One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (18 page)

OBEDIENCE TO THE RULES WON’T SAVE YOU

Please don’t misunderstand. Jesus was not attacking the Pharisees for their obedience or holding it against them. He was attacking them because they were trusting in that obedience for their justification; because they were using it as a way to marginalize and judge others; because their outward compliance was more important to them than the heart of the Law: love for God and neighbor; and more damnably, because they thought they could buy God’s favor with their behavior, that God owed them somehow.

Luke’s narrative gives the intent of the story: “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous …” (v. 9). The Pharisees had stopped trusting in God and had started trusting in themselves and their own abilities. They were human beings, in other words, and like any of us, no matter how much they obsessed over their daily record, they could never have earned their righteousness before God.

There is one final wrinkle. We learn that Jesus told this parable not simply because they were trusting in themselves, but because they “treated others with contempt.” Their belief in their capacity to be good enough to impress God and other people fueled contempt for those who weren’t obeying the way they were.

The connection is not an arbitrary one. Trusting in oneself, believing that righteousness can be attained through hard work and discipline, always leads to contempt for other people. The impetus for right living, to be righteous before God, was the thing that made this Pharisee, and others like him, unrighteous before Him. Why? Because it engendered hatred for their neighbors and disdain for grace. Some might say this same diagnosis applies to Christians today.

What we see here—and just about everywhere throughout the Gospels—is that the immoral person gets the Gospel before the moral one does. The prostitute understands grace while the Pharisee doesn’t. It is the actively unrighteous younger brother who grasps it before his self-righteous older brother. Our goodness is just as toxic as our badness, maybe even more so.

Back to the parable.

A WELL-DESERVED BAD REPUTATION

The tax collector really was as bad as he thought he was. As we noted earlier, tax collectors were essentially debauched thugs and thieving traitors. At some point in this tax collector’s life, his love of money had overcome his allegiance to his brothers and sisters, and he had betrayed them.

Jesus wasn’t setting him up as someone to be emulated. Jesus exalted this man because he did not even dare to lift up his eyes, instead beating his breast and crying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

Undoubtedly, when Jesus’s audience heard this prayer, they scoffed and said, “Of course he’s a sinner! That’s the understatement of the century!” But because he knew that he had nothing to bring to the table, righteousness-wise, he went away justified. With empty hands, he could receive the free gift of grace.

Again, sinners love and value grace simply because they know they need it! The self-righteous good man who is impressed with himself is the one who chafes against God’s free gift. This is no coincidence. Those who think they are “good” are, in fact, the ones most in need of grace—and the most opposed to it. Yet the whole point of this parable is to demonstrate that Christ has come to bless those who know they are bad and not those who think they are good.

To put it another way, Jesus did not come to offer moral reformation, he came to effect a mortal resurrection. Which is precisely what all of us need—both the “bad people” who know they’re bad and the “good people” who think they’re good. All of us have fallen short of the glory of God. The Law levels the playing field.

If you’re simply looking for moral reformation (improved behavior), you might need a life coach, a cheerleading section, or a really good friend, but not a Savior. But if you require mortal resurrection, you’re going to need something beyond yourself, someone who will raise dead people to life, give sight to the blind, and set captives free.

Jesus uses this parable to tell those of us who think we have it together, who never miss work or church, who love our kids and take our wives out on dates, who read our Bibles each morning, that we are still needy beggars who find acceptance with God in Christ’s righteousness
alone
.
Alone!
We never outgrow our need for grace—ever.

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE

If you ever want to clear out a dinner party, bring up the subject of total depravity. The crowd will part like the Red Sea! Yet as unattractive as it sounds, the doctrine of total depravity is not only one of the more misunderstood aspects of Christian theology, it is also one of the most crucial, especially if we are to understand ourselves as creatures whose reliance on God’s grace knows no end. So before the Darth Vader theme starts playing in your head, a few notes about what total depravity isn’t.

Total depravity does
not
mean “utter depravity.” Utter depravity describes someone who is as bad as he or she can possibly be. Thankfully, God’s restraining grace keeps even the worst of us from being utterly depraved. Even the most detestable villains of human history could have been worse. So don’t read utter depravity into total depravity.

If total depravity isn’t utter depravity, then what is it?

As understood and articulated by theologians for centuries, the idea of total depravity means more than one thing. On the one hand, total depravity affirms that we are all born “dead in [our] trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1–3; Col. 2:13), with no spiritual capacity to incline ourselves toward God. We do not come into this world spiritually neutral, in other words; we are born with an inheritance of Adam’s sin—that is, a death sentence. We therefore need much more than to reach out from our spiritual hospital bed to take the medicine that God offers. We must be raised from death to life. In this sense, total depravity means we are totally unable to approach God on our own power. We will not, because we cannot, and we cannot, because we’re dead. In Romans, the apostle Paul puts it like this:

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. 3:10–12)

For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. (Rom. 8:7–8)

Salvation is not a matter of our coming to God. It is a matter of God coming to us. Robert Capon explains it in this way:

Jesus came to raise the dead. The only qualification for the gift of the Gospel is to be dead. You don’t have to be smart. You don’t have to be good. You don’t have to be wise. You don’t have to be wonderful. You just have to be dead. That’s it.
4

So in the sense above, Christians are obviously
not
totally depraved. We who were dead have been made alive.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. (Eph. 2:4–6)

Once God regenerates us by His Spirit, draws us to Himself, unites us to Christ, raises us from the dead, and grants us status as adopted sons and daughters, is there
any
sense in which we can speak of a Christian being totally depraved? Well, yes.

When theologians speak of total depravity, they are not only referring to our total inability to come to God on our own, but also to
sin’s effect
: sin corrupts us in the totality of our being. Our minds are affected by sin. Our hearts are affected by sin. Our wills are affected by sin. Our bodies are affected by sin. This reality lies at the center of the internal conflict that Paul articulates in Romans 7:15: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

The painful struggle to which Paul is giving voice arises from his condition as someone who has been raised from the dead and is now alive to Christ (justified before God), but lingering sin continues to plague him at every level and in every way (sinful in himself). Paul’s testimony demonstrates that even after God saves us, there is no part of us that becomes sin-free—we remain sinful and imperfect in all of our capacities, in the totality of our being, or, as William Beveridge put it:

I cannot pray but I sin. I cannot hear or preach a sermon but I sin. I cannot give alms or receive the sacrament but I sin. I can’t so much as confess my sins, but my confessions are further aggravations of them. My repentance needs to be repented of, my tears need washing, and the very washing of my tears needs still to be washed over again with the blood of my Redeemer.
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So even after we become Christians, our thoughts, words, motives, deeds, and affections need the constant cleansing of Christ’s blood and the forgiveness that comes our way for free. While it is gloriously true that there is nowhere in your life the Spirit has not infiltrated, it is equally true that there is no part of any Christian in this life that is free of sin. Because of the totality of sin’s effect, therefore, we never outgrow our need for Christ’s finished work on our behalf—we never graduate beyond our desperate need for Christ’s righteousness and his strong and perfect blood-soaked plea “before the throne of God above.”

This is why the Gospel is just as much for Christians as it is for non-Christians. Our dire need for God’s grace doesn’t get smaller after God saves us. In one sense, it actually gets bigger. Christian growth, says the apostle Peter, is always growth into grace, not away from it.

So Christian growth does not involve becoming stronger and stronger, more and more competent every day. It involves becoming more and more aware of how weak and incompetent we are and how strong and competent Jesus was and continues to be for us.

Remember, the apostle Paul referred to himself as the least of all the saints and the chief of sinners at the
end
of his life. For Paul, spiritual growth had to do with the realization of how utterly dependent he was on the mercy and grace of God. He did not arrive at some point where he needed Jesus less. It was, paradoxically, Paul’s ability to freely admit his lack of sanctification that demonstrated just how sanctified he was. When we stop narcissistically focusing on our need to get better, that
is
what it means to get better. When we stop obsessing over our need to improve, that
is
what it means to improve!

Because of total depravity, you and I were desperate for God’s grace before we were saved. Because of total depravity, you and I remain desperate for God’s grace even after we’re saved. Thankfully, though our sin reaches far, God’s grace reaches infinitely further.

SINFUL SAINTS AND SAINTLY SINNERS

At this point someone might say, “Wait a minute. Is
sinner
an appropriate term to describe a Christian’s identity? After all, didn’t Paul refer to Christians as saints? Once God saves us, aren’t we new creatures? The old (sinner) is gone, and the new (saint) has come?” These are important questions.

Once again Martin Luther is a great help to us. He is the one who first described Christians as being
simul justus et peccator
(simultaneously justified and sinner).
Simultaneously
is a crucial word in Christian theology; it describes life and reality “in between the times”—between Jesus’s first and second coming, the time after Jesus’s bodily resurrection yet before our bodily resurrection. It points to the coexistence of two times at the same time: the old age and the new creation are both present realities. In themselves, Christians remain the old Adam in the old age; in Christ, they share the status of the second Adam (Jesus) in the age to come.
Simul justus et peccator
is a way of identifying this double existence.

The point is not that everyone’s a little of each.
Just
and
sinner
are total rather than partial realities. The Christian, in him- or herself, is totally a sinner while at the same time, in Christ, being totally righteous before God. In other words, Christians are fully human—real people with real problems and real pain—who are nevertheless fully known, loved, and saved (Rom. 5:6–10).

The designation of
sinner
is misapplied only if it is used to describe the Christian’s core
identity
—their person. Before God, identity is
not
a both/and (sinner
and
saint); it is an either/or (sinner
or
saint). The basis of this difference is not anthropological (what I do or don’t do). It is strictly and solely Christological: to be in Christ is to be righteous before God.

Paul does something unprecedented (in comparison with early Jewish literature) in that he designates all people outside of Christ with the identity
sinner
(Rom. 5:8, for example). But even more novel and scandalous is his corresponding claim that it is precisely sinners who are, in Christ, identified as freely justified (Rom. 3:23–24). Sinners and saints at the same time, in other words! So to borrow an expression from a Reformation confession, while the old Adam is a “stubborn, recalcitrant donkey,” this does not define Christian identity before God.

So,
simul justus et peccator
is
not
a description of our Christian identity; it is
not
a description of who we are before God. It is, however, a description of the both/and that characterizes the Christian life
as lived
here and now, in the real world.

Pastorally, and in our relationships with other people, this truth allows us to affirm (without crossing our fingers) that in Christ—at the level of identity—the Christian is 100 percent righteous before God, while at the same time recognizing the persistence of sin. If we don’t speak in terms of two total states (100 percent righteous in Christ and 100 percent sinful in ourselves) corresponding to the coexistence of two times (the old age and the new creation), then the undeniable reality of ongoing sin leads to the qualification of our identity in Christ: some sin must mean not totally righteous—akin to pouring acid on the very foundation of the peace we have with God on the other side of justification.