the now
19Aug07
Why do people constantly talk about “the now but not yet?”
see pp. 57-58 on Luke 9.57-62 in
Download Pure.PDF
Why do people constantly talk about “the now but not yet?”
see pp. 57-58 on Luke 9.57-62 in
Download Pure.PDF
“It is finished” yet “All the days of my struggle I will wait until my change comes”: “I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind”
Could it be that “it is finished” applies fully to us now, while Job 14 and Romans 7 describe unresolved struggles prior to Jesus’ finished work?
I’m glad I found your site. I’m inspired yet again to enjoy God’s steadfast love.
This is a nice end to a good day.
Much peace…
Hey Allison - yes much peace! There it is - God’s steadfast love - it endures forever. That’s where the overflowing abundant life is. That’s the eternal life we’ve stepped into in Christ >>
Think of it this way - you’re sitting at a funeral and the pastor says that the dead person just stepped into eternity. Actually….I stepped into eternity in November 1990. The truth is we step into eternity the very moment the blood of Jesus comes and washes us from every sin.
Jesus said it this way - “whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” The instant we confess Jesus Christ as our Savior, we die with him. We’re buried with him, baptized into his death, and our former life ends. We don’t go on dying with Christ, because Christ isn’t stuck on the cross forever dying. He died once, he was buried once, and all of death and hell could not keep him there. And just as he was raised to life, so the instant that we die with him - we are raised into a completely new life in him. The life we now live is lived through faith in Jesus; and Jesus dies no more.
So the moment of salvation changes everything. We die, we resurrect, we are born of the Spirit, we enter the kingdom of God. There is no “not-yet” in that. We have experienced an inward resurrection that will last for eternity. The outward resurrection which we will later experience (either after our physical bodies die or when Christ appears) is a consequence of the inward resurrection that has already taken place!
The enemy of our souls does everything he can to play this reality down. There’s nothing he can do when someone sincerely calls on the name of Jesus for salvation. But he can come along immediately afterward and tell them nothing really changed. The lie boils down to varying degrees of “you’re still mine.” Pharaoh played the same card when he chased the Israelites into the Red Sea. Satan will scrap for any ownership you will allow him. If he can’t own your spirit/soul, he will insist he owns your body (or your “flesh,” or your “soulish nature,” or any other philosophic device that allows him to divide and conquer). If he can’t own your eternity, he will do everything he can to make you forget that today is the day of salvation. The power of the kingdom of God is somehow all way back in the past, and the glory of the kingdom is somehow all far off in the future; meanwhile Satan tries to force us to accept that he owns today. None of these claims are true. The prince of this world will come, but in God’s reality he has NOTHING in us.
We as believers are faced with a choice today that will resonate for all eternity. We can duck into the not-yet of burying the dead, or we can let the dead bury their own dead - and go preach the eternal living NOW of the kingdom of God.
As far as salvation, certainly. Romans 7 ends (almost) with deliverance “though Jesus Christ our Lord”, “Thanks be to God!”.
Yet as Christians we must sin boldly. Paul says “all things are lawful for me” as our righteousness and resurrection is in Christ already. But we have not yet been raised imperishable, changed away from the sting of death, though the law has been fullfilled (repeated “Thanks be to God!”).
The key consideration here is whether living in a corruptible mortal body requires that we sin. Jesus believed that it did not. He lived in a corruptible mortal body and did no sin.
Obviously Luther believed a mortal body requires sin, and many have followed him in that understanding. And Luther borrowed from Aquinas, who followed Augustine, who followed Origen and Philo, who followed Plato, who distilled much of his understanding of human nature from ancient Brahmanism. Of course, making Christianity line up with Plato made it far more acceptable to the Greeks, and many so-called church fathers stumbled into this unfortunate compromise.
Regardless, we must recognize clearly that Jesus condemned sin in the flesh. In other words, he proved once and for all that sin does not belong in the mortal human body. And the rest of the New Testament is a consistent witness that we are to live out this victory as proof. Human philosophy and human experience stare at this witness in disbelief, so men resort to constructing cheap philosophical experiential doctrines. Yet we must understand that in quoting Luther on this, we are merely quoting philosophy.
You will not finding Paul telling believers to sin boldly. In fact, he said “God forbid” to this exact suggestion. If you look closely at “all things are lawful for me” as a prooftext for the necessity or inevitability of sin in the life of the believer, you will find it in the same breath as “the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.” The truth is that those who live by the Spirit do by nature the things required in the law of liberty.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that we cannot speak by the Spirit of God and preach “sin boldly.” No matter how we think we can twist those words around to somehow highlight the power of God’s mercy, we make ourselves personally responsible for everyone who hears us and sins as a result. Men may think it’s clever and unexpected, but this is exactly the sort of thing Jesus warned it would be better to have a millstone tied around your neck and be drowned in the sea than to do.
Besides…we can live right now in a place where death has no sting. Why not?