2 posts tagged “romans 3”

I was listening to the Mark Driscoll teaching on "Death By Love - Reflections On The Cross", and was really touched by Mark's passion for not "emasculating" the offensiveness of the cross, not hiding the "bad" news about our sin and the wrath of Holy Almighty God.
One part of the teaching, however, struck especially close to home. He was talking about how he heard a guy on Christian radio on Easter Sunday compare the cross to investment banking, basically saying that the cross shows how valuable we are, that God knew the cross was worth it, because we are of such high value to God. Mark said he just went ballistic seeing the cross being misused to place humans and humans' value at the center of the cross.

What struck home is that I distinctly remember having eerily similar thoughts about our value and the cross as the guy on the radio. Check it out here. Note I didn't use the investment banking example, but basically my thought went along the lines of the fact that because God declared that the price for us would be the death of His Son, He thereby also declared our value to be worth the death of His Son.

Now I've been wrestling with this ever since I heard the teaching. Am I over-emphasizing our value as people - going in the direction of humanism?

Then today God gave me a great thought which kind of cleared stuff up for me:

The cross does not prove our value, rather the cross gives us value.

That is, without the cross, we all have become truly worthless (2 Kings 17:15, Romans 3:12). However, one thing that happened at the cross was that God gave us worth and value while we were worthless (Romans 5:8). In other words, yes, my thoughts I had back then are still true: The thing to remember, though, is that without the cross and without that declaration of our value, we are all worthless. Our value is completely dependent upon the cross and the objective love of God.

So we have yet one more tension in the Christian life to keep in mind: Without the cross, we would have been worthless because we all turned from Him, but with the cross, God declared us to be as valuable to Him as His own Son. Our value is not the centerpiece of the cross, nor the reason for the cross, rather it is one of many consequences of the cross.

The teaching this Saturday was on the second part of James 2, the part which caused Martin Luther to say

St. James' Epistle is really an epistle of straw, compared to [Paul's epistles], for it has nothing of the nature of the Gospel about it.

What rubbed Luther the wrong way was the emphasis James puts on works: Faith is dead without works, we show our faith by our works, and he even goes so far as to say "a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone" (v. 24) - seemingly a direct contradiction to Romans 3:28 "we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law."

Something I noticed while we went through the passage is that in verses 21-23 he talks about how Abraham proved and validated his faith by sacrificing Isaac. This exact story is used by Paul in Romans 4 to prove the point that Abraham was saved apart from works!

It seems to me some people in the churches James was writing to were taking Paul's teaching of faith apart from works so far as to say faith was possible without works. James' point is loud and clear: Faith without works is not faith! Faith is completed by works.

I was challenged once again by the fact that we are told so often in the New Testament that one of the main reasons we are created is to do good works (which God in fact prepares for us to do!). Salvation does not come by good works, and James never says otherwise - but he does say if I look at my life and I don't see myself giving myself for others, helping others, serving others, doing good deeds - something is seriously very wrong.

Living a life of good works is as natural a consequence of true faith as a beating heart is to a living body - our bodies are not alive because our hearts are beating, rather our hearts should be beating if we are alive.

Oh Lord, freely give me true faith in you, that I may walk in the works you are preparing for me even as I write these words.