthing him out of the tomb. No one who is born of God continues to sin. We are completely liberated from the bondage of sin because we have sprung up from the grave with Him (Col. 3:1). In a mystical way, all of humanity was included in that death and resurrection. But if the whole cosmos is “born anew” in the vicarious death and resurrection of Christ, why do men still sin? Humanity is in an identity crisis. They haven’t heard the truth about what He’s done and who they are (Rom. 10)! How can they live it if they haven’t heard the word of faith? Notice this chapter of 1 John talks consistently about “living in Him.”

No one who lives in Him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen Him or known Him (1 John 3:6).

The new birth doesn’t happen when you conjure up enough faith. It happened when Christ died your death. Your moment of faith recognized the new birth and enabled you to live in Him – in step with His Spirit and word. Are we living in the faith awareness of our true identity as sons? Or are we still living according to that false identity as sons of a foreign father? Faith realizes and manifests the True Self … Christ within, the hope of glory! Actively seeing and knowing Him in the Gospel manifests in a righteous life.

All have sinned. But don’t expect to sin another day in your life! And if you do, your forgiveness has already been worked out in Jesus. Confess it – recognize you did something contrary to your identity – then own your forgiveness, not the sin. As Andre Rabe writes, “Don’t tell God about your sin. Tell sin about your God!”

Do not make the mistake of thinking there is no original sin. Just be aware of the greater truth that you were originally in. God allowed us all to be bound over to original sin only that He may ultimately have mercy on us all (Rom. 11:32)!

Our sinfulness points us to a need for the Gospel. It has become an occasion for grace, because without it – and without the law – we would not have known the state of our depravity apart from Him. We would not have understood our utter inability to please God or be godly on our own. We would not have seen or appreciated the depths and riches of His love. We had to see that we were sinners, otherwise how could we see the need for a Saviour? We need to develop a righteousness consciousness – not a sin consciousness. And yet without an honest recognition of our sins, we would still blindly go on trying to live an independent existence. We would be void of relationship, for we would see no need for the Gospel. We would think we were self-sufficient and carefree, when in all reality we are utterly dependent on the Gospel of life and vitally sustained by His relationship.

True Identity

I joyfully embrace all the verses that point to my own unrighteousness and depravity apart from God. Why? Because it keeps me cheerfully free from trusting in myself and trying to bear the responsibility of mastering the helm of my own salvation.

We acknowledge original sin, but we also acknowledge that on the cross, every speck of that sinfulness was swallowed up and completely destroyed. We don’t say that sin never existed. We say it was completely erased. Big difference.

When I say I am not a sinner anymore, I am not crediting that to self-righteousness, but to the righteousness of God in Christ. If we claim to have never sinned we deceive ourselves (1 John 1:8-10). But if we think we are still sinners, we disown our True identity and we are just as deceived.

We should never be sin-focused. God did not leave us with indwelling sin so that His grace would keep abounding. But He used our sinfulness and the law to point us to our need for Him. To say that God left indwelling sinfulness inside you to keep you humble or keep you dependent on Him is to miss the point and call the work of the cross “unfinished.” How could He leave the substance of pride in you to bring humility? That is ridiculous. Do not blame God for sin. He used it. He did not cause it; He dealt with it.

In the existence of the old man Adam, you were crippled by sin. In the existence of the new man Christ, you are completely evil free. You are not schizo. The new has come, the old has gone. We are not saying the old never existed, or that some aren’t still living according to it today – but the old was a lie existence, a false existence.

Who is in Christ?

As we start to apprehend the massive scale of the cross, the idea of humanity’s inclusion begins to stagger us. Even our terminology begins to change. Who shall we scripturally say is actually in Christ? Who is the Body of Christ? What is the Church? Terminology gets muddled and sometimes keeps us locked into limited mindsets. And with revelation always comes a new language.

Now most would consider this is a no-brainer because we think of being “in Christ” as a term exclusively for believers. Believe and you’re in. And yet we know that God was in Christ reconciling the whole cosmos to Himself. So we have to look at the bigger picture.

Two truths are essential here:

1. What took place in Christ includes all people.

2. No one fully participates in Him apart from faith.

These two truths are not exclusive from one another. They exist in a dialectical tension. All are included, and faith makes our inclusion tangible by engaging it. These are the objective and subjective sides to salvation. Simple, but very mystical.

On the one side, you have what God has done for us, apart from us, before we knew about it, received it or responded to it. On the other side, personalizing it by faith allows us to subjectively participate in it. Even that faith is a gift which we will discuss later.

There are so many verses that refer to all men as the recipients of Christ’s work. As our vicarious representative, Christ absorbed all our humanity, assumed it when He took on human flesh, destroyed its curse on the cross, resurrected it and brought it back to the Father.

He is the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). And as Paul reminds us in 1 Cor. 15:22, “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.”

In Hebrews 2:9 he says, “Jesus… suffered death, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone.”

When the New Testament says all - which it does often - that should not be marginalized. This is completely separate from our own faith acceptance, our trusting realization of the fact. Even your faith doesn’t add to what He has done; it relies on it. It lies down and drinks in what He has done.

Subjective and Objective Reality

So the term “in Christ” can be applied in two separate ways in scripture. Objectively, we are all in Him. There is no insider versus outsider. When you see a pagan on the street, it becomes hard to demonize them with bigotry when you realize humanity is all in the same boat. Difficult to judge their “otherness” when I discover we are all one humanity in Christ. All included in the family whether we realize it or not.

But then experientially, there is another “in Christ” we find in scripture. It is that coming into Him by faith - a personalization where we accept, trust and experience the regeneration of the Holy Ghost. Humanity was “in Him” from the foundation of the world, and yet we are called to a recognition of that by accepting the light of Christ. That doesn’t mean He just flutters into our body the moment we say a prayer. We are aligning with what He has already decreed to be true about us from the origin of time. My faith doesn’t create Reality. It simply trusts in Reality. And it is in the midst of faith that Reality manifests.

As a believer, the “entering in” by faith is simply agreeing with the facts. We are believing the light of truth, or believing the darkness of a lie.

So there are the two sides of being “in Him.” All are in Him in one sense - in the overarching greater sense (we will explore a host of scriptures on this). And then the scriptures talk about another “in Him” that applies to those who accept their inclusion. Only here is the concrete benefit ever realized and the hellhounds quenched. Faith is necessary to experience, appropriate or activate this salvation. Otherwise you’re a bum on the street because you don’t know there’s $50 billion in your account.

To accept it by faith is not creating reality. We are not talking about a form of existentialism here. Rather, it is accepting reality - recognizing the inclusion He has already given and thereby experiencing the benefits.

Election Misconception

But aren’t some chosen and others not? Wasn’t God running a big lotto in the sky at the dawn of time, determining who would enjoy heaven and who He sovereignly determined should burn forever in hell? We could spend chapters digging into the Calvinist vs. Arminian debate that blathers ceaselessly like dog chasing it’s own tail (Do we choose God or does He choose us? And if He chooses some of us – then what about the unchosen?).

I will not jump into this exhaustive topic except to say the idea of limited atonement or double predestination is simply unfounded (the idea that Jesus only died in a limited way for some – the elect – and the rest of the dirty scoundrels He always intended to cook up in hades). This generally comes from a misreading of Romans 9-11 where Paul rabbit trails from nothing can separate us from the love of God (Rom. 8:39) to all of Israel will be saved (Rom. 11:26). Paul did say some hard things about insiders and outsiders if you read it that way. But he only did so ultimately to put all of humanity on the same level playing field. Jacob and Esau are the same. Chosen Israel, Paul is saying, is no better than hardened Pharaoh. The same vessels of honor are no better than the vessels of dishonor. These are actually quite inclusive texts, because Paul ultimately is saying, “God has handed everyone over to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all” (Rom. 11:32).

Election is not about God choosing this human over that human. There was no lotto wheel. No random word of choice. In the beginning His Word was “Jesus!” Election is all about the Electing God and the Elected Son. Jesus is both Elector and Elected. He is God’s choice for all of humanity. And all of humanity was vicariously represented in Him. Notice in Ephesians 1 that we are elect “in Him,” chosen “in Him,” predestined “in Him!” God didn’t pick you over someone else – He picked Jesus on behalf of everybody. And those of us who realize our free association in Him participate in an inheritance that was always ours. All talk of election must be centered upon Christ.

One Catholic Church

So the Church is defined as those who are realizing their salvation in an ongoing way – and actively submitting to His verdict of our innocence. And yes there is a sense in which scripture tells us to “come out from them” and abandon our former worldliness. Because we are consciously in Christ, there is a dramatic sense of separation from the spirit of the world. We are in the world, but we do not live like the world. We are generous and loving – not fornicators, addicts, chasing idols or finding our fix where the world does. We realize that we have died to the spirit of the world.

At the same time, however, we are not separatists in another sense. The word Pharisee means “separatist.” We actually learn to embrace the world in a far deeper way than we ever could when we were “of the world.” In Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, no real insider and outsider. We become Paul explaining to godless pagans that “in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). We can now embrace humanity with agape love.

The Church is a microcosm here in the earth of what humanity and the entire cosmos is really called to be - and we treat those who don’t know the Truth according to their true identity as much as possible. Those who are not yet awakened to the fact that they are clean and forgiven before they even know to ask.

The Church has a very catholic message. That word means “universal.” Our message was never meant only for a few inbred sheep in an Appalachian snake-handling sanctuary. Nor are we just one of 31 varieties of Baskin Robbins world religions to pick from. The Good News of Jesus Christ is not another religion. Rather, it is the universal announcement of the end of all worldwide religion. It is a catholic message for all of humanity: that God is no longer in the religion business. He stepped down and accomplished salvation for us all single-handedly.

How this filters out in every day life is double sided. On the one hand, we embrace the “unclean” as though they are clean – as though they are family, because they are. We coax Christ to bubble out of their bellies. On the other hand, we exercise some common sense when it comes to practical, daily life. We yoke ourselves differently with believers than unbelievers. We don’t put an unbelieving pedophile in charge of Sunday school, but yet we welcome pedophiles, as well as the rest of the world, with open arms. We are scandalously forgiving of the Jerry Sanduskys, the Hitlers, the Osama Bin Laden types. The guy on the street is just as much included as you and me - whether he knows it or not.

Two Sides of Being ‘In Christ’

Therefore, I see this “in Christ” issue as two intersecting truths. Truth is often multilayered. It is a wheel within a wheel – one dimension within another (as in the Book of Genesis, where there was one creation story within another creation story). In the objective sense, Christ died for all – there are no insiders or outsiders. And in this other wheel, we must have faith in order for salvation to actually kick in - in terms of its real, nuts and bolts benefits.

God’s benefits rain on the just and unjust. And only the Church experiences God directly through our belief in Jesus Christ. For faith is the realization and awareness of the Source: On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you (John 14:20, NIV). Faith becomes the avenue through which healing, wholeness, joy and fruitfulness fully manifest. Faith is our connector to the glory. But let us not be quick to make faith an in-or-out dividing issue – because this double-sided coin of being “in Christ” also has a third component. Between the objective and subjective sides of salvation, there is also overlap: people grow progressively into faith (it is not a lightening bolt experience where your engine jumps from zero to 100% on the faith meter).

Scripture is full of mystery and paradox. Just when you think you have something figured out, there is some entirely opposite seeming thing that’s going on. Two simultaneous truths held in divine tension. Rather than jumping to offense with every paradox or losing any hope for an answer, we must learn to trust that God has it all figured out. We begin to enjoy the journey of discovery as He brings the enlightenment. Often two seemingly contradictory truths are both reconciled when you see them in the light of clearer revelation.

East and West

If we look at the tension of competing truths in the Church, where do we see the biggest division of all? Quite likely it is between the East and the West. Here we see one of the main examples of conflicting thought and worldview among Christians.

The Eastern Orthodox Church has actually believed this sort of stuff for centuries regarding humanity’s inclusion in Christ. But then again, they have a much higher tolerance for mystery and non-linear thinking.

American revival religion has a very low threshold for mystery. If you can’t answer everything in a two-sentence Facebook post, it must be heresy. Just when we think something is simply black and white, we miss that the Lord wants to open our eyes to Technicolor.

Western thinking, although it prefers analytical, rational bullet points is not altogether bad. We need the linear as well! We need both math and mystery. The Bible came to us in Greek and Hebrew for a reason. Eastern and Western thought need one another, just as you need a right and left side to your brain.

The point here is to give you a quick little history lesson. Most of my readers are undoubtedly Western, so I want to expose you to a different way of seeing.

Augustine and Athanasius

A lot of our Western theology (both Protestant and Roman Catholic are Western) traces its roots primarily back to one guy … Augustine.

I have been to St. Peters Basilica in Rome several times. It is the largest and undoubtedly most beautiful church in the world. If you move toward the front of that church you will notice four absolutely massive pillars. Upon them are carved the four main doctors of the Church. Any historian who looks at the first centuries beyond the apostles will recognize these four men as the biggest movers and shakers of the early Church.

Two men are from the West – Augustine and Ambrose. Augustine was the theologian of the two.

But there are also two men carved from the East – Athanasius and John Chrysostom. Of these two men, Athanasius was the theologian.

So you basically have two theologians who set the foundational course of Christian thought: Augustine in the West and Athanasius in the East. These were the two main theologians of the Church age beyond Paul.

What does this have to do with you? Maybe you’ve never even heard of Augustine. Well it has a lot to do with you, because a lot of the mindsets you’ve picked up sitting in the pews every Sunday trace all the way back to Augustine. This doesn’t mean everything you learned was wrong. But you may have seen things from a one-sided perspective. Luther, Calvin and all the evangelical world was highly influenced by Augustine.

Two Perspectives

In the West, Augustine took a bottom up approach to theology. For him, it was about men transitioning from sinners to God. There was a focus on conversion and two separate worlds. Apart from conversion, we never move from love of self over to the love of God. Self-love and love for God. Two cities; two worlds. A call to move from outsiders to insiders. And in Augustine’s thought, his theology starts with the fallen human condition and works its way up into a doctrine of God.

But in the East was this other fellow Athanasius. And he looked at things totally differently. Not incorrectly … differently. This is not about right or wrong. To jump from Augustine to Athanasius is not like moving from Veggie Tales to Harry Potter. This is not heresy. Just because a perspective is unfamiliar does not make it wrong. People often fear what they don’t understand, cutting themselves off from a vast world of revelation. Then in order to preserve human tradition they try to bring understanding to others out of their own ignorance. This is what racism, genocide and religion are always based upon – brute ignorance and fear.

So tune in, turn on, and drop out for a minute. We’re talking about two equally important world-class historic theologians. But they looked at things radically different in some respects.

Athanasius takes top down approach. His focus is not so much on working up from the bottom – from the separated human condition like Augustine. Instead, Athanasius starts at the answer. His theology starts from the perspective of what Jesus has already accomplished for the entire cosmos. Then he works it down from there into how it trickles out and affects our individual human lives.

Athanasius is not so much problem-focused on mankind making a transition. Instead, he starts with what God Himself did to regenerate humanity. Then the rest of the details (such as our acceptance of it, etc.) eventually filter out from there. Our response to the ultimate Truth is not Athanasius’ focus. He starts with the incarnation – Christ absorbing all of humanity into Himself as He took on human flesh. And “if one has died, therefore all have died” (1 Cor. 5:14).

So it is not moving from problem to answer for Athanasius. It is not about moving from outsider to insider. For Athanasius, it’s all about, “This is what Christ did …” We’re all insiders whether we know it or not. Christians are those who have come to the point of faith-awareness that we’ve already been included. The Church is comprised of those who are no longer resisting their inclusion but embracing it as they walk with Jesus.

Here is a big difference in the two schools of thought. Whenever the New Testament mentions all – which it does a lot – these passages get sidelined in the West. Nobody wants to touch them.

But in the Eastern Church, those are actually considered the main texts!

There are two sides to the coin. We can’t ignore the strong universalistic pull in the Gospels, but at the same time, salvation is not actualized in an individual life until each comes to faith.

Of course we know that - at least in this life - not all have accepted the Message. We don’t know about the future. You could make a case that some do or don’t eventually get it. We are called to hope for all - but it’s a mystery. We leave it open.

What we do know - right here and now on the subjective side – is that we are called to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord, called to be witnesses who know and proclaim Him in this world. That’s the subjective side of personally trusting our lives to Him.

But in the West, this is the only side that’s ever emphasized. And it slips precariously over into us trying to “drum up faith” which is actually dualism, legalism – and trying to reaccomplish just about everything else Jesus did for us.

In the Western world, our view of the Gospel is much more exclusive and myopic. Not that the East doesn’t have its share of problems as well. But in this area, we could stand to learn a thing or two from our Orthodox brothers.

Generally, in theology, the rule of thumb is to take the clearest passages of scripture to help you interpret the more obscure, weird-to-us passages. But that means you must assume to know exactly what the so-called clear passages are!

For Augustine, he considered the separation of the sheep and the goats to be the clear text, and everything else had to line up with that. The texts related to humanity’s inclusion in Christ (the all passages) got stifled. Now why Augustine considered a parable - the sheep and the goats – to be the clearest text, I don’t know? It seems quite allegorical to be the measuring rod for your entire theological system … but that’s Augustine.[33]

Athanasius thought differently.

Athanasius on the other hand, saw a different main text on which to build. He took this idea of “One died for all, therefore all died” as his clear baseline by which to interpret everything else. An inclusive text.

The result is that to this day in our Western family conversation – thanks to Augustinian thought – people have not taken the word all literally. Or they have tried to twist scripture to qualify or debunk it in some way. There’s too much division and exclusion in the back of our minds.

Now is it possible that both Augustine and Athanasius are right? Yes! That’s exactly what I’m saying. We don’t deny the fallen human condition or the two cities or exclusion from participation apart from faith. But the greater reality is ultimately found in what Christ has accomplished in all for all. And within that sphere, there is a personal response, a faith decision, an acceptance of this Truth … an awakening to Reality. Only the One True City is victorious.

Incarnation and Christology

While much emphasis is rightly given to what Christ achieved on the cross, the average churchman knows little of Christology. Christology deals with the person, nature or being of Christ – not just His actions. It is the “make up” of who He is – specifically as the God-Man in the incarnation. T.F. Torrance often emphasized that the person and work of Christ must be taken together as one unbroken whole. There is no separation between “who He is” in the incarnation and “what He accomplished” on the cross. His incarnation and atoning act must be viewed as one comprehensive concept.

Without a grasp of who Christ is, we are left to ourselves to “go to God.” Constantly striving on a treadmill of religious activity to climb into His life. By looking only at “what He did,” we often run off trying next to figure out what “we must do.” How many merely imitate His saving actions by trying to kill themselves!

Consider not merely the “how” of salvation but the “Who” of salvation. So many are confused over what must be “done” regarding salvation, but miss the significance of Jesus’ identity – in His ontological existence. Ontology is the study of His being.

The union of God and man in the person of Christ is the very heart of the Gospel. Christ in His very being is the permanent union between God and man. His very personhood is salvation. He is God and humanity intertwined. A revelation of His incarnate being knocks our own human action out of the equation when it comes to the salvation business. How? Because He did not simply unite His own personal humanity into God. He wove our humanity into God!

The Hypostatic Union

This union between Jesus’ divinity and His humanity is called the Hypostatic Union from the Greek word hypostasis, meaning “person.” In the incarnation, God became man. He is two natures in one person. This divinity can never be separated from His humanity. For instance some may say, “He did this as a man,” or “He did that as God.” But there is no division.

T.F. Torrance shows that as one whole person, Christ is able to act at once from the side of God as God, and from the side of man as man. He fulfilled both sides of the covenant relationship between God and man.

God had always approached mankind in love. But right from the start, Adam in fear and alienation ran and hid from God in the bushes. Christ stepped into our human skin as the Last Adam, and would ultimately answer God back for us and as us – just as the ram that appeared in the thicket took Isaac’s place on the altar. When God asked Adam, “Where are you?” It was Christ who would ultimately step into our humanity and answer back to God from the bushes on the cross as mankind’s representative. Moses veiled himself that he might minister among the people; so did God veil himself in the human flesh of Jesus Christ. There is no ultimate revelation of God unless He was embodied in humanity. The incarnation is God spoken in human language. Salvation could not have been affected any other way.

The mystical union of the God/man relationship is the very essence of His being. It is also the very heart of reconciliation that culminates in his atoning work on the cross.

Incarnation vs. Greek Dualism

The incarnation is a pretty big deal! Heaven and earth are reconciled in the incarnation. God and man find their union in Jesus Christ. Heaven and earth have been permanently rewired in the person of Christ. And this union somehow cosmically stands outside the limitations of time and space. Long before little baby Jesus was born in a manger in Bethlehem, His death mystically pre-dated the foundation of the world!

In a very real sense, there has never been a separation between Heaven and earth – except in the enmity of our own minds caused by sin (Col. 1:21-22). We have been obsessed with a separation that doesn’t exist from His perspective. A separation He has dealt with once and for all – even before it happened.

Bad theology produces bad worldviews. And such worldviews have caused all sorts of destruction throughout the centuries. The incarnation flies in the face of the Greek dualism that has shaped many of our ideas about theology, science, politics and life itself. Dualism essentially makes a separation between “natural world” and “spiritual world.” Visible and invisible. Mind versus matter. Spirit substance versus material container. This stuff infected the ideas of the early Church from the beginning.

The most dangerous form of dualism is gnosticism which takes this idea to the radical extreme of saying the material world is evil! This is the core concept of religion. Gnostics didn’t even believe Jesus came in the flesh, because His natural body would have been evil. They thought He was just a “spirit being.” So John had to warn us that anyone claiming Christ didn’t come in the flesh is of the antichrist. This vilification of the natural word manifests in a thousand ways in religion today. Money, wine and music are considered evil. Procreate with your wife, but don’t enjoy it, because physical pleasure is wrong! Wear uncomfortable starchy clothes to church – it’s more spiritual.

I won’t deal exclusively with gnosticism here, but just the basic notion of a dualistic separation between spiritual and material world. Consider the theology of the Deists, which came about during the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. You will remember from history class that many of the American founding fathers were into Deism. The whole idea is based on an “outer space” God who is over there. Distant, aloof and detached from the material world. He made the world and set it into motion through mechanical laws. The Deists rejected supernatural events, miracles, incarnation, the Trinity, the inspiration of scripture – any direct interaction between God and the material world. They believed that reason based on material world observation was the only way to determine anything about God’s existence.

This bad theology spilled over into the scientific worldview of men like Isaac Newton. Newton’s understanding of physical laws – which shaped all of science – has the inherently flawed notion of a separation between the physical and spiritual world. Helpful as they were for bringing us out of a magically superstitious and primitive mindset – they unfortunately deny the mystical, ongoing interaction between Creator and creation.

Consider the scientific method: on one side of the equation you’ve got the idea/theory/concept (spiritual world stuff) – and on the other side, you work it out separately in the physical observation of the laboratory (material world stuff). Idea is separate from reality. Invisible separate from visible. Eventually, God was written off by the sciences altogether. It became strictly material world observation. In fact, atheism has become the predominant underlying theory of science!

Quantum Entanglement

Even in the arena of science, we are starting to realize there is really no separation between the visible and invisible. With the advent of quantum physics, the idea of a strictly natural, observable universe run by a set of predictable mechanical laws was blown out of the water. The spirit realm and natural realm are intertwined. Scientists have begun to observe the bending of time and space, worm holes, black holes – quantum mechanical phenomena that show “reality” is unexplainable yet interconnected beyond our wildest imagination.

Natural laws that seemed to be “fixed” don’t appear so anymore. Millions of proofs have shown an unknown but very real relation between particles in the universe. One of the most amazing discoveries is that everything in the entire universe is an entangled system that is interconnected. For instance, take two small particles like electrons that are “entangled” from the same source and observe them separately – no matter how far apart they are (put one in Mozambique and the other on Jupiter) – if you turn one electron, the other electron will turn simultaneously. The space between them is irrelevant – they move in unison faster than the speed of light. They are somehow united. This proven principle shows all our ideas of spatial separation could be mere illusion. Could it also say something of our union with God that is closer than time and space could ever fathom?

The inherent interconnection between God and humanity that exists in the fabric of Jesus’ identity as the God-man is more solid than reality itself and faster than the speed of light. In Him all things hold together (Col. 1:17). Religion – the attempt to set ourselves right with God on our own – is a joke. C. Baxter Kruger notes: We don’t make Him part of our lives; Jesus has already made us part of His. Heaven and earth have been permanently rewired in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being (John 1:3).

He is Everywhere

I could not scratch the surface of what the incarnation means to the cosmos. It is not just that God was bound up in the humanity of Christ. But through the humanity of Christ, the entire created order was bound to God! He permeates all creation. The dividing lines of God as here or there have disappeared. Our dualistic separation of “sacred” and “secular” dimensions of our natural lives are utter nonsense. Kruger writes:

What part of creation has come into being behind the back of Jesus? And what part of creation manages to continue to be without Him? What part of creation is not included in His relationship with His Father and the Holy Spirit? The ultimate dualistic disaster is ripping the Father, Son and Spirit apart, such that we could possibly encounter one without the other. Given the beautiful and utter oneness of the Trinity, the fact that the Son is the Creator and sustainer of all things means that He has a relationship with all creation, and in Him so do the Father and the Holy Spirit. What part of our human experience is therefore ‘secular,’ without Jesus, devoid of the life of the Father, Son and Spirit? Motherhood? Work? Play? Romance? Gardening, golf, teaching, doctoring, governing, loving our neighbors?[34]

Heaven and earth are united in the Son of God. Attempting to bridge this gap on our own (between the life of the Trinity and our human existence) is the definition of religious idiocy. It is impossible to “get the Spirit into people.” Only the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Son of God was capable of achieving such a massive task of uniting humanity with Holy Spirit. Unweaving you from His presence is as impossible as unweaving the Father from the Son. But we must also see that God has woven the “ordinary” business of our natural lives into the fabric of His existence. There is no separation. Kruger says, “It seems to me that we are giving ourselves far too much credit, assuming that ‘ordinary’ things like laughter, fellowship, caring, working, giving ourselves for others, being parents, making music, creating things are simply ‘human’ and have no Jesus or any Holy Spirit in them. Our dualisms have blinded us, and we don’t even know it.”[35]

Consider the following quote from Albert Einstein:

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men.[36]

CHAPTER 4

HELL IS SORT OF REAL

BUT HEAVEN’S DOOR IS ALWAYS OPEN

STOP BLAMING GOD FOR THE BAD PLACE

On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there.

- Revelation 21:25

I do firmly believe in the existence of hell. But not in the way it has been commonly taught. There is no subject as touchy as this one, where people assume you are saying things you are not. I already hear someone asking, “Are you writing off the hell we know and love so dearly?”

Western evangelicalism has drafted a modern version of hell that has less to do with the Word of God and is more akin to the “traditions of men” that Jesus warned us about (Mark 7:8, Matt. 15:3). I am tired of people basing their hell doctrines on make-believe visions, depressed theology and the medieval fiction. It is also sad that the Gospel has been reduced to a choice between Heaven and hell, when in reality the Gospel is about our union with Jesus Christ.

Before I am accused of clipping out any Bible verses on hell – I would simply ask those accusers, “Which of the universal texts do you want to clip out of the Bible?” Because there are lots of them. Whenever scripture uses the word “all” (which it does a lot), we cannot avoid it.

The ‘All’ Verses

I would encourage you to take a good honest look at these “all” verses – in relation to the cosmic scope of Christ’s saving act. Allow me to throw caution to the wind and run the risk of proof texting for a moment.

Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous (Rom. 5:18-19).

It is one thing to believe Jesus died as a man. There’s an untold dimension of grace when you realize He came to die as mankind. The apostle Paul was literally “standing outside Himself in ecstasy” (2 Cor. 5:13), because he had realized this: “that if one died for all, then all were dead” (v. 15).

For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive (1 Cor. 15:21-22).

How many died in Adam? Ummm … all? Well we’re talking about the exact same all here made alive in Jesus Christ. How quick we are to have faith in the one man Adam to bring death to all … yet how fearful is the suggestion that the one man Christ could bring life to those same dead men! Some rabid evangelical may call you a Universalist!

It is now impossible to see insiders or outsiders. All are included in Christ. In Him even the pagans live and move and have their being … they are His “offspring” (Acts 17:28). That’s right … Paul said this to pagans. And again, Peter speaking to unbelieving Gentiles said, “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean” (Acts 10:28). That’s right … he said this to unbelievers. None are to be called impure or unclean. Even unbelievers are included in Christ in a hidden way. Titus 3:2 tells us to “speak evil of no man.”

The Inclusion of Humanity

For starters, we see that “God was in Christ reconciling the cosmos to Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). And in Jesus Christ, all things are already forgiven, reconciled and beloved of God:

and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in Heaven, by making peace through His blood, shed on the cross (Col.1:20).

to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in Heaven and on earth under Christ (Eph. 1:10).

Everyone is included in the cleansing work of Christ. We can no longer use a language of exclusion. The outsiders have become insiders. There is no longer “forgiven versus unforgiven.” Heaven and hell are both full of forgiven sinners. I don’t even like to say “saved versus unsaved” because that word saved means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. About the best we can accurately say is “believer or unbeliever.” Do you realize what He’s done for you? Do you believe the truth about your inclusion?

So insiders and outsiders are both related to God in the same way – through Jesus Christ and his death – and there’s no room for hostility. For Christ came to proclaim the unity of all mankind both to those who were near to God and those who were far away. Through Christ both sides have come into a close relationship with the Father. … The revealed secret is simply that the outsiders are now insiders sharing in the inheritance, the family, and the promises which come from Christ’s message of good news about God (Eph. 2:16-18; 3:4-6, BCJ)

God has clearly reconciled, redeemed and unified all of humanity in Himself. How does this cause you treat the waiter, the cabbie or the parking attendant – knowing we’re all family? We are all included, whether we know it or not. Even the unbeliever is included in Christ in a hidden way.

Christ’s work on your behalf is true, whether you know it or not, feel it or not – even if you don’t believe it! Facts are facts, whether they are believed or not. The believer is a man who, by faith, recognizes what has happened and therefore enjoys his participation in it. But our acceptance or rejection of Christ’s loving sacrifice does not nullify its cosmic scope. No matter how much you reject Christ, He never fails to love and include you. You are free to reject Him – but your rejection does not nullify His inclusion. You cannot dictate His character that way. You cannot make Him cease being Love. At the height of Israel’s rejection of their own Messiah, they reached the point of crucifying Him – and yet this was the very act by which He chose to forgive, include and save them.

God specifically loves sinners, as “God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).

Who is this sacrifice for? Jesus Christ is “the atoning sacrifice … for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). He is the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people (Titus 2:11).

Even in the Old Testament it was foretold:

All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before Him (Psalm 22:27).

Will that literally happen – will all turn to the Lord? We will see. We know that God’s patience toward sinners is unlimited (1 Tim. 1:15-16). And “people are not cast off by the Lord forever” (Lam. 3:31).

In light of what we have seen, consider this verse anew: “Therefore, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus … ” (Rom. 8:1). Who all is included in that? Hmmm … it’s starting to look bigger than we realized.

God’s Desire for All

We see in the scripture that the Lord wants all men to be saved.

The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise, as some understand slowness. Instead He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance (2 Pet. 3:9).

(God) wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth (2 Tim. 2:4).

But is He able to do it? Hmmm …

I know that You can do all things; no purpose of Yours can be thwarted (Job 42:2).

Nothing is too hard for You (Jer. 32:16).

How big is the family? Did you know that everyone is related to Him?

Do we not all have one Father? Did not one God create us? (Mal. 2:10)

… I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in Heaven and on earth derives its name (Eph. 3:14-15).

We know that Philippians 2:10-11 says, “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of things in Heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth. And every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” But Romans 10:13 also says, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

But don’t put those two verses together!

Not Universalism

Once again, let me say this clearly: I am not a Universalist.

But I do have hope.

Earlier I argued that this hope for the salvation of all men is not merely permitted. It is commanded. God has this very same hope (2 Pet. 3:9, 2 Tim. 2:4). I am fully convinced that the church loves the idea of hell more than God does.

I fully embrace the validity of all the judgment passages of scripture, just as I embrace all of the universal texts. I refuse to write off any set of scriptures in the name of theological tidiness – because I could unwittingly throw out some treasures in the process. Is it possible that we could embrace both the judgment texts and the universal texts? Is it possible to get off our intellectual high horses on this topic and face the facts that there is some mystery here? Can we hold all of these seemingly paradoxical texts in a dialectical tension – not trying to write off one side or the other – but living in a place of hope and optimism? Or must we continue to dogmatically claim to know things that the scriptures only hint at?

I am not a Universalist … I just don’t know.

I am not a Universalist … Maybe I’m just an idiot?

I am okay to say I don’t have it all figured out. In saying I have hope, I am not talking about wishful thinking for the salvation of humanity. Hope is different from wishful thinking. Hope scours the scriptures for a solid Biblical basis. And it is this strong hope that I want to make a case for in this chapter.

The fact is that all of humanity is included in Jesus. And yet, apart from faith, that inclusion exists only in a hidden way. To suggest the inclusion of all humanity is not to negate the necessity of faith. But even then we must recognize that faith is a gift and it is not of ourselves. We play no part in the salvation business … it is all grace.

Two Dogmatic Views

You can make a very strong scriptural case for rigid infernalism (people literally burning in literal flames forever). And you can make an equally strong Biblical case for rigid Universalism (everyone definitely making it out of hell or no one going there at all). The early Church fathers often preached the “possibility” but not the “presumption” of the salvation of all men. I believe that hell could very well be an everlasting life sentence; I am just not erasing the verses that suggest the possibility of parole.

Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed to this as a founded hope, one in which we should be careful in making statements regarding certitude. “It is generally known that, in the New Testament, two series of statements run along side by side in such a way that synthesis of both is neither permissible nor achievable: the first series speaks of being lost for all eternity; the second, of God’s will, and ability, to save all men.”[37]

Many people teach this subject from only one side of the coin, and often in a knee-jerk, gut-reaction sort of way. They vehemently preach either infernalism or Universalism. Many guys have absolutely no understanding on this issue – yet they attempt to bring understanding to others. I have seen infernalists and Universalists both blinded by rage and unable to engage the whole counsel of scripture. It is hard to bring understanding to others when you are confused yourself. And it is impossible to learn without humility and teachability. Humility means not always bringing our pre-conceived notions to the table of learning. So I want to cover two very seemingly opposite things - a paradox in scripture: the existence of hell alongside a very real universal scope of work accomplished on the cross.

Some people call me religious because I do believe in the existence of hell. Others call me a Universalist because I do believe in a universal atonement (note that there is a massive difference between Universalism and believing in a universal atonement). But the real issue at stake is the way we have maligned the loving nature of God.

Hell is Locked From the Inside

One thing I will not do is to blame God for hell. As C.S. Lewis said, “The doors of hell are locked on the inside.”[38] If you are there, it’s because you want to be. But the doors of Heaven are always open day and night (Rev. 21:25).

Lewis says the damned are in a sense “successful rebels to the end,” because hell is their own willful determination to live a selfish, independent existence apart from Love. People, not God, choose hell. In the end, you get what you want. And if you don’t think people like hell, you should spend a Sunday in some of the churches I’ve visited.

Scripture seems to give men liberty to pursue their own demand toward self-destruction. You can’t buy grace, but you are free to reject it. Says Lewis in The Great Divorce:

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in hell choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.[39]

Whatever hell is, and to whatever degree it is populated – the question of utmost importance concerns the nature of the Goodness of God. Whether He is mankind’s greatest friend or greatest enemy. I will argue in this chapter that it is God’s very Goodness, not His hatred that actually tortures men in hell.

God is not the enemy of the damned but the Saviour of the damned. Lewis writes again in God in the Dock, “It’s not a question of God ‘sending’ us to hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be hell unless it is nipped in the bud. The matter is serious: let us put ourselves in His hands at once – this very day, this hour.”

Lewis says that hell grows up within a man and eventually takes him over. I am not saying, as critics would argue, that hell is “only a state of mind.” But in a sense it may very well be the morbid delusion of trying to escape a God who is everywhere. It seems to me an irrelevant argument to fight over whether its flames are physical in nature or spiritual only. The fact is, it is a horror we needed saving from regardless of it’s composition. C.S. Lewis writes in The Great Divorce:

Hell is a state of mind - ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.[40]

The Vengeance of God

Hell is not God’s vengeance on sinners. It is the condition of unbelief itself. The very thing He came to save us from. God loves every soul in hell just as fully and completely as He loves every soul in Heaven. Robert Capon has often said: Heaven and hell are both full of forgiven sinners. It’s just that those in hell refuse to accept their already given gift of acceptance.

Vengeance is not wreaked on God’s children, but on sin itself – because of what it does to destroy mankind. His “wrath remains on them” who refuse to accept that wrath has already been removed (John 3:36). Any Biblical phrase regarding God’s “vengeance” can ultimately be interpreted no other way than the sowing and reaping men bring upon themselves by rejecting the mercy already given on the cross. Rejecting the only package Love comes in. He doesn’t pull back that mercy. The mercy itself haunts them. To own a curse that has been annihilated is insanity – and that, my friend, is hell. You see it everyday. Hell is no more than an extension of what we already see in this temporal world – on our streets and in our churches. God has fully dealt with the sin issue on the cross. Yet some refuse to accept His already given solution – demanding to hold onto a penalty that has already been absolved from His perspective.

The Rigged Trial

God is a Judge whose whole shtick is non-judgment. Look no further than Jesus’ dealings with the adulteress to see this in action. Jesus said in John 5:22, “The Father judges no one, but has given over all judgment to the Son.”

So who is the Judge? The Son … Jesus.

Then Jesus turns right around in the same book in John 12:47 and says, “I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.” Put those two verses together … do you see a scandalous, behind-the-scenes conspiracy here?

“This Son, strangely, does not judge, but rather saves. Not only in this verse, therefore, but throughout the Gospel of John, there lurks the image of the rigged trial, of a judgment at which the judge is shamelessly in cahoots with the guilty world and utterly determined to acquit it no matter what,” writes Capon.[41]

Capon explains the formula this way: At the evening of time, when everyone bellies up to the court bench, we will see that He is a Judge who is handing out the same thing to everybody: non-judgment. He is giving us what we don’t deserve. Now instead of taking the non-judgment (which you don’t deserve), let’s say instead you demand to get what you do deserve … well there is no stronger imagery than hellfire and brimstone for that kind of stupidity.

The wrath of the Lamb is nothing more than Him honoring your own chaotic demand to self-destruct. Men demanding to live within the confines of a legal universe – refusing grace – demanding to pay accounts that have been settled. You can refuse grace, but you can never nullify it.

Mercy triumphs over judgment – but it doesn’t skirt it. The wrath of the Lamb is not that God is personally peeved at people. It is about wiping out a sinful identity that justly demands to be destroyed, and that He did destroy in His own death.

“All that the world has to do to escape judgment is believe – for the simple reason that, by the gracious work of Jesus, it has in fact already escaped it. It need do nothing to earn that escape, and it certainly need not compile questionable lists of good works to prove that it deserves to escape. It need not negotiate with God, or be afraid of God, or try conning God into being lenient. It has only to believe that God in Jesus has settled all His problems of sin and to laugh loud and long at how graciously easy the whole business always was. But for those who do not believe … they have been judged and condemned already by the very fact of their refusal to believe in the non-judgment already pronounced,” says Capon.[42]

Theologizing aside for a moment – one of my favorite mystics of the Church, Dame Julian of Norwich, beautifully explains this concept in the simplest of ways that she understood in her own intimate interactions with the Lord:

I saw no wrath except on man’s part, and that He forgives in us. … which failure is not in God but it is on our part — for we, because of sin and miserableness, have in us a wrath and a continuing opposition to peace and to love.[43]

For this was shown: that our life is all based and rooted in love, and without love we cannot live. And therefore to the soul it is the most impossible thing that can be that God would be angry, for wrath and friendship are two opposites. … I saw no kind of wrath in God, neither for a short time nor for a long.[44]

C. Baxter Kruger points out that it is our own wrath, not God’s, which is the problem. It was our wrath that the crucified the Lord – not His. Jesus did not bear the Father’s wrath on the cross. He bore ours.

Stop Blaming God

What I will not do, on the subject of hell, is make God to be the ultimate and greatest enemy of mankind. And I will not make hell bigger than eternal grace.

One may argue that God in His sovereignty technically “sends people” to hell – and scripture may even occasionally word it that way. But the greater truth is this: He reluctantly accedes their own demand for self-condemnation. He came to save the world, not condemn it – the world stood condemned already (John 3:18). There is grace even in this. He does not cease to be Goodness in allowing men to have their own way. He allows them only to taste – long as they will – the futili-ty of swimming against that Goodness.

It never entered the heart or imagination of God to burn His own children. Concerning those who idolatrously burned their own children to Molech, the Lord said that burning their children is “something I did not command, nor did it enter My mind” (Jer. 7:31).

The Triune God is pure Love. You are free to reject Him all you want. But you can’t make Him stop including you. You can’t turn Him into a bad guy by rejecting Him. You can’t own Him that way – you can’t forcibly control Him and stop Him from being Love. At the height of their rebellious rejection, the Jews and Gentiles crucified their Saviour – and this was the very act He used to include every last one of them.

There is never an ultimate rejection on God’s part. Such a thing never even entered into His mind. Even His discipline that we perceive as “rejection” is always for the goal of bringing correction and growth in our lives. Lamentations 3:31-33 tells us:

For the Lord will not reject forever. Although He causes grief, He will have compassion according to the abundance of His steadfast love, for He does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone.

Is it possible that our concept of a hell-mongering deity is the chief underlying idol of our churches today? Is our Western version of “Christianity” more akin to Molech worship with a fish on the bumper? The late Brennan Manning highlights this twisted idolatry:

In my own life, honoring the First Commandment, “I am Yahweh your God: you shall have no gods except me,” has meant repudiating the god of fear and wrath handed on to me by preachers, teachers, and church authorities in my youth, repudiating the strange god who sees all non-Christians as good-for-nothings, who consigns all heathens to hell, who has given any one denomination a bonded franchise for salvation, who rubs his hands together with malicious glee and sends a Catholic to hell because he ate a hot dog on Friday, April 27, 1949. It has meant repudiating the strange god who flinches at gracing certain other churches with his presence; who despairs a beleaguered couple who practice birth control; who forbids a divorcee the Eucharist; who ordains that some of his creatures (whether for race or creed or some other reason) shall be denied equality opportunity for employment or housing; who tells married Catholic priests they are excommunicated and mature women that in America they can be vice president of the country, but in the church they must sit down, submit, and shut up.[45]

What I am Not Saying

Before I go further, I don’t want a snowball’s chance in hell of you misunderstanding me here. It’s important for me to communicate what I am not saying.

I am not saying “all roads lead to Rome.” Jesus Christ is the only Door. No one sees the Father except by Him. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Nor am I saying there is no hell. I am not suggesting that what you believe or how you live is unimportant.

I am also not saying that repentance is unimportant. But my repentance did not save me. Repentance is not the price tag for salvation; it is a first fruit of salvation.

I also am not preaching ultimate reconciliation – a future point at which God does something to pull all men out of hell. I’m not looking to a future reconciliation of all men. I believe it already happened 2000 years ago. The issue is – will people accept it? Often Universalists are waiting for God to “do something else” to affect the salvation of all. But He’s already done it in Jesus. The only question that remains is whether all of mankind will stubbornly resist reality?

As important as faith is, we must realize that our own faith does not save us. It was the faithfulness of Jesus Christ that saved us. All men are home free whether they know it or not. God is not waiting for me to conjure up enough trust to “save myself” at some point. The fact is I am already included. My willpower doesn’t pull off salvation. My willpower is only capable of stupidly resisting a salvation that is already mine thanks to Jesus.

I am also not writing off the fear of God. There may be an initial fear and trembling when we first realize the futility of rejecting Him. But it is ultimately the kindness of God that leads men to repentance. Fear may be the “beginning of wisdom,” but it is not the end of wisdom. That place is reserved for love. We must take the final word given us in scripture regarding fear. “There is no fear in love. Perfect love casts out all fear …” (1 John 4:18). The fear of God is one of the most highly misunderstood principles on planet earth. We fear God not because He is bad, evil, malicious or untouchable. We fear Him because He is a billion volts of beauty, gladness, happiness and sweetness – and we are mere two-volt fuses! We can’t handle the goodness!

I alluded to the concept that God does not simply love as an action. If so, then perhaps He would also hate as an action. God does not love. God is Love. All He is capable of is love. I will say it again: even His wrath is merely a hot extension of His love. Wrath is not one dark side of His schizophrenic personality. It is a hot fury against the sinfulness that corrupts and destroys His children. If you stubbornly insist on owning and identifying with that corruption, you will feel the heat. But even His wrath is positively for you … it has never been against you. His wrath is not about a navel-gazing, narcissistic need to defend His own holiness. Holiness is displayed in His servanthood and His willingness to give Himself and love the unlovely. God is not sometimes loving. He does temporarily love. He does not conditionally love. He is Love.

The Inescapable Love of God

Now I will tell you what hell is not. Contrary to a few centuries of demonic doctrines, hell is not separation from God. This is impossible because all of humanity is woven into the humanity of Jesus. Running from God is as impossibly insane as running from yourself.

David said, “Where can I run from Your presence? If I make my bed in hell You are there” (Psalm 139:8). Where you gonna run from a God Who is everywhere? He takes up all the space! Sin separated you from God. It didn’t separate God from you. This is more than semantics – this is a pretty big deal. Sin caused you to withdraw, run and become alienated from God in your own mind (Col. 1:21). It brought the delusion that you could find a spot – a bush to hide under where God didn’t exist. It is an attempt to run from the inescapable that causes men to say “Let the rocks cover us up! Let the mountains fall on us!” (Rev. 6:16, Luke 23:30)

His love is inescapable. But it is His love itself that torments those who are in hell.

The Orthodox Church – comprised of millions of believers – have for centuries believed that our concepts of “Heaven and hell” are really the attempt of human language to describe two sides of what it’s like to be in the presence of God. Ultimately, they say, we all go to the same place – into His presence. Whether or not we like that has to do faith/trust/acceptance.

His love is inescapable. But it’s His love itself that torments those in hell. C.S. Lewis says the flames of Heaven and hell are both set ablaze by the fire of God’s love.

No Separation From God

What if some perceive God’s fiery presence as pure bliss, but others perceive it as a fire of torment? Daniel saw a river of fire coming out of the throne. The psalmists, on the other hand, saw a river of pleasure. Our God is a consuming fire. Either you love Him or you will scorn Him. But you can’t hide from Him. There is no place you can escape His presence. As a matter of fact, we see in Revelation that the damned are tormented in the presence of the Jesus Christ and His holy angels!

The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of His indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name (Rev. 14:10-11).

Are these guys being roasted because the Lamb enjoys the entertainment? Is this some morbid sport – to watch the heathen burn – as some primitive religious minds have imagined? No! Why are they tormented? Because they are still worshipping the beast. It is self-inflicted. They still stubbornly refuse to get with the program of enjoying the party. But it still happens in His presence.

The primary idea that the damned are shut out from the presence of God likely stems from a mistranslation of second Thessalonians 1:9, in which the King James says they “shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power.” Many newer translations incorrectly change this to say they are “shut out” from the presence of the Lord. This is where we get the idea of separation – that the destruction shuts us out from God.

The Greek word “from” (apo) refers to destruction “exuding from” His presence, not driving us away from His presence. King James had it right. His loving presence is the source of destruction for those who attempt to swim against it. Confusion over apo arises because sometimes it means “away from.” But more often it simply means “from” such as “Grace to you and peace from (apo) God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 1:2). Note that this usage is found a mere seven verses before the one in question (2 Thess. 1:19).

Sure those flames of love may cause the impenitent sinner to run … but there is no place to go. There is never an implication of separation from God in the Greek text. In fact, just the opposite concept is found – that God is unavoidable.

The point here is not to reduce hell merely to a “state of mind.” But even if it were in a sense a state of mind that in no way denotes that it doesn’t exist as a very real dimension for those bound in it.

God is Hell

What if hell is not merely a geographical place as Westerners have imagined, but rather two drastically opposite perspectives of the presence of God Himself?

Love or wrath, pain or pleasure, bliss or torment. To some it’s a party with smiling faces. For others they only see a room full of cannibals ready to eat you! The bottom line is this – it depends on the eyes of faith. Trust. Metanoia – a change of mind. Not that faith is merely a state of mind either – but a literal, regenerative faith of the heart (which is still a gift being rejected by th reprobate).

God is not schizophrenic. But our two-sided human vision of Him is a theme resounding throughout scripture. Consider this passage from Exodus:

… and the glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai. For six days the cloud covered the mountain, and on the seventh day the Lord called to Moses from within the cloud. To the Israelites the glory of the Lord looked like a consuming fire on top of the mountain. Then Moses entered the cloud as he went on up the mountain. And he stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights (Exod. 24:16-18, NIV).

Notice that the Israelites perceived a terrible fire. But to Moses, he saw it as a big glory cloud – he walked right into the blissful presence of God! Consider the principle of “dwelling with a consuming fire” found in Isaiah 33. Who can dwell in that fire? The righteous!

Consider the following statement from the Orthodox Church, which explains their point of view on this matter:

The general teaching of the holy Fathers of the Church is that Paradise and hell do not exist from God’s point of view, but from man’s. It is true that Paradise and hell exist as two ways of life, but it is not God who created them. In the patristic tradition it is clear that there are not two ways, but God Himself is Paradise for the saints and God Himself is hell for the sinners.

This is inseparably linked with the teaching of the Fathers about reconciliation and man’s enmity towards God. Nowhere in holy Scripture does it appear that God is reconciled with men, but that Christ reconciles man to God. Moreover it appears in the whole patristic Tradition that God is never opposed to man, but man opposes himself to God by having no communion and participation with Him. Thus man makes God his enemy and God does not make man His enemy. Through the sin which he commits, man sees God in an angry and hostile way.[46]

Many of the early Church fathers (Isaac the Syrian, Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen) and Eastern Church fathers like Gregory Palamas taught this exact view of hell. Writes modern Byzantine Catholic theologian Ric Ballard:

God as understood as an experience of hell to those who reject Him makes the idea of hell a total action of mercy and love. I have even heard it described by those in our Eastern tradition as a place for those who cannot be healed, similar to our mental homes. Such an existence is not one that God forces them into for eternity but is the result of their own self-deception and their continual rejection of Him. At no point does He reject them rather we find them eternally rejecting Him.[47]

And the Eastern Church does not hold this view exclusively. Many in the West also acknowledge there is no place where God is not – that His love is for all human beings, sinners included. Church father Gregory Nazianzen says, “God Himself is Paradise and punishment for man, since each tastes God’s energies according to the condition of his soul.”[48] This statement rings true, though we must remember that the “condition of the soul” is not improved by a lifelong work of purging. It is solely dependent upon recognizing our gift of perfection by faith.

Pleasure or Torment

Hell is an attempted self-exclusion from this communion with His universal love.

“The power of love works in two ways: it torments sinners, even as happens here when a friend suffers from a friend; but it becomes a source of joy for those who have observed its duties,” wrote 7th century theologian Isaac the Syrian. “As for me I say that those who are tormented in hell are tormented by the invasion of love. What is there more bitter and violent than the pains of love? Those who feel they have sinned against love bear in themselves a damnation much heavier than the most dreaded punishments. The suffering with which sinning against love afflicts the heart is more keenly felt than any other torment. It is absurd to assume that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is offered impartially. But by its very power it acts in two ways. It torments sinners, as happens here on earth when we are tormented by the presence of a friend to whom we have been unfaithful. And it gives joy to those who have been faithful. … That is what the torment of hell is in my opinion: remorse. But love inebriates the souls of the sons and daughters of Heaven by its delectability.”[49]

Hell could be described as a violent attempt to separate yourself from an inseparability with God. This notion of His very presence being the source of either pleasure or torment is also echoed in the West in Christian mystic Thomas Merton:

Our God also is a consuming fire. And if we, by love, become transformed into Him and burn as He burns, His fire will be our everlasting joy. But if we refuse His love and remain in the coldness of sin and opposition to Him and to other men then will His fire (by our own choice rather than His) become our everlasting enemy, and Love, instead of being our joy, will become our torment and our destruction.[50]

Modern theological teacher Norman Grubb explains it in a similar way:

But the wrath of God is only manifest in those who have the wrong relationship to Him. It is not Him as He is, who is all love. But it is what He must appear to be to those who run counter to the law of His being. The wrath operates in them, not in Him. If I have a right relationship to an electric switch and turn it on, as I should do, I get a pleasant light. If I defy any warnings and stick my finger in the apparatus, I get a nasty shock. The shock is what I feel within myself through my unlawful contact.[51]

This view of hell has an arguably stronger historical grounding than pop American evangelicalism. It is also rooted in a proper understanding of God’s nature and a healthier concept of wrath.

Hope not Dogmatism

I have a strong hope for the salvation of all men. In fact, their salvation is already objectively secured in the finished work of Christ. Whether they subjectively realize it, receive it or accept it is the matter in question. I do not think that our hope should turn to dogmatism in this area. I believe the most Biblical model is to stay in what writer Brad Jerzak calls the humility of hope.

Why do I say humility?

We are so fearful of mystery and so prone to peddle linear, logical answers to questions beyond us – when in actuality we are rarely even asking the right questions!

“If it is objected that Mystery is a dumb answer to the world’s questions, the objection is sustained. On two grounds: Yes, it’s a dumb answer, because all the world ever does is ask dumb questions – like, How can it get home? when it’s already there; and, How can it find favor? when it’s already got it. And yes, it’s a dumb answer, because it’s literally dumb: sheep-before-her-shearers, silent-before-Pilate, still-as-the-grave, plain, unanswering, speechless, ask-me-no-questions-and-I’ll-give-you-no-pious-pap, dumb,” writes Capon. “But it is the answer!”[52]

Just like Calvinism and Arminianism, Universalism as a theological model ultimately relies on human logic to resolve mystery. It says that everyone will definitely, automatically, eventually make it out of hell with utmost certainty – if hell even exists at all. It is dogmatic in areas where scripture is fluid and open ended.

I think it betrays humility to dogmatically insist we know exactly what happens to every individual after death. One can say, “I have gone beyond mere hope … I know what will happen.” But it is not your faith you are relying upon here; it is your reason.

Thoughts on Universalism

Another unfortunate tendency among many dogmatic Universalists is to revolve their entire focus, ministry and belief system around the hell issue. Hell, rather than being a side doctrine, becomes the “main thing.” They are often more obsessed with hell than legalists! Sure, I will occasionally teach on hell (I am doing so here), but at the end of the day, we must leave hell where it belongs – it is a doctrine, not theology. Theology is the study of God. But doctrines are beliefs about subsidiary Biblical topics (water baptism, communion, etc.) and are open to reformatting in light of clearer Biblical understanding. They must be held loosely as servants of scripture, not its master.

Evangelicals usually throw around Universalism as a dirty word, but most don’t fully understand what it means. Labels aren’t always helpful, but I will take a moment to explain that there are two basic types – Christian and non-Christian Universalists.

The non-Christian variety believes everyone makes it into Heaven, paradise, nirvana or whatever – no matter what you believe. Jesus is perhaps one of many ways, but not exclusive Savior. This mode of belief is obviously wrong to anyone who holds the scriptures to be true.

The other variety of Universalism is Christian Universalism. They attest that Jesus is the only exclusive Savior. But they also believe that everyone will definitively, beyond a doubt receive Him as Lord, in this life or the next. Although this may get me into trouble, I must say that I no longer vilify Christian Universalists as the demonic heretics the way I did in years past. There are things we can learn from every theological stream, even though every theological stream may have some errors. I have read some amazing books by Christian Universalists (such as The Inescapable Love of God by Thomas Talbott).

The undeniable fact is that there is a very real, universal aspect to this Gospel – found hugely in Paul’s writings. We must recover the catholicity of the message. The sectarian, pharisaical mind is always attempting to put up walls of separation and lines of demarcation between the believer and the unbeliever. But the Gospel is the very wrecking ball sent to tear those barriers down.

“So are you saying everyone is saved?” is a dumb question. Everyone is “saved” as sure as everyone is human, but they don’t all act like it. They’re not all experiencing the truth of the human identity as it exists in Jesus. That word “saved” means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Saved or unsaved? Spirit-filled or not? Insider or outsider? Heaven or hell? All I see is one sacrifice on behalf of humanity. I don’t see lines of division anymore. Everyone is objectively included, but everyone hasn’t subjectively realized it. The Pharisee always likes to make himself feel better by comparing himself to the unclean. Our first knee-jerk reaction to scandalous, inclusive grace is to draw off boundaries between ourselves and the others. But the focus of the Gospel is always inclusion, not exclusion. Never is it about separation, but about the One New Man.

I am only a Universalist in that I am a hopeful one. I make no assertive predictions about the duration or population of hell. But I refuse to make hell bigger than eternal grace. Rather than Universalism, I align with the Trinitarian stream on these issues. Not because it’s another easily labeled theological package, but because it rejects the packaging. I am allowed to embrace mystery and hold the tension of scripture intact without cheapening it with presumption and pat answers. The Trinitarian view sees everything through a lens of God’s inclusive love. I see the Universalist error in writing off hell altogether as somewhat understandable. It is a reaction against the twisted, maniacal versions of “god” that have pervaded the depraved doctrines of Mother Church for centuries. We must not write off hell, but rather see it as man’s own folly – not God’s invention.

The beauty of mystery is not that it leaves us in confusion, but that it draws us ultimately into deeper revelation. There is a frustration born of mystery that must not be aborted by pat answers – the frustration is our friend, an invitation to leave the shallow waters of incomplete understanding. Frustration is not our final bedfellow. Every shroud is ultimately, in some way removed from our eyes in the torn veil of Jesus’ own body. He is the Revealer and the Revealed. But our exploration of Him and what He has done need not be dumbed down to cliché answers. We will always yearn to know and explore more and more of what He has accomplished. “Thoʼ there is much to be puzzled about, there is nothing to be worried about,” said C.S. Lewis.[53] Every question is summed up in the basic revealed truth that God is Love – the height and depth of which we will ever explore.

Parable of the Prodigal

Some of the best visual imagery of the Father’s heart on the subject of hell is found in the story of the prodigal son in Luke 16. Allow me to borrow heavily from Robert Capon’s rendition of the tale.[54] We should really call this story the parable of the Good Father or better yet, the parable of the Fatted Calf (after all, what’s your favorite part of the story? The party). Jesus is the Fatted Calf of the Father.

This parable is often taught as a story of repentance. If it is a repentance tale, then it is a crummy one. The prodigal was pretty much thinking of his own needs the whole time – he only decided to come home because he was tired of eating pig food.

While the prodigal was walking home, he was rehearsing his repentance speech to his father: “I was a bad boy.” True. “I wasted all your cash on cocaine and hookers.” True. And his third point, “If you just take me back into your house, I’ll be like one of your servants.”

Meanwhile, the father is sitting on the rocking chair on the front porch, when in the distance he sees the son walking home. The father jumps up and bolts toward his son. Before the son ever gets the confession speech out of his mouth, the father embraces him, smothering him with affection. This son of mine who was dead is now alive!

Confession doesn’t save you. It was only after the father ran and embraced him that the confession begins to spill out. Confession “is only to bring (sins) to the light of Jesus and to see clearly that they were forgiven all along,” says Capon. “It is only … to force ourselves to rejoice over our sin because it has become the occasion of His grace. … The only thing we do in confession is drag ourselves back out of the dark that never was.”[55]

As the confession rolls, notice the son only gets the first two points out of his mouth. “I wasted your cash.” True. “I was a bad boy.” True. But notice that he never mentions the third point. Right here in the father’s embrace, he realizes that slavery is never going to fly in his dad’s house. The father seems almost to dismiss the confession altogether. He is only obsessed with joy over his resurrected son.

Now it’s party time. Bring out the ring; bring out a robe! Kill the fatted calf! Suddenly the place is alive with celebration – racks of rib, DJ on the turntables, goblets of wine. A feast is prepared. Music. Laughter. Dance.

But you may remember there is one more character in this story. Let us not forget the elder brother. With the cacophony of eating and singing and merriment all around, the elder brother, who was hard at work out in the field, refuses to even go into the party. Fuming with anger, he won’t even speak to the prodigal or call him brother. He calls him “that son of yours, who wasted all your money.”

You had better believe there is a place called outside the party. There is a place called outside the gates. There stands the elder brother. Sulking at the full acceptance of the prodigal in his own self-imposed hell. Angry that his brother gets a party while “all these years I’ve been slaving away for you.”

There’s something at the beginning of this story that most folks don’t notice. The prodigal was not the only one who wanted their dad to drop dead and give him his inheritance early. Both boys got their inheritance early – it was split between them (Luke 16:12). The prodigal got the cash, which he snorted away in wild living. But the elder brother got the farm. The whole farm was already his … hence the dad says, “You could have had a barbecue with your friends anytime you wanted! It’s already yours.” Even the rocking chair the father was sitting on at the beginning of the story already belonged to the elder brother. An inheritance has been given to every lost soul in prison, but they refuse to enjoy and participate in it. The doors of the party are wide open all the time.

Do you see where the father is in this story? He is standing outside the party pleading with the elder brother to come in. This is a picture of Christ preaching to the damned.

He reasons with the son saying, “Look, here’s your problem. You’re an accountant – you’re keeping line item records of rights and wrongs on your brother, but I don’t keep a record of rights and wrongs. You’ve gotta let it go.” Nothing in this kingdom is based on our performance.

How does this story end? Does it have a good ending or a bad ending? In fact, it has no ending. Freeze frame! Racks of beef, goblets of wine, DJ spinning the vinyl – and elder brother standing outside. No ending. It has been frozen here for 2,000 years.

There is an outside of the party. You could conceivably sit in the corner sulking away with your paper Burger King crown – the stubborn king of your own self-willed existence. But it is a non-existence. A hell of your own making.

The elder brother could conceivably stay out here in his own self-imposed hell forever. We don’t really know what happens. But where do you see the father in this story? You never see him go back inside without the son.

Postmortem Salvation?

Am I saying there is hope for men to receive Christ even after they die? We have to deal with the scriptural fact that the conditions of the afterlife may not be as cut and dry as modern evangelicalism has told us. To even suggest this idea is evangelical suicide, but I committed that long ago. I am well beyond caring what the EFCA thinks about me.

The Father’s whole goal was to bring humanity into Himself. At no point does the Son give up on mankind. At no point do we ever see the Shepherd cease from searching after the lost sheep. Because of evangelical persecution, folks shrink from this idea that it is possible for people to accept Jesus after they die. But if we are honest with ourselves, we don’t know much about it. There is no explicit verse that says you have to confess Jesus “before you physically die.” I know for a fact that everyone has a fair shot. Do you think someone who died in Botswana in 1534 who never heard the Gospel is automatically going to hell? If so, chances are you have been severely psychologically abused by religion and may need to see a therapist.

In some way, somehow – perhaps outside of time and space – Colossians 1:23 says, “This is the Gospel that you heard and has been proclaimed to every creature under Heaven.” Now when does that happen? Most of the Church hasn’t even heard the Gospel! They have heard morality club sermons and legalistic systems of climbing the wall of a hamster wheel. This verse tells me that somehow, in some way, everybody is going to have a chance to see Him as He really is – hear the true Gospel.

Just because you learned something in the Wednesday night fellowship hall doesn’t make it right or even halfway Biblical. There is a lot of mystery, subtlety and nuance to the scriptures on these issues – but not confusion. This concept may seem “out of the box” but it is not heretical. It is easy to demonize fellow believers and attack them as heretics. But everybody has a little heresy in their thinking somewhere. Humility helps us to see that maybe we don’t really own the orthodox, fundamental high ground in scripture where we thought things were simply black and white.

I don’t presume to have definite answers here … But there seem to be some elements we’ve neglected in our Western, Greek-minded linear approach to scripture. For instance, what do we do with verses where Peter talks about Christ preaching to the disobedient dead men in prison?

For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit; in which also He went and made proclamation [literally preached] to the spirits now in prison, who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water (1 Pet. 3:18-20).

I do know this: There is nowhere you can go where Christ is not preached. Some may argue that Peter is simply referring to angelic spirits, as if Jesus went down to hell just to boast to the devil at His accomplishments. But Peter continues in the next chapter:

For the Gospel has for this purpose been preached even to those who are dead, that though they are judged in the flesh as men, they may live in the spirit according to the will of God (1 Pet. 4:6).

This is clearly talking about dead men. Judged in the flesh that they might live in the spirit? Does that suggest hope beyond this mortal world? Does it put a less genocidal spin on the Noah’s Ark story? That perhaps the flood wasn’t God’s final word for those folks?

We can’t assume this applies only to Noah’s day or to people who have died in the past. What if Noah was just an illustration here? We are talking about a realm outside of time and space that is past, present and future. All souls who enter the grave will hear.

Most of the early Church fathers believe Jesus descended to the grave not to suffer further, but to release souls from prison. It seems clear that the dead are being evangelized, and Jesus in not just down in the basement to do some gloating in front of Lucifer. Early Christianity has a number of texts showing a prevalent belief in posthumous salvation. I would not even begin to guess at what is meant by being “baptized for the dead.”

Otherwise, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why then are they baptized for them? (1 Cor. 15:29, NASB)

All I know is that no one is vicariously repenting for someone else except Jesus. I can’t even trust in my own repentance! Christ was baptized and repented on my behalf. In fact, most folks miss the point of baptism. Baptism is not a symbol of your faith or repentance. Baptism is an open sign of Christ dying your death – a recognition of His baptism in blood for your repentance. Baptism points to His death … it is not a sign of my own faith. Maybe the early Church was symbolically showing that Christ died even for those loved ones who had passed away before them, who had never even heard the message!

Someone will say, “John, even to even suggest the possibility of receiving Christ after you die will knock the knees out of our evangelism programs.”

We’ve personally seen hundreds of thousands accept the gospel in our own evangelism programs in the nations. I do not evangelize out of fear of hell. I evangelize out of the joy of Jesus Christ. Some have asked, “If we don’t fear hell, why even become a Christian?” So you are a Christian only because you fear hell? Well friend, let me introduce you to Jesus!

I don’t know what opportunities may or may not be available after death – I just know that I am called to hold out the word of life that whoever trusts Him will not perish. You can be motivated by fear of hell. You can take the responsibility of souls on your own shoulders. But I’ve thrown my trust onto the one who carries the whole government on His shoulders and has the whole wide world in His hands … now I am driven by the pleasure of awakening from darkness.

This is not to say we shirk the Great Commission or flee the mission field like Jonah. Just the opposite, we run headlong into the harvest fields with a higher perspective. I am ultimately not assisting the Lord in procuring humanity’s acceptance – rather I am joyfully proclaiming an inclusion they never knew existed. I am preaching the “Word of reconciliation,” not a potential reconciliation.

What is ‘Hell?’

So many of our ideas about hell stem from allegorical language, parables and apocalyptic imagery. It is not always easy to grasp a literalistic interpretation from dreams, visions and symbolic language. If you are a strict literalist, then you believe Jesus Christ is literally a physical lion, literally a tangible fuzzy lamb and literally a rock. Did He have multiple incarnations? Did He come as a chunk of rock and we just missed it?

Sometimes there are metaphors. And hell chatter is chock full of metaphor, like it or not. Writers of scripture were trying to describe something outside of time and space from within the confines of time and space. Rather than give you hard facts on the nature of hell, my goal in this chapter is to encourage you to leave some things in the realm of mystery.

I don’t want to spend time parsing out Greek and Hebrew words for “hell.” I could write chapters on those technicalities, but it has been done before. All I can tell you is that “hell” itself is a very loose word that is not in the Bible. It is a conglomeration of many words, all of which could have multiple meanings. There is sheol (the grave), Tartarus (a holding place for fallen angels used extensively in Greek mythology), hades (the grave), Gehenna (the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem where idolatrous human sacrifices by fire were performed) and the abyss (bottomless pit), not to mention the lake of fire.

Scholars study these words exhaustively but often with their own skeptical predisposition. I am not going to break them all down except to say it’s complicated. We’re not exactly dealing with the medieval story of Dante’s Inferno. Most of our ideas of hell are modern fabrications. But at the same time it’s simple enough to know you don’t want to go any of those places!

I think a wrong tactic by well-meaning Universalist scholars is to water down the intensity of these words to make God seem nicer than we thought. He is already nicer than you think. They will spend extensive time explaining that Gehenna was just a garbage dump outside Jerusalem with rotting corpses whose “worm never dies.” But there is no contextual literary or archaeological evidence of this – just a traditional belief handed down by a certain branch of scholars that say it was a trash heap. Was it a dump? Maybe. But that is just hearsay. No evidence for that. Is it supposed to make me feel better that instead of God throwing me into fire, He’s gonna toss me into a garbage dump forever? The relevant issue is not “what is the nature of hell.” Knowing God’s heart is the only relevant issue.

We don’t want to hear “Trust me or I will burn you.” So we change it to “Trust in me or I will slap you on the hand.” But it’s actually better than all of that. He doesn’t want to burn or even slap anyone. He experienced your holocaust – now He beckons you to trust in that. He came to prevent you from sticking your own hand into the meat grinder. I do believe in the existence of something horrid if we refuse to trust Mr. Love – if we refuse to wake up to reality. Softening the verbiage seems to be a diversion from the main point. Jesus was clear that there are intense, self-inflicted consequences to refusing Mr. Grace. Universalists point out that the word “hell” has pagan origins as if that’s an excuse to write it off altogether. The Anglo-Saxon word “God” has pagan origins as well!

I don’t want to water down the warnings of hell. At the same time, however, we cannot water down the ethics of God by giving “judgment” anything less than a redemptive aspect. What if the fires of hell are actually love in its hottest eternal severity directing you to grace?

Everlasting Torment

It is not that I am divided between Universalism and infernalism, whilst playing both sides against the middle. It is more that I am a hopeful agnostic. I see both sides of the scriptures on the issue and I am okay not knowing all the answers. My confidence rests in that – whatever the future holds – the Answer has me. There is no room for panic or irrational fear. It’s about trust.

While I’m not drawing hard lines, it is worth taking a look at our existing concept of eternal punishment. The Universalist dogma always makes a point to challenge the word “aeon” (eternal) as not really lasting forever but for “an age.” You are free to split hairs over aeon – whether it means forever and ever, for a temporary age, the age to come, etc. For me personally, I think the argument is somewhat futile. A god who sovereignly burns someone for a thousand years in a pit of demonic, hellish molestation is only slightly better than one who does it forever. Whether hell is for a certain time period or not – I am not banking any trust in that notion. The main problem with this reasoning is that hell becomes viewed as a purgatory. A temporary torture chamber to clean you up. Hell doesn’t clean you up. Jesus did. He cleaned you up from hell. He came to plunder hell, not send people there.

For all the dispute over this word, I personally see no definitive Biblical limit to its duration. I think anyone there could feasibly stay as long as they want. Infernalists argue that if hell is not eternal, then neither is our eternal life in Heaven – because the same word “aeon” is used for both. That’s a fair argument.

I will suggest a third alternative, however. What if the emphasis on “eternal” relates to the nature, origin or intensity of the experience, not necessarily the duration?

The Greek usage of the word eternal was used to describe the fire that consumed Sodom and Gomorrah (Jude 1:7). But we know those cities did not burn forever. It is eternal in relation to its origin. It came from the eternal God. In fact, the scriptures say that the fortunes of Sodom and Gomorrah will one day be restored (Ezek. 16:53)!

Also, when Jonah went three days into the belly of the fish – a shadow of Christ entering the tomb, the prophet said, “I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever (olam). But You brought my life up from the pit, O Lord my God” (Jon. 2:6). This eternal experience stood outside of time, but by measurement of time, it lasted three days. However long hell may or may not last, one thing is for certain: God is bigger than forever. The relativity of time is something we must consider from God’s perspective. After all, what Christ accomplished in three days in His saving act was of infinite nature.

Hell as Remediation

Now setting aside the time factor, let’s look at the intrinsic idea of punishment or torment. I have said that hell is not God’s punishment of sinners, but rather the condition of unbelief itself. While I do not see hell as purgative (purging us of sin), what if it does in fact have a redemptive purpose? The law does not clean us up, but it is a great signpost pointing us to our need for grace. This is perhaps my clearest explanation of hell. It exists so that the moment you dip your toe into the lake of fire, you realize the folly of your stubbornness and surrender to the unforced rhythms of grace. In this sense, and in this sense only does hell have a positive benefit.

Respected Bible translator and commentator William Barclay notes that the word kolasis (punishment) was always used in a remedial, not a retributive way. It is about correction, not “I’m gonna get you sucka!” Originally this was not an ethical word at all – it was neither good nor bad. It was actually a horticultural word. It referred to the act of pruning a plant in order to bring about more fruit. Aristotle defines this ancient Greek word kolasis as a corrective word aimed at bettering the offender, while another Greek word timoria indicates the vindictive character of punishment. What if hell is a place that stands eternally as a means of correction for anyone who chooses to swim there?

This could also indicate the eternal destruction of the “old man” – the old sinful nature. The apostle Paul hands someone over to satan for the “destruction of their flesh” (1 Cor. 5:5). Sounds gruesome, but Paul regularly uses the term “flesh” (sarx) not merely for our physical bodies, but the old fleshly, sinful nature. Does that mean satan can cast out satan? No. Satan doesn’t save you. Paul is essentially saying, “Stop trying to help this hard-headed guy. Let him have the full consequence of what he wants. Let him fully face the ramifications of his satanic actions until he gives up.” Even satan is no more than a pawn in God’s ultimate plan for the redemption of humanity. He is not God’s equal and opposite adversary. Now you shouldn’t just go handing folks over to satan. This is an extreme case – Paul did not want this guy causing harm to the local body. But even so, the “handing over” was inspired not by vengeance but correction, “so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.”

Early Church father Clement of Alexandria said it this way, “Even God’s wrath, if so His admonitions can be called, is full of benevolence towards the human race, for whose sake the Word of God became man.”[56]

“God does not wreak vengeance, for vengeance is to return evil for evil, and God punishes only with an eye to the good,” said Clement, “…all things are arranged with a view to the salvation of the universe by the Lord of the universe, both generally and particularly.”[57]

Such a redemptive view of “wrath” was a common theme among many in the early Church. The-odoret of Cyrus said, “For the Lord, the lover of men, torments us only to ensure us that He may put a stop to the course of our iniquity. All these things, He says, I do, and bring in desolation, that I may extinguish men’s madness and rage after idols.”[58]

And again, we read in 4th century Paulinus of Nola that the destruction of unbelievers was ultimately for their cure, echoing Paul in Romans 11, “A common disobedience shut up all, in order that faith might heal the whole; so that all the world may be made God’s servant.”[59]

Let me reemphasize, if there is a corrective element to hell – it is not in a purgatorial sense of beating the sin out of you. It is simply allowing you to face the consequences of refusing the free gift until you relent to the wonder of His goodness. Though God could potentially use it, hell is not God’s intent for anyone. The reason God ordered Gehenna to be desecrated was because people were burning their children this way. Have we turned God into Molech? For too long the Church has turned good news into bad news. Instead of God saving souls from hell, we think God damns souls to hell.

Parables of Judgment

Let us look briefly at a few of the Lord’s own judgment parables. We won’t cover them all, just some of the ones that could appear “non-gracious” on the surface (as if Jesus lost the plot). Without negating their intensity, I want to offer more than the usual, dull hopelessness we’ve seen in them. There is a silver lining of grace even in the harshest judgment narratives.

There is always the very real possibility that Jesus’ admonitions about hell could have been posited in a way that applied to the human condition before the cross and resurrection. This may seem a stretch, as they are apocalyptic in nature. But Paul, who is the chief epistle writer tasked with explaining the Gospel in a post-resurrection world, never mentions hell so much as once. Nevertheless, I would caution against bringing any dogmatic views to the table. We must remember that all the words of Christ are always relevant to the Church throughout all time. How those words apply (before versus after the cross, etc.) is a matter of rightly discerning the texts – and human error is always possible in the field of discernment.

“Before approaching particular [hell] texts, it is necessary to consider the fact that particular words of Jesus can be attributed with a high degree of probability to the pre-Easter Jesus,” points out von Balthasar. “Whereas certain reflections by Paul and John clearly look back upon all that happened to Jesus – to His life, death on the Cross and Resurrection – and, in so doing, consider and formulate this totality from a post-Easter perspective.”[60]

I will hold out that this is a hope. But as Balthasar himself says, “this distinction can be drawn only with caution, and not categorically.” There is no direct indication that the Lord’s hell narratives are to be ignored today in a post-Resurrection world. So in playing “devil’s advocate,” allow me to investigate the parables themselves, rather than flippantly ignore them.

Lazarus and the Rich Man

Because I say that hell is not literal “separation” from God, someone may question the great chasm that exists between the rich man who is in torment and Lazarus who is in Abraham’s bosom in the parable found in Luke 16:19-31. Allow me to update and paraphrase this parable in modern vernacular to help you get the picture. You’ve read it a million times. You’re overly familiar with it. I want to put a different face on it so you’ll see a few details you missed.

You’ve basically got this stockbroker fellow (we’ll call him Archibald) who drives his Maserati into his gated community. Every day he passes a bum on the street named Lazarus, who eats out of the man’s trash bin while dogs lick his festering HIV sores. That’s how life went on earth. Now, fast-forward and you will see the condition of both men after they have died.

When Lazarus dies, he goes to a place called Abraham’s bosom. Sounds like a pretty tender, positive place to be. But Mr. Moneybags, on the other hand, goes to Hades, where he is in torment. For starters, you should keep in mind that this is a parable – Jesus made no bones that this was a literal story, so He had freedom to embellish and paint figurative caricatures. Parables are not literal.

In Luke 16:24, Archibald calls out to Abraham, “Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.”

First of all, he calls Abraham father … and Abraham calls him son. So there is one chasm we have already bridged – the relational gap. You may call Archie a son of satan, but the truth of the matter is that he is a son of God. Whether he’s walking in that is a different story. So what’s holding this banker back from being tapped into Abraham’s Promise. What’s the deal?

First, let me show you another gap that obviously doesn’t exist. Archie and Abe are talking to one another. Archibald may be locked up getting visitation rights in the slammer – maybe there’s a bulletproof plate glass between him and Abraham. But nevertheless, Abe is on the horn talking to him. The communication lines are open. And what’s he talking about? The Gospel.

Mr. Fancy Pants shows quite clearly why he’s here. Has nothing to do with his big stock portfolio or the fine Pinot Noir he liked to drink on earth. Archie’s attitude speaks for itself. He doesn’t even talk to Lazarus directly. He talks to Abraham. He is expecting Abe to send Lazarus out to fetch him some water like an errand boy. He stubbornly refuses to let go of his old life. He’s still in a self-imposed prison. He refuses to acknowledge the truth and see who’s in the Maserati now. He won’t let go of his willful self-centeredness.

Then he wants Lazarus to run out making phone calls from Tel Aviv to Bethesda warning his brothers about hell. He’s still expecting to be served. We see he hasn’t budged. There’s no change, no repentance, no recognition of his own hellish attitude. But these are still just symptoms of an underlying problem. Selfishness alone doesn’t land you in hell or we would all be there.

It is right here in the story that Abraham preaches the Gospel. “Your brothers already have Moses and the prophets,” he says. The law was enough to show all you boys that you need a Savior! “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:31).

This is a present tense situation! You boys still won’t hear the message – none of you are waking up to faith. There’s only one man risen from the dead that they refuse to believe in, and that is Jesus Christ. The only gap between Archibald and the Father’s bosom is Archie’s own continued headstrong determination to be there by refusing faith.

This parable is about refusal to trust in the resurrection. It’s no coincidence that the man in this story is named Lazarus. Everybody was talking about the man Lazarus who Jesus raised from the dead. He was a type of the one to come. Lazarus is a walking sign of resurrection. It’s all symbolic about lack of trust … unbelief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The only separation here is one that is simple to explain. It is Archie’s own refusal to trust the Gospel and cling to a false identity. This man’s riches didn’t land him there … his existence there is a stubborn rejection of reality. Only faith, not human effort, can bridge that chasm (Luke 16:26). It is a faith he continues to stubbornly reject, despite his thirst – he’s still wheeling and dealing. And he won’t be enjoying Abraham’s house in this condition, because there is a solid chasm of “It doesn’t work that way around here.”

The Foolish Virgins

Let’s look at another parable that suggests an eternal “shutting out” from the party. It’s the parable of the five foolish virgins in Matt. 25:1-13.

The Bridegroom was coming. Five virgins were prepared with oil in their lamps to meet Him. Five others were not prepared. When the Bridegroom came at the least expected hour, the unprepared virgins went out in a rush to buy oil, but were refused entry into the party when they returned later. Door shut. Case closed.

Let’s make something clear. The virgins were not denied entry because of their lack of purity. They were chaste like all the others. And they weren’t refused entry because they had not pumped up enough oil – that is for sure. It was actually their last minute, self-effort scramble to work up that oil that got the door slammed in their faces. It was not the brutal intensity of accumulating oil that earned the five wise virgins their entry. If it was so hard to get oil, then how come the foolish ones were able to pull it off that same night? They were not denied entry based on personal morality or lack of oil-gathering good works.

As a matter of fact, the five wise virgins who did make it in were not a stellar example of Christian charity either. They refused to share their oil with the other girls! Morality and works must be taken out of the equation as qualification of entry.

Robert Capon nails the underlying problem. The five foolish virgins refused faith. This story has nothing to do with their actual work of preparation. The problem is that all ten virgins had been invited to the feast. But only half of them trusted the initial invitation enough to actually bother getting ready for it. They all knew He was coming – all of them were “slumbering.” While we are instructed to “watch” for His coming, we can’t deny that even the wise girls were lazy and snoozing like the rest.

It is not the actual preparation that saves us. The problem is that five of them never believed enough to get prepared. The ones who trusted the Gospel invitation were “known” by the Bridegroom. The others were just in a last-minute frenzy to “earn it” when He showed up. What if, rather than scrambling, they had just gone to the party from the start, empty-handed and asked for grace? What if like Elisha’s widow they trusted enough to bring in their empty jars? It’s worth a thought.

The Sheep and the Goats

The final parable I want to cover is the Sheep and the Goats. This is definitely Jesus’ Halloween Haunted House of parables – the scariest of all. And no doubt, it should invoke a measure of consideration. But there is grace hidden even in this one.

Jesus tells of His coming in all His glory in Matthew 25:32-46:

All the nations will be gathered in His presence, and He will separate them from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep at His right hand and the goats at His left. “Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by My Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited Me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You something to drink? When did we see You a stranger and invite You in, or needing clothes and clothe You? When did we see You sick or in prison and go to visit You?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

“Then He will say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave Me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite Me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe Me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help You?’

“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

In this parable, you can’t really say Jesus is moralizing at all. Why? Because nobody consciously did a thing to get themselves in there. Robert Capon in his Parables of Judgment (which I highly recommend that you read) explains it well.

“The kindness of the blessed to the least of the King’s brethren should not be taken as drumsful of industrial-strength good deeds … Jesus shows us in this parable that even those who did relate to Him didn’t know what they were doing,” writes Capon. “Do you finally see? Nobody knows anything. The righteous didn’t know they were in relationship with the King when they ministered to the least of His brethren, any more than the cursed knew they were despising the King when they didn’t so minister. Knowledge is not the basis of anybody’s salvation or damnation. Action-in-dumb-trust is. And the reason for that is that salvation comes only in relationship with the Savior – by a relationship that, from His side, is already an accomplished eternal fact, and therefore needs only to be accepted by faith, not known in any way.”[61]

As for the goats, the question may be posed, “Can a goat become a sheep?” We don’t really know. Aren’t all men “like sheep going astray?” Aren’t all men at some point like Jacob dressed in the unbelieving goatskins of Esau? In doing a word study on Jesus dividing them “one from another,” the key word is allelon. It is also found in two places where Paul says we are members of “one another.” The word suggests delineation within unity. In Romans 12:5 we are “members one of another” (NASB), “individually one of each other members” (INT). And again it is used in Ephesians 4:25 when we are told to lay aside falsehood “for we are members of one another” (NASB), “we are members one of another” (KJV), “because we are of one another members” (INT).

Again – remember that this is a parable (symbolic rather than literal language is used – you are not a sheep, you are a human being). Could the separation of sheep and goats be the separation of individuals from what is false into what is true? That may sound like a stretch … but remember I don’t think Jesus is dealing with literal farm animals here. Like all parables, this is obviously full of symbolism and allegory. This is a very intense seemingly exclusive passage on the surface, but we cannot read it at the ultimate expense of all the inclusive passages.

Another serious consideration is whether Jesus is talking not about “individuals” but about “kingdoms” as He has been doing all the way up through Matthew 24 pointing to Jerusalem’s impending downfall in 70 AD. Some translations say He is dividing “people” one from another. But in that chapter the text does not use the word people – only nations.

Capon makes another good point. He says the King does the least damaging thing He can think of with the cursed. “‘You never did like My parties. Why don’t you just go downstairs to do your sulking?’ To be sure, the language with which He issues that final invitation to get out is severe (everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels, eternal punishment) … hyperbolic or not, is not without a built-in reference to grace,” says Capon. “While such mayhem is indeed a dramatic way of showing how God chooses to throw a party, it is not one bit too dramatic for showing how terribly serious He is about His plans for the eternal season. … This party cost the King His life. He is not about to write it all off as a whim.”

Hope in the Church Fathers

Why do I prefer to stay in the humility of hope? Many of the early Church fathers maintained the “possibility” but not the “presumption” of the salvation of all. While it is modern American evangelical suicide to suggest the hope of a universal salvation, the early Church fathers readily flirted with the notion. What would happen if we lay aside a few of our American pop theology books for a while and actually spent some time reading the Patristics – the early Church fathers? These are men who were separated in some cases only by decades from the first apostles, taught by men with direct lineage to them.

“All men are Christ’s, some by knowing Him, the rest not yet,” said Clement of Alexandria (150-213 AD). “He is the Savior, not of some and of the rest not. … For how is He Lord and Savior if He is not Lord and Savior of all? He is certainly the Savior of those who believe … while of those who do not believe, He is Lord, until having become able to confess Him, they obtain through Him the benefit appropriate and suitable (to their case). … He by the Father’s will directs the salvation of all … for all things have been ordered, both universally and in part, by the Lord of the universe; with a view to the salvation of the universe. … But needful correction, by the goodness of the great overseeing Judge (by means of) the attendant angels, through various prior judgments, through the final judgment, compels even those who have become still more callous to repent.”[62]

Elsewhere, Clement writes, “The universe has become ceaseless light. … The Sun of righteousness who traverses the universe, pervades all humanity alike. … Giving us the inalienable inheritance of the Father. … Writing His laws on our hearts. What laws are those He thus writes? That all shall know God from small to great. … It is always the purpose of God to save the human flock.”[63]

Like many other of the early Church fathers, Clement recognized a catholicity to the atonement that modern teachers fear to discuss. He writes, “The Lord is an atonement, ʻnot for our sins only,ʼ that is, of the faithful, ʻbut also for the whole world.ʼ Therefore He indeed saves all universally; but some as converted by punishments, others by voluntary submission, thus obtaining the honour and dignity, that ʻto Him every knee shall bow, of things in Heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth,ʼ that is angels, and men, and souls who departed this life before His coming into the world.”[64]

Some Church fathers went so far as to suggest Christ ultimately redeemed even fallen angels. I don’t personally feel we should to draw conclusions either way on such an elusive subject. But the fact remains that many of the fathers had strong universal leanings. Origen (185-254 AD) is such a one. I will quote but one Origin passage, where he writes, “Seeing, then, that such is the end, when all enemies will be subdued to Christ, when death – the last enemy shall be destroyed, and when the kingdom shall be delivered up by Christ (to whom all things are subject) to God the Father; let us, I say, from such an end as this, contemplate the beginnings of things. For the end is always like the beginning: and, therefore, as there is one end to all things, so ought we to understand that there was one beginning; and as there is one end to many things, so there spring from one beginning many differences and varieties, which again, through the goodness of God, and by subjection to Christ, and through the unity of the Holy Spirit, are recalled to one end, which is like unto the beginning.”[65]

Consider also Eusebius (263–339
AD) in the following:

Christ will therefore subject to Himself everything, and this saving subjection it is right to regard as similar to that, according to which the Son Himself shall be subjected unto Him, Who subjected to Himself all things. … But after the close of everything, He will not dwell in a few, but in all those who are then worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven. So then shall come to pass, all in all, when He inhabits as His people all.[66]

Ambrose (330–397 AD), one of the most important Church figures of the 4th century, is often associated with universal thought. “This seemed good to God … to manifest in Christ the mystery of His will … namely, that He should be merciful to all who had strayed, whether in Heaven or in earth … Every being, then, in the heavens and on earth, while it learns the knowledge of Christ, is being restored to that which it was created,” writes Ambrose on Ephesians 1. Elsewhere on 1 Corinthians 15:27 he writes, “When every creature learns that Christ is its head, and that Christ’s head is God the Father, then God is all in all; that is to say, that every creature should believe alike, that with one voice every tongue of things in Heaven and earth and under the earth, should confess that there is one God from Whom are all things.”[67]

Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390 AD) a renowned doctor of the Church famously said “the unassumed is the unredeemed.” This direct reference to the vicarious humanity of Christ meant that the Lord assumed the entirety of our humanity, leaving none of that humanity unredeemed. His close friend Basil the Great (329–379 AD), also a prominent doctor of the Church (while simultaneously holding to views of eternal reprobation) wrote, “For all things shall be subject to Him, and all things shall acknowledge His empire; and when God shall be all in all, those who now excite discords by revolts, having been quite pacified, shall praise God in peaceful concord.”[68]

Another of the Cappadocian Fathers – Gregory of Nyssa (335–395 AD) – said the following, “When every created being is at harmony with itself … and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord; when every creature shall have been made one body … Now the body of Christ, as I have often said, is the whole of humanity.” And again he writes, “everything shall be subdued to Christ, and they shall be subdued by a full knowledge of Him, and by a remodeling. … Now God will be all in all at the time of restitution.”[69]

Gregory of Nyssa showed more Universalist leanings of any of the Cappadocians. He stated, “For it is needful that evil should some day be wholly and absolutely removed out of the circle of being. For inasmuch as it is not in the nature of evil to exist without the will, when every will comes to be in God, will not evil go on to absolute extinction, by reason of there being no receptacle of it left.”

Finally, Jerome (347–420 AD), a doctor of the Church and translator of the Latin Vulgate said, “The Cross of Christ has benefited not earth only but Heaven … and every creature has been cleansed by the blood of its Lord.” Furthermore, he writes, “So in the restitution of all things, when the true physician, Jesus Christ, shall have come to heal the body of the whole Church, every one … shall receive his proper place … What I mean is, the fallen angel will begin to be that which he was created, and man, who has been expelled from Paradise, will be once more restored to the tilling of Paradise. These things, then, will take place universally.”[70]

Augustine, who himself adhered to a strong concept of eternal hell, disagreed with but never went so far to label Universalist Christians as heretics. He readily admitted that the idea of universal salvation had many adherents in the early Church. He refers to “the very many in his day, who tho not denying the Holy Scriptures, do not believe in endless torments.”[71] It seems clear that a strong Biblical hope in the salvation of all men is not pure lunacy. Is it possible that the “restoration of all things” also includes the reprobate? I must finally reiterate that overall, we find a general “possibility” but not a blanket “presumption” of the salvation of all among the fathers. Dr. C. Baxter Kruger sums it up well:

That Jesus Christ loves us all and has included us everyone in his life with his Father and the Holy Spirit, I consider to be an absolute, eternal fact. That every human being will come to experience this life fully, I consider to be a hope, but not a fact. It is a hope grounded in the astounding love of the blessed Trinity – in the endless fidelity of the Father, the complete and finished work of Jesus, and the redeeming genius of the Holy Spirit. I think we have every reason to hope for everyone to come to know the truth so as to experience salvation. But to make such a hope an absolute fact, or a conclusion, or a doctrine is, to me, a mistake. That would be to deny, theologically speaking, the authenticity of our personhood and our real freedom to participate. We are real to the Father, Son and Spirit, distinct persons within the life of God, with our own minds, hearts and wills, which will never be violated by the blessed Trinity. So there remains the possibility that in our distinctness, we will choose to live against our own beings. Such a violation of reality is as absurd as it is painful, but possible. It is not possible for the Father, Son and Spirit to morph into another God, with another dream for humanity. In this universe, and in all universes to come, the Father, Son and Spirit will never, ever give up their dream that we would all come to experience fully the Trinitarian life together.[72]

Her Gates are Never Shut

Better than any theological discourse on Heaven and hell, scripture paints a brilliant image of the heart of God in Revelation 21. It is articulated well in Brad Jerzak’s Her Gates Will Never Be Shut.[73] We see in Revelation 21:6 that the Lord gives an open invitation, “He said to me: It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.”

Next the passage shows us the Bride, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of Heaven. This is the Church. Outside her gates are all the wicked, naughty folks. But notice in verse 25 that “on no day will its gates ever be shut!” And what do the Spirit and the Bride say together in verse 17?

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let him who hears say, “Come!” Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life (Rev. 22:17).

Who is the Bride beckoning to come and drink? Whoever is thirsty. To whom is this invitation offered? The only other people in this story are the wicked who are outside the city gates – the gates that will never be shut day or night. Does this give you a picture of the heart of God? No one impure comes in to ruin the party. Jesus is the Open Door. The only requirement is that all who enter have their robes washed in Him.

Your gates will always stand open, they will never be shut, day or night, so that men may bring You the wealth of the nations – their kings led in triumphal procession (Isa. 60:11).

Notice the kings and nations. George MacDonald, mentor of C.S. Lewis, says it is important to watch the course of the kings and nations throughout the Book of Revelation. First you see them duped by Babylon. They assemble for battle. Weird things eat at them. They get released. They rebel again. Lots of back and forth drama. But finally, as you reach the end of the book, you see a grand finale as they enter the city:

The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it (Rev. 21: 24-26).

And as they enter, they partake of the Tree of Life. What is the Tree of Life for?

… On each side of the river stood the Tree of Life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations (Rev. 22:2).

Theodoret (393–457 AD), said it this way, “All the kings of the earth shall adore Him. Some, indeed, in the present life willingly, but all the rest after the Resurrection; for not yet do we see all things subject to Him, but then every knee shall bow to Him.”[74]

No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and His servants will serve Him (Rev. 22:3).

I think we have reason for hope. Do these images not showcase the heart of God? You can feasibly stand outside those gates forever. But is His grace ultimately irresistible? Irresistible not by controlling force, but by sheer goodness? Can a child stand in the open door of a candy shop for eternity and never have a taste of what is inside? You would have to be a pretty stupid kid (although I have met some dumb kids).

Jesus is both the Alpha and the Omega of our human existence. We can trust Him implicitly with the future. It brings to mind Julian of Norwich’s famous and most beautiful vision of the Lord:

And it seemed to me that if sin had not been, we would all have been pure and like to our Lord as He made us, and thus, in my folly, before this time I often wondered why, by the great foreseeing wisdom of God, the beginning of sin was not prevented, for then, it seemed to me, all would have been well. But Jesus (who in this vision informed me of all that I needed) answered by this word and said: “Sin is inevitable, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”[75]

Is His love ultimately irresistible? We will see …

CHAPTER 5

THE FAITH OF GOD

AND WHY YOU SHOULD GIVE UP

FAITH: THE EFFORTLESS

CONNECTOR TO THE SUPERNATURAL

The Message does not demand faith; it supplies faith.

- Francois du Toit

So far I have unashamedly painted quite an inclusive message … a Gospel whose absolute catholicity means that drinks are on the house for everyone. At this point, the role of faith must be called into consideration.

Faith is broader than intellectual agreement – it is quite mystical. By that I do not mean intangible or elusive – but it is alive and resonates in the heart. Faith is ultimately a Person. That being said, I do plan to demystify faith in this chapter. In doing so I will likely offend some of my Charismatic readers. But rest assured, I will equally offend any academics out there because the topic of faith also engenders discussion of miracle.

In the past several years, there has been a tremendous realization of our supernatural inheritance all across the Body of Christ. In our own ministry, we have seen a most extraordinary display of miracles … hundreds healed of tumors, cancers, deafness and blindness. And the more phenomenal displays such as people floating off the ground, rain falling inside buildings, huge sums of money appearing in pockets or supernatural weight loss of twenty, forty, even eighty pounds!

Nothing strange about it. Supernatural Christianity is normative Christianity. It’s the only kind.

Over the past several decades, through the Word of Faith movement, the prophetic movement and all sorts of Charismatic renewal streams in various denominations – faith has been rightly emphasized as bearing supernatural substance. It is not merely intellectual assent – but a regenerative response in the heart that bears outward proof. There has been a great deal of teaching enforcing the reality that faith is our connector to the glory realm – that all things are possible for those who believe. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1).

Faith itself is concrete substance and connectivity to the divine. The Lord is bringing the Church corporate into a fuller and fuller realization of our sonship and true identity in Him (moreover, His identity in us!). The more we see who we are – and what He’s done to bring us into divine union – the less we will preach faith in the coming days. We will preach the substance we are connected to … not the connection itself! We will simply declare the Gospel (Christ did it) and crazy stuff will happen.

Saved by Grace

There has been a subtle but massive shift over the centuries from preaching the Gospel – the Good News that Christ saved you – to preaching the demands of our “human response.” Faith has somehow become something “we do” rather than its original Biblical definition. True faith is simply an effortless realization of the facts. Christ is the Fact. Faith doesn’t save you, the Fact did. You are not saved by faith. You are saved by free-gift grace. Faith is the simple recognition of the free gift that’s already been given to you.

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God (Eph. 2:8).

This is a pretty big deal to grasp! In fact, it is not even your own faith that saves you! It’s the faith of Christ. I am incapable of generating faith on my own. I am incapable of self-generating the New Man. If self-effort is involved, it is not faith.

Unfortunately, in our modern Christian world, we have turned faith into the one “good work” by which we are saved. And this transfers to every other area of life, including the working of miracles, healing, financial provision and bettering of relationships. “If you can only pump up enough faith, then you can do anything.” But the true flavor of faith is not striving or hernia-popping. That is willpower, not faith. The flavor of faith is rest.

Entering His Rest

Consider what the Apostle Paul says about the Israelites who failed to enter into the Promise Land in Hebrews 3 and 4. First, he calls them “disobedient.” But how did they disobey? Was it the complaining over quail? Was it the golden calf? What was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back? Paul goes on to tell us, “So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief” (Heb. 3:19). It is clear that lack of faith was the one thing that precluded them from entering in. They didn’t trust the goodness of God to bless them. But what blessing did they miss out on? Paul continues …“Now we who have believed enter that rest …” (Heb. 4:3).

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from His (Heb. 4:9).

Faith is the opposite of works. Yes, faith causes you to do some amazing works! But faith itself is effortless – it is the path of rest and ceasing from our labors. The best way to describe faith is simply that it means “trust.” The rest that exudes from faith is the ultimate manifestation of the supernatural. Francois du Toit states the following in his notes to Hebrews 3 in the Mirror Bible:

You can experience God’s supernatural provision and protection and yet remain outside His rest. The ultimate proof of faith is not experience of the supernatural, but entering into His rest. His rest celebrates His perfect work. … He longs for you to discover your own completeness and perfection as seen from His point of view. His rest is sustained in you by what He sees, knows and says about you in reference to the finished work of Christ.

We do nothing to gain or generate faith. Faith looks like giving up! Retiring! Yet our desire to go and do marvelous things to bless the world … these are fun byproducts of faith – the power of God working through us! You can work harder and accomplish more than all the people around you, yet still be rested and strife-free … if you’re operating in faith. There’s a difference between works for righteousness and works of righteousness. When you do things to get love, acceptance or approval – you’re still thinking like an orphan and working in your own strength. When you do things out of the overflow – knowing you’re already loved, accepted and cherished – not only is it fun and easy, but much more productive! The paradox is that when you kick out the performance-orientation, you actually perform better – life is no longer toil, but a labor of love. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love (Gal. 5:6).

Christ or My Faith?

Jesus pointed to faith as the only thing the Lord ultimately calls us to do, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one He has sent” (John 6:29). That simplifies things quite a bit! But it is still impossible for you to even do this one work! It was actually Jesus’ own faith in the Father that saved you … not your own faith. The faith of Christ has now been counted as your own.

This is where the subtle problem comes in. Rather than faith effortlessly working through us, we have tried to work for faith. We’ve even trusted in our own self-generated faith to save us! We are called to trust Jesus – not have faith in faith.

The majority of preachers will proclaim that Jesus died to save you. But in their very next breath, they say, “Now if you believe in Jesus, you will be saved.” Does that sound innocuous? Well it’s actually the most common form of legalism around. Salvation comes in the first half of the equation, “Jesus died to save you.” If you stop right there you have preached the Gospel successfully. You can leave it alone, and let the message do its work. Perhaps they will believe. However, once you add on the second part, “It’s up to you to believe,” the Gospel has been lost in a human attempt to generate a subjective experience.

Yes, faith is important! You will never see the kingdom without faith. But your own faith does not have a salvific sense in and of itself. Faith is just a recognition that you’re already saved by Christ. A recognition that He’s already objectively healed your physical body as well. Faith is necessary to bring the objective reality into subjective experience. But let’s put faith in its proper place. Otherwise, people are not putting their trust in Jesus Christ. Instead, they are trusting their own belief in Jesus Christ!

Anyone who is wondering, “Do I have enough faith?” is barking up the wrong tree. Again, this runs deeper than splitting hairs. Many people are in bondage banking their salvation on their own “response” or their “decision” for Christ.

“I chose Him,” they say. No, He chose you. Salvation is not about believing that you are a believer. How do you even know you’re a believer? If you’re looking to your own subjective experience or an encounter – who’s to say you didn’t misinterpret your conversion experience, or that it didn’t go deep enough? You’ll go headlong into an endless spiral of navel-gazing. There may be a valid moment of encounter, but you can’t bank on that. And if you are banking on it, you’re still having faith in your own experience.

The only thing you can bank on is that Christ was crucified to save you. Done deal – you’re in!

Christ is Enough

You can stop trying to prove to God that you believe enough – or trying to conjure up enough faith to get special favors from Him. You can do good because you are already a loved child of favor – instead of doing things to become a loved child of favor.

Trusting in your own ability or decision to believe causes you to look within your own heart. As long as we’re looking at our own faith in this way, we’re looking at our works. Faith in Christ looks away from the heart to the person of Christ. It’s not about your accepting, your decision for Christ, etc. It’s about the truth (Jesus finished the job).

Faith does not mean asking, “Do I really believe?” or “Have I really accepted Christ?” Instead faith is asking, “Is He really the Son of God who was crucified for my salvation?” This is what it really means to “examine yourself to see if you are in the faith” (2 Cor. 13:5). Here, Paul is not saying “look to self.” Rather, the rest of the verse tells us to “realize that Christ Jesus is in you!”

Faith does not say, “Do I believe?” but rather, “Christ is Savior.” Faith does not look at itself but at Christ. Otherwise, this “so-called” faith becomes a self-work. Law is about what we are to do. The Gospel is about what Christ did. Most Christians are not confused regarding salvation by “outward works.” We know that refraining from pork, observation of the Sabbath or wearing a suit to church has nothing to do with salvation. Such legalisms are easy to spot when they are external. But the worst kind of dead works are the internal ones … striving in our hearts to pump something up.

The prevalence of non-grace, non-gospel teaching has bound up most of the Church into endless spirals of internal striving. When you tell people they have to believe in Christ, you’re actually preaching law, not Gospel. But when you tell them Christ died for them, then you’re preaching the Gospel. You’re preaching Christ crucified.

Now how does this carry over to experiencing the supernatural? For one, faith does not take away your sinful nature. Faith recognizes that it already died with Him on His cross. In the recognition of our death to the old, we manifest the new. In my recognition that I have already been healed by His stripes, I effortlessly manifest healing. In the simple recognition that I am a son, I effortlessly manifest my sonship. I am not trying to become a son. I was born from above. I am not trying to manifest my sonship. I simply am who I am … a son. Done deal. The more this sinks in, the more I will shine. But it’s not up to me to “make it sink in!” Faith just comes from hearing the word: the fact is … I am a son!

Faith is Recognition

Your faith is not an end in itself. It is a recognition of what He has done. Your altar call moment did not save you. You were saved because Jesus responded to the altar call!

This makes people mad because it is too easy. The scandal of the Gospel has always been the fact that it is too good, too greasy a freebie to be true. Everybody is worked up about “What is my part? Jesus finished the job, but I still have a response to make!”

When the Gospel is presented to you, an effortless, ecstatic response comes forth. You need not focus on that – it was your focus on Jesus that caused it. The Gospel is not about man’s response. Jesus Christ is our human response to the Father. Jesus Christ the God-Man became our full response to God. He fulfilled our side of the covenant relationship. Nothing is dependent upon you. God never intended that you should fulfill your side of any bargain. This is the “good news” – this is the Gospel.

What is “your part” to play? Your part is nothing. And therefore, your part is everything. Since Jesus stepped in and died for you, as you … He carried the full responsibility for your salvation, healing, deliverance and liberty from corruption. And since He took your place … in a mystical sense you have been replaced! Your entire life is now a response to God, because you’ve been vicariously exchanged and woven into the very life of the Trinity! There is no more Jesus plus me. It is Jesus, therefore all of me! We are one.

I am not preaching apathy. You don’t stop responding to God because of the Gospel message. Just the opposite – the Gospel is the revelation that our whole life has been consumed! You’ve been absorbed into God, like it or not. It is no longer I, but Christ (Gal. 2:20). Yes, you have a distinct personality – but He is the very life in your bones!

Jesus swept humanity up into Himself, acted on our behalf, and now He is our vicarious representative to the Father. This does not exclude you from participation – it makes you fully involved in the divine life. None of which is self-effort or striving for acceptance. It is God’s conclusion about you that spawns your agreement with Him.

Manifesting Reality

Robert Capon tells the following parable of faith. A man is in a hospital bed in a full body cast, his arms and legs motionless in traction. Meanwhile, he hears that his house is falling apart. As he lay in the hospital, he is helpless to do anything about it. Later, his friend comes along and says, “I have just paid off the contractor I engaged to repair your house. It’s all fixed – a gift from me to you.” The man’s friend has repaired his house. All the man can do is trust that his friend’s word is true. But his belief does not “change” the truth. The facts are the facts. All his faith accomplishes is the enjoyment of the facts. Capon writes:

Look at it another way. Suppose I had decided, while staring at the hospital ceiling, that if only I could work up enough faith, you would undertake to repair my house. And suppose further that I had grunted and groaned through every waking hour trying to get my faith meter up to red hot. What good would that have done unless you had decided, as a gift to me in response to no activity on my part whatsoever, to do the job for me? No good, that’s what. Faith doesn’t fix houses – carpenters and painters do. And faith doesn’t pay bills, either. Faith, therefore, is not a gadget by which I can work wonders. It is just trust in a person who actually can work them – and who has promised me He already has.[76]

Christ the miracle worker has already done it all. It’s only an issue of the revealing of what He’s done so we can wake up to reality. Right now, the earth is groaning for the revealing of the sons of God. Groaning for us to manifest an already existing reality. I am convinced that we are about to see a major outpouring of the supernatural like never before. But it will not come from groaning and pushing and trying to “make ourselves” manifest the kingdom. It is coming through an awakening to our identity – that we have already arrived. Our arrival is not a future point (when the manifestation occurs). Our arrival has happened – it is Him. You are a source of endless possibilities. Your identity is in Him, and your actions are an outflow of it. The problem has been our attempt at creating identity by carrying the responsibility for evangelism, miracles, kingdom advancement, good marriage, etc. on our own. Those things will happen. But it’s foremost a question of being rather than doing.

When the Church says “outpouring” she is usually misguided. She is looking for an inpouring – for God to come down from the sky and fill her tank. But the true Biblical definition of outpouring is found here: out of your belly shall flow rivers of living water (John 7:38). Know it or not, we possess His fullness.

You are not going to pump up the faith to shine forth your sonship in the realm of unusual miracles – no more than you pumped up your own salvation. You see, the Gospel was never about your faith – it was always about the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.

The Faith of Christ

Ever since the Reformation – and especially in the past half century – scholars and theologians have come to the overwhelming conclusion that the many verses supposedly about our “faith in Jesus” should really be translated as the “faith of Jesus.”

It has always been about His faith and His faithfulness.

… even the righteousness of God which comes through the faith/faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all those who believe, for there is no distinction (Rom. 3:22).

… for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who is of the faith of Jesus (Rom. 3:26).

… nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through the faith of Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified (Gal. 2:16).

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith/faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me (Gal. 2:20).

But the Scripture has shut up all men under sin, that the promise by the faith of Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe (Gal. 3:22).

… in whom we have boldness and confident access through His faith/faithfulness (Eph. 3:12).

… and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith (Phil. 3:9).

At every point it has always been about Jesus and His faithfulness in the work of the cross. We are about to see an unveiling of His glory and power like never before. But it will be simply an unveiling of an already existent union with God that He had fully secured all along.

True Evangelism

Trinitarian theologian Thomas F. Torrance delineated as of utmost importance the difference between true evangelical preaching and unevangelical preaching.

There is, then, an evangelical way to preach the Gospel and an unevangelical way to preach it. The Gospel is preached in and unevangelical way, as happens so often in modern evangelism, when the preacher announces: this is what Jesus Christ has done for you, but you will not be saved unless you make your own personal decision for Christ as your Savior. Or: Jesus Christ loved you and gave His life for you on the Cross, but you will be saved only if you give your heart to Him. In that event what is actually coming across to people is not a Gospel of unconditional grace but some other gospel of conditional grace which belies the essential nature and content of the Gospel as it is in Jesus. … To preach the Gospel in that conditional or legalist way has the effect of telling poor sinners that in the last resort the responsibility for their salvation is taken off the shoulders of the Lamb of God and placed upon them – but in that case they feel that they will never be saved. They know perfectly well in their own hearts that if the chain that binds them to God in Jesus Christ has even one of its links their own feeble act of decision, then the whole chain is as weak as that, it’s weakest link.[77]

Forcing the “one good work” of faith back upon hearers for salvation is our favorite “Gentile legalism” today. Torrance compares it precisely with the error Paul struggled against in the Galatian church. It is a subtle yet crucial diversion from the true Gospel. Torrance explains:

How, then, is the Gospel to be preached in a genuinely evangelical way? Surely in such a way that full and central place is given to the vicarious humanity of Jesus as the all-sufficient human response to the saving love of God which He has freely and unconditionally provided for us. We preach and teach the Gospel evangelically, then, in such a way as this: God loves you so utterly and completely that He has given Himself for you in Jesus Christ His beloved Son, and has thereby pledged His very Being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualized His unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way that He cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying Himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of Him, and has thereby already made you His own before and apart from you ever believing in Him. He has bound you to Himself by His love in a way that He will never let you go, for even if you refuse Him and damn yourself in hell His love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. From beginning to end what Jesus Christ has done for you He has done not only as God but as man. He has acted in your place in the whole range of your human life and activity, including your personal decisions, and your responses to God’s love, and even your acts of faith. He has believed for you, fulfills your human response to God, even made your personal decision for you, so that He acknowledges you before God as one who has already responded to God in Him, who has already believed in God through Him, and whose personal decision is already implicated in Christ’s self-offering to the Father, in all of which He has been fully and completely accepted by the Father, so that in Jesus Christ you are already accepted by Him. Therefore, renounce yourself … and follow Jesus as your Lord and Savior.[78]

What About ‘My Faith?’

But this is too easy! His faith is enough to save me? Does this undercut our own personal faith response to the message? By no means! His faith is the very thing that empowers my faith. This reality of my inclusion in the life of God haunts me, chases me down and compels me to make a choice. Not a choice of whether I will die and be raised – for that has already happened in Christ! It compels me to decide whether I will thankfully, joyously embrace the divine life He has given me and recognize that I have been crucified with Christ.

Whatever our faith response may be, it is merely an expression of and confidence in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. His repentance on behalf of man is the only thing that empowers true repentance within man. Placing salvation fully in His court means that self is taken out of the equation – and that is the only place where true trust happens. His conclusion about you is the substance and source of salvation. My ecstatic “Yes!” response to hearing the truth of this divine union finds its validity only in the union itself.

To preach “human response” invalidates the Gospel. Our faith is personalized only insofar as we see His already completed work. “My faith” must never be the condition of salvation. My faith can only be full, true and effective so long as it is a response to the prior saving work of Christ and His faith.

What if some were unfaithful? Will their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness? (Rom. 3:3).

Begin to see how insignificant is human failure in comparison to God’s grand success. In fact, the new birth is merely the revealing of an innocence, from God’s perspective, attributed to mankind from the foundation of the world.

How many a soul has been fearful of Matthew 10:33, “But whoever denies Me before others, I will deny before My Father in Heaven.” The word “deny” is arnēsētai, which actually means to “contradict.”[79] Francois du Toit explains. If you contradict Him as being your true origin, identity and innocence - He will contradict you! Because He is fully convinced of your innocence.

If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot disown Himself (2 Tim. 2:3).

CHAPTER 6

THE CASE FOR DIVINE COMPLACENCY

FULLY SATISFIED IN THE GOSPEL

RESTING IN GOD &

DRIVEN BY DIVINE PLEASURE

For it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure.

- Philippians 2:13

Resting in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ should make believers the most relaxed people on the planet. Why then do most Christians walk around with a permanent, herniated look on their faces? Religion. Strife. Burnout. Self-effort … All fruits of an anti-gospel message that permeates pulpits around the world. The Church is in need of a massive religious enema. She’s trying way too hard. The scandalous notion that Jesus actually accomplished something on our behalf should infuse us with such rest, security and trust that the world wonders at our remarkable hope.

The word “complacency” gets quite the bad rap in the Church today. But I would encourage you to kick back, recline at the table and enjoy the feast as we consider the complete satisfaction Christ has provided us.

Old Puritan preachers and many classic revivalists were strong proponents of divine contentment. When you read the words of Charles Spurgeon, Jonathan Edwards and others, the term complacency was used often. It was considered a virtue.

Edwards wrote, “Since I came to this town [Northampton], I have often had sweet complacency in God in views of His glorious perfections, and the excellency of Jesus Christ. God has appeared to me, a glorious and lovely being chiefly on account of His holiness. The holiness of God has always appeared to me the most lovely of all His attributes.”[80]

R.C. Sproul points to Edwards’ use of the word complacency in its basic Oxford Dictionary definition as, “the fact or state of being pleased with a thing or person; tranquil pleasure or satisfaction in something or some one.” Adds Sproul, “I labor the earlier English usage of the word complacency because it is used in a crucial manner in the language of historic, orthodox theology.” Sproul writes:

If we take note of Edwards’ language, his choice of words to describe his enraptured delight in the glory of God, we observe his accent on the sweetness, loveliness, and excellence of God. He reports of enjoying a “sweet complacency” in God. What does he mean? Is not the term complacency a word we use to describe a certain smugness, a resting on one’s laurels, a sort of lazy inertia that attends a superficial sort of satisfaction? Perhaps. But here we see a vivid example of how words sometimes change their import over time.

What Edwards meant by a “sweet complacency” had nothing to do with a contemporary dose of smugness. Rather, it had to do with a sense of pleasure. This “pleasure” is not to be understood in a crass hedonistic, or sensual, sense but rather a delight in that which is supremely pleasing to the soul.[81]

The Key to Contentment

Holy complacency is all about being satisfied in the divine pleasures of God.

They will be intoxicated with the fatness of Your house, and You will give them drink from the wadi of Your delights, because with You is life’s fountain; in Your light we shall see light (Psalm 36:8, SEPT).

In writing to the Philippian church, Paul urges them to be anxious about nothing (Phil. 4:6) and presents himself as an example of a man who has learned to be content in times of plenty and in seasons of external lack (Phil. 4:11-13). How did Paul muster up this contentment?

Traditional religionists will strive for the annihilation of desire. But that is gnostic stoicism – okay for a Buddhist but not a Christian. Paul did not learn to desire “less,” so he could be content with less. In fact, the apostle’s appetites were hot and furious – not lessened. But fulfillment of those desires came neither through worldly ambition nor his own religious efforts.

Paul had learned to be fully satisfied on the fatty ashes of Christ’s sacrifice.

I will satisfy fully the life of the priests with abundance, and My people will be satisfied with My goodness, says the Lord (Jer. 31:14).

Blessed (happy, fortunate, to be envied) is the man whom You choose and cause to come near, that he may dwell in Your courts! We shall be satisfied with the goodness of Your house, Your holy temple (Ps. 65:4, AMP).

Paul found everything he had ever wanted in the person of Christ – the source of his bliss and fulfillment. Those in Christ truly lack nothing. He had been plugged into an eternal wellspring of grace.

Maybe this satisfaction – this divine complacency – sounds good to you on paper. But how do we tangibly feast on this abundant grace in our daily lives? By faith. That is, simply by trusting. The flavor of faith is not striving, contending or “pressing in” for something. The flavor of faith is rest. It is to trust in what someone else has already accomplished for us. His work was enough to satisfy you perfectly.

Christ has now become our eternal Sabbath Rest.

Satisfied with the Sin Remedy

Staunch legalists, strivers and will-power advocates get itchy when you speak too often of grace. They are hell-bent on ridding the Church of the wrong type of complacency. Their fear is that you will promote the ever-taboo notion of greasy grace. But I’ll be the first to say that grace is far greasier than anyone would have suspected! Slippery, buttery and dripping with ease and fatness – no one could exaggerate how free and glorious is this grace. Grace is not cheap – it cost Jesus everything.

Your own everything couldn’t afford it.

However, if we are speaking in terms of “license to sin,” that is where the misconception about grace lies. Grace is not simply a “hiding” away of sin – or even a mere forgiveness of your sinfulness. Grace is not just a cover up – as if God the great Santa Clause in the sky is covering His eyes from your wrongdoings – acting as if they don’t exist. He’s not choosing to put you on the “nice” list when you deserve the “naughty” list. Grace does not hide God’s eyes from your sinfulness. That’s what we’ve been taught – but the true Gospel is far better.

Grace actually eradicates sinfulness itself. It’s not a cover up – instead it’s an absolute removal of your old heart. Grace is not a freedom to sin, but it is freedom from sin. On the cross, your sinfulness itself was destroyed in His death. Your old sinful self was co-crucified together with Christ. Grace mystically transformed your identity from a sinner to a saint. There’s no mixture left.

Grace does not merely “cut you slack” while leaving you with indwelling sinfulness. Grace fully nailed that “indwelling sinfulness” to the tree – your entire old corrupt nature was abolished as a free gift (Rom. 6, Gal. 2:20).

What I am saying is that there is nothing left for you to do, but simply be who you are – that perfect new you who is one spirit with the Lord (1 Cor. 6:17). It should be more difficult to sin than to manifest the true holy you. Now your chief end is to glorify God simply by enjoying Him forever. As John Piper often says, “God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in Him.”

Does Grace Produce Apathy?

Keeping these things in mind, we must depart from the ridiculous, but sadly common misconception that grace breeds sinfulness. This was the same faulty argument that Paul addressed concerning his Judaizing opponents in Galatians 2. For the Jews to admit their need for grace was an admission of the inadequacy of the law to justify them. The law, being found insufficient, was therefore abandoned as a justifying agency. To invalidate the law in this way - did this mean that Christ therefore was a promoter of sin?

If, while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! (Gal. 2:17, NIV)

Let me explain this tricky verse from the top. Paul is not suggesting that “we” must continually seek justification – nor is he saying here that believers are still sinners. He is speaking of those who are still bound in religion, who have not yet found the complacent satisfaction of their perfection in Christ. Bible translator Kenneth Wuest opens up this verse:

The Christian Jews, in seeking to be justified in Christ, were shown to be sinners just like and in the same class as the Gentiles. When they sought justification in Christ and thus by grace, it was an admission on their part that there is no justification by works, that the seeker is not justified, and is therefore a sinner. The attempt to be justified in Christ awakens the consciousness of sin, and compels the Jew to put himself on the plane of the Gentile. The Jew who calls the Gentile a sinner, in seeking to be justified by faith, is forced to admit that he is a sinner also. He has found that the law has failed him as a justifying agency.

Paul repudiates the false assumption of the Judaizers who charged that Christ is the promoter and encourager of sin in that He causes the Jew to abandon the law as a justifying agency, and in doing so, puts himself on the common plane of a Gentile whom he calls a sinner and a dog. The Judaizers argued that in view of the fact that violation of the law is sin, therefore, abandonment of the law in an effort to be justified in Christ is also sin. Thus Christ is the promoter of sin.[82]

It is the law that causes sin to increase. Does grace cause sin? Absolutely not! Paul writes, “The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more” (Rom. 5:20). Paul also asks in Romans 6:1, “What shall we say then? Shall we keep on sinning since grace abounds? Perish the thought! How shall we who died to sin keep doing that very thing?” The renowned Bible commentator Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote:

The true preaching of the Gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament Gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean that it really amounts to this, that because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will redound all the more to the glory of grace. If my preaching and presentation of the Gospel of salvation does not expose it to that misunderstanding, then it is not the Gospel.[83]

I don’t want to overcomplicate this. But I had to lay some groundwork for a very simple idea. Grace does not amplify the drive to sin – religion does that. And more specifically, grace does not incite the one specific sin it is most often blamed for – the sin of apathy.

For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age (Titus 2:11-12, NIV).

Grace does not cause apathy – religion does.

Retiring from Self Effort

Let me put this in simple terms now. Someone will say: If you preach grace, people are going to get lazy.

True grace does not produce laziness, but it does breed divine complacency!

The common mindset is that everyone will clock out if we aren’t motivating them with fear, guilt and religion. This is the sick perversion that has masqueraded as Christianity for too long. It is bondage – the spirit of antichrist at work in the pulpit and is diametrically opposed to the Gospel.

True grace does not promote apathy or “self-complacency.” It is not freedom to be apathetic – grace is freedom from apathy. Paul had a fiery ambition that drove him preaching all over the Mediterranean from Jerusalem to northern Greece – until there was no place left for him to preach (Rom. 15:23). He was an Energizer bunny! But Paul was not motivated by anything less than the enjoyment of God and the fire of love that burned in his bones. He said, “Woe to me if I don’t preach the Gospel!” (1 Cor. 9:16). He felt a glorious compulsion – an inward fulfillment and delight from spreading this good news. He couldn’t stop himself – he was possessed by the love of God which “compelled” him. The grace apostle achieved far more than the rest.

Paul’s compulsion to serve did not originate from a slavish need to “help God out.” He co-labored only in a sense that he was a “container” of God. The branch passively drinks the sap of the vine and effortlessly bears fruit as a result of its union. It was Paul’s addiction, not his burden! Instead of Christ with Paul – it was Christ as Paul.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure (Phil. 2:13, KJV).

God does not need your efforts to help prop Him up. Though you serve and do kingdom works in this life, yet it is no longer you, but Christ laboring through you “according to the working of His mighty power” (Eph. 1:19). You are living in a state of active retirement. The you is retired, and as Norman Grubb often articulated, now the Christ has in a sense replaced you. You are simply a vessel, a temple – a container that holds this mighty God.

I consider myself as having died and now I’m enjoying a new existence which is simply Jesus using my body (Gal. 2:20, DIS).

This is not to say you are Jesus. You have a distinct personality, as do the Father, Son and Spirit have distinction. Yet, this is a distinction within unity. The problem is that we lack revelation on our union – our deep, mystical oneness with God.

Even Christ’s continued work through your life is for the purpose of announcing the Gospel – that is, the good news that His work has been finished since the foundation of the world. Your entire life proclaims an already completed victory!

Jesus actually meant it when He said, “It is finished.” He didn’t just mean it’s finished for that day. “Wow … been really tough at the office boys – I’m gonna knock off early and call it a day. Be back again at 9 a.m. Monday to start this all over again!”

The finished work of the cross is such an offense, because it invalidates every other human attempt at spirituality. Though we labor to proclaim the cross, we do not labor to repeat it as religion does. We do not labor to strive toward our own holiness, sanctification or redemption. We trust that it is ours. Nor do we strive to enter into more of His fullness. For by our union with Christ we are already full of the Godhead (Col. 2:10).

A Better Kind of Complacency

There’s a massive difference between the pleasant satisfaction of divine complacency and the numbing paralysis of lukewarm nominalism. We’ve all seen churches that are dead cold – no excitement, no zealous fervor for the Lord. Their joy and expectancy are sucked dry. They slumber.

The problem of apathy is real, and many John the Baptist types try to address it. It is no wonder that so many – who catch the fire of the Spirit – want to shake and rock the Church back to attention. To rouse her from her narcoticized worldly sleep.

And so what do these zealous trumpets do? Unfortunately, they try to get Mother Church off the couch and right onto the treadmill. They bark at her. They shout at her. They come at her with the whip of the law. To their credit, these voices do have zeal, but it is a zeal “without knowledge” of grace as Paul says in Romans 10 – zeal for self-effort. Pharisees are very zealous. But the answer to apathy is not zeal for the law. Instead, we need a zealous appreciation that Christ has finished the job. John the Baptist was great, but there has been a change in covenant.

Grace does not beat the Church awake. Grace woos her with the extravagant love of Christ poured out on the cross. Entices her with the fragrant myrrh of His sufferings for her on the cross. It allures her with the promise of divine pleasures that supersede the lesser comforts of this world. Invites her to drink and to be drunk on love (Song. 5:1).

Hunger Versus Satisfaction

In the face of overwhelming apathetic disinterest in the Church, many Charismatic zealots feel justified in whipping people up into a striving frenzy:

“We’ve gotta get hungry! We’ve gotta get desperate! We’ve gotta cry out for more! We’ve gotta press in for revival!”

There is an inward striving, an internal straining to push themselves into something they already have. Religion always gets you to work for something that’s already yours.

In fear of growing lukewarm, these people say we must constantly stay hungry for God. Intimacy with God becomes a striving work. Ironically, such a person tries to remain in a state of dissatisfaction at their current “level” of spirituality. As if by forcing themselves to be unhappy, they will be pleasing to God. Meanwhile, that old virtue of divine contentment in Christ’s fullness gets thrown out the window. All of this is actually rooted in a lack of faith.

I’m not pressing in anymore. I’ve been pressed into.

I’m not contending anymore. I’ve been contended for.

I’m not a God chaser anymore. I’ve been chased down, roped and hogtied. Bagged and tagged!

So many fast; they pray; they push; they pull. They attempt to get what they’ve already got. But their own efforts have alienated them from grace.

I’m not hungry anymore. I am fully satisfied.

Hunger is the state of the prodigal in the pig slop. Sonship is satisfied on Christ – the Father’s Fatted Calf.

You may ask: But doesn’t God want us to hunger for more and more of Him? Doesn’t He want us to hunger and thirst after righteousness?

First of all, you are already righteous in Him. But notice the rest of that verse … He says that those who hunger will be fully satisfied.

Blessed and fortunate and happy and spiritually prosperous (in that state in which the born-again child of God enjoys His favor and salvation) are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (uprightness and right standing with God), for they shall be completely satisfied! (Matt. 5:6, AMP)

Our satisfaction speaks of trusting and drinking from all that He has done. The flavor of faith is not thirst … the flavor of faith is complete satisfaction. Knowing that we sit at the King’s table. This is what Abraham, the father of faith, was commended for. He was, “Fully satisfied and assured that God was able and mighty to keep His word and to do what He had promised” (Rom. 4:21, AMP). When we drink of this Living Water, we will never thirst again!

Religious people know that money, material things and the work of their hands don’t bring contentment. But they do think that their striving to please God and follow the rules will bring satisfaction. They’re looking to add something onto the cross for extra brownie points. They don’t see that they are still basing their hope of satisfaction on self.

Are you fully satisfied in what He has done? Or are you still praying “More Lord?” The only Biblical more Lord is the continual discovery of fullness He has already deposited in my belly.

A Language of Unbelief

There is a prevailing language of unbelief in the Charismatic church today. A barrage of terminology and ideas that lock people into a never-ending search for God. The point of conversion was not your initiation rite into a lifelong chase after an elusive, fleeting deity. We are not called to be God-chasers, always begging for a little bit more like Oliver Twist. I am no longer even “seeking after God.” He found me. He and I are in unio mystica.

The New Covenant is a finding covenant. An arrival. An enjoyment of the Promise Land that we have already entered. Isn’t your claim to Christianity the very boast that you are no longer looking for answers, but that you have found Him? Christianity is the only faith that can scandalously boast that we are no longer seeking, but have confidently laid hold of God. It seems such an arrogant boast! I have all of God! I have arrived! This is the stumbling block of the ages.

Seeking is a pre-Christ action.

One might say, “But doesn’t He reward those who earnestly seek Him?” That is Hebrews 11:6. Read the beginning of the verse, “And without faith it is impossible to please God.” God is impressed with faith. He wants us to trust we are in union with Him by the finished work of the cross.

The Lord once spoke to an anonymous mystic, asking her this, “If I am the air you breathe, if you are in Me and I am in you, why are you looking for Me?” She said, “At once I felt so close to God that I could never describe it. …”[84]

Never again fall for the catch phrase of today prompting you to “get hungry” for God. How can I do that, when I’ve been feasting on the Lamb? The admission of hunger is an admission of lack. A hungry child is a sign of bad parenting. It is an assertion that Christ’s sacrifice was not a good enough meal for you. Do you need something more than His cross? Let the cross be the only thing that mesmerizes you. Stop begging for things He’s already given. Stop asking from an Old Covenant perspective. He has already poured out all that Heaven has to offer.

Yes, the unquenchable hunger to explore the depths of Him is born from above. But striving attempts to get more of a God you already have is indicative of unbelief. You are not an outsider. It is time to discover the riches we already have in Christ.

There’s no more need to beg Him to “open the Heavens.” He already did that. He checked that one right off the prayer list when the veil of His flesh was torn and all of Heaven opened with it. If you stop asking for that – and actually trust that it exists for you – you will experience that open Heaven every day of your life. A fully supernatural lifestyle.

Are you tired of performance-based, emotional rollercoaster spirituality? Thinking God is happy with you one day and upset with you the next? Trust in His finished work, not your own efforts. Rest in the knowledge that you are permanently plugged into Heaven, whether you know it or not, feel it or not. He is continually smiling at you. You are basking in perma-glory thanks to His work. Don’t doubt just because you’re not experiencing it in some particular way. It is by first believing that we experience. Manifestations follow faith.

As for me, I will continue beholding Your face in righteousness (rightness, justice, and right standing with You); I shall be fully satisfied, when I awake [to find myself] beholding Your form [and having sweet communion with You] (Psalm 17:15, AMP).

There is an infinitely sweet satisfaction in beholding His face. And how can the believer claim to do this? Because the veil of sinfulness has been removed. We can see Him clearly in the person of Christ. He told of this day long ago through the prophet, “I will no longer hide My face from them, for I will pour out My Spirit … ” (Ezek. 39:29).

My whole being shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise You with joyful lips (Psalm 63:5, AMP).

And so we come to the real root of the issue. Renowned 17th century theologian Jeremy Taylor once quipped, “God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy.” God demands joy. God demands that we be satisfied. God demands that we be fat and complacent on the very thing that He is fat and complacent upon. Again, Sproul says:

God’s love of complacency is the special delight and pleasure He takes first of all in His only-begotten Son. It is Christ who is the beloved of the Father, supremely; He is the Son in whom the Father is “well pleased.”

By adoption in Christ, every believer shares in this divine love of complacency. It is the love enjoyed by Jacob, but not by Esau. This love is reserved for the redeemed in whom God delights — not because there is anything inherently lovely or delightful in us — but we are so united to Christ, the Father’s Beloved, that the love the Father has for the Son spills over onto us. God’s love for us is pleasing and sweet to Himself — and to us. …[85]

Realize your old Esau has been crucified with Him. You are a Jacob generation – an Isaac company – children of promise, laughter and inheritance created for His divine love.

Pleasure Working Through You

The apostle James tells us that faith without works is dead. This is a beautiful truth, and one that is often misunderstood and distorted. Always read James through the lens of Paul, not in addition to Paul. We must rightly divide the word. James is largely a transitional book for Jews in Jerusalem moving from Judaism to faith in Christ. Some scholars say it is actually a sermon based on Leviticus 19. Obviously James was a believer and an apostle, but his letter does not carry the same clarity of grace that was only articulated through the apostle Paul. Paul wrote two-thirds of the New Testament. He mentored Mark and Luke before they wrote the books of Mark, Luke and Acts. Acts was mostly about Paul’s ministry. Paul once had to rebuke Peter in front of everyone. Peter openly endorsed Paul’s letters in scripture. And men sent from James even persecuted Paul!

All that to say … maybe Paul was carrying something that the other boys were not!

If you read James backwards, you could get really tweaked out. James is not saying faith plus works is required for salvation. No surcharge of good works has been added. The thing James is conveying is that faith will manifest in works. Faith works through us. But if the striving toil of self-effort is involved, it ceases to be faith.

Does this mean we must always be looking over our shoulder making sure we’ve done enough works to prove our faith was effective? No. It’s not even about generating your faith. It’s the faith of God. The Gospel is His conclusion about us. Faith is the only natural response to such good news. And from that effortless trust of our inclusion in Him, we long to walk in godliness. We thrive on allowing God to work so mightily through us! There is a joy and a delight – not a legalistic compulsion – in participating in good deeds. God working in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure.

The good pleasure part is important! Works are not added to faith. Nor do we work alongside faith. Co-laboring is not me on one side of the yoke and Jesus on the other side – both pulling like oxen with our combined might. Co-laboring is about Jesus working through me, as me. I am a vessel that contains Him, a temple that houses Him, a branch that effortlessly carries the sap of the vine and bears fruit. My abiding in Him is a passive work – I’m just attached, and fruit happens!

Paralysis or Empowerment?

There is nothing apathetic about grace. Grace is no mere “cover up” of sin. Grace is defined as the divine influence of God upon man. It is like wind that fills the sails and drives the vessel of your humanity to lengths that are impossible to ordinarily go.

Grace infuses you. Grace is a Person who possesses and fuels you.

Contrary to the accusations against “grace teaching,” grace is no limp paralysis – laying around, waiting for a lightning bolt to knock me off the couch and push me along like Frankenstein. Of course we make choices and take initiative. But even our cognitive ability to make decisions and the strength to work is all a gift of grace. Part of maturing is knowing the difference between striving and actively moving in the unforced rhythms of grace. Fruitfulness all flows from a happy, ecstatic impulse toward our divine calling.

This is what Paul said he was pressing in toward. He was not pressing in for moral perfection. Not pressing in for more of the Spirit he already had, or trying to get closer to a God with whom he was already in Union. He was pressing in toward his high calling – literally to complete his life’s race and vocation – his ministry purpose that would ultimately result in martyrdom (Phil. 3). Love and grace will push you to lengths that fear and law never will. To think there was no pleasure even in this most grueling task, you are missing the nature of the Gospel, as well as the personality of the apostle. The religious man is compelled to run strictly out of legal motivation – dry duty, obligation and fear of ulterior consequences.

But we run out of a sheer pleasure! Not merely loving toward God, but allowing His love to flow through us tangibly in charity. We are at rest in the middle of the storm. The flavor of faith is rest, but the results of faith are mountain moving.

Divine pleasure is a great gauge to determine whether we are laboring from rest or strife. Did you know that ultimately, every man is looking for pleasure?

“All men seek happiness,” says Blaise Pascal. “This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”[86]

Reward in the Journey

Every man is in hot pursuit of pleasure. It’s just that some have a perverted notion of what will bring it about. Pleasure is always our motivation in the divine life. I do not preach the Gospel because God needs the help or because I need the brownie points. I preach the Gospel for the fun of it! Paul said, “Woe to me if I don’t preach the Gospel.” Not because he was afraid of being punished if he didn’t preach. Grace had infused him, and he had to let it out. He was given a golden ticket and he had to give it away. He was hammered drunk on the message! He was a man possessed, and there was nowhere else that this high-octane, supernatural voltage would allow him to go!

A complacent satisfaction in God may cause you to accidentally outwork all your religious friends.

We do not merely labor for future rewards. There are inherent blessings in being fruitful – bearing a healthy, moral life and doing good works. Even unbelievers see the holistic benefit of doing good, without being driven by a legal demand of a future Heaven. There is inherent good in doing good. But furthermore, Christ Himself is our reward. We do not labor to earn something from God, or even to impress Him. We labor for the simple sake of the joy and pleasure of God within the tasks at hand. We pursue labor for the inherent fun in the call itself.

Grace does not cause a man to retreat from work, but to find the deepest satisfaction of God’s presence amid the otherwise most wearisome of tasks. It was even for the joy set before Him that Jesus endured the cross! Doesn’t mean He enjoyed the nails – but He was thrilled with what those nails would accomplish. You may not enjoy getting up at 7 a.m. Monday morning, but it’s for the joy of the paycheck set before you that you endure the alarm clock! And He even invades the tasks at hand.

True pleasure does not motivate us to join the welfare line. True pleasure motivates us to succeed and run with our destiny! Maybe you’re a pizza delivery guy. That’s not necessarily your ultimate calling. But your desire for pleasure encourages you to stick with it while you work your way through college to become an astronaut. Pleasure never lets you camp along the way at a lesser desire. You don’t have to remain a pizza man for life. For others, being a pizza man is exactly what they want to do! Regardless of the grandeur of your career in the eyes of men, true nobility is found in your sonship and allowing God’s faithfulness to flow even in the simple things.

Regardless, grace never puts limits on us. It always pushes us to fulfill divine desires to succeed. Grace is violent and furious at propelling us into favor. Nor does it allow us to bail out just because there are temporary, momentary hardships that are not immediately pleasurable in themselves. Grace gives us a divine infusion of hope and torpedoes us toward impossible goals.

Grace through faith makes us want to do things. Not merely feeling we have to do them as under the law. You don’t force yourself into evangelism – you get addicted to sharing good news. You don’t force yourself to pay a legal tithe – you get addicted to giving thousands over and beyond out of the generosity of a new heart. You don’t force yourself to be a good spouse – grace inspires love and addiction to serve your spouse.

Divine Ambition

Admittedly the word “ambition” is a dirty word in today’s society (we generally think of selfish ambition). Yet there is a divine ambition born of grace that begins to fuel us, as we are no longer fettered by our own strife. The paradox is that when the whip of the law is removed, we can actually run harder and faster! Paul spoke of always being detained from visiting the Romans because a divine ambition had driven him to preach the Gospel throughout the Mediterranean (Rom. 15:20). He covered a vast area by ancient travel standards – until there was literally no more work for him to do in those regions. Paul had reached everyone he possibly could! They all heard the message either directly through him or vicariously because of him. Is it not amazing that Paul, the grace apostle, outworked all the others?

For I have worked harder than any of the other apostles; yet it was not I but God who was working through me by His grace (1 Cor. 15:10, NLT).

Without a doubt, when many hear the message of grace – after prior years of living under legalism – there often ensues a season of quitting their labors entirely. Some then mistakenly blame the grace message as the root of apathy. But in fact, grace simply peeled back the religious veneer of their former striving dead works, and men are sometimes left to sort through the rubble of their earlier motives. Let’s not be quick to throw new believers directly on the assembly line. Paul spent years pulled aside after his conversion. As we take time and allow our hard drives to be defragmented from all those years of performance orientation, we see that grace ultimately empowers us to outlast and outrun all the law-based surface workers. In the end, God is looking for lovers, not workers. And the paradox is that the lovers will outwork the workers.

Be infused with the revelation that it is Christ Himself who works through us. Unless the Lord builds the house, the workers labor in vain. This is from Psalm 127, which also tells us “The Lord gives to His beloved even in his sleep.” The wisdom God gave Solomon in his sleep is the very power that established a nation.

Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us (Eph. 3:20, NIV).

We don’t fearfully hyperventilate at our good works. Nor must we overanalyze every little thing we do in fear of being religious. “Is that me or God?” As we explore the effortless gift of grace and power latent within us, we just step out and take risks – pursuing God-given impulses to go to the mission field, write music, rescue orphans and widows, start businesses, go to college, create things, pioneer. Grace is the divine enablement for all of it. The very spark of creative initiative that pushes you to be the good boy you already are and do the good things you were foreordained to do from the foundation of the world. At the creamy center of it all is a divine complacency, knowing we can relax internally because the end results are not up to us.

Religion says grace plus me. You drive ahead thinking grace is just part of the equation, and you burn out depending on your own efforts. Grace is not another tool on your tool belt. Religion also says grace minus you. You are paralyzed, fearful of doing anything presumptuous and wait for a lightning bolt to confirm you should tie your own shoes in the morning. Meanwhile life drives over you like a bus.

What does the Gospel say? All is grace. It does say to give up – to fully retire from strife and frustrated self-effort as if God needs your help. But hope and pleasure make you stay in the game, trusting that it is God’s grace that empowers you to pursue dreams and vision. He works so mightily through you and ultimately enables you to bowl through every obstacle. Knowing that the end results are not up to you enables you to keep your eyes on Him, your feet pursuing life’s adventure. Faith works through you to move mountains.

CHAPTER 7

BORN FROM ABOVE

REGENERATION, NEW CREATION

& THE NEW BIRTH

WHAT DOES IT MEAN

TO BE BORN AGAIN?

I was born again … when Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary and rose again from the virgin tomb, the first-born from the dead.

- T.F. Torrance

The all-sufficient faithfulness of Jesus Christ has brought us into a Promise Land of rest. A glorious inheritance is ours. We were already walking in Paradise, and we didn’t even know it. We who believe have entered into that rest, just as faith has awakened us to see and participate in a whole new era. The old has gone. The new has come.

The new creation stands outside of time and space. When we speak of the new creation, we are speaking of the kingdom. We are speaking of the Gospel. We are speaking of a new age ushered in by Christ where the reconciliation of the cosmos is tangibly manifest and substantively seen. We speak of our mystical union with God in Christ.

There is an intrinsic link between the old creation and the new creation. In order to talk about the old and the new, we should look first at the two covenants in scripture.

Two Covenants, One Plan

In one sense, the old and new covenants are diametrically opposed. The former is based, as Paul says, on rules, regulations and legal outward observances. These external ordinances accomplish no change of heart in the listener. They produce slavery not freedom. In fact, we read in Romans 5 that the law actually causes sin to increase. It amplifies our rebellion. The law exacerbates the problem of our fallenness – it does nothing to relieve it. Is there anything inherently wrong with the law? By no means. But it was not intended to save you. Its purpose was to zoom in on our inability to be self-righteous or maintain our own spirituality … its aim was always to point out our need for a Saviour.

The law highlights our futile attempt at self-existence apart from God. It is a tutor aimed at eventually driving us headlong into divine love.

In fact, Old Covenant is a bit of a blanket term – there are a number of covenants cut throughout the Old Testament. A promise to Abraham. A promise to Noah. But Old Covenant most commonly describes the agreement between God and man chiseled out on stone in the law of Moses.

In the one sense, the old and new are opposites. One based on human performance, the other based on the power of resurrection life (Heb. 7:16). But in a greater sense, we must see the old and the new as one cohesive plan of God. All these various agreements in the old find their summation and ultimate fulfillment in Christ. There was not a separate, angry “Old Testament God” who one day morphed into a lighter, happy-go-lucky New Testament version after He stepped down and finally empathized with us in our humanity. You have to see the entire Old Covenant as a grand set up for the New. Preparation ground for the grand finale. Throughout the conflict of human history, there was always an all-out D-day assault secretly and preemptively orchestrated behind the scenes against the problem of sin and fallenness. Again, T.F. Torrance called Israel the womb of the incarnation. Her entire history was a build-up for Plan A, which God had intended from the foundation of the world. That Christ would step into the humanity of Israel’s family tree and accomplish everything on behalf of the cosmos.

The Gospel is the divine laughter at the problem of the ages that was solved before it began.

God was not experimenting with several different programs to see which one would work, after successively failing at each. We think his original plan was to hang out with a couple of naked vegetarians in the Garden of Eden. But Adam ate the apple, and that plan was botched. So He went back to the drawing board. Next idea was to try and mop up the mess with a bunch of regulations – the law. Then after the law failed, we figure He threw His hands up in the air and said “Oy vey! I’ve gotta go down and fix this Myself!” We think Jesus came to earth as a last ditch effort to recover as much loss as possible – to stem the Adamic bleed with the tourniquet of His own death. But only a small fraction of folks have openly responded to Jesus throughout human history. So many in the Church think He botched that part too – that Jesus didn’t really finish the job in his time on earth. Much of the Church is waiting for Him to do something else – to return again in one final Hail Mary pass at the Second Coming and really take care of business by nuking everyone at Armageddon.

The Old Covenant was not one of many failed attempts at human redemption. Jesus was always Plan A. The incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is the center of the universe and the culmination of all historical divine activity. The covenants and laws were merely a preamble pointing to this final act. And His Second Coming will merely be the final ramification of what He has already completely accomplished here on earth.

The Old Covenant was not a failed experiment. It was simply a precursor to the New Covenant … the only plan He had up His sleeve all along. God was making sure to cover all the bases, showing us how absolutely impotent we were at the business of saving ourselves. The ultimate intent of the law was that it should be fulfilled in Jesus Christ and in Him alone. That we would always trust Him and not in ourselves. That we would give up completely on the how of life and become infatuated with the Who. Even the Garden of Eden was an orchestrated set up. He always intended something far better than Eden. The very fact that Adam was excommunicated from Eden was God’s grace in disguise – He never wanted man to live forever in that state of decay. And so the old was always a preamble for the divine joke of the Gospel. He has always planned that we would sit back and laugh over sin and the fall itself when we see they would become an occasion for His grace.

The Law was an Incubator

Sure the law had some temporary practical benefit. As a system of sin management for fallen people it was good at teaching us how to lock up crooks, not cheat on one another’s wives and not pilfer the cash register. The law had some glory on it. But it was a fading glory. In comparison to the greater, ever-increasing glory in Christ, Paul says the law has no glory at all. Like Hagar, the slave woman, we are told to kick salvation-by-regulation to the curb. She only produces slave children. But we are children of Sarah, the free woman.

The old legal system is a leftover. Although the Church is still bewitched by it day and night in various forms, it is a relic. A better covenant has come. Christians know better than to abstain from shellfish or adhere to beard shaving guidelines of the old. We don’t send our wives outside the house during their monthly cycle, or follow the other six-hundred-some-odd Jewish laws. But what do we do? We still cling to the relic of spirituality-by-means-of-human-advancement. We push and pull and fast and pray and strain at a gnat with all sorts of internal striving – attempting to purify our own hearts and draw near to a God who’s already one-ed Himself with us. We struggle to please Him who is already pleased as punch about us thanks to Jesus. There are plenty of so-called “New Covenant believers” who wouldn’t claim to adhere to Old Covenant law, yet they cling onto any number of internal legalisms with all their might.

Once the baby is born, don’t toss it aside in order to coddle and kiss the afterbirth. You don’t photograph the placenta, wrap it in swaddling clothes and build it a nursery. You throw it away (unless you’re a hippie and eat it). Yet we have enshrined and built mausoleums to the afterbirth of the law. The old system was merely an incubator, a cocoon preparing us for the new.

The Plan of God was one fantastic eternal Idea now revealed. Christ. The substance is Christ. Once the substance appears, the shadows fade away. But the shadows had their purpose in this one flawless orchestration.

Old and New Creation

Christ and His redemptive act was always the eternal plan of God from the foundation of the world. We must see that Christ was present even at the onset of the old creation.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made (John 1:1-3, NIV).

Just as the Old Covenant was engineered to make way for the New, so should we see the old creation was always intended to make way for the new creation. One seamless act. It was an inevitable consequence in the heart of God that the new creation should spring forth out of the old – as a seed inevitably gives birth to something that is similar in substance, yet altogether more glorious than itself. That seed must die, in order to bring forth new life. Evil was allowed to strike death, only for the grand redemptive purpose of bringing life from the dead, restoring creation to a state better than it was in the beginning.

At the fall of Adam, God was not wringing His hands in Heaven, caught off guard my mankind’s failure and subsequent perversion of His creation. Contained in the DNA of His original plan was the redemption of that creation. Mankind, made in the image of God, was marred by sin. But mankind never lost his value to God, just as the lost coin never loses any value to its owner in the parable. The sheep may get lost, but the sheep never loses its value. His plan was always redemption.

In a very real sense, there is but one creation. Old and New Covenants are, in one sense, diametrically opposed – but in a greater sense actually the same – as the old paved way for the new. Similarly, the new creation in Christ is altogether different from the old world. Indeed! And yet, it was always God’s progressive design to transcend the old with the advent of the new through the broken body of the Son. The new creation is the sovereignly orchestrated evolution of the old world.

From the dawn of creation, the reconciliation of the universe was always woven into the fabric of His plan as the very culmination of His divine strategy.

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in Him all things were created: things in Heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. And He is the head of the body, the church; He is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything He might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in Heaven, by making peace through His blood, shed on the cross (Col. 1:15-20, NIV).

Kainos Creation

The apostle Paul was “standing outside himself in ecstasy” in 2 Corinthians 5:13 and was literally possessed by the love of God because he recognized that “one died for all, therefore all died.” He goes on to say a couple verses later:

Therefore, if any one is in union with Christ, he is a new being (TCNT)

Whosoever, then, is in Christ, is a new creation (CON)

… he becomes a new person altogether (PHI)

The verse continues to read, “His old life has disappeared, everything has become new about him” (KNOX). And also, “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (KJV). Numerous versions even suggest that “he is in a new world” (BAS). We will explain this a bit later.

Understand that Christ did not just clean your slate and give you another chance at the old you. You are not just a remodeled version of the old Adamic self. You’ve been thoroughly transformed into something new.

There are various Greek terms for the word “new.” One of these words is neos. The word neos suggests that something is new in relation to time.[87]

I had an old Toyota. It broke down. Now I have a new (neos) Toyota.

I had an old typewriter. It broke down. Now I have a new (neos) typewriter.

New in these examples concerns antiquity versus modernity. The new typewriter is in every respect just like the old one, but it’s the latest model – it’s shiny and all the keys work. Neos speaks of a timeframe. Young versus aged. This, however, is certainly not what the apostle was saying when he called you a new creation. You are not new according to time. You are not just an updated model of the same old Toyota that you were before. You are something altogether different than you were before. Allow me to explain.

Contrary to popular opinion, the Gospel is not a “start over” program or a “second chance” message (i.e. I ruined my life, but God gave me a clean slate and threw me back in the game). He didn’t just give you a new start at the same ordinary human self. That is not really good news! If I spoiled it the first time, what is to prevent me from spoiling it again? Jesus didn’t just forgive you and give you a second chance to perform better. Instead, He transformed the very substance of what you were. He changed you, restored you, and rebirthed you as an entirely new creation.

There is another word for new that Paul uses in this passage. It is the word kainos. Kainos new means a different “kind.” It means new in kind or quality. It means unique. It means novel. Unprecedented. Never seen before – a new kind of substance.[88]

“That’s different! That’s unusual! Never seen one of those before! Wow … that’s new!”

You are a kainos creation. The earth has not yet beheld what you are – it’s groaning for the revelation (Rom. 8). You are a different kind of breed. You have not begun to scratch the surface of your new super self! If you had an old Toyota, you don’t just get the new year’s model of Toyota. Instead, you are now driving the Star Wars Millenium Falcon! You did have an old typewriter, but now you have a smart phone that reads people’s minds, teleports you across country, shoots laser beams and is connected to a never-ending online bank account!

You are not a revamped version of your old self … you are a new breed. Something unimaginably unprecedented.

New Humanity, New Covenant

Seeing the Greek perspective on the word new changes everything in understanding the difference between the old and new self. It’s not about two different timeframes, but two different varieties.

As a kainos creation, you are a new kind of human … but in fact, you are really what humanity was always intended to be. One authentic creation in its originally intended redeemed state. Not new according to time. The old you was born into time. The new you was born out of time. Before time. Beyond time. Bigger than time and space and geography.

“There are no ordinary people,” said C.S. Lewis. “You have never talked to a mere mortal.”[89]

Christ reconnected us to our True Identity in His image, which is why Paul says in this passage, “Henceforward, we do not think of anybody in a merely human fashion” (KNOX). We’ve been restored to life in the Spirit as spiritual beings.

Where else do we see the term kainos? The New (Kainos) Covenant! Although the old was a precursor to the new, the Kainos Covenant is a different kind of agreement altogether. Not merely a new law, but something altogether different from the written code. One written in letters of love inside the human heart. The living law of love. “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you …” (Ezek. 36:26). The two covenants and the two creations are only connected as a shadow would be connected to a real man. You see the rough outline. But how could you ever explain what a living, breathing man was like in a world of two-dimensional shadow people? You did not pass from being an old shadow to a newer shadow. You have gone from shadow to becoming a real man.

Furthermore, the nature of the word “kainos” is special in that it is a corporate word. It speaks not in terms of an old individual self being replaced by a new individual self. Instead it infers that you are grafted into a bigger picture. You have been united with a larger corporate entity. You have been brought into a whole new world.

A Whole New World

Look again at what Paul said: “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is a new creation” (Gal. 6:14-15, NIV).

It was not just you who died on that tree. The whole world was crucified to you. And in some mystical way, the entire world was sucked up into the black hole of His suffering and death. The entire cosmos was on that tree.

For God was in Christ reconciling the cosmos to Himself … (2 Cor. 5:19).

The old era that was represented by Adam and the fall of humanity has been replaced by the new era of Christ and His kingdom. You are in a whole new realm now. You are grafted into something bigger than yourself. You are one with God. The crazy thing is that everyone else is grafted in as well; they just don’t know it! What’s the difference between a believer and an unbeliever? The fact that you believe it!

… we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of believers (1 Tim. 4:10, NASB).

You’re already a new creation, even if you don’t fully recognize it yet. The transition from old to new was not sourced in your “decision.” It was sourced in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ who absorbed humanity into Himself. Becoming a new creation is not about when you accept it. This is much bigger than your individual decision. Paul is speaking to the Corinthians of how all have died in His death. Therefore if anyone is in Christ he is a new creature. Quite often, people assume this is a conditional “if.” If you come to faith and receive Him, then you become new. But this is not a conditional “if.” It is a conclusive “if.” All of you have died … now “if” you’re dead – what does that mean? It means you’re all new! The same “if” is used in this conclusive way in Romans 8:31, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

Consider the following from the Dictionary of Paul and His Letters:

The translation “old self” and “new self” is too individualistic, since the idea certainly means the individual Christian. … The “old person” is not just the sin nature, which was judged at the cross and to which is added a “new person.” The “old person” is what believers were “in Adam” (in the old era). The “old” points to everything connected with the fall of humanity and with the subjection to the distress and death of a transitory life, separated from God.[90]

All of creation was included in this renewal, as the old Adamic era faced its end in the Last Adam. Now we who believe are enjoying and living in this new and marvelous supernatural existence. Let us look at the Heinz Cassirer translation of Romans 6:4:

Well then, by virtue of undergoing baptism into death we were buried with Him, in order that, as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glorious power, we, too, might live and move in a new kind of existence (CAS).

Or as J.B. Phillips translates it, you “rise to life on a new plane altogether” (PHI). You are now sharing Jesus’ relationship with the Father.

There is one creation just as there is one God. Even the old world held within its fabric the very image, germ and seed of its Maker. He prized us and found us worth redemption.

We are employing lots of different terminology, but all these words mean essentially the same thing: new creation, redemption, reconciliation, new birth, regeneration, salvation, etc. They are all the work of Christ stepping into our humanity, turning it back to its original design, destroying its corruption in His own death, and resurrecting it back to life.

The “old” was simply creation in its state of decay, limitation, alienation and blindness. The “new” is the self-same creation, but fully cleansed and purged of corruption. Restored to its authentic design and far better.

Born Again

In discussing the new creation in this way, we want to revisit this basic question: What does it mean to be born again? For all the modern evangelical talk of the “new birth,” there are some major blind spots in the currently accepted message. As soon as we see our renewal as sourced in Christ and Him crucified, we recognize that the new birth was never about my choice, personal decision or altar call experience. In no way did we ever self-generate the new man. This cuts to the heart of our self-salvation process.

We think of the “new birth” as a simple, basic, clearly understood concept … Christianity 101. Yes, it is simple, and we should understand it. But we grasp it no more than the religious leaders did during Jesus’ day. The Lord was being anything but clear when He brought up this mystical concept of rebirth to Nicodemus … keep in mind that Jesus was speaking in shadows and parables.

Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs You are doing if God were not with him.” Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the Kingdom of God unless they are born again” (John 3:1-3, NIV).

Now later in this conversation comes the banner verse, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

How are we saved? Jesus talks about believing and about being born again. Now John 3:16 seems pretty self-explanatory and it is often paired together with Romans 10:9, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”

Yes, you will! But belief and confession are not the purchase price of salvation – it’s merely aligning with the salvation He already purchased. If you take these two verses, isolate them from the rest of the scripture and put them into an evangelism tract, you have a great formula for “getting someone saved.” Just muster up a little faith and voila! You did it!

I understand that tweaking with our “born again” paradigm flirts with molesting the holy grail of all doctrines. But just humor me for a minute. I’m not trying to confuse the system here. You may think I am overcomplicating things. “Just believe!” you may say, “It’s simple!” I would argue that we have overcomplicated things already. In all of Christendom, no one can quite agree on this fundamental idea … what must I do to be born again?

Do I pray? How long? How hard? Until it sinks in? How do I know it sank in? Do I pray and believe? Believe how deeply? What if I believe the wrong thing? Do I believe and repent? Is repentance changing the mind? Is repentance changing the actions? Do I stop snorting coke? Do I stop picking up hookers? How much repentance is enough? What if I just snort one line of coke? What if I just have one hooker?

Me, me, me, me, me … what do I do, what do I do, what do I do?? How much faith is enough?

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that “… if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

Doesn’t seem like much … one tiny mustard seed.

Over the years, I have literally prayed the sinner’s prayer with hundreds of thousands of people. I have never seen a single one of them move a mountain … ever.

Here’s the deal. Jesus was not saying that if you strain and burst a blood vessel you can finally squeeze out a mustard-seed worth of faith. Forget reading the verse in context … how about we at least read the entire verse for starters to see what He meant: “He replied, ‘Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, “Move from here to there” and it will move. … ’” (Matt. 17:20).

The whole point here … Jesus was saying, “You boys have NO faith! Not even a smidgeon! If you had even the tiniest little germ of belief (which you don’t), you could take on hell with a water pistol.” Jesus is saying they are hopelessly bankrupt in the faith department. I would argue that we’re largely in the same boat today.

Another Recipe for Salvation

It is true Jesus told Nicodemus that faith was necessary. But maybe you’ve never noticed something else. Jesus was highly inconsistent in His answer to the question “What must I do to be saved?” In fact, He gave several different recipes for salvation and they all seemed quite contradictory. Do you remember the story of the rich young ruler?

Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”

“Why do you ask Me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.”

“Which ones?” he inquired.

Jesus replied, “‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother,’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’”

“All these I have kept,” the young man said. “What do I still lack?” (Matt. 19:16-20)

Notice here the same topic as discussed with Nicodemus: how to get eternal life? And how does Jesus answer? Keep the law! Points the kid right to the Ten Commandments. Now you won’t see any evangelical get near this one. You’ll see plenty of John 3:16 posters at the football game “BELIEVE!” but never a Matthew 19:18 poster “KEEP THE LAW!” That doesn’t fit the grid. But both are formulas for salvation offered by Jesus. We know we can’t work up law … but herein lies the problem. We do think we can work up saving faith. So we’ve decided to pick and choose which recipe for salvation that we like. We know that the law is powerless to save us because we are powerless to keep it. But we still think we can pull off faith – as if that department is still within reach.

Amazingly, in this passage, Richie Rich actually thinks he’s been doing a good job at the Ten Commandments. But as we read on, we don’t see Jesus giving him any kudos for his stellar legal performance. Instead, Jesus starts shooting from the hip – almost making stuff up as He goes along – amping the law up on anabolic steroids! It seems Jesus is intentionally making it impossible for the rich young ruler. The man says “I’ve done these things (kept the law) … what else do I lack?”

Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in Heaven. Then come, follow me.” When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth (Matt. 19:21-22).

Now selling all your stuff is nowhere found in the law. In saying to “sell your stuff,” Jesus starts personally tailoring a salvation method that He knows the rich young ruler can’t accomplish. He throws the kid’s brand new Aston Martin from sixth gear into neutral, jingles the keys and says, “Okay, I’ll take it. Along with everything else you own. You’ll be walking from here on out. You good with that?” It was beyond anything this trust fund baby could ever bring himself to do.

The disciples start calculating at this point. Their minds start spinning … they know if they were in Richie’s shoes they would have the same problem. They’re thinking, “Sure, we’ve left everything to follow Him … But then again, we were dead broke to begin with!” Finally, in a moment of honesty they blurt out what they are really thinking … “This is impossible!”

When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:25-26).

This is the whole point! Salvation is God’s business. You can’t do anything to be saved. You can’t follow the rules enough. You can’t believe enough. Salvation, as a human task, is utterly and totally hopeless.

The Impossibility of Salvation

Not only is Jesus extremely inconsistent with His answer to “How do I get saved?” On top of it all, He seems to be making up random new rules at the drop of a hat, just to add a new layer of complexity to the already difficult rules they knew!

“Instead of just keeping the law, have a yard sale and get rid of all your stuff as well.”

“Forget what you read about murder – flip someone off on the highway and you’ve already killed him.”

“Forget what you heard about adultery, just wink at those Web sites and you’ve already done it.”

“Wanna fix yourselves up boys? Okay, chop off your hands and pluck out your eyeballs.”

Remember when Jesus, speaking of the resurrection in John 5:29 says, “Those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned?” Ever wonder about that verse? Well so did they! Doesn’t sound very gracious does it? Here we have the same principle. Jesus is showing everyone they are up the creek without a paddle. Which of them had not done evil? Condemnation stood waiting at the door! Jesus was backing them into a corner. But there was always a hidden, silver lining of grace in His words. He was pushing them ever toward a cliff of trust, trying to get them to hope their own actions would not be the final clause of their eternal fate. His actions are the final clause in the story of humanity’s salvation. Jesus was simply crushing their faith in their own moral, ethical and spiritual high ground. Showing the utter hopelessness of any human attempt to climb through any door besides the Sheep Gate.

The Narrow Gate is not adherence to the Sermon on the Mount. The Narrow Gate is Christ Himself.

Jesus was in the habit of frustrating people, of disqualifying their best efforts, in order to show them their need for a Savior. He knew they couldn’t fulfill the external works of the law, nor the internal work of faith. He put good works and faith on the same plane; in fact, in John 6 He said faith is a work. God was gonna have to pull this off. Even Jesus’ admonitions to believe were not the “easy out” method by which we think we are born again. His command to believe, like every other command, highlighted our inability to do it. The guys He most instructed to “believe” (the disciples) were also the guys He clearly said did not believe.

Then Jesus’ disciples said, “Now You are speaking clearly and without figures of speech. Now we can see that You know all things and that You do not even need to have anyone ask You questions. This makes us believe that You came from God” (John 16:29-30).

The disciples had been with Jesus a long time. At the end of His ministry, Jesus sits them across the table and starts speaking in plain talk. No more parables of sheep, goats, wheat and tares. Just clear communication. They get excited! “Wow … He really is sane! He’s not a nut job after all … We really can trust Him. We believe!”

“Do you now believe?” Jesus replied. “A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave Me all alone …” (John 16:31-32).

Right up to the end, Jesus said His disciples didn’t believe jack squat. Let me say this loud and clear: Nobody has ever believed enough to be saved. Nobody but Christ has had perfect faith. Not even Abraham. Abraham, the father of faith, doubted big time! One night of doubt with Hagar and Abraham birthed the Islamic world!

Holy Frustration Batman!

The whole point of Jesus’ teaching was to absolutely frustrate His listeners, so they would give up trying to save themselves and throw themselves into the arms of a Saviour. Jesus, in His earthly ministry, was transitioning Jews from Old Covenant law to New Covenant grace. In case you never realized it, Jesus was not a grace preacher! He was preaching the law on steroids. He was showing the people how futile it is to climb into salvation. As a matter of fact, He was indeed preaching grace, but only in a hidden way. Just as the Law was, in a sense, a cloaked henchman of grace in that it knocked the knees out from under our self-effort, causing us to give up and trust God.

The New Covenant begins not with Jesus’ earthly preaching – not with the Sermon on the Mount – but with the cross. It is most clearly articulated by the apostle Paul. Jesus was called to get the job done, in His incarnation, death and resurrection. Paul was only called to explain it. Jesus explained little in His earthly ministry – in fact, He spoke in mysteries and hard sayings. But He embodied our corruption and brought it to a brutal end as He fulfilled the demands of the law in His own servant body. He liberated us completely from the law. We see grace in Jesus because He is grace. But in His sermons – such as Matthew 5-7 and beyond, Jesus is preaching law prior to His death. He chose Paul as a vessel, on the other side of the cross, by which He would now articulate grace. Something altogether different. Something far superior to the law. I am not elevating Paul’s words over the words of Jesus. I’m saying that Paul’s words are the words of Jesus – from this side of the cross. Jesus spoke in shadows, parables and dark speech. Paul on the other hand is clearly explaining what Jesus just accomplished after the fact. Jesus intentionally obfuscated the truth so that His listeners would dig for it – abandoning their own reasoning and trusting in Him.

So back to our question … Are we born again by believing in Jesus? No, you can’t do that successfully enough. You were born again 2,000 years ago when Jesus Christ came out of the virgin womb. You were born again when He stepped out of the virgin tomb.

Jesus gave Nicodemus and Richie Rich different recipes for salvation, each impossibly customtailored for each individual. Telling Nicodemus to believe was no different than telling him to keep the law. Impossible. Even the John 3:16 poster at the football game is preaching law. Nobody can conjure up faith.

Christ has already given birth to us by the Spirit in His own incarnation, life, death and resurrection. Your own faith doesn’t birth you. His faith birthed you. The faith of God flowing through your life now becomes the first fruit of the new birth. The person and work of Christ is the source of the new birth. Jesus Christ is our faith. He is the Mustard Seed.

“The Message does not demand faith,” says Francois du Toit. “It supplies faith.”

Jesus never sent His disciples out saying, “Boys, let’s water this salvation business down to the lowest common denominator. Let’s drop the bar to make it really easy. Just twist people’s arms to say this simple prayer of faith.”

No! It was just the opposite. Jesus was going around frustrating everybody, showing them how infinitely impossible the salvation game was. His whole ministry seemed geared at telling people how futile it was for humanity to climb into Heaven – as unachievable, in Nicodemus’ mind, as climbing back into the womb.

One guy asks, “How do I get saved?” The Teacher answers, “Follow the law.” To another guy on the exact same topic Jesus says, “Believe in me.” Same question. Two radically different answers.

But in fact, it is the same answer. Only Jesus could fulfill the law. And only Jesus could attain perfect saving faith. His answers were custom-tailored to be impossible for each individual. But with God, all things are possible.

The Conversion Experience

Let’s look for a moment to the currently accepted notion of what it means to become born again. Our idea is that of an emotional conversion experience. Where someone walks down to the altar, perhaps mourning over sins or mustering up the effort to change their lives. Depending on the strictness of your denomination, that change may entail a willingness to jump over any number of hurdles – from changing the length of your skirt to simply raising your hand at the altar call. Christians are torn over “how much” repentance is to be involved at conversion, as well as what “repentance” actually means. Some expect you to instantly fulfill Torah; others simply expect you to stop sleeping with your girlfriend.

Regardless of what we believe about repentance, all evangelicals seem to agree that being born again ultimately has to do with us believing in Jesus. Faith in Jesus: the one surcharge to salvation.

This idea piggybacks off our earlier conversation with Nicodemus in John 3 about being born “from above.” Here it gets confusing for people, and many doubt their own salvation … because how much faith do we need exactly? How do I know if my conversion experience went deep enough? The Good Lord knows we need to believe in the heart … not just the head! So make sure you don’t stop at the first goose bump. Work up a strong emotional fervor (a few tears would be nice – perhaps a grunt).

Experience is a flimsy ground for salvation. I’m not banking on my experience; I’m banking on Christ. I am not looking for an experience of a lifetime. I’ve been brought into a lifetime of experience.

We are saved by His faithfulness, not our ability to muster up faith. In fact, we are saved by His unmerited grace – a free gift. And this is “realized” through faith – and that not of ourselves! Faith is simply the lens by which we see a salvation He has already procured for us.

Is faith necessary? Yes. But faith is not a magical formula we are called to generate on our own.

And this is exactly what He’s saying to Nicodemus, the ruling Pharisee who is so dead broke in faith that he’s slinking to Jesus in the dark behind everybody’s back, so as not to ruin his reputation with the Sanhedrin. “You wanna get saved Nick? Okay, forget this cloak and dagger midnight rendezvous stuff. Put all your chips on red in the daylight. That’s right, all your eggs in one basket. Trust in Me. The One you don’t wanna be seen with. The nut bar Sabbath breaker who spits in people’s faces and breaks bread with tax collector thugs – the guy who tore up the temple and told all you professionally religious guys that the whores are gonna enter the kingdom before you do. That’s right, trust Me, Nick. The ‘Glutton and Winebibber.’ Believe in Me.”

Impossible. Just as He did with the rich young ruler, Jesus is giving Nicodemus a recipe for salvation he can’t possibly conjure up. “You’ve gotta trust Me, the most unreligious guy you’ve ever met. You’re going to lose your reputation, your ministry, your career.”

Can Nicodemus make this jump? Hardly. Now we see why Jesus in the same breath talks about being “born again.” Generating faith is as impossible as birthing yourself.

Divine Origin

The “new birth” is incorrectly taught as something you must choose to do. That being “born again” is something you actively decide or participate in. That is impossible. You contribute nothing to your spiritual birth – nothing more than you contributed to your natural birth. You didn’t choose to have your parents; your parents had you. You didn’t pop yourself out of the natural womb. Nor do you have any participation in your spiritual birth.

You were “born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13).

Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of His creatures (James 1:18).

“The reality of our adoption is not one we can force. For those of us who would charge into claiming our ‘adoption’ as yet another thing to accomplish, the good news is that adoption is under the Holy Spirit’s jurisdiction,” said John Calvin. “Our adoption—God welcoming us into His relationship with His Son—is brought about by the Spirit, ‘without whom no one can taste either the fatherly favor of God or the beneficence of Christ.’”[91]

Jesus is telling Nicodemus that salvation comes from above. It is all God’s business … your human effort plays no part in it at all. He says that if anyone should understand this, it’s you Nicodemus – a religious leader of Israel! Shouldn’t you of all people know that salvation comes from above, Nick?

A number of translations say “born from above.” The key word here is anothen, meaning “from above, from Heaven, from the beginning, from their origin (source), from of old, again, anew.”[92]

On the one hand, it means your life finds its origin in Him and His will, not in your own effort or willpower. But this is also saying, “back it up … start it over from the top.” This literally means to start back at the beginning – back at your original design from above. Return to the origin – your authentic blueprint. This is about renewal – rediscovering mankind’s initial design as a spirit being in union with God. A restoration of the original creation.

New creation and old creation both originated in the heart of God as one seamless act. The new was always intended as a regeneration of the old. God breathed His very life breath into Adam. We find our very life source in His substance! Somehow we were with Him, in Him and as Him from the foundation of the world. We were associated in Christ from the dawn of creation (Eph. 1:4). We have “forgotten the rock from which we where hewn” (Isa. 51:1), but the believer is one who begins to recognize and remember his true identity: that “as He is, so also are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). We are restored to that very image – our true selves made in the very image of God. Spawned from an immortal seed. The divine, immortal you!

You have been born again, not from a perishable seed [mortal sperm, human origin], but from one that will live forever [immortal] because it comes from the eternal, living Word of God (1 Pet. 1:23).

Jesus speaks of two births saying, “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.” There are two births – the natural birth (born of the broken water of a human womb) and the spiritual birth (born of Spirit from above).

Only by discovering his true and authentic origin as a spirit being (not a mere carnal, flesh-driven, fallen man) can Nicodemus engage the kingdom. The kingdom cannot be comprehended apart from a realization of his true, authentic identity as a son of God. Apart from an awareness of his sonship, Nicodemus will be continually driven by hollow impulses with no appetite for heavenly things.

Regeneration

By no means do I intend to diminish anyone’s conversion experience. In actuality, we endorse experience more than just about any ministry on the circuit. But your experience is merely the awakening to a sonship with which He has already endowed us. We should live a life of continual intoxication in His presence, because we are continually in union with Him apart from our own efforts. Our experience is just an awakening to a forgiveness He purchased before we were born. Realizing a regeneration that had taken place before the world began. Experiencing a new creation that is older than the first one. It is not our conversion experience itself that has power to save. We are simply experiencing a salvation He already procured. His finished work is the object of your experience. We are experiencing what He accomplished to reconcile the cosmos before the cosmos even existed.

He rebirthed humanity when He stepped into human skin. Jesus regenerated mankind. When we hear this good news, faith effortlessly pops up as an ecstatic “Yes!” to what He has done. It’s a gift! Faith is now the eyes to see what He’s done. And out of that faith flow good works and a happy, holy life in obedience to the daily influence of the Spirit. We are now motivated not by legalism but love – the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus.

Despite the overwhelming scriptural evidence against it, most evangelicals rabidly believe that our conversion experience itself regenerates us. That a man is not truly new until Holy Spirit individually recreates him at an altar call or whatever. Holy Spirit is always pointing us dramatically and emotionally to what Christ accomplished, but the Spirit is not doing additional regenerative works. He is supplying the new life and energy of God that was already fully poured out on the Tree.

The word regeneration is used only twice in scripture: first, regarding Christ’s saving act in Titus 3:5, and again concerning His return in Matthew 19:28. Thomas F. Torrance points out the following:

It is significant that the New Testament does not use the term regeneration (paliggenesia), so often as modern evangelical theology does, for what goes on in the human heart. It is used only of the great regeneration that took place in and through the Incarnation and of the final transformation of the world when Jesus Christ will come again to judge the quick and the dead and make all things new. That is to say, the Gospel speaks of regeneration as wholly bound up with Jesus Christ Himself.[93]

The “new birth,” being synonymous with regeneration, is not about what happens in the heart of individual believers. Yes our hearts are awakened to this reality, but even Paul did not point to his experience on the Road to Damascus as a “conversion” … rather, he refers to it as his “calling.” Jesus does not magically float down and enter a man at the altar. In fact, his conversion was a disclosing of something God knew to be true about Paul all along, as he said “God, who set me apart from birth … was pleased to reveal His Son in me” (Gal. 1:15-16). What we call “conversion” is simply having our faith eyes opened to see the image of Christ that was latent within us all along. Torrance continues:

“Conversion” is not an emotional experience or a radical change in heart as the repentant sinner tearfully trods the sawdust trail beneath the billowing dome of the revival tent; it is about what happens in the regeneration of the human mind in the incarnation. May I suggest that we think of conversion “Christologically” rather than “anthropologically”?[94]

By saying we should no longer think anthropologically, Torrance is saying mankind should not be looking within himself with an “in-turned notion,” but that we should be looking to Christ. Not just what He did, but who He is in the incarnation. This is a matter of Christology – our understanding of the very fabric of the nature and person of Christ. Christ Himself – in His very makeup – is the substance of conversion. We’ve been so self-focused on what we have to do or say or believe to be reconciled to God, that we’ve missed what He did. But even beyond that, we’ve missed Who He is.

We’ve missed the simple fact that He is the reconciliation between Heaven and earth. The God-Man connection. Jesus Christ is the covenant between God and man. Jesus Christ is our human response to the Father. His person and His work are all one in the same. Salvation was not merely an act He accomplished. He Himself is Salvation.

The Conversion of Christ

Every doctrine of conversion must be grounded in Jesus Christ Himself. Even to the point that He took our place in our acts of repentance and personal decision, “for without Him all so-called repentance and conversion are empty,” says Torrance. “Our conversion or ‘new birth’ is a sharing in the conversion of the human mind wrought in the healing assumption of Adamic flesh in the incarnation. Our new birth is a prior act of sheer grace, whereby, through no merit of our own, we are given to participate in the ‘conversion’ of Jesus Christ.” We do not depend on our own “decision” for Christ, as this throws men back upon themselves to be saved, effectually telling men they are responsible for their own salvation.

From the very moment of His virgin birth, Christ was beating back our old nature, converting humanity through His own struggle against temptation, in His fasting, in His persecutions, in His sweating of great drops of blood. He embodied our repentance. He repented for us, just as He was baptized for us. He was turning our nature back into submission to God. He received baptism from John, clearly not needing it for Himself – but He was stepping in, becoming our conversion.

You were not born again during an epiphany moment on November 13, 1999. Now it is fine to talk about when you first came to faith – and I have no problem with the term conversion experience – but it wasn’t the moment Christ first included you. It was the moment you realized your inclusion. Accepted your already given gift of acceptance. Many of us have dramatic testimonies of when our lives were first radically transformed by faith. I myself was instantly delivered from drug abuse and all sorts of evil. Yet the power of my encounter was not rooted in my acceptance of Him, but His acceptance of me. And He had accepted me and blessed me long before I ever realized it.

When Were You Saved?

When did it first happen? My new life sprang up not when I “received” it but “he gave us life when He raised Christ from the dead” (Eph. 2:5). The new birth finds its origin in the life, death and resurrection of Christ.

We must stop thinking in the dimension of time (when the new creation began), and start thinking in the dimension of a Person. Maybe it first became visible to you on November 13, 1999. But you were included in Him before you started – predestined from the dawn of time. All people, before and after Christ, were included in His grace – even before He came 2,000 years ago.

At the incarnation, Christ was not leaving His heavenly rest to do a second work of repairing Adam. He had foreordained His own coming, and it was latent within His original work of creation. He worked six days, and on the Seventh Day God rested. It never says He clocked back in again on Monday morning. The Sabbath Rest never ends. God completely restored you from the foundation of the earth, before you ever fell in Adam. He’s not sitting on pins and needles hoping you make the right choice. From His perspective, you’ve always been complete. You just realized it for the first time on November 13, 1982.

The good news is that your faith was insufficient to accomplish salvation. You don’t have to depend on yourself. The requirement is too high. To be saved by law, you had to perform spotlessly, which was impossible. And to be saved by your own faith? Well, that requires perfect faith. Let me say it loud and clear: nobody could believe enough! This frees us to just relax and trust Him. And that is the very nature of what faith is: trust.

Jesus made sure that the hurdle of the law was too high for you to jump over. But what most evangelicals don’t know is that He also made the hurdle of faith just as high. In fact, Jesus basically gave us the law in order to contribute to our sin problem … to show us how depraved we really were apart from Him.

But did you know He also contributed to our doubt problem? On the one hand, Paul tells us, “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4). And yet Jesus makes it clear in John 12:40 that even this is not beyond God’s sovereign plan, as ultimately, “(God) has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, so they can neither see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts, nor turn—and I would heal them.”

Blinded to See

Why would God intentionally blind us? Quite simple really. For your own safety, He cannot allow you to take credit for having your own faith. So He put all of us in the same boat of trouble … not to harm us, but to help us. God is pure goodness and evil does not come from Him. But knowing we would choose evil, He always intended to use it for our good.

He handed all men over to disobedience that He might have mercy on all (Rom. 11:32).

Like the law, faith is not a price tag for salvation. Rather, it becomes the initial byproduct of hearing the news of your salvation! John 5:24 tells us that belief is proof positive that one already “has crossed over from death to life.” You begin trusting instead of striving.

Let’s be honest. Whose meager efforts at faith amount to perfect faith? I’m originally from the Bible Belt. If you’ve never been there, it is quite bizarre to encounter so many lukewarm, fence-riding, nominal believers. Everyone you meet says, “Yeah, I’m a Christian.” But you know that none of them believes any deeper than the butter spread on their Waffle House pancake. You meet a crack head: “Yeah, I’m a Christian.” You meet a pimp: “Yeah, I’m a Christian.” You meet plenty of racists: “Yeah, we’re all Christians.”

It’s not real Christianity; it’s just a cultural phenomenon. Ultimately, this is what the scriptures refer to as “taking the name of the Lord in vain.” That commandment has nothing to do with creative divine swear words. God#*&it!! No. This commandment is about folks plastering a Jesus fish to the car bumper, but living like a demon. Being a “Christian” in name only. Nominalism.

What’s the point? We all know that such hypocrisy does not amount to real faith. But what we don’t see in this situation is the big plank we have lodged in our own eyeballs. Every one of us is in the same boat as these hypocritical hillbillies. Don’t put yourself above them, just because you don’t smoke crack or use racial slurs. It’s easy to see their shallow version of Christianity and notice when they’re full of hot air. But what makes your two-bit steps toward repentance or good works significantly better than theirs? Because you donate to missions, that makes you better? Abraham healed an entire nation of barrenness with one prayer. Have you ever done that? Yet supposedly the least in the kingdom is greater than Abe and John the Baptist and all those guys.

We are considered greater than the patriarchs, who longed to look into our day, not because we out-accomplished them. But because Christ did.

What if the crack head smoked only once a week, instead of everyday – would that be enough change – enough proof of saving faith? What if the pimp only drove around with one hooker on his arm, instead of a carload – would that be evidence enough of saving faith? Oh, but the changes we’ve made in our lives are much more significant than that. I see plenty of “believers” manifesting poverty, sickness or sin at times – yet they are still prone to compare their faith with others. Maybe you’ve led your household to the Lord – have you led your city to the Lord? How about your state? It’s a subjective rubber ruler. Do you know you have enough faith when you stop beating your wife, or when you start walking on water?

How Much Faith is Enough?

Am I saying we are imperfect or that we should work harder? No! Just the opposite. I’m saying it’s time we openly declared our state of bankruptcy when it comes to pumping up faith, and start relying on the perfection of His faith that He has freely given us. “Lord I believe (to some extent). Help my unbelief!” Often the reason we are not manifesting new creation realities is because we are trying so hard to generate the faith on our own! It is time we rest in His faith.

Christ has perfected us all with His faith. But it doesn’t manifest in exactly the same way for all people at every altar call. We are catching this revelation over time. Time does not fix us! We are not in a time-process of becoming holy; we are in a process of discovering how holy we’ve been all along. It’s not about how long it takes to transform you. It’s about Who transformed you long before you ever realized it.

One day, we’re all going to catch up to this mighty revelation of what He has done. It’s the only way. But I’ve still never met a man who believes the Gospel the way he’s supposed to.

He has regenerated humanity, but we have not yet seen the full ramifications. Nothing holds us back from seeing it right here, right now – the kingdom is at hand. We do not preach a Gospel of postponement or delay. Power, right living, good marriages, healthy children, liberation from poverty … it’s all your inheritance available now, as we discover what’s already ours. And yet, He fully intends to speed up our process of discovery. The good news is that we don’t wait forever for these things to manifest if we don’t see them right away. Paul always spoke of the ever-present Christ in the same breath as the hope of His reappearing. When He returns, in the second coming, we will all experience that final regeneration! This is not really a second paliggenesia. It is merely an outward transfiguration of what had already been completed in us long ago. We don’t know what it will fully look like, except that this final regeneration is not separate from the first one. The flower will fully open to reveal what He finished from the origins of time.

CHAPTER 8

THE DIVINITY OF MAN

ADOPTION & IMMORTALITY

REMEMBERING THE DIVINE

ORIGIN OF OUR SONSHIP

For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.

- Athanasius

To summarize, we have been talking about regeneration and re-creation. Not strictly two creations – but one plan and purpose of God. That out of the old would spring the new. The seed must die in order to bear fruit. Now there is kainos creation. The old has gone; the new has come … a different kind of creation. The Kainos Covenant – a different kind of covenant has come. We have moved from the shadowy external law to the Law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus. It is written on human hearts and we have been melded together with God in love. We have come into something that is better than Eden.

We are now seeing the new creation not as God’s “Plan B” to recover as much as possible after Adam’s mess. But rather it is an intended extension of His original creation.

We were created in His very image and likeness. It was always in the heart of God to restore that image and likeness. Evil marred and perverted us, but we never lost our intrinsic value to God. Though evil was allowed to run its course, it was always His intent that we would ultimately be redeemed from that evil.

Our origin existed from the foundation of the world. Through faith, we see that the worlds were framed by the word of God, “so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Heb. 11:3, KJV).

… what we now see did not come from visible things (BER).

… what is seen does not owe its existence to that which is visible (WEY).

… the world which we behold springs not from things that can be seen (CON).

Despite the common phrase that God “created something out of nothing,” the truth is simply that we “did not evolve out of existing matter” (NOR). In fact, we pre-existed invisibly in the heart and imagination of God. We were associated with Christ from the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4).

Your true origin goes much further back than your parents’ choice in the back seat of a ‘77 Chevy Nova. Mankind is not simply a temporal being who began at a point in time by a human decision. You are not a ray with a finite beginning point that will live on into eternity:

The truth is that like Jeremiah, the Lord says, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart …” (Jer. 1:14). We were with Him, in Him, as Him in the beginning. Predestined in Christ. Pre-existing in the heart of God. Created in His eternal image, there is a very real eternal aspect about you that goes eternally forward and backward:

Adam was breathed from the very divine substance, the pneuma breath of God. In the same way, it is His very living Presence that animates you. He is the Life. Dogs produce dogs, trees produce trees … what does God produce? You are very sons of the eternal Most High God.

As my friend Dave Vaughan often says, “It will be very hard for you to avoid your divinity in the coming days.”

We are a mirror image of God Himself. In this, 1 John 4:17 tells us, “As He is, so are we in this world.” He is returning us to the truth of our divine origin. We have simply forgotten the Rock from which we were cut (Isa. 51:1). Humanity has been in an identity crisis. Living completely under par to our original design and destiny.

You are Gods

I am well aware that various movements have taken “Ye are gods” theology to bizarre conclusions. But the fact remains, as we are told in Psalm 82:6, “I said, ‘You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.’” Some have tried to mitigate this verse to suggest we are simply “judges” or “mighty ones.” But the literal word here is Elohim – gods. And to further bolster the point, Jesus quotes this passage – the New Testament Greek using the word Theoi – which is clearly translated as “gods.”

“It is a serious thing,” says C.S. Lewis, “to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.”[95]

We see that His Spirit is enjoined with our human spirit echoing the clarion call of sonship: “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Rom. 8:16, KJV). And through this miraculous union, we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4).

The apostle John wrote, “Beloved, now we are the children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2). We are all recipients of divine glory of the Father and Christ:

Through Him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God (Rom. 5:2, ESV).

And the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will Himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast (1 Pet. 5:10, NIV).

We pleaded with you, encouraged you, and urged you to live your lives in a way that God would consider worthy. For He called you to share in His Kingdom and glory (1 Thess. 2:12, NLT).

He called you to this through our Gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Thess. 2:14, NIV).

For God wanted them to know that the riches and glory of Christ are for you Gentiles, too. And this is the secret: Christ lives in you. This gives you assurance of sharing His glory (Col. 1:27, NLT).

The disastrous lie of religion chains us to a morbid identity as sinful dogs. But you are the bride of Christ, purified by His blood – consummated as one on the Tree where the two bled into one. You are flesh of His flesh. Bone of His bone. He who is in Christ is one spirit with the Lord (1 Cor. 6:17). There is no separation. As coinheritors with Christ, we like Him have dominion over all things, over the vast cosmos – and one day we shall fully manifest the reality of this dominion.

A Dependent Divinity

Such magnitude is far beyond human ability. Your divine nature is a God-given and Christ-dependent reality. Nothing has been independently vested upon you, but rather you are intrinsically dependent upon the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. The glory you experience is no result of a two-dimensional transaction between you and God based on your faith. This is Trinitarian. You are effortlessly graced to participate in the Spirit because of Jesus’ relationship with the Father. He prayed, “Now, Father, bring Me into the glory we shared before the world began” and then just after added, “I have given them the glory You gave Me, so they may be one as We are one” (John 17:5, 22). You have been infused with the same glory that the Father and the Son shared from the dawn of time.

Know what God has lavished upon you! He couldn’t give you anything more; you would be a threat to the Trinity! He’s poured His own beauty, His own worth, His own power upon you. It is no independent divinity apart from Him, but a very unction that flows because of your union with Him. By your union with Christ you are full of the Godhead (Col. 2:10).

It is His very Spirit of Sonship that infuses you: “God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!” (Gal. 4:6, RSV)

Augustine said, “If we have been made sons of God, we have also been made gods.”[96]

Consider even the Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting Irenaeus, which states, “The Word became flesh to make us ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Pet. 1:4): ‘For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.’”[97]

The early Church fathers clearly saw this exchange of the divine nature, as Athanasius boldly writes, “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God … He endured shame from men that we might inherit immortality.”[98]

And again we see Thomas Aquinas write, “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us share in His divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.”[99]

This concept is highly prevalent in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, where it is known by the Greek term theosis, meaning “divinization” or “deification.” Of course, religious processes are quick to creep in – with a certain quota of prayer, fasting and asceticism folks think they are climbing into godhood. This is not proper theosis, but in fact idolatrous divination.

There is no process to climb into this divinity. The only process is one of remembering as we hear the Word. We’re discovering the new creation reality of grace given us in the saving act of Jesus Christ. We are waking up to our infinite, immortal selves.

Ours is a dependent divinity. No separate, individual godhood. There is no life apart from Mr. Life. It is all about relationship – being in Christ. Family. Union. Love. “I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty” (2 Cor. 6:18). In no way does this relate to the self-realization movements of new age. It relates solely to looking at Jesus Christ, and when we see Him, we will be like Him (1 John 3:2). We were not created with immortality, but we were created from immortality and for immortality. All our fountains are in Him.

In the Family of the Trinity

The Gospel “celebrates our pre-creation innocence and now declares our redeemed union with God in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 1:9, MB). Far from intangible or obscure, it is the declaration of our existence in the family life of the Trinity. C. Baxter Kruger writes:

When Christianity says God, it says Father, Son, and Spirit, existing in a beautiful, intimate relationship of other-centered love expressing itself in boundless fellowship and unutterable oneness. It does not speak of a being that is isolated or unapproachable, detached or indifferent. It does not speak of a legalist, or a self-centered potentate, or an unmoved mover. God, for the Christian Church – at its best, anyway – is a relational being: three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, sharing life and all things in other-centered love and incomparable togetherness.

But we dare not stop there. The minute we mention the eternal relationship of the Father, Son, and Spirit, we have spoken volumes about the entire cosmos and the destiny of the human race. For this Trinitarian relationship, this abounding and joyous communion, this unspeakable oneness of love, is the very womb of the universe and of the humanity within it.[100]

Tertullian, around 200 A.D. wrote the following, “Only it is from Him that we receive it, and not from ourselves. For we will be even gods, if we deserve to be among those of whom He declared, ‘I have said, “You are gods,”’ and ‘God stands in the congregation of the gods.’ But this comes of His own grace, not from any property in us. For it is He alone who can make gods.”[101]

Religion throws you back upon yourself for salvation, continually navel-gazing in an endless attempt to climb the mountain. But Jesus blew the professional religious elite out of the water by saying, “No one knows the Father except the Son.” In one line, He invalidated all our human attempts at “knowing God.” Jesus came to know the Father for us, and to plug us into that eternal relationship.

Whatever you think you know about God is wrong if it doesn’t look like Jesus. To see Him is to see the Father. Yes, God interacts with all men indirectly - even apart from their faith - by sustaining, protecting, guiding and wooing mankind to Himself. But we can never know God outside of Christ because He is the only clear and express image of the invisible God. He is the ultimate revelation by which the Father has chosen to show Himself. Our possession of the divine nature flows not alongside the Lord’s, but completely from His “who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see” (1 Tim. 6:16).

And yet to see Him is to manifest His very likeness. “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made Him known” (John 1:18, NIV). So the crazy thing is, Christ is the revealed image of the invisible God. And now there will be a people whose eyes are fixed on Him, who can rightly say that to see us is to see the Father!

Divine Origins

Some wrongly believe the forbidden fruit tapped us into divine power. The Lord did not caution Adam against partaking of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil because He feared our participation in the divine nature. That tree of law brought no such positive enlightenment. The fact is that Adam was already made in the divine image prior to the fall, and from God’s eternal perspective Adam was already restored in Christ before he ever fell. Tertullian writes:

Now, although Adam was by reason of his condition under law subject to death, yet was hope preserved to him by the Lord’s saying, “Behold, Adam is become as one of us;” that is, in consequence of the future taking of the man into the divine nature.[102]

You go much further back than your parent’s decision. The brothers of Jesus – including James – rejected Him during His earthly ministry, familiar with Him only as a man of natural birth. But Jesus appeared to him after the resurrection enabling James to see that we did not begin in our mother’s womb.

It was God’s delightful resolve to give birth to us; we were conceived by the word of truth (James 1:18, MB).

Peter also recognizes this divine birth from above saying, “we were born anew by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3, MB).

Jesus is the firstborn from the dead – the firstborn of many brothers. But His sonship is unique in that our own sonship is dependent upon His. He did not merely come as one of many brothers – as one who ran His own course, showing you how to do the same. His death was of a special class as the Father’s Only Begotten. Fully God and fully man. In this One Man’s death, an entire new humanity sprang forth in union with Him. Fully adopted in the family of God.

Adoption: Huiothesia

Our Western concept of adoption is far different from the Hebrew use of the word. Though it is one of the most cherished aspects of our faith, the true nature of adoption has been utterly misunderstood today.

We thought that somehow we originated outside of God and were brought into the family. Our modern notion of adoption is a legal exchange when the child of one biological parent becomes the son of another biological parent. But you did not originate in satan. The devil created nothing.

The accurate scriptural essence of adoption is simply realizing our true origin as He has seen it all along. A child begins as a teknon (a little child). But the word huiothesia (adoption) speaks of being openly recognized as a son and heir. It is connected with the idea of the bar mitzvah ceremony – where a boy is legally and openly recognized as a legitimate son, with all the rights of sonship.

It’s not switching parents … it’s about realizing who you belonged to all along. The devil never owned you except in your fallen mind.

For He foreordained us (destined us, planned in love for us) to be adopted (revealed) as His own children through Jesus Christ, in accordance with the purpose of His will [because it pleased Him and was His kind intent] (Eph 1:5 AMP).

The thief never authentically possessed anything or anyone. You were sourced in God. We must realize that our origin pre-dated our natural parents. You are of a divine DNA. Immortal spermata. A celestial, indestructible, incorruptible seed. “These are they who discover their genesis in God beyond their natural conception! Man began in God. We are not the invention of our parents!” (John 1:13, MB) Consider the preceding verse, John 1:12, as we return to a more thorough explanation offered in Francois du Toit’s Mirror Bible:

John 1:12 Everyone who 1realizes their association in Him, 6convinced that He is their 2original life and that 7His name defines them, 5in them He 3endorses the fact that they are indeed His 4offspring, 2begotten of Him; He 3sanctions the legitimacy of their sonship. (The word often translated, to receive, 1lambano, means to comprehend, grasp, to identify with. This word suggests that even though He came to His own, there are those who do not 1grasp their true 2origin revealed in Him, and like the many Pharisees they behave like children of a foreign father, the father of lies [Jn 8: 44]. Neither God’s legitimate fatherhood of man nor His ownership is in question; man’s indifference to His true 2origin is the problem. This is what the Gospel addresses with utmost clarity in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus has come to introduce man to himself again; humanity has forgotten what manner of man he is by design! [Jas 1:24, Deut 32:18, Ps 22:27].

The word, 2genesthai [aorist tense] is like a snapshot taken of an event, from ginomai, to become [See 1:3]. The Logos is the source; everything commences in Him. He remains the exclusive Parent reference to their genesis. There is nothing original, except the Word! Man began in God [see also Acts 17:28]. “He has come to give us understanding to know Him who is true and to realize that we are in Him who is true.” [1 Jn 5:20].)

The word, 3exousia, often translated “power;” as in, He gave “power” to 2become children of God, is a compound word; from ek, always denoting origin or source and eimi, I am; thus, out of I am! This gives 3legitimacy and authority to our sonship; 4teknon, translated as offspring, child.

“He has given,” 5didomi, in this case to give something to someone that already belongs to them; thus, to return. The fact that they already are His own, born from above, they have their 2beginning and their being in Him is now confirmed in their realizing it! Convinced, 6pisteo; 7his name onoma, defines man [see Eph 3:15]. “He made to be their true selves, their child-of-God selves.” — The Message)[103]

Faith is not some intangible essence that you drum up to climb into this family. You do not self-spawn the new man. You had nothing to do with your natural birth; you have nothing to do with your spiritual birth. You were born from above. Faith is merely the lens to see this reality. That faith comes by hearing. Hearing the facts: that you have been woven into the life of God before you were even born.

We are awakening to our True Selves. The false self – under a false fatherhood of the adversary – has no substance. A lie only holds power to the degree to which you believe it has any power.

We are awaking to our origin – breathed from His very substance, re-created and born anew in Him – the Lamb of God who was slain from the foundation of the world. Who recreated the cosmos and entrusted us with this ministry of reconciliation – to let the world know God does not hold their sins against them. To proclaim liberty to the captives who were bound in their hellish self-destruction.

Humanity has been in an identity crisis. But He came to awaken humanity to the truth – that we are a divine race. Heirs of an immortality that cannot be gained by human endeavor. Eternity is stamped on our souls and is “brought to light through the Gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10). We look just like our elder Brother. He has empowered us to be who we really are. There is a massive difference between becoming something and realizing who you were all along.

Future Unveiling

Where is the origin of the new creation? When does the new birth begin? It is all intrinsically sourced in Christ’s death and resurrection.

… by His boundless mercy we have been born again to an ever-living (immortal) hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (1 Pet. 1:3).

The return of Christ is not a “second work” of somehow recompleting something left unfinished on the cross. “What He accomplished is reality and it is complete. The future holds a further unveiling and manifestation of this reality … but the event that made it real was the life, death and resurrection of Christ,” writes Andre Rabe. He continues:

Can you see how the new birth, is just like the new creation – it is the original creation that is rescued from the decay and chaos of the kingdom of darkness. Our decision for Christ only has substance because of God’s decision for us. Our faith is simply entering into – saying yes – to what God already believes to be true. As with the original creation, all Adam could do was to open his eyes to the perfection and completion of what God had done already, even so with redemption, our only contribution is to open our eyes to the perfection and completion of the salvation He achieved for us, with us and in us, even before we were aware of it.[104]

The entire Adamic race met its end in the Last Adam, and we have been raised to new life through Him who is the Firstborn over all creation. Now, that creation “waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed” (Rom. 8:19). The created order awaits the full revealing of our identity. We do not await our new birth. We are already sons. We await the full disclosure of our sonship – the manifestation of our inheritance. We don’t become sons … rather we are awakening to that sonship!

Inheritance spills out through the revelation of what is already ours. The Weymouth translation says, “We wait and long for open recognition as sons through the deliverance of our bodies.” Visibly, outwardly seen in full force the reality of an adoption that has already taken place in Christ.

And yet, we are not wasting away in a frustrated longing. “The joyful anticipation deepens. All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy” (Rom. 8:18-25, MSG).

Manifested Sons

All of creation stands on tiptoe, awaiting the full, future experience of its liberty.

Because the universe itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption [it’s bondage to decay (GSPD), it’s slavery to death (CON), the shackles of mortality (NEB), the tyranny of change and decay (PHI)] into the liberty of the glory of the children of God (Rom. 8:20).

We have been taught that sons of God will somehow set the earth at liberty from its corruption. And so many are awaiting a future revival army to change the course of history. I do believe a great future wave of awakened believers is coming, but it will not be man who is making the difference. Notice in this verse that it is not about our efforts liberating the earth from its curse. It is rescued from decay into the “freedom which belongs to the glory of the children of God.” The glorious splendor of God’s presence, emanating from the discovery of our own identity as divine sons, causes the universe to experience Gospel liberty. As we walk in Truth, this internal order spills out into external order throughout creation. It’s all about His glory. When we know who we are, we manifest who we are. We are aligned with His tangible Presence. We adorn the created order as the divine gardeners we were always intended to be. All of creation hinges on the revelation of God’s heart to mankind.

Mankind was intended to reign in life. Like Adam, we were called to tend the garden of pleasure. Eden means “pleasure,” or “voluptuous living.” Perfection, abundance, health and happy living are our portion. No new age or utopian philosophy holds a candle to the bliss of the true new age that has dawned. We see in verse 20 that the creation was made subject to decay (imperfection, futility). The Berkley translation says “the bondage of transitoriness” … in other words, the bondage of time. Outside of time, there is no death. For all we know, leaves may not even fall off the trees. There is no decay. No rust or moth to destroy. The Tree of Life in Heaven bears fruit in and out of season. There are no dark times. No dry times. No destruction. In the same way, we have been born of His eternal, immortal, everlasting Seed.

Outside of Time

Remember when Jesus entered Jerusalem, He cursed the fig tree that didn’t produce? Scripture says it was not even yet time for figs to grow! On the surface, doesn’t this seem a bit harsh? “C’mon Jesus … it’s too early for the poor thing to produce!” What is the moral of the story? If Jesus wants a fig, you better give Him a fig!

Jesus has broken the bondage of the seasons. We are no longer confined to the limitations of time or any other restrictive dimension of the created order. We have been placed as gardeners over that natural order. Though you may not know it – though it may seem mystical and hidden to you – you have even transcended the laws of time, physics, gravity and more in Christ! We no longer have the excuse of the seasons … I’m not prepared. I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough education. He has fully filled you, equipped you and given you everything – whether you know it or not. Whether you feel it or not. You are not bound by time and seasons. Your destiny does not hinge on your natural abilities. You are eternal, infinite, immortally woven into His own divinity.

The new creation is not bound by time, because it is timeless. Jesus Christ has broken the bondage of the seasons and nothing holds us back from manifesting these new creation realities right now. Here in Romans 8, it doesn’t say creation is awaiting some future end-time harvest to set things right. It says all of creation waits up until … now. Now is the time we are united to God and experience Him. Not yesterday or tomorrow. He is Immanuel, God with us, in us, as us. The future doesn’t make the new creation real … Jesus did.

Charismatics are obsessed with “times and seasons” as if the work of the cross was one blip on a never-ending treadmill of God always “doing a new thing.” Everyone’s always trying to figure out what God is doing next so they don’t miss out. But the new thing started 2,000 years ago. All we’re seeing now is the unwrapping of the finished thing!

Likewise, the prophetic camp is big on making annual prophecies, which seem to fluctuate based on God’s moody temperament. 2022? Good year. 2023? Bad year. Up year. Down year … Did you know your spirituality is not based upon fluctuating seasons, but upon a Person? Nor is it based upon His moody temperament. It’s based on His finished work.

Some time back, the buzzword was that we needed to be like the sons of Issachar – this was from a remote Old Testament passage about men who “knew the times and the seasons.” For all the talk about knowing the times and seasons of the Lord, few have really recognized the “season” we are in. I don’t want to be like the sons of Issachar anymore than I still pay attention to these expired “prophets.” Why go backward to some Levitical priesthood that was based on the power of human performance? No. We are of a different priesthood that does not seasonally fluctuate on our performance. Paul says we are now of a Melchizedek priesthood which is based on the power of resurrection life. Everything is now based on the performance of Christ. The good year/bad year prophecies are irrelevant to me. I am in a season called the New Covenant. The continual Year of the Favor of the Sovereign Lord. The eternal Today … the Sabbath Rest.

The creation itself shall see its ultimate and final liberation – not just objectively, not just in theory – but in tangible outward display. When? As we are finally awakened to our own identity as sons. Again – not in our becoming sons, but awakening to our adoption that was settled from the foundation of the world. The return of Christ will present us with the grand finale in our realization of who we are and what He has done.

Gardeners of Paradise

Creation is groaning for the revealing of this sonship. You’ll be walking down the road and a horse will say, “Don’t you know who you are?” As our full identity in God is revealed, the impact on creation will be exponential. Adam was a centrifuge of favor – the river Pishon spit its gold out at Adam in Genesis 2. He didn’t dig in the ground for his livelihood. Creation seemed to spill its treasures at Adam’s feet. There was no toil, no sweat. Adam may very well have tended the garden through the spoken word. We see that God framed up the entire cosmos through the spoken word (Gen. 1, Heb. 11). We see Adam speaking into creation as he named the animals. Could he have simply said, “Carrots be planted … Fruit trees grow?” However it happened, his work was without strife.

Adam was fruitful; he owned all the real estate and yet he never toiled. Likewise, the new creation is designed for more fruitfulness, less human sweat. Garden works. For Adam, his work and his play were not divorced. He probably loved swinging around the garden like Jungle Jim! He loved his job: tending the Garden of Pleasure. The separation of work and play was a product of the fall. Today, men work to afford play time. And they play in order to escape work. But in the Gospel these two things – work and play – are reconciled. In the Gospel, our vocation is always to tend the Garden of Pleasure.

Are you still trying to figure out what God has called you to do? Ask yourself instead what you would enjoy doing – even if you didn’t get paid for it. That’s probably what you are ultimately called to do – and get paid for it. This is not to say we must intrinsically enjoy every single aspect of work in this life. But the advent of our freedom from the curse has already come in Christ. We can begin to experience Paradise now. Our ultimate motivation is still joy. The deeper we are impacted by this Gospel revelation, the more joy, contentment and fulfillment we find – saturated by God’s presence in the midst of our labors.

Incarnational Life

I do not believe miracles break the laws of nature. I believe that the glory of God causes nature to transcend itself. The creation longs for us to walk in the reality of our sonship because we cause the natural order to rise above itself. We provoke the natural order to reach beyond its limitations.

Consider the water molecules, bouncing around before Jesus stepped on the sea! Were they excited that they were going to do the impossible that day? That they were going to transcend the laws of gravity and hold Jesus up?

Or how about the water molecules in the jars at the Wedding of Cana in Galilee … were they excited that they were about to be transformed into the substance of wine?

The new creation has been supernaturally liberated from the shackles of bondage imposed by sinfulness. Free from decay and the limitations of a strictly “natural” order. As sons, rather than breaking natural laws, we draw the natural realm to a higher plane. Consider Peter walking on water. Maybe you didn’t realize this, but it’s naturally impossible to walk on water. Peter did not walk on the water. Peter walked on the Word. Jesus said, “C’mon Pete,” and Peter knew that the Word of Jesus had more authority than the law of sinking. The water had to align with the Word.

In the same way, we have been seated as co-heirs in Christ in heavenly places, high above the laws of the material world. And that material world is longing for us to walk in our true identity within its borders – lifting its lid so that new creation realities are manifest. Yes, the world is groaning for us to wake up!

Adam was placed “as God” to the earth just as Moses was made “as God” to Pharaoh (Exod. 7:1). Because Adam walked under the governing entity of God, the earth positively responded to Adam. Literally, Adam could walk as a happy governor over the earth, because his vertical relationship with God was in order.

What was the fruit? Everything was easy. Adam got the best parking spaces. Barely lifted a finger and things fell into place for him. The earth prospered. It was not until he fell that this changed. His eyes turned from God and the earth’s eyes turned from Adam. Instead of being God-focused, Adam became “stuff-focused.” The earth correspondingly withdrew from Adam. He was no longer recognizing the governing entity of God. He was under a new governor – the slave master sin. Adam’s face turned to the dirt, where he had to dig in the ground by the sweat of his brow among the thorns and the thistles for his own livelihood. Back when his face was turned to God in trust, the rivers poured their gold out at Adam. Multiple streams of income! But now that Adam is earth-focused, digging in the furrows, the Book of Job says the earth swallowed up its gold. There is the paradox. When we hold natural things lightly (like money) with our eyes focused on God in generosity, we prosper. But when we are obsessed with idols – anxious, toiling, digging for them – we lose even that which we have.

Jesus never said anything bad about money or the natural order – He only wanted to cure us of the idolatry of it. We are created to be blessed and to rule and reign in life. He didn’t write off the natural world: He baptized it. It is about having our priorities in order. Jesus essentially said, “I know you have need of these things (Dolce Gabbana sunglasses, cornflakes for your kids) but seek first the kingdom above these things.” Despite the criticisms of what some would deem a “prosperity gospel,” God has always wanted us to live an immensely blessed existence in the new creation. Disperse of the gnostic, dualistic criticism that the natural order is evil. We are an incarnational people called to prosper spiritually and naturally. Not for our greed, but to make us resource providers to the world. Poverty is not His plan. Starvation in Africa is not His plan, nor the sex slave trade in Asia. Let it be on earth as it is in Heaven does not mean “send the big Sahara down from the sky.”

Thank God the story doesn’t end there! He did not leave Adam in his state of bondage to this new governor sin. Jesus Christ stepped into our place as the Last Adam … He bore Adam’s thorns and thistles on His own sweaty brow – destroying the curse of poverty itself, baptizing the material order in His own incarnation! He stepped into the depth of our bondage, decay and corruption – not breaking our curses one-by-one in an endless deliverance class. No! He destroyed the curse itself. Brought us out of the kingdom of darkness and into the glorious light. The bondage of time, death, poverty and disease have become the occasion of His grace. He became the curse, that it might be fully destroyed in His own servant body. We were born again, out of time, springing out of His grave to newness of life. The Firstborn of many brothers who is leading many sons to the revelation and manifestation of His glory. The entire cosmos has been restored and reconciled to its divine origin.

Heaven and Earth are Reconciled

We can only guess at the full beauty of the new creation as she blossoms in all her splendor. Forever we will marvel at the beauty of the incarnation. Whatever the final resurrection may look like, it will be free from all our fallen notions of dualistic separations between Heaven and Earth – between God and the natural order. Between God and ourselves. All distance and difference has forever been erased. And although we see it dimly now, the Gospel revelation is transforming us outwardly from glory to glory as we discover the authentic DNA of our design in Jesus Christ. The incarnation, which somehow mystically happened before it ever occurred, has changed everything. God is not simply bound up in Christ. But rather through Christ, He has bound Himself to the entire created order. This was always His successful plan. It means there is nowhere you can go – no rock you can overturn – where God is not. He is truly all in all. And especially present in you … His Body.

Yes, the cosmos has been permanently rewired in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. All things have been forever united in the Son of God.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Crowder loves to push the envelope and provoke God’s people to extreme joy. He is a father and is recognized internationally as an author, speaker and advocate of supernatural Christianity. John is on the forefront of a fresh renewal movement marked by the message of grace, ecstatic experience, miracles and a recovery of the foundational preaching of the finished work of the cross. John and his wife Lily have four children based in Portland, Ore. As founders of Sons of Thunder Ministries and Publications, they speak at schools and conference events around the world. SOT hosts mass evangelism events and operate multiple homes for orphan children in developing nations. They have a background in church planting and currently oversee Cana New Wine Seminary in Portland, Ore. Along with his bi-annual magazine, The Ecstatic, John has written thousands of articles during his journalism career. He has authored five books:

Cosmos Reborn

Mystical Union

The Ecstasy of Loving God

Seven Spirits Burning

The New Mystics

John’s weekly video teachings on The Jesus Trip have garnered more than a million views. John and Lily have a heart to see the Kingdom of God manifest creatively in every sector of society. Their vision is to equip the Church and reach the world by clearly communicating the finished work of the cross. Creative miracles and unusual signs and wonders mark John’s ministry.

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More books by John Crowder

Mystical Union

A Scandalous Message!

When you think of the cross, do you think of fun? Get ready for the Gospel as you’ve never heard it. With clear revelatory truths on the New Creation and the scandalous joys of the cross, Mystical Union is one of John’s most revolutionary, life-changing works. The happy Gospel of grace is about uninterrupted union with the Divine. This book lays out our most core beliefs. It promises to wreck your theology and cheer you up with undeniable Biblical truths on the free gift of perfection.

The Ecstasy of Loving God

Trances, raptures & the supernatural pleasures of Jesus Christ

God has destined you to live in the joyful radiance of Himself, just as Adam was called to live in the realm of Eden. Ecstasy, or “extasis,” is the Greek term for trance, and is linked with a pleasurable, God-given state of out-of body experience recorded throughout the sciptures and the Church age. In this book, John takes us on a journey from past to present to introduce us to a lifestyle of a deep practice of God’s presence.

Seven Spirits Burning

The Sevenfold Spirit of God

John’s long-awaited book, Seven Spirits Burning, is an extensive, Biblical plunge into the nature and operation of the sevenfold Spirit of God. This book unpackages a deep theological and Christocentric understanding of the seven Spirits. John has taught for years on the seven Spirits, but not until now has he released this detailed compilation of his study and experience. This book could possibly be the magnum opus of anything written to date on the Spirit’s sevenfold nature. Engage the depths of your union with God.

The New Mystics

The supernatural generation

Two thousand years of miracle workers and pioneers crammed into one generation. The fiery bowls of Heaven are being poured out through an extreme body of spiritual forerunners. Are you called to walk among them? The New Mystics contains more than 70 photos, illustrations, and biographies of men and women whose lives demonstrated the phenomenal throughout the ages. Let their stories inspire you to join their ranks as part of this supernatural generation.

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Mothers in the Presence of God

Practicing the Presence of God for real-time moms whose lives are full of dirty diapers and soccer practice. This book gives practical, down-to-earth, real-life examples and wisdom from a mother of four. Lily draws readers to the simple awareness of God’s presence in the day-to-day role of parenting. Experience fulfillment of a Holy Spirit saturated life in the midst of doing laundry! Realizing the grace of the Gospel and our effortless union with Christ enables mothers to enjoy and rest secure in their spirituality with religion-free parenting.

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John Crowder hosts this unique three-month seminary for wild-eyed wonder junkies to be deeply established in the revelation of the Gospel of grace. Cana offers a unique marriage of life-transforming, happy theology woven seamlessly with an intoxicating practice of the presence of God. Where else will you find doctorate level theologians and mystical ecstatics on the same platform? Cana is a drunken seminary. A three-month theological circus of fun geared to saturate students with the Living Word - in the wine of the New Covenant.

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1 Fr. Robert Capon, The Romance of the Word: One Man’s Love Affair with Theology (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1967), 9.

2 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, The Doctrine of God, page 656.

3 C.S. Lewis, Introduction to On the Incarnation by Athanasius.

4 Fr. Robert Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1985), 25.

5 Fr. Robert Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox (Minneapolis, MN: The Seabury Press, 1974), 17, 20.

6 See Book Three of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.

7 Thomas F. Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (London: T & T Clark, Ltd., 1996), 4.

8 James B. Torrance emphasizes Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideas in Christology, ET (London: Collins; New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

9 James B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 69.

10 Augustine (c. 354 – c. 430), On the Trinity (Book VII, Ch. 4).

11 Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace, p. 34.

12 F.M. Lehman, “The Love of God” (1917 Hymn).

13 C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1966), 218.

14 C. Baxter Kruger, God is For Us (Jackson, MS: Perichoresis Press, 1996), 26.

15 C. Baxter Kruger, Across All Worlds: Jesus Inside our Darkness (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2007), 31.

16 N.T. Wright, “The Cross and the Caricatures.” 2007

17 Ibid.

18 Athanasius, On the Incarnation.

19 Ibid.

20 Wright, “The Cross and the Caricatures.”

21 Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, edited by Gerald Hawthorne, Ralph Martin and Daniel Reid (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993)

22 Kruger, God is For Us, p. 26.

23 A Lesson of Love: The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, edited and translated for devotional use by Fr. John-Julian, OJN (Walker and Company, 1988), Ch. 46.

24 Paul Murray, “Drinking in the Word: Dominicans and the New Wine of the Gospel.” (http://www.op.org/international) January 23, 2008.

25 Karl Barth, Christ and Adam: Man and Humanity in Romans 5. Translated by T.A. Smail (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1956), 17, 22.

26 Ibid., p. 12.

27 Christ’s vicarious humanity is a term coined by Scottish theologian James B. Torrance. See also the chapter “The Vicarious Man” in C. Baxter Kruger’s book God is For Us.

28 Ibid., p. 26.

29 Ibid., p. 12, 16.

30 Ibid., p. 47.

31 Ibid., p. 75, 77.

32 Francois du Toit, Introduction to The Mirror Translation (Hermanus, South Africa: Mirror Word, 2007), 14.

33 See The City of God by Augustine of Hippo (c. 354 – c. 430).

34 C. Baxter Kruger, “Dualisms and the Holy Spirit.” (http://baxterkruger.blogspot.com), June 19, 2009.

35 Ibid.

36 Philipp Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 284.

37 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?: With a Short Discourse on Hell (Ignatius Press, 1988).

38 C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Harper Collins, 2009 ed.), 130.

39 C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996 ed.), 72.

40 Ibid., p. 68.

41 Fr. Robert Capon, The Parables of Judgment (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1989), 25.

42 Ibid.

43 The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, chapter 48.

44 Ibid., chapter 49.

45 Brennan Manning, Relentless Tenderness of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell, 1986), 18.

46 Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos of Nafpaktos, Life After Death. Translated by Esther Williams from The Holy Fathers on Paradise and Hell (Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 2005).

47 Ric Ballard, “God is Hell” (Article accessed at: http://easterncatholicspiritualrenewal.blogspot.com).

48 Ibid.

49 Isaac the Syrian (c. 630 - c. 700): Homily 28 from The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. Translated by Dana Miller (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984).

50 Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions Publishing, 2007 ed.)

51 Norman Grubb, “We Only Know Right Through Wrong.” From The Intercessor (Zerubbabel, Inc.), Vol. 23, No. 2.

52 Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox, p. 123.

53 C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950-1963 (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2007), 355.

54 See Robert Capon’s sermon “The Father Who Lost Two Sons” (Chicago Evening Sunday Club, first aired Jan. 7, 2001).

55 Capon, The Parables of Judgment, p. 27-28.

56 Clement of Alexandria (c.150 – c. 215) The Paedagogus (VII, Ch. 8).

57 Clement of Alexandria (c.150 – c. 215) The Stromata (VII, Ch. 2).

58 Theodoret of Cyrus (c. 386 – c. 485) Homily on Ezekiel (Ch. 6, v. 6).

59 Paulinus of Nola (c. 354 – c. 451) quoted in Thomas Allin, Universalism Asserted (E. Stock, 1888), 153.

60 Balthasar, Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?

61 Capon, The Parables of Judgment, p. 175.

62 Clement, The Stromata (Book VII, Ch. 2).

63 Clement of Alexandria (c.150 – c. 215) Exhortation to the Heathen (Ch. 11).

64 Clement of Alexandria (c.150 – c. 215) Fragments (Comments on 1 John, Ch. 2, verse 3).

65 Origen (c. 185 – c. 254) Origen De Principiis (Book I, Ch. 7).

66 Eusebius (c. 263 – c. 339) Ecclesiastical Theology (Book III).

67 Quoted in Allin, Universalism Asserted, p. 133.

68 Basil the Great (c. 329 – c. 379) Commentary on Isaiah

69 Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – c. 395) Orations (36).

70 Quoted in Allin, Universalism Asserted, p. 134.

71 Augustine (c. 354 – c. 430), Enchiridion: On Faith, Hope, and Love (Ch. 29).

72 C. Baxter Kruger, “Universalism” (http://baxterkruger.blogspot.com), Sept. 10, 2012.

73 Brad Jerzak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009).

74 Allin, Universalism Asserted, p. 145.

75 The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, chapter 27.

76 Fr. Robert Capon, The Astonished Heart: Reclaiming the Good News From the Lost-and-Found (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996), 41.

77 Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ (Colorado Springs, CO: Helmers & Howard, 1992), 93.

78 T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, p. 94.

79 James Strong, Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1890), Entry 720.

80 George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University, 2003), 112.

81 R.C. Sproul, “Abundant Love” (Article from Tabletalk Magazine).

82 Kenneth Wuest, Wuest Word Studies in the Greek New Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980).

83 Martin Lloyd-Jones, Commentary on Romans 6.

84 Fr. Juan Arintero, The Song of Songs: A Mystical Exposition (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1974, 1992), 403.

85 Sproul, “Abundant Love.”

86 Blaise Pascal, Thoughts. Translated by W. F. Trotter (New York: P.F. Collier & Son Co., 1909-14), Section 7.

87 Strong, Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Entry 3501.

88 Strong, Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Entry 2537.

89 C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 46.

90 Hawthorne, Martin and Reid, Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, 628.

91 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (III.1.2).

92 Strong, Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Entry 509.

93 T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, pp. 84-86.

94 Ibid.

95 Lewis, The Weight of Glory, p. 45.

96 Augustine (c. 354 – c. 430) “Psalm 50.” Exposition on the Book of Psalms.

97 Irenaeus (2nd century – c. 202) Against Heresies (Book III, Ch. 19) taken from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1995 ed.).

98 Athanasius (c. 269 – c. 373) On the Incarnation (Ch. 8).

99 Thomas Aquinas, Opuscula Theologica (57:1-4).

100 C. Baxter Kruger, The Shack Revisited: There is More Going on Here Than You Ever Dared to Dream (New York: FaithWords, 2012), 115.

101 Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 220) Adversus Hermogenem (Ch. 5).

102 Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 220) Adversus Marcionem (Book II, Ch. 26).

103 Francois Du Toit, “John Text Changes.” (http://mirrorword.net), May 2013.

104 Andre Rabe, “The New Creation and the New Birth.” (http://hearhim.net/wordpress), April 22, 2011.