Next Best Thing

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Eph. 2:8-10 ESV)

For this brief text, I keyed in on the words or phrases of “grace,” “gift of God,” “workmenship,” and “prepared beforehand.” All of these ideas are directed at believers. These are positive phrases and encouraging thoughts. They should be! Again, these contain a powerful sense of God’s pleasure and pride in us. That as believers, we are and have been, conformed to Jesus’ image. We are to “look like” Jesus. Even more specifically; that we are representatives, agents, ambassadors of Christ. That, of course, does not mean that we are uniform, exactly the same, identical. Indeed, we are all unique, purpose built, designed for the good works that God has put in our paths.

So, in this brief text, we have a comforting sense of encouragement, affirmation, and pride from God.

But that’s not all!

We also have a strong implication that we must be out there doing what God wants done. We were created in Christ Jesus for … a purpose! There’s a reason we were saved. There’s a reason that God made us as he did. That purpose is “good works.”

These good works are not difficult for us to find. The text says that God prepared these good works for us that we would walk in them. I get the visual of a series of stepping stones, each of them a good work that I’m to do, all laid out for me. All I need to do (which does NOT mean this is easy!) is to step into that next good work that God has for me.

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This reminds me of a phrase from Craig Groeschel: “Doing the next, best thing in your life.” This idea of doing good works that God prepared for us is part of doing the next, best thing in my life.

Rom. 3:21 - God Is "Tricky"

Romans 3 is really interesting! In a startling "reveal," Paul says that it turns out that God can - and does - save people apart from the Law.

Paul points out that the Law was never intended to save people. The sacrificial system could not accomplish that (Heb. 10:4). Abraham was saved before he became Jewish because (Rom 3:21), 'God has shown a becoming-saved-process that is not at all linked to The Law.' The Law doesn't save - it brings death and even greater realization that we are doomed. But God - all along - had this undercurrent of salvation by grace through faith. God's salvation was always apart from The Law. The Jewish mindset was that they needed to obey the rules to get God to like them more.

The author of Hebrews says a similar thing as Paul when he does a "reveal" that there's another order of priesthood that you-all forgot about. Everybody was fixated for the longest time on the Aaronic Priesthood. But there was this other priest - no relation to Aaron at all - that was a priest of God whom even Abraham showed submission to. This guy with the crazy name, Melchizedek, was a believer in Yahweh and acted as his priest hundreds of years before Aaron came along.

I have to chuckle at this. It's a bit like the illusionist who distracts your attention away from what's really going on and it when the effects are shown, it looks like "magic." All this time God had a righteousness and a priesthood working in the background ready to be used when The Law and Aaronic priesthood had fully taught us what we didn't want to believe. Because what we wanted to believe was that we could try really hard and get God to like us.

That could be confusing so let me restate the lesson: it is absolute folly to think you can do anything to make yourself acceptable to God.

Go 'head, try it! Here's a list of 613 commands - just 613 of them. Go ahead, keep them all.

OK, OK, that's too many and too hard. Here - let's start you out on just ten rules. Live your life so as to not violate just those ten. Hmmmm. Can't do that either.

Well, by the time people are figuring this all out, Jesus comes along and says there really are just two: love God and love neighbor. We still can't do it.

Have we learned the lesson? We can't do anything to gain acceptance by God. OK, now let's get to the real point: it's about grace and it always has been.

This must have been an earth-shattering realization for both Jews and Gentiles. An earned righteousness that is apart from rule-keeping. Mind boggling!

Grace In The Garden

I was listening to a friend’s sermon the other day and it caused me to reflect on the grace of God. Specifically, I was reminded of the grace that God displayed in the Garden of Eden and especially when Adam and Eve fell into sin. Though it seems to be rarely preached, that whole episode just drips with grace and mercy. I’m indebted to Dr. Gerry Breshears for many of these insights.

First, I think it is real important to understand the nature of the Garden. It was a ‘dispensation’ that was marked, if by any description at all, by the word “freedom.” The Garden, was full of wonderful things: “The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; .... Out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food;” The landscape was lush and pleasing, the garden was a source of four rivers, and God told Adam, eat whatever you want; there was only one exception. But, in our weird pathological way, we focus on the exception rather than the overwhelming provision and freedom that God gave Adam.

God was pretty clear about that exception – if you eat it, you will die. Now most preaching gets this part pretty wrong. Most preaching seems to put these words in God’s mouth: “If you eat this, I’ll kill you!” This makes God a vengeful person waiting to squash people. This is wildly inconsistent with God’s own description of himself in Exodus 34:6-7. By the way, did you know that passage is the most quoted verse in the Bible by the Bible? This statement of consequences should be stated this way: “Don’t eat that fruit or you’ll suicide.” It was a warning; very akin to Grandpa saying to his five year old grandson, “Don’t try to use that power saw in the garage or you’ll hurt yourself!”

Well, we all know what happens next. Lucifer, in the form of a ‘serpent,’ manages to get Eve’s attention and both Adam and Eve sin. Let’s not forget that Adam clearly knew the deal about that fruit and still chose to eat it.

After Adam and Eve sinned by exercising faithless autonomy in the eating of the prohibited fruit, God exercised grace in several ways.

Speculatively, we can say that God did not destroy them (including the serpent) immediately. He generously allowed all of them to draw another breath and their hearts to continue beating.

First in the text, we read that God came to them (Gen. 3:8). He did not force them to come to Him; He initiated contact with his now-sinful children. God didn’t make a power play, God came to people. As we think about Christmas, shouldn’t this echo in our ears? God with us – “Emmanuel.”

Second, we read that God called out to them (Gen. 3:9). He did not immediately declare punishment; but He sought communication with them. He asked where they were. He asked for an explanation. He patiently interviewed all the parties that he was interested in.
Well, it was obvious that Adam and Eve had disobeyed and there were consequences. God had three curses to hand out. He began with the serpent.

The third point of grace is that God can’t even get through the first curse without holding out the prophetic hope that humans would get their – well, 'revenge' would not be too strong a word (Gen. 3:15b). God promises that humans, though bruised on the heel, would strike back at the head of the serpent. This is amazingly hopeful! Women are cursed with painful childbirth and strained relationships with their husbands. Men are cursed with work that is toil and knowlege that they will physically die and disintegrate.

The fourth point of grace is that God sees the shame they feel regarding nakedness and provides coverings (Gen. 3:21). This is significant in that innocent animals had to die for these coverings. God shows grace by his provision, even though his kids had really wrecked everything.

Lastly, God protects Adam and Eve from the Garden by hiding it from them. They are in a state of spiritual death and need to be protected from the Tree of Life. Think of it, if they were allowed to continue eating from the Tree of Life while in a constant state of spiritual separation from God, it would be unthinkable in its spiritual horror that Adam and Eve, and all their descendants would continue to biologically live in some sort of zombie-like state. We can only speculate at the real terror of that. In any case, God protects them from something awful, maybe some sort of sacrilege, by hiding the Tree of Life. But, not to worry, the Tree of Life shows up again at a time when we will be better able to metabolize it. Look at Revelation 22:1-2.

So all of this tells me that God’s grace was pervasive even in the midst of “The Curse.”