The Final Events.
The Moral Insiders.
Part Forty-two in a Series.
https://secondcoming.org/blog/
The Parable of Two sons. Two Kinds of People.
“Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
Then Jesus told them this parable:
“There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.
“Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.
“When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ So he got up and went to his father.
“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
“The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
“But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.
“Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’
“The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’
“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’” Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32
In the parable of the two sons, we find that each represents a different way of alienation from God.
1.Tax collectors and sinners represent and correspond to the younger brother. They observed neither the moral laws of the Bible nor the rules for ceremonial purity followed by the religious Jews. They engaged in wild living like the younger brother, they left home by leaving the traditional morality of their families and of respectable society. They made deals with the Romans.
- Pharisees and teachers of the law were represented by the elder brother. They held to traditional morality of their upbringing. They studied and obeyed the scripture. They worshipped faithfully and prayed constantly.
The parable of the two sons takes an extended look at the soul of the elder brother and climaxes with a powerful plea for him to change his heart.
The parable is much more than the exclusive focus on the father freely receiving his penitent younger son. God will always welcome them no matter what they’ve done.
The targets of the story are not wayward sinners but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. They are the moral insiders.
He wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self-righteousness and how these things are destroying both their own souls, and the lives of the people around them.
The parable reveals the destructive self-centeredness of the younger brother, but it also condemns the elder brother’s moralistic life in the strongest terms.
Jesus is saying that both the irreligious and religious are spiritually lost, both life paths are dead ends. Every thought humanity has had about how to connect to God has been wrong.
Older brothers and younger brothers are with us today in the same society, church and often in the very same family. Jesus is on the side of neither the irreligious nor their religious, but he singles out religious moralism as a particularly deadly spiritual condition.
When Christianity first arose in the world it was not called to religion. It was a non-religion.
Where’s your temple? Christians said we didn’t have one.
Where do your priests labor? Christians would say they don’t have priests.
Where are the sacrifices made to your gods? Christians would have responded that they didn’t make sacrifices.
Jesus himself was the temple to end all temples, the priest to end all priests, and the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. The Romans called the early Christians atheists.
In general, religiously observant Jews were offended by Jesus.
Those estranged from religious and moral observance were intrigued and attracted to him.
Jesus says to the respectable religious leaders “the tax collectors and the prostitutes enter the Kingdom before you” Matthew 21:31
Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible believing religious people of his day. Why?
Let’s dig a little deeper.
Younger brother comes to father and says give me my share of the estate.
In those days when a father died the oldest son received a double portion of the inheritance.
This division of the estate only occurred when the father died.
To receive and ask for the inheritance before the death of the father was a sign of deep disrespect.
It was the same as to wish him dead. “Give me what is mine” he says.
The traditional Middle Eastern father would be expected to respond to such a request, by driving the son out of the family, with nothing except physical blows. The father doesn’t do anything like that.
He sold and divided his property between the two sons as requested.
He had to sell his land holdings, his community identity. The younger brother is asking his father to tear his life apart, as in the past people’s identities were tied up in the lands they owned.
The father patiently endures a tremendous loss of honor, as well as the pain of rejected love, but the father maintains his affection for his son, and bears the agony of estrangement and rejection.
The son cashes out and goes off to a far country and lives an out-of-control lifestyle
He is down in the mud with pigs. He comes to his senses he devises a plan. He says to himself I will return to my father and admit that I was wrong and forfeit the right to be his son. He intends to ask his father to make him a hired servant.
The younger son had disgraced his family before the whole community. He was dead to them, as the father describes it. The rabbis taught that if you violated community standards an apology was not sufficient you had to make restitution.
In the pigsty, the younger son rehearses his speech, and when he feels he is ready for the confrontation, he picks up and begins the journey home.
Younger son comes in sight of the house. His father sees him and runs, yes runs to him. Middle Eastern patriarchs did not run, children might run, women right run, young men of might run but not the pater familias, the dignified pillar of the community, the owner of the great estate. He runs to his son and showing his emotions openly falls upon him and kisses him.
“Bring the best robe and put it on him”. What does that mean? The best robe in the house would have been the father’s own robe, the unmistakable sign of restored standing in the family. The father is saying “I’m not going to wait until you’ve paid off your debt, I’m not going to wait until you’ve groveled, you’re not going to earn your way back into the family, I am going to simply take you back, I will cover your nakedness, poverty, and rags with the robes of my office and honor.
He commands the servants to prepare a feast of celebration with a fatted calf.
Meat was reserved for special occasions, the most expensive meat being the fatted calf.
Word spread quickly, a full-fledged feast was going on, with music and dancing, all to celebrate the restoration of the younger son to life family and community.
God’s love and forgiveness can pardon and restore any and every kind of sin or wrongdoing. There was no evil that the father’s love cannot pardon and cover and there is no sin that is a match for his grace.
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” 2 Cor. 12:9
Jesus shows the father embracing his son, before he has a chance to clean up his life and give evidence of a change of heart, before he can recite his repentance speech. Nothing, not even abject contrition merits the favor of God.
The father’s love and acceptance are complete and free. God’s grace is free, but not cheap.
The Final Events will end with the splendor of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ also known as the Parousia. The Signs of Parousia are detailed in the Final Events Blog series and emphasize the Imminent Return and Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and the Love of the Father for all mankind.
The Lost Elder Brother
The elder brother hears from the servants that his younger brother has returned and been reinstated, he is furious. Now it is his turn to disgrace the father. He refuses to go into what is perhaps the biggest feast and public event his father has ever put on.
He remains outside the door, publicly casting a vote of no confidence in the father’s actions. This forces the father to come out to speak to his older son. A demeaning thing to have to do when you are the Lord of the Manor and the host of a great feast. He begins to plead with his eldest son to come in, but he continues to refuse.
Why is the older son so furious? He is especially upset about the cost of all that is happening. He says you’ve never given me a goat for a party how dare you give him the calf. The fatted calf is only a symbol, because what the father has done, costs far more than the calf. By bringing the younger brother back into the family he has made him an heir again with a claim to 1/3 of their now diminished family wealth.
This is unconscionable to the elder brother. The elder brother says I’ve worked myself to death and earned what I’ve got but my brother has done nothing to earn anything, he’s merited only expulsion and yet you lavish him with wealth where’s the justice in that?
The Elder son says “I have never disobeyed you, so I have rights, I deserve to be consulted about this.
You have no right to make these decisions unilaterally.”
The elder brother’s fury leads him to insult the father even further. In a culture where respect and deference to elders was all important such behavior is outrageous. How will the father respond to his older sons open rebellion? “
My son, he says, despite how you’ve insulted me publicly, I still want you in the feast. I’m not going to disown your brother, but I don’t want to disown you either. I challenge you to swallow your pride and come into the feast. The choice is yours. Will you or will you not come in?
The elder brother has not been sharing in his father’s anxiety and watching for the one that was lost.
He does not share in the father’s joy at the wanderers return. The sounds of rejoicing kindle no gladness in his heart. He inquires of a servant the reason of the festivities and the answer excites his jealousy. He will not go in to welcome his lost brother. The favor shown the prodigal he regards as an insult to himself. When the father comes out to remonstrate with him, the pride and malignity of his nature are revealed. He dwells upon his own life in his father’s house, as a round of unrequited service, and then places in mean contrast the favor shown to the son just returned. He makes it plain that his own service has been that of a servant rather than a son. When he should have found an abiding joy in his father’s presence, his mind has rested upon the profit to accrue from his circumspect life.
His words show that it is for this he has forgone the pleasures of sin. If this brother is to share in the father’s gifts, he himself has been wronged. He grudges his brother the favor shown him, he plainly shows that had he been in his father’s place, he would not have received the prodigal. He does not even acknowledge him as a brother but coldly speaks of him as thy son.
The listeners are on the edge of their seats. Will the family finally be reunited in unity and love? Will the brothers be reconciled? Will the elder brother be softened by this remarkable offer and be reconciled to the father?
Jesus doesn’t finish the story and tell us what happened because the real audience for this story are the Pharisees- the elder brothers, the moral insiders, the saints in the church. The elder son is represented by the unrepenting Jews of Christ’s day and also the Pharisees in every age who look with contempt upon those whom they regard as publicans and sinners. Because they themselves have not gone to great excesses in vice, they are filled with self-righteousness. For I say unto you, That except your righteousness. shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and. Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. Matt. 5:20
Like the elder son in the parable, they had enjoyed special privileges from God. They claim to be sons and daughters in God’s house, but they had the spirit of the hireling. They were working not from love but from hope of reward. In their eyes, God was an exacting taskmaster. They saw Christ inviting publicans and sinners to receive freely the gift of his grace, the gift which the rabbis hoped to secure only by toil and penance, and they were offended. The prodigals return which filled the heart father’s art with joy, had only stirred them to jealousy.
Jesus is pleading with his enemies to respond to his message and what is that message he is redefining sin what it means to be lost and what it means to be saved.
“Oh man what is good and what does the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” Micah 6:6- 8
Two Lost Sons
The young man humiliates his family and lives a self-indulgent dissolute life. He is totally out of control alienated from the father and cut off from God. The listeners to the parable would have all agreed. The elder brother is fastidiously obedient to his father and therefore to the commands of God. He is completely under control and quite self-disciplined.
We have two sons, one bad by conventional standards the one good yet both are alienated from the father.
The father must go out and invite each of them to come into the feast of his love.
There is not just one lost son in the parable there are two. Jesus deliberately leaves the elder brother in his alienated state. The bad son enters the father’s feast, but the good son will not. The lover of prostitutes is saved but the man of moral rectitude is still lost. We can almost hear the Pharisees gasp as the story ends.
It was a complete reversal of everything they had ever been taught. Why doesn’t the elder brother go in he himself gives the reason, “because I’ve never disobeyed you”.
It’s the pride in his moral record, it’s not his wrongdoing, but his righteousness that is keeping him from the sharing and the feast of the father.
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.” Isa. 64:9
How could this be? The answer is that the brothers’ hearts and the two ways of life they represent are much more alike than they first appear.
What did the younger son want most in life? He chafed at having to partake of his family assets under the father supervision. He wanted to make his own decisions and have unfettered control of this portion of the wealth. How did he get to that? He did it with a bold power play, a flagrant defiance of community standards, a declaration of complete independence.
What did the older son want most? He wanted the same thing as his brother. He was just as resentful of the father as was the younger son. He too wanted the father’s goods rather than the father himself. However, while the younger brother went far away, the other the elder brothers stayed close and never disobeyed. That was his way to get control.
His unspoken demand is “I’ve never disobeyed you, now you have to do things the way I want them to be done”. The hearts of the two brothers were the same. Both sons resented their father’s authority and sought ways of getting out from underneath it. Each rebelled, but one did it by but so by being very bad, the other being extremely good. Both were alienated from the father’s heart. Both were lost sons.
Do you realize what Jesus is teaching? Neither son, loves the father for himself, they both were using the father for their own self-centered ends, rather than loving, enjoying, and serving him.
This means that you can rebel against God and be alienated from him, either by breaking his rules or by keeping all of them diligently. It’s a shocking message, careful obedience to God’s law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against God.
You can avoid Jesus as Savior, by keeping all the moral laws.
If you do that, then you feel you have “rights”.
God owes you answered prayers, a good life, and a ticket to heaven., when you die. You don’t need a Savior who pardons you, by free grace, if you are your own savior. This attitude is clearly that of the elder brother. Why is he so angry with his father? He feels he has the right to tell the father how the robes, rings, and livestock of the family should be deployed. In the same way religious people commonly live very moral lives but their goal is to get leverage over God to control him to put him in a position where they think he owes them.
“Not every one that says unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that does the will of my Father which is in heaven.” Matt 7:21
If like the elder brother you believe that God ought to bless you and help you because you have worked so hard to obey him and be a good person, then Jesus may be your helper, your example, even your inspiration, but he is not your Savior. You are serving as your own Savior.
Elder brothers obey God to get things. They don’t obey God to get God himself, in order to resemble him, love him, and know him and delight him.
So religious and moral people can be avoiding Jesus as Savior and Lord, as much as the younger brothers who say they don’t believe in God and define right and wrong for themselves. Here is Jesus radical redefinition of what is wrong with us nearly everyone defines sin as breaking a list of rules. Jesus shows us that a man who has violated virtually nothing on the list of moral behaviors, can be every bit as spiritually lost as the most profligate immoral person.
Why?
Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord and judge, just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life.
There are two ways to be your own Savior and Lord. One is by breaking all the moral laws and setting your own course and the second is keeping all the moral laws and being very, very good.
Jesus does not divide the world into moral good guys and immoral bad guys. He shows us that everyone is dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others to get power and control for themselves.
“Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus”. Romans 3:20-26
We are just going about it in different ways. Even though both sons are wrong, the father cares for them, and invites them both back into his love and feast. This means that Jesus’ message, is a completely different spirituality. The gospel of Jesus is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism or relativism, conservatism, or liberalism. Nor is it something halfway along a spectrum between two poles it is something else altogether.
The gospel is distinct from these two approaches. Everyone is wrong. Everyone is loved. Everyone is called to recognize this and change only by the grace of God.
By contrast the elder brothers divide the world into two– the good people like us are in and the bad people, who are the real problem of the world, are out.
Younger brothers, even if they don’t believe in God at all, do the same thing– the open-minded and tolerant people are in, and the bigoted narrow-minded people are the real problem with the world, are out. But Jesus says the humble are in and the proud are out . I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. Luke 18: 14
The people who confess they aren’t particularly good or open minded are moving toward God, because the prerequisite for receiving the grace of God is to know you need it.
“The Lord cares for the humble, but he keeps his distance from the proud”. Psalms 138: 6
Years ago, the question was posed “what’s wrong with the world?” GK Chesterton responded “I am”.
This is the attitude that grasps the message of Jesus. Both sons are wrong, yet both are loved.
The story does not end on the same note for each.
Jesus is trying to say that while both forms of self-salvation are equally wrong, each one is not equally dangerous. The irony of the parable is now really revealed. The younger sons flight from the father was obvious, he left the father literally physically and morally.
The older son stayed at home. He was more distant and alienated from the father than his brother because he was blind to his true condition.
As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.
Revelation 3: 17-19
He would have been horribly offended by the suggestion that he was rebelling against the father’s authority and love, but he was. The elder brother is more blind to what is going on being an elder brother- he represents the non-believing Pharisees, a spiritually desperate condition.
Jesus summarizes his ministry as a rescue operation coming to seek and save that which is lost. For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost. Luke 19:10
What does it mean to be spiritually lost?
In the parable the younger brother is lost, and this is clearly seen when he ends up in a pigsty. He’s run out of friends, money, and resources because of his self-indulgent undisciplined, and foolish behavior. It has led to a complete life collapse. While in the pigsty the younger brother realizes he has lost his way and returns to try and rebuild his life.
The elder brother is lost. His attitude brings much misery and strife into the world more so than the younger brothers lostness. We see the elder brother became angry; all of his words were dripping with resentment. Elder brothers believe that if they live a good life, they should get a good life and that God owes them a smooth road, if they try very hard to live up to standards.
What happens then if you are an elder brother and things go wrong in your life? if you feel you’ve been living up to moral standards, you will be furious with God. You don’t deserve this you think.
How hard you’ve worked to be a decent person. You may swing miserably back and forth between the “I hate thee” and “I hate me”.
The elder brother’s inability to handle suffering arises from the fact that there his moral observance is results oriented.
The good life is lived not for delighting good deeds themselves, but as calculated ways to control. Jesus conveys the difference between the two – results oriented selfishness and a faithfulness born of love.
So how does a person who is lost, yet who perceives he has no sins on the list, get saved?
They feel terrible and repent. They may punish themselves and bewail their weakness. When they finish, however they remain elder brothers. Remorse and regret are just a part of the self-salvation project. Pharisaical repentance doesn’t go deep enough to get at the real problem. What is the problem?
Pride in his good deeds rather than remorse over his bad deeds was keeping the older son out of the feast of salvation. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked. Revelation 3:17
The elder brother’s problem is self- righteousness, the way he uses his moral record to put God and others in his debt, to control them and get them to do what he wants. His spiritual problem is the radical insecurity that comes from basing his self-image on achievements and performance, so he must endlessly prop up his sense of righteousness by putting others down and finding fault.
What must we do then to be saved? To find God, we must repent of the things we have done wrong, but if that is all you do, you may remain just an elder brother. To truly become Christians, we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right.
Pharisees only repent of their sins, but Christians repent for their very roots of their righteousness. They allow self to die that Christ may live.
We must learn how to repent of the sin, under all our other sins and under all our righteousness, the sin of seeking to be our own savior and Lord. Luther calls this self-abnegation. When you realize that the antidote to being bad is not just being good, you are on the brink. If you follow through, it will change everything, how you relate to God self, others the world, your work, your sins, your virtue. It is called the new birth. Being born again. Daily.
The question is raised who should have gone out and search for the lost son? Jesus knew the Bible thoroughly and he knew that in it’s very beginning, it tells another story of an elder and younger, brother Cain and Abel.
In that story God tells the resentful and proud older brother you are your brother’s keeper. The true elder brother would have said “father my younger brother has been a fool and now his life is in ruins. But I will go look for him and bring him home and if the inheritance is gone as I expect I’ll bring him back into the family at my expense”.
It is only at the elder brother’s expense that the younger brother can be brought back home. Because as Jesus said the father had divided his property between them, before the younger brother and son had left. Everything had been assigned. The father says to the older brother, “my son everything I have is yours”, every penny that remains of the family estate belonged to the elder brother.
Mercy and forgiveness must be free and unmerited to the wrongdoer. If the wrongdoer must do something to merit it, then it isn’t mercy.
But forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness. The point of the parable is that forgiveness always involves a price someone must pay. There is no way for the younger brother to return to the family unless the older brother bore the cost himself.
Our true elder brother paid our debt on the cross in our place. Jesus was stripped naked of his robe and dignity so that we could be clothed with a dignity, a standing we don’t deserve. On the cross Jesus was treated as an outcast so that we could be brought into God’s family freely by grace.
Jesus drank the cup of eternal justice so that we might have the cup of the father’s joy. There is no other way for the heavenly father to bring us in except at the expense of our true elder brother Jesus Christ. Jesus who had all power in the world saw us enslaved by the very things we thought would free us. So he emptied himself of his glory and became a servant. Philippians 2.
He laid aside the infinities and immensities of his being and at the cost of his life. He paid the debt of our sins, purchasing us. The only place our hearts can rest is in his father’s house.
The Feast of Homecoming
Jesus not only died, but rose from the grave on the third day. “He broke the power of death” Hebrews 2:14. “But God raised him from the dead freeing him from the agony of death because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him”. Acts 2:24. Because Jesus paid the penalty for our sin, with his death He has achieved victory over the forces of death, decay, and disorder that keep the world from being our true home.
At the end of the story of the prodigal sons, there is a feast of homecoming.
So too at the end of the Book of Revelation, at the end of history, there is a feast, the marriage supper of the lamb Revelation 19. The Lamb is Jesus who was sacrificed for the sins of the world so that we could be pardoned and brought home. This feast happens in the new Jerusalem the city of God that comes down out of heaven to fill the earth. Revelation 21 and 22.
Jesus’ salvation is a feast; therefore, we can believe in and rest in His work for us, through the Holy Spirit, He becomes real to our hearts. There is a difference between believing that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. The difference between believing that God is gracious and tasting that God is gracious is as different as having the belief that honey is sweet and having the actual sense of its sweetness. We must sense on the palate of the heart the sweetness of His mercy.
The ultimate purpose of Jesus is not only individual salvation and pardon for sins, but also the renewal of this world, the end of disease, poverty, injustice, violence, suffering and death. In Matthew 25 Jesus describes judgment day. “Many will stand there and call him Lord, but Jesus says stunningly that if they had not been serving the hungry, the refugee, the sick, and the prisoner then they hadn’t been serving Him” Matthew 25:34-40.
The inevitable sign that you know you are a Sinner and saved by sheer costly grace is a sensitive social conscience and a life poured out in the deeds of service to the poor and poor in spirit. Younger brothers are too selfish and elder brothers are too self-righteous to care for the poor.
Religion operates on the principle of “I obey, therefore I am accepted by God”. The basic operating principle of the gospel is “I am accepted by God, through the work of Jesus Christ, therefore I obey”.
A keen fundamental insight of Martin Luther was that religion is the default mode of the human heart.
Your computer operates automatically in a default mode unless you deliberately tell it to do something else. Luther says that even after you are converted by the gospel, your heart will go back to operating on other principles, unless you deliberately, repeatedly, set it to gospel mode.
We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel as if we were digesting it and making it part of ourselves.
“You know the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ that though he was rich yet for our sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich”, 2 Corinthians 8: 9
Think on His costly grace, until you want to give, like He did.
Martin Luther wrote “The truth of the gospel is the principle article of all Christian doctrine, most necessary it is, that we know this well, teach it to others and beat it into our heads continually”.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was appalled at how many in the German church capitulated to Hitler in the early 1930s. In response he wrote the Cost of Discipleship. There he warned about the dangers of what he called cheap grace, the teaching that stresses that grace is free, so it doesn’t really matter how we live.
The solution, he said, was not to return to legalism, but to focus on how seriously God takes sin and on how He could only save us from it at infinite cost to himself.
Bonhoeffer realized that the only group who produced changed lives, were not those who worked harder or been more obedient but those “who heard the word of God and understood it”. Matthew 13:23. Bonhoeffer insisted that people whose lives remain unchanged by God’s grace, didn’t really understand it’s costliness, and therefore didn’t really understand the gospel.
They had a general idea of God’s universal love but not a grasp of the seriousness of sin and the meaning of Christ’s work on our behalf.
In the end Martin Luther’s old formula still sums up things nicely: “We are saved by faith alone, not our works, but not by faith that remains alone. Faith works.”
Nothing we can do can merit God’s grace and favor, we can only believe that He has given it to us in Jesus Christ and receive it by faith. If we truly believe and trust in the one who sacrificially served us, it changes us into people who sacrificially serve God and our neighbors.
If we say, I believe in Jesus, but it doesn’t affect the way we live, the answer is not that we need to add hard work to our faith, so much as that we haven’t truly understood or believed in Jesus at all.
We can have a foretaste of that future salvation now , in service to others, in the changes of our inner nature, through the gospel and through the healed relationships that Christ can give us now. But that is only a foretaste of what is to come.
Whenever men choose their own way, they place themselves in controversy with God. They will have no place in the Kingdom of God for they are at war with the very principles of heaven.
Because the law of the Lord is perfect, and therefore changeless, it is impossible for sinful men in themselves, to meet the standard of its requirement. This is this was why Jesus came as our Redeemer. It was his mission, by making men partakers of the divine nature, to bring them into harmony with the principles of the law of heaven. When we forsake our sins and receive Christ as our Savior, the law is exalted, the apostle Paul asks: “Do we make void the law through faith? God forbid yea, we establish the law”. Romans 3: 31
The Final Events will end with the splendor of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ also known as the Parousia. The Signs of Parousia are detailed in the Final Events Blog series and emphasize the Imminent Return and Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and the Love of the Father for all mankind.
The cross of Christ is to be lifted high above the people, absorbing their minds, and concentrating their thoughts. Then all the spiritual faculties will be charged with divine power, direct from God. Then there will be a concentration of the energies in genuine work for the master send forth to the world beams of light as living agencies to enlighten the world.
Christ accepts, so gladly every human agency that is surrendered to Him, He brings the human into union with the divine, that He may communicate to the world the mysteries of Incarnate love. Talk it, pray it, sing it proclaim abroad the message of His glory and keep pressing onward to the regions beyond.
- Trials patiently borne
- Blessings gratefully received
- Temptations manfully resisted
- Meekness, kindness, mercy and love habitually revealed
are the lights that shine forth in the character in contrast with the darkness of the selfish heart into which the light of life has never shown.
It is true that you claim to be a child of God, but if this claim be true, it is thy brother that was dead and is alive again and was lost and is found. He is bound to you by the closest ties, for God recognizes him as a son. Deny your relationship to him and you show that you are but a hireling in the household not a child in the family of God. Though you will not join in the greeting to the lost, the joy will go on, and the restored one will have his place by the Father’s side and in the Father’s work.
He that is forgiven much the same loves much.
“But you will be in the darkness without, for he that loveth not, knows not God for God is love”. 1 John 4: 8
Hanging on the cross, Christ was the Gospel. Now you and I have a message, “Behold the Lamb of God, which takes away the sins of the world.” Will we not keep our eyes fixed on a crucified and risen Savior, in Whom our hopes of eternal life are centered? This is our message, our argument, our doctrine, our warning to the impenitent, our encouragement for the sorrowing, the hope for every believer.
Christ crucified–talk it, pray it, sing it, and it will break and win hearts. This is the power and wisdom of God to gather souls for Christ.
Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to thy cross I cling.
The Final Events.
The Moral Insiders.
Part Forty-two in a Series.
The Final Events will end with the splendor of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ also known as the Parousia. The Signs of Parousia are detailed in the Final Events Blog series and emphasize the Imminent Return and Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and the Love of the Father for all mankind.
https://secondcoming.org/blog/