Faith Tidbit #37

A third function of the Ten Commandments, God's law, is as a guide for God's people. The Commandments continue to function as a mirror for those who seek to live lives expressing gratitude for the free gifts of forgiveness and eternal life that come to those with faith in Jesus Christ. Martin Luther said that the Christian is to live in "daily repentance and renewal." God will use the Ten Commandment to show the Christian her or his "growth edges." God will use the Ten Commandments to help the Christian to avoid allowing sinful habits to gain a foothold and to lure the believer away from God. God will use the Ten Commandments to deepen our relationship with Him when we pray something like David prayed: "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting" (Psalm 139:23-24)

Faith Tidbit #35

So, if we can't obey the Ten Commandments which we must obey in order to have the life that only God gives, what good are they anyway? The Ten Commandments have three main functions. First, they act as a hedge on the behaviors and activities even of those who don't believe in God. The Bible says that the law is written on human hearts. Even those who regularly flout belief in God and believe that they have the right to do whatever they want will, at the moment they feel others have crossed them, appeal to some notions of right and wrong that somehow justify their sense of being wronged. Even in societies that have little or no experience of the God revealed to Israel--and in Jesus Christ, the Ten Commandments written on all human hearts will be appealed to, both by the victims of lovelessness and by the perpetrators anxious to prove that their violations of God's law are in some way justified. The Ten Commandments are a hedge against human lovelessness. The second function of the Ten Commandments tomorrow.

Faith Tidbit #34

So, if, as we said yesterday, we can't keep the commands we must keep to avoid losing the life only God can give, why does God bother giving us the Ten Commandments? The answer is that God gives us His law as a mirror, a means by which we can see ourselves as we really are, not as we pretend to be. "Through the law," the Bible says, "comes the knowledge of sin." When we honestly look at the law and how far we are from keeping it, we see how far we are from God and how filled with futility our lives are going to be, now and in eternity. Wrestling honestly with God's law is like the bracing first step of all Twelve Step programs: We are incapable of loving God completely or of loving others as we love ourselves. If the Ten Commandments were the only thing God revealed about Himself to the human race, life would be pointless.

Faith Tidbit #33

Although the Ten Commandments reflect God's will for all humanity for all time, two points should be made. First: "'No human being will be justified in [God's] sight' by deeds prescribed by [God's] law..." In other words, even if we were capable of mustering enough love to obey the Commandments perfectly, they wouldn't spare us the consequences of our past lovelessness, the condition of sin into which all humanity was born. Sin shuts us off from God, the One Who gives life. And so, the grim consequence of sin, which none of us can avoid is death. The Bible says, "The wages of sin is death..." The second point will be here tomorrow.

Faith Tidbit #31

However different traditions number the Ten Commandments, everyone is in basic agreement that they are divisible into two sections or tables. The first table is about our relationship with God. The second is about our relationship with others. (In my Lutheran tradition, that's Commandments 1-3 and 4-10, respectively.)

Faith Tidbit #30

It's important to notice that the Ten Commandments don't actually begin with a command. In fact, they begin with a promise: "I am the Lord your God..." Here, God underscores that a relationship with Him cannot be earned by adherence to His revealed will in the commandments. God promises to be our God without strings or preconditions. Relationship is God's gift to us. We may spurn that gift. But God offers it nonetheless. To understand this, consider the love of most parents for their children. Children may spurn parental love, opting out of a relationship. But this won't alter the parents' love for them. Jesus, in fact, told a parable or story which conveyed this truth about God's stubborn grace toward His children, as well as about God's respect for the choices we make regarding what to do with His offer of relationship.

Faith Tidbit #29

God originally gave the Ten Commandments so that His chosen people, the Hebrews (also known as Israel), would be a peculiar people entrusted with God's "will in its entirety." God gave the commandments to Moses, the instrument God chose to lead His people out of slavery in Egypt to the land God promised to Israel.

Faith Tidbit #28

Different Judeo-Christian traditions reckon the Ten Commandments differently. For example, Lutherans and others see Exodus 20:3-6 (also Deuteronomy 5:6-10) as a single command prohibiting the worship of anyone or anything but God. Other Christian groups divide these verses into two commandments, one prohibiting idolatry and the other proscribing the creation of statues or objects to be worshiped. Lutherans and others split the proscriptions against covetousness as they appear in Deuteronomy 5:21, into two commandments, while other Christian traditions see the verse presenting a single command. Judaism refers to the commandments as Aseret ha-Dibrot. If you ask how many commandments there are and how they should be reckoned, my answer will be, "Yes."

Faith Tidbit #27

Scholars refer to the Ten Commandments as the decalog. This is a compound word from an ancient translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, which was commonly read by diaspora Jews in the days of Jesus and the apostles. Deca, which appears in our common word, decade, means ten and logoi means words. Thus, the commandments are referred to as the ten words. The original Hebrew texts of the Old Testament give no title to the Ten Commandments. As noted in The Lutheran Cyclopedia, "The Bible gives us no basis for numbering of the Commandments or of determining their respective position..."

Faith Tidbit #26

Obeying the Ten Commandments, important as they are, cannot save us from sin, death, or futile living. (We're incapable of complete obedience to the commandments anyway.) In the New Testament, the Ephesian Christians were reminded that, “by grace you have been saved through faith” in Jesus Christ. Faith in Christ and not obedience to the Ten Commandments is what saves us. Even before Jesus came into our world, God's people were saved not by adherence to the law, but by their faith in God and God's promises. Genesis says that Abraham "believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness." In other words, Abraham had a right relationship because he adhered perfectly to God's law. (In fact, Genesis makes clear that on more than one occasion, Abraham deliberately acted in ways contrary to God's law.) But, Abraham received the gift of a right relationship with God, the meaning of righteousness, by trusting in God. The Bible says that when we receive God's righteousness as undeserved gift, God justifies us.

Faith Tidbit #25

A third kind of law or commandment appearing in the Old Testament is the moral law. It's also sometimes called the Mosaic Law, because it was first revealed by God to Israel through Moses, in the ten commandments. The commandments appear in Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21. They're also explained in much Leviticus, chapters 18-20. The moral law reflects God’s will for all humanity for all time, including today.

Faith Tidbit #22

The first five books of the Old Testament--Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy--are referred to as the Pentateuch. As scholar John Drane notes, the five books contain "accounts of humanity's beginnings..., accounts of Israel's forebears..., and accounts from Israel's escape from Egypt and journey to the promised land...But above all it contains 'laws': regulations for religious and social life, and great moral laws built on the ten commandments."

Why Should Jesus' Execution Bring Salvation?

In comments earlier today, Spencer Troxell, posed an important question:

I wish I understood why it was necessary for Jesus to be crucified for the sins of the world. Can you explain this to me without saying "For the wages of sin are death, which is the answer that I'm always given, although it's not a logical answer. WHY IS IT THAT one man's murder by an angry mob somehow offers salvation to that mob?

This has always troubled me. You're one of the smartest christians I know, so hopefully you can shed some light on the subject.

First of all, I'm probably not one of the smartest Christians Spencer knows and I'm apt to prove it in what I write below.

Secondly, he's not alone in wondering about the Biblical insistence that Christ's death was necessary to bring about salvation for humanity. I think about it myself sometimes and just this evening, before our Midweek Advent worship, a member of the congregation I serve as pastor remarked, "I'm looking forward to seeing how you answer that question because it's something I wonder about."

The Bible is insistent that Jesus had to suffer and die for fallen humanity in order to bring us salvation. The Gospel of Luke, for example, says that the risen Jesus told two of His disciples, who were skeptical of the word they'd gotten from some others of Jesus' followers that they'd seen Him alive at His tomb, "Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”" (Luke 24:26)

But why was it necessary? There are, you should know, many theories of atonement among Christian theologians. (Atonement is a word from Old English, literally a compound word meaning at one-ment. The idea is that Christ's death on the cross brings reconciliation between God and humanity, making them one.) Honestly, all these theories are little more than informed conjecture, none of which can really tell us why God chose to use Christ's death on a cross and His resurrection to bring about that reconciliation. But that God has made that choice, the New Testament is emphatic.

Both John's Gospel and the New Testament book of Hebrews refer to the ancient Jewish custom of sacrifice of unblemished lambs in connection to Jesus. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, these lambs were sacrificed on the altar at the temple in Jerusalem. The lambs were stand-ins for people who realized that their sins, their violations of God's call to love God and love neighbor, the themes of the two tables of the Ten Commandments and later, incorporated by Jesus into the Great Commandment. The lambs bore the sins of the repentant and for yet another year, they and God were at one.

In John's Gospel, John the Baptizer sees Jesus and says, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29).

But, the New Testament, especially Hebrews, makes clear that there is a qualitative difference between Jesus and all the other unblemished lambs who gave their lives for the sins of others. Hebrews says that all the Jewish religious rites that preceded Jesus were either faint copies of heaven or faint precursors of God's definitive action in Christ. The temple replicated heaven. The lambs sacrificed at the temple could only atone for sin for a restricted period of time. The atonement from Jesus is everlasting.

Hebrews says that Jesus was not only the ultimate sacrificial lamb, but also the ultimate high priest. It was the high priest who sacrificed the lambs on Yom Kippur. Priests had to purify themselves in order to enter the holy of holies where the sacrifice happened. Not so with Jesus because He was sinless. And this sinless sacrifice and priest, Hebrews says, "has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself" (Hebrews 9:26).

From all of this, I think, we get an idea of the seriousness of sin. And in speaking here of sin, I'm not necessarily referring to the individual violations of God's will that are forbidden in God's law, things like false witness, stealing, or misusing God's Name. Those are sins, individual acts that result from the basic human problem of alienation from God and an inward turn to self and selfishness. If we're turned away from God, we're turned away from the source of life. Jesus, Hebrews says repeatedly, has done what all the religious rites of ancient Judaism only hinted at: obliterated sin's power "once for all." (See here).

To God it evidently makes perfect sense that a condition which threatens our eternal lives should be reversed by a perfect sacrifice on the part of an eternally righteous God Who didn't need to experience death. It must make sense to God that our sin should be exchanged for His righteousness, that His undeserved acceptance of death should bring us life.

I don't understand this. Nor can I explain it.

But I do want to suggest a different way of looking at Jesus' death. The angry mobs who cried for Jesus' death and the gutless Roman governor, Pilate, who ordered Jesus' execution were only the proximate causes of His murder. Unlike the lambs offered up by sacrifice by pious Jews on Yom Kippur, Jesus, God-in-the-flesh offered Himself up. His death wasn't really the result of the decisions of jealous priests, angry Pharisees and Saducees, disappointed crowds, or a Roman governor. According to the Old Testament prophecies and the witness of the Gospels in the New Testament, God long ago decided that Jesus would die on a cross. Jesus' death happened at God's initiative, not ours.

Luke 9:51, for example, says that Jesus, when it was time for His crucifixion, "set his face toward Jerusalem."

When Pilate couldn't get answers out of Jesus, he asked if Jesus realized that he had the power to have Jesus executed. "“You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above..." (John 19:11).

And elsewhere, while referring to Himself as "the good shepherd," Jesus asserts, "No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again" (John 10:18).

Now, what's significant in all of this to me is that it speaks to a premise of your question. Yes, my sin is the ultimate reason that Jesus went to a cross. A sinful world didn't (and doesn't) want the bother of a sinless Savior come to reclaim a fallen world. We harbor the notion that if we can kill off Jesus (or deny His resurrection or deny His existence), we can have the run of things and do exactly as we want. (See here.) But, in reality, had it not been Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, Annas, Judas, the angry mobs, or the sadistic soldiers, Jesus would have died for us anyway. God mandated it and was in control even when Jesus' murderers thought that they were. His resurrection underscored that.

I don't know why God chose to use the death of a sinless Savior to bring salvation. But when I look back on Old Testament history and when I consider the horrors that human sin unleashes--from the killing chambers of Auschwitz to the terrorist horrors recently unleashed in Mumbai, God's method of atonement doesn't surprise me. Sin is truly grave, killing business. It doesn't shock me that death would play a role in the expunging of its killing power.

In the cross, it seems, God comes into our world and shares the worst of our human experience so that all who surrender to Christ can experience the best of God's experience, resurrection and everlasting life.

I don't get it. But apparently from God's vantage point, it was necessary in order for Him to truly connect with us and take us back from the evil that threatens to take us down for eternity.

This may not be a very satisfying answer, Spencer. But for now, it's the best that I can do. Someone sharper than me can probably see and say more.

[UPDATE: Four years ago, my colleague and fellow blogger Mark Roberts wrote a fantastic series of posts on why Jesus had to die.]