Lenten Readings -- Jeremiah 3

Introduction to Jeremiah
Jeremiah 1
Jeremiah 2
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1. The relationship between Jeremiah and King Josiah is curious. Given that Josiah is the hero of the books of the Kings (e.g., 1 Kings 13:1-2), we would expect Jeremiah to praise Josiah and his reforms. But we get almost nothing directly about Josiah -- mostly prophecies against Judah during his reign. It almost makes me wonder if critiques of Josiah were not included in the collection of Jeremiah's prophecies as they were put into their current form. Any praise for Josiah would surely have been preserved since that was the view of the historical "winners." But what we get is largely silence on Josiah and only rebuke of Judah during his reign. [1]

It's perhaps a reminder that not every thought that Jeremiah or Paul had was inspired. We consider inspired the ones that ended up in Scripture in a mature form.

So, Jeremiah 3 continues the critique of Judah during the days of Josiah's reign. Jeremiah prophesies against Judah for worshiping other gods on every high hill (Ba'al) and under every green tree (Asherah). 2 Kings indicates that Josiah's father, Manasseh, had reversed the reforms of his father Hezekiah and promoted Baal and Asherah worship in Judah (2 Kings 21:2-9). Since Manasseh ruled for fifty-five years, worship of these other gods no doubt had gained a very strong foothold in the land by the time of Jeremiah.

2. Once again, Jeremiah uses the image of a wife who has run around with other men. Judah is like a prostitute that has slept with many other gods -- stone and tree (3:9). 

Here's the storyline of the metaphor. Israel, the northern kingdom, ran around with other gods first. So, God divorced her. This is a metaphor for Yahweh letting the Assyrians destroy the northern kingdom.

Then, Yahweh says, he expected Israel to come back to him, like a divorced wife who comes back to her first husband. Jeremiah alludes to the sentiment of Deuteronomy 24:1-4 -- it was considered wrong for the first husband to take her back because she had been defiled. Perhaps Jeremiah is alluding to this legislation in the newly discovered Book of the Law.

Nevertheless, Jeremiah says that Yahweh was willing to take Israel back (Jer. 3:7). [2] But she didn't return. This raises some interesting questions. For example, most Christians do not consider Deuteronomy 24 to be binding today. In fact, some conservatives think that a remarried woman should go back to her first husband because they see her as still married to the first husband in God's eyes. Clearly, they have misinterpreted Scripture on this score. 

I would say that the view of her defilement relates closely to purity laws that connected with the Ancient Near East and that the New Testament did not continue. Even more, the woman in Deuteronomy 24 is tossed around -- she doesn't really have any agency in the things that are happening to her. This suggests that the issue in Deuteronomy is not one of her moral choices but of uncleanness, a system that the New Testament largely does not continue.

As usual, Jesus pulls the rug out from under the whole discussion by "fulfilling" the Law and getting to the heart of the matter -- don't divorce her in the first place so you can go after some other woman legally.

3. Back to Jeremiah. Jeremiah says that Judah's guilt is even greater because it saw what happened to her sister Israel, yet she did exactly the same thing, going after Baal and Asherah (3:7-11).

But now, Jeremiah says, because there is no rain, Judah is calling out to Yahweh (3:3). Just now, Jeremiah says, you have called to me (3:4-5). "Father, will you be angry with me forever?" After all the evil Judah has done, dare she call out to Yahweh to take her back?

It's tempting to see here the beginnings of Josiah's reforms, which date to around the year 621BC. Judah is beginning to call out to Yahweh. In Jeremiah's view, she has not yet earned a hearing.

4. Interestingly, Yahweh calls to the remnant left in the northern kingdom. He calls lone individuals and members of families to come to Jerusalem and return to Yahweh (3:14). God will take them back if they repent. This sounds a little like Josiah's call for Israel to come worship Yahweh in Jerusalem.

There is still hope. Jeremiah does not yet see the inevitable destruction of Jerusalem. He sees a picture of Jerusalem as a place where both Israel and Judah have returned to serve the Lord and all the nations come there to worship Yahweh (3:17). Jerusalem becomes the "throne of the nations."

Interestingly, Jeremiah sees no need in that future day for an Ark of the Covenant (3:16). Is this a blurring of Jeremiah's later prophecies with his earlier ones? Presumably, the Ark was still in the temple in the days of Josiah. But Jeremiah sees no need for one in the restored kingdom, presumably after the new covenant of Jeremiah 31 is established.

This is the first hint of something we will see in full form in Jeremiah 7. Jeremiah has strongly negative views of the temple as it is currently run. While Josiah restored and strengthened the place of the temple in the life of Judah, Jeremiah has little time for it or the sacrificial system (7:22).

Rather, he calls them back to the pure worship of Yahweh -- their true husband, their sole God. 

[1] Although see 2 Chronicles 35:25.

[2] Note also that in Hosea 1-3, God is willing to take his "wife" back as well.

Lenten Readings -- Jeremiah 2

Previous readings were an introduction to Jeremiah and some thoughts on Jeremiah 1.

1. Roughly the first ten chapters of Jeremiah relate to the time before Josiah's reforms in the late 620s BC. By this time, the northern kingdom of Israel had been gone for a century. After destroying the northern kingdom, the Assyrians had mixed the land of Israel in the north with non-Israelites. This would become the place where the Samaritans would live. 

Although Judah escaped destruction, it was still living under the tension of Assyrian dominance at the time of Josiah. However,  Assyria was entering its last decade of power before it would finally be defeated by the Babylonians in 609BC. King Josiah would also die in 609BC trying to stop the king of Egypt from backing the Assyrians up.

2. Jeremiah 2 indicts Judah for being unfaithful to Yahweh, even though Yahweh brought Israel out from Egypt. It is a theme we see often among the prophets. 

Why? God asks through Jeremiah. Why did you go after other gods? Why wasn't Yahweh good enough for Israel? Jeremiah is baffled that a people would change its gods. When has a people ever done that?

The main competitor would seem to be Ba'al. We remember that Israel did not expel all the other Semites from the land. During this period, the Israelites may have been largely henotheistic — believing in the existence of other gods while holding that only Yahweh should be worshiped. The biblical prophets repeatedly called them back to the exclusive worship of Yahweh. In this period, you probably had families who had always worshiped Ba'al, and you probably had Israelites who also worshiped Ba'al. You may also have had Israelites who thought Yahweh and Ba'al were the same god by different names.

Josiah would insist not only that Yahweh be the sole God Israel worshiped but that he only be worshiped with sacrifice properly in Jerusalem at the temple. Later, the Samaritans would develop their own temple and their own syncretistic way of worshiping Yahweh (300s). Similarly, some of the exiles after Babylon destroyed the city would eventually set up their own temple in Elephantine in Egypt (400s BC). These alternative temples may reflect how novel Josiah's reform was at the time as well as the fact that the concept of worshiping Yahweh outside Jerusalem continued in the minds of many people.

None of that had happened yet when Jeremiah was prophesying. He was bringing Judah back to the story -- it all started when Yahweh delivered them from Egypt. They must have no other gods before him. Yahweh is a fountain of living water for them (2:13) -- an image Jesus uses in John 4. But they have tried to dig their own cisterns, cisterns with cracks that let the water out. Israel was a lovely vineyard who instead has gone after wild grape vines (2:21).

3. Jeremiah also warns Israel against reliance on Egypt. This will not be a problem for Josiah. As we mentioned, Josiah will die in battle against Egypt in 609, trying to stop them from helping the Assyrians against the Babylonians.

The final part of the chapter warns Israel about idolatry. They take a tree or a stone and call it their father (2:27). God sends them prophets. They kill them (2:30). They have forgotten their bridal attire (2:32).

Idolatry and worshiping other gods usually goes hand in hand in the prophets with social injustice. So Israel has oppressed the innocent poor -- even though they have not broken into your houses in desperation (2:34). It would be interesting to hear more about what Jeremiah is thinking here. Did the poor sometimes break into homes looking for food and such? Or was this a common trope used to put the poor in their place, an excuse to hate them?

The chapter ends again with a warning not to depend on Egypt for help.

Lenten Readings -- Jeremiah 1

Yesterday, I introduced the book of Jeremiah. 

1. Jeremiah was a priest -- a descendant of Levi -- who lived in the territory of Benjamin. He was from a city named Anathoth, which suggests he was a descendant of Abiathar the priest. Solomon banished Abiathar to Anathoth (three miles northeast of Jerusalem) because he backed another son of David for the throne.  

Although the name of Jeremiah's father is the same as that of the high priest in his day, it probably is not the same person. For one, Jeremiah was very critical of the temple, as we will see. But the fact that he was from Anathoth suggests he was from a priestly line that did not serve in the temple. The descendants of Zadok served in the temple.

Despite his priestly lineage, we never hear of Jeremiah offering a sacrifice. He started prophesying in the thirteenth year of Josiah's reign. The Book of the Law -- likely some version of Deuteronomy -- was discovered in the eighteenth year of Josiah's reign. While there is a significant overlap between the theology of Jeremiah and that of Deuteronomy, Jeremiah never mentions it.

This context puts Jeremiah in an interesting situation from the start. He likely grows up and begins his prophetic work during a time when sacrifices could be offered to Yahweh anywhere. For example, we can easily imagine that sacrifices were regularly offered to Yahweh in Anathoth. Yet, Josiah shuts down any sacrifices outside the Jerusalem temple. 

While 2 Kings is overwhelmingly positive toward this move, it is very possible that families like Jeremiah's saw this as a power move, even an economic move. Come to Jerusalem, offer your sacrifices, shop a little in our stores and eat at Burger King. I'm exaggerating of course, but these are possible dynamics of the time.

On a side note, the high priest Hilkiah does not go to Jeremiah to authenticate the Book of the Law. Instead, he goes to Huldah, a married prophetess. 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles thus suggest that she was a higher spiritual authority in the land than both the high priest Hilkiah and the prophet Jeremiah. This fact firmly undermines any absolute prohibition of women in spiritual leadership.

2. God knew Jeremiah before he formed him in the womb, that is, even before he was conceived (1:5). Historic Christianity believes that God foreknows everything that will happen. God foreknows every person who will ever be born. The sense is that Jeremiah's life had a specific calling on him as a prophet. God had a very specific purpose for his life to fulfill. 

As a Wesleyan, I believe Jeremiah had a choice in that calling. And God foreknew that Jeremiah would be obedient in his choices. This is not a statement of predestination.

We should also be careful not to overread these verses. For example, it doesn't say that God has this specific a calling for every person. It just doesn't say that. Nor does it say that God directs the majority of fertilized eggs not to be born. The passage simply says that God had a very definite plan for Jeremiah specifically, and God had it before he was even conceived. The verse does not go beyond that to make claims about all people or draw broader theological conclusions.

3. Jeremiah 1 ends with some symbolic visions. A vision of an almond indicates God is watching the situation in Judah and that his word will be fulfilled. A boiling pot warns that Babylon will invade from the north. 

The unhappy message of Jeremiah was that Judah would be judged for its idolatry and worship of other gods. This message would bring opposition against him. But God declares that Jeremiah would be like a fortified city, an iron pillar, and bronze walls. 

God's word to Jeremiah suggests that God was giving him a fearsome task. Speaking prophetically to kings and high priests is not for the faint of heart! In his calling, God was helping Jeremiah brace for the incredibly daunting task that he was about to face.

5.3 The messiness of holiness (part 3)

And now, the final installment of "A Brief Guide to Wesleyan Holiness" or some similar title. Previous links in this series are at the bottom. I'll clean it up and self-publish as soon as I'm able.
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15. I am quite certain that the preceding pages have not answered several important questions, for I have heard them asked in response before. Why has the preaching of holiness waned over the last half-century? Some of it is uncertainty over the meaning of the key biblical texts. Most of it is the difficulty of matching the doctrine to our lives as believers. Still others step back and wonder whether the doctrine can lead us to focus too much on ourselves in a narcissistic, hyper-introspective way.

One very important question is that of addiction. In general, our sense of living above sin imagines a will that is more or less "normal" for a human being -- at least after grace. I realize I am in dangerous theological territory here because all human wills are incapable of making the right choices in the face of temptation without God's help. We would normally assume God's help will automatically put us in the range of a "normal" will.

Nevertheless, our individual wills can start on this journey from different points. A person who is under a sinful addiction of some kind has a longer journey toward victory over Sin than someone whose will is more or less whole even though enslaved. They used to call these sorts of challenges "strongholds."

For sure, we must not underplay the power of God. The stories of conversion from the 1800s and 1900s frequently involved instant deliverance from addictions to things like alcohol. After "praying through," individuals would testify to never drinking again from that moment forward. Broader Wesleyans like William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, regularly witnessed individuals who were instantaneously delivered from addictions like alcoholism.

My friend Keith Drury used to wonder if we collectively don't have as much faith today as we used to. He wondered if, in those previous generations, they expected more of the power of God than we sometimes do today. His question was whether God has "settled" where our expectations have settled. [5] Whatever one thinks on that question, we do not hear as many testimonies of instant deliverance from addiction as we used to.

Brain chemistry is involved. We know far more about the physical conditions of addiction than Wesley might have imagined. That can't change our faith in the power of God over temptation. But it may help us get a better sense of the additional challenges that can face the addict when it comes to holiness.

Our theology does not change. God has the power to deliver the person whose brain is enslaved not only to Sin but to certain chemical "thirstings" that relate to addiction. As Wesleyans, we have an optimism about God's grace even in the face of such strongholds. If we believe in deliverance from demon-possession, we certainly believe in deliverance from the addictions of our body chemistry.

16. In Mark 9, Jesus' disciples are unable to cast out a particularly difficult demon. Jesus indicates that extra prayer was required and, in some manuscripts, fasting as well. The passage makes it clear that some enslavements to Sin are more difficult to overcome than others.

Although I suspect Paul had his eyesight in view, there are "thorns in the flesh" where God does not entirely remove a challenge in this life (2 Cor. 12:7-10). Let me be clear that Paul is not talking about some inevitability of sin for him -- or us. That is not the takeaway here. By God's grace, we can be victorious over temptation every time.

However, I wonder if God does not always take away every struggle entirely. I grew up with the sense that, after entire sanctification, previous struggles with temptation would instantly go away more or less forever. Let me reiterate. God has the power to do this. We should expect that -- even if such struggles were to remain in some form -- they should become less and less pronounced over time.

But in exceptional cases, it is at least possible that God will not always take away the struggle completely, even after we have surrendered them entirely to him. Similarly, after years of ease, a battle can resurface in a moment of crisis. Although it was probably physical, Paul eventually came to a place of peace that it was God's will for him to live out his life with this "thorn in the flesh." It occurs to me that addictions also involve a significant physical component. In that sense, a struggle with alcoholism is, in large part, a physical struggle and a fight with the chemistry of our bodies.

I have heard individuals struggle with the way their parents speak and behave as a disease like Alzheimer's progresses. They usually conclude that it is not their parent doing such things any longer. In my mind, this is another case of a dramatically altered physical structure of the brain complicating one's behavior.

We can pose the same question with regard to some who struggle with homosexual temptation. Clearly there are some who testify to complete deliverance of such desires. Others commit themselves to celibacy and a disciplined mind despite continued temptation. For example, Wesley Hill holds to a biblical understanding of homosexual practice and thus rejects that he can ever act -- in mind or body -- on his sexual desires. [6] Yet after more time in prayer than most of us ever give, God has not removed those desires from him entirely. I do not know for certain, but I can imagine that he would liken those impulses to a thorn in the flesh.

Again, we make no allowance for sin. No temptation should take a believer at any time. Our faith in consistent victory over temptation in heart and mind remains firm. We also expect that there will be increasing ease of temptation in these extreme cases. However, if a person is not constantly vigilant, a battle can arise over previous strongholds in a moment. 

God apparently does not always completely remove areas of temptation, even if it wanes. I remember the teenager who asked for God to remove his sexual temptation toward the opposite sex. He was later thankful that God didn't answer that prayer. In any case, victory over Sin must remain even though fighting can arise within in a moment. Such areas of potential vulnerability require constant vigilance.

17. Here, I want to return to the concept of entering God's rest daily in Hebrews 3:13. I am told that it is dangerous for a former addict to think of themselves as no longer an addict. [7] Every day, Gerald May suggests, they should begin with the recognition that they are an addict and thus, in so many words, that "Sin lieth at the door." It is a reminder to be vigilant to the propensities of our bodies and not to let our guard down.

I wonder if this is a good practice with regard to any thorn in the flesh that we might have. "Good morning, Lord. I pray you give me victory today over the temptation to do X through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen." And then believe God can and will do it. Then tomorrow is another today.

Every day that is called today, enter God's rest. "Good morning, Lord. This is a day that you have made. Grant me the power to live a life filled with love today and to be victorious over any temptations to sin that may arise." And then tomorrow will be another today, another day to enter God's rest.

18. A former addict may have what I might call an "impoverished will." Such disempowered wills are not merely internal. They can arise from the contexts in which we live as well. You may have heard of a concept known as "generational poverty." It refers to a family that has been impoverished for multiple generations and is in a cycle of dependency. It is much harder for someone who grows up in such a context to climb out to what the rest of us think of as a normal life. There are internal obstacles most of us do not know.

When those of us who have grown up in an "empowered" family look at such individuals, it is easy to miss the enslavement that can be part of this situation. We might think glibly, "Just get a job already." We may not see hidden chains that are likely part of the situation. Their environment might make certain thoughts oblvious to them that are obvious to us. Similarly, we may evaluate others without awareness of our own blessings, which are gifts from God.

It is not pleasing to God to have a hard heart toward those who have not enjoyed the blessings we have (1 John 3:16-18). The question of how to help those with an "impoverished will" because of their context is often a complicated one, and I offer no easy solutions here. Yes, God can radically alter one's mindset and situation in a moment, and he does. God often heals us of our illnesses, but he doesn't always. For example, I have never heard of an amputated leg spontaneously appearing upon a prayer for restoration.

On an even more sensitive note, some of us have mental or emotional challenges that impair our wills in various ways. Similarly, some of us may have blind spots or cognitive challenges that others do not. As the well-known story of Phineas Gage shows, our brain structure has a real impact on our ability to process thoughts and impulses. [8] Like the amputated leg that God doesn't seem to heal, could there be situations where brain structures are effectively "amputated"? 

I say none of this to diminish the power and potential of God nor to make excuses. Can can heal anything entirely. Nevertheless, it seems like there is an exceptional category I am calling an "impoverished will" where the fallen human situation is messier than Wesley's tidy ordo salutis. God still has the situation under control and can do whatever he wishes.

19. Another response to the tidy theology of holiness is the charge of narcissism and hyper-introspection. It is perhaps no coincidence that the modern holiness movement coincides with the age of Western individualism. Without even realizing it, our cultural blinders make it all too easy to make the quest for holiness a quest of individual isolation.

On the one hand, the quest for holiness can feed a certain sense of self-importance that a person may not even recognize in him or herself. Some of us may obsessively think about ourselves, observing every little aspect of goodness we see in ourselves. This attitude has sometimes been called a "holier than thou" attitude. I reject, of course, that all of those who pursue holiness are guilty of this condition, but some perhaps have been in the past.

Then there is the opposite extreme, the person with a hyperactive conscience whose relentless self-examination leaves them constantly decimated in terms of their own moral self-evaluation. I grew up in a family of "sorry" people without a solid sense of their own value in Christ. We were servants of the King but rarely God's children. Thank God for that Easter morning in 1987 when I read through the book of Galatians and was set free from my bondage to self-defeat!

John Wesley was known to say that "there is no holiness but social holiness." That is to say, holiness always involves our relationships with others. Holiness is not something we do merely one-on-one with God. God regularly and normally uses others in the process of our sanctification.

As an introvert, this was a difficult pill for me to swallow in college. I wanted the Lord to zap me in private prayer. But God often works through others. We often will not find victory over that besetting sin without the help and accountability of others. It doesn't have to be that way in theory, but God often insists in practice. 

In seminary, David Seamands' book, The Healing of Memories, was very helpful on this score. [9] Although his language is a little cheesy, he suggested that some of us have broken antennae -- damaged "love receptors" -- that aren't receiving the love of God for us even though he is beaming it to us. In God's wisdom, Seamands argued that God often and typically uses others to help us fix the antennae, to heal our ability to receive God's love for us.

Wesley himself is well-known for the small accountability groups he established. Holiness is not a solo sport. It is a team sport, and we do it together as a church. Yes, God can zap us individually, but that's not really the way he designed the game.

20. We can thus speak of a corporate as well as an individual holiness. As a body, we should be sharpening each other, helping each other grow, holding each other accountable. The well-known 1 Thessalonians 5:23 is addressed to the whole church -- that it would be sanctified and preserved blameless. We are prone to make it about me, but it is even more about us.

It is theoretically possible that a whole congregation could be without sin. But it is unlikely. As a Wesleyan, this is how I have justified a corporate confession of sin. At the same time, the Anglican confession is not entirely Wesleyan. "We have done those things we ought not to have done, and we have left undone those things we ought to have done." The latter statement reveals the all too common defective view of sin as anything short of perfection, missing the absolute mark. God only holds us accountable for finite sins of omission -- not infinite, limitless, unattainable ones.

21. Another objection to holiness is the frequent disconnect in our times between the quest for personal holiness and a near absence of evangelism and biblical justice. Arguably, these connections were a feature of much 1800s and some early 1900s holiness. In those earlier times, the holiness movement was a revivalist movement with street meetings and corner tent revivals. That is to say, evangelism went hand in hand with the pursuit of holiness. But at some point, the movement turned inward and became associated with smaller churches that often do not seem to do much in the way of evangelism.

Similarly, in the mid-1800s, those who preached sanctification were known for their association with the abolitionist and women's rights movements. The Salvation Army was a child of the holiness movement. Yet, by the end of the 1800s, Methodism had become affluent and comfortable, apparently more interested in respectability than godliness and redeeming society. [10] In more recent decades, holiness churches have also sometimes rejected these historic social concerns in lieu of newer concerns that perhaps cost us less to engage.

By "structural evil," we refer to the way in which culture and society can be wired to harm others. This was obvious in the days of American slavery, which John Wesley called "the vilest that ever saw the sun... the sum of all villianies" [11] Black people were not treated as individuals created equally in the image of God but as property, even less than human. Even after the Civil War, the South found ways to perpetuate this structural evil with its Jim Crow laws and other cultural patterns of oppression.

I wish I could say that there was a consistently strong correlation between the pursuit of holiness and opposition to things like racism and sexism, but history shows that this is not always the case. Indeed, holiness has sometimes been used as an excuse to disengage from societal issues, making personal piety a retreat rather than a catalyst for justice. I have known individuals who strongly professed entire sanctification yet seemed to manifest a significant spirit of racism, revealing a deep disconnect between personal holiness and an outwardly facing holiness. The same could be said of sexism.

Raising these types of holiness issues can result in some defensiveness. For example, a person might deflect these concerns by raising other valid moral issues of today. I hope it is obvious that such concerns are not mutually exclusive. But at times, it is hard not to get the impression that this is sometimes an avoidance technique -- an attempt to avoid an unsurrendered area of one's life by changing the subject. 

The motto "God hates sin" has a sound of holiness, but a quick look at what God hates in Scripture is revealing. God hates a proud look, a lying tongue, hands that are quick to shed blood, one who plots evil, feet that run to evil, false witnesses, those who sow dissension (Prov. 6:16-19). These overwhelmingly refer to individuals who bring harm to others. 

God abhors those who speak lies and are bloodthirsty (Ps. 5:4-6). God hates those who love violence (Ps. 11:5). God doesn't want to look on traitors and those who swallow up the righteous (Hab. 1:13). Notice again the theme of God hating haters -- those who do harm to others. More than anything else, it is a hatred of hatred. 

What is the sin that God hates the most? It is the sin of hurting other people, particularly the vulnerable.

Here, we come to a sobering question. Could some Christians be hiding an unholy heart behind a veneer of godliness without even realizing it? In the name of hating sin, could some of us be making excuses for ourselves to be hateful toward others? "I would love my neighbor, but I can't because God has commanded me to be holy." God, of course, is the judge of all our motivations, and he can divide between the thoughts and intents of our hearts (Heb. 4:12).

22. We humans are incredibly good at rationalization, where we find ways to justify what in the end is not justifiable. We make the simple complex in an attempt to avoid what is really straightforward. May the Lord correct any instance in this book where I might have done so. Test the spirits to see if they are of God.

What should be clear is that God wants to empower us to live a godly life that is fully devoted to Jesus, doing everything we do to the glory of God. God wants to give us the fullness of the Holy Spirit, our Advocate, our power source. He wants to empower us to love God with our entire being and love our neighbor and enemy as well. 

In theory, we would love God and others with every part of our being from the moment we receive his Spirit. Yet in practice, there are often areas of our lives that we still need to work through. Eventually, many believers will testify to a crisis experience where they lay their all on the altar. This full consecration of ourselves is then met with God's entire sanctification of us.

The journey does not end there. If we do not walk consistently in the Spirit, old battles may re-emerge. There can be thorns of our flesh that, while they do not defeat us, require special, conscious attention in our walk with the Lord. After we have given everything we know to give, new areas may surface as we walk through the normal stages of life development.

We continue to grow in grace even after we have committed ourselves to be fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ. Every day that is called "today," we choose again to enter into God's rest. Then one day, whether at the second coming or in death, we will finally be perfected. Ultimately, in the resurrection, we will be glorified. Our humanity will be consummated even beyond the perfection of Adam. We will be like Jesus for we will see him as he is.  

[5] His musings were rarely statements of firm belief. He wondered about many things without having certain answers or positions. I found almost all of his musings more insightful than most people's conclusions.

[6] Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (Zondervan, 2016). As a reminder from James 1:14-15, it is important to reiterate that temptation in itself is not sin. It is when one acts mentally or physically on that temptation when it becomes sin, as well as if one feeds the temptation.

[7] Gerald G. May, Addiction & Grace: Exploring the Psychology of Addiction, the Power of Spirituality, and the Path to Freedom through Contemplative Practices (HarperOne, 2007).

[8] In 1848, a railroad iron shot through his skull. With the change in the physical structure of his brain, his personality changed dramatically thereafter.

[9] David Seamands, The Healing of Memories (Victor, 1985).

[10] See Kevin Watson's Doctrine, Spirit, and Discipline: A History of the Wesleyan Tradition in the United States (Zondervan, 2024). 

[11] In "Thoughts Upon Slavery" (1774).

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Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)
3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)

4.1 What is the flesh? (part 1)
4.2 The oxymoron of a "carnal Christian" (part 2)

5.1 The order of salvation (part 1)
5.2 A fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ (part 2)

Lenten Readings in Jeremiah -- Introduction

During Lent this year, I want to read through the book of Jeremiah, starting today with a little background.

Day 1: Background

1. I don't want to spend too much time on background here because much of it will become clear as we read through the text. Jeremiah prophesied during the reigns of Josiah, Jehoiakim, and Zedekiah -- roughly from the 620s BC to the time after the temple's destruction in 586 BC. Jeremiah is sometimes called the "weeping prophet" because the message God gave him was one of coming judgment and destruction.

I've often said that I would much rather be a prophet like Isaiah than one like Jeremiah. The message from Isaiah to King Ahaz was an optimistic, positive one -- have faith, Ahaz, because God is going to deliver you! Jeremiah's message was that Israel was going into exile. Let's just say kings often don't like people who speak the truth to them and bring bad news!

Jeremiah had what I sometimes call "Cassandra syndrome," from Greek literature. In Greek mythology, Cassandra did not return the god Apollo's love so he cursed her with the gift to tell the future... but for no one to ever believe her. Jeremiah's situation was not dissimilar. Though he was obviously right, he was largely rejected by his people.

This is also a reminder that it isn't always easy to see who the true prophet is in the thick of things. There were other prophets in Jeremiah's day who were parroting the message of Isaiah a century earlier. "Don't worry," they said. "God is going to save us." But they were false prophets. 

2. Suffice it to say, Jeremiah did not sit down one day and write from chapter 1 to 52. In fact, it will become clear that the chapters of Jeremiah in our Bibles aren't in the order in which they were prophesied. Jeremiah had a scribe, Baruch, who wrote down the prophecies for him. At some point, someone collected them into a collection of scrolls. [1]

This is a paradigm shift. Jeremiah's prophecies originally had a very oral character, even if parts of them were written down. Without even realizing it, we live in a literary age. [2] We think in terms of books. They thought in terms of speech, meaning that they thought of books differently than we do. Books retained an oral, more fluid character for them. We tend to think of books as having a much more fixed, preserved character. 

Similarly, they read books aloud. The "reader" of a book was not someone sitting alone with a copy of a book in their hands (cf. Mark 13:14). A reader was the person who read a text aloud to an audience of some sort, whether Israelites in a synagogue or a reader in a Christian house assembly. The vast majority of people could not read themselves although literacy was likely higher among Jews.

3. Because the material of Jeremiah is not in order, it's clear that the book itself was edited into its current form later. In fact, the chapters are in a different order in the Greek Old Testament dating from as late as perhaps the 200s BC. This suggests that the arrangement of Jeremiah was not entirely fixed even a couple centuries before Christ.

The first compilation of Jeremiah's prophecies probably took place during the Babylonian exile in the mid-500s. Perhaps Baruch himself edited the prophecies of Jeremiah's life onto scrolls. It's important to remember that God can inspire editing as well as initial writing. Most Christians probably have never thought about this possibility, simply assuming Jeremiah sat down and wrote the book all out at once. 

But the concept of inspired editing as part of the process fits equally well with the notion of inerrancy as an author writing something all at once. The key is that the text in its "canonical" form -- the content and shape it came to have in the biblical text -- was inspired. There are some complications here, but this general sense of the situation suffices for our reading.

[1] The book form was not used at this point in history. Scrolls were not infinitely long. A work the size of Jeremiah probably would be kept on three or four scrolls.

[2] At least the older ones of us do. Younger individuals live in a digital age and are digital natives. This is a third major paradigm shift in history.

5.2 A fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ (part 2)

Previous links in this series at the bottom.
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8. Therefore, perhaps it would be useful to summarize the key principles in play, the "big rocks," as it were. What are the core principles of holiness that we have uncovered in our journey so far?

• Holiness for us as humans is belonging to God, which both makes us holy/purifies us of our past sins and also necessitates that we be free from sin going forward.
• The essence of sin is a choice that is contrary to the love of God and our neighbor, although we can unintentionally wrong others as well. However, this latter is not the focus of the New Testament.
• God promises us that the Holy Spirit can empower us to live victoriously over every temptation we face. We can consistently rise above temptation by God's grace. This is a promise from the very moment we receive the Spirit when we are joined to Christ.
• Since Adam, humanity has been under the power of Sin. However, the Holy Spirit delivers us from Sin's grip on us. If we find ourselves losing to Sin, the antidote is the power of the Spirit through a relationship with God.
• We are filled with the Spirit when we appropriate the atonement of Christ and become part of the people of God. But we can and must be filled with the Spirit continuously as believers. This is not just when we face particular tasks, but it is an ongoing need. To rise above Sin, we must be in an ongoing relationship with the Holy Spirit.
• Many Christians testify to an experience when they became a "fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ." They experience this moment as a crisis experience when, after fully surrendering their lives to Christ to the fullest degree they knew how, they sensed the filling of God's Spirit in their lives. 
• If our relationship with Christ wanes, sin may creep back into our lives. For this reason, we may have to have such a crisis experience more than once on our journey.

The way these details play out in our individual stories may vary somewhat, but the goal is the same for all of us. God wants us to give him our full allegiance and devotion. He wants us to love him and our neighbors fully. He stands ready to make it happen. He wants to fill us to the full with his presence in our hearts and lives.

 9. Although at times Paul used dualistic language of flesh and Spirit to present these truths, other parts of Scripture speak of the heart as the center of our moral being. We should take all of these images as pictures and metaphors. It seems obvious to us today that our skin doesn't make decisions, nor do our hearts. These were possibly already metaphors for them too.

A modern picture might see us as a combination of intellect, emotion, and will. We know today that our brain is the organ that primarily facilitates these functions. [3] Different parts of the brain play more central roles in these functions, but all are ultimately involved. Nevertheless, the division of our psychology into intellect, emotion, and will can be helpful.

Our intellects are of course involved in all our moral decisions. And our decisions shape our minds and thinking. Our thinking involves patterns and habits, like paths that we create walking through a field over and over again. Sanctification involves the creation of new paths, new patterns of thinking. Sanctification involves "the renewal of our minds" (Rom. 12:2).

However, mistakes in our ideas are not in themselves morally good or bad. They are correct or incorrect, but in themselves they do not indicate a lack of holiness or purity. Impure thoughts have to do with what we are thinking about rather than our beliefs themselves. Certainly, our sanctification will affect our ideas on some level.

One of the strengths of the Wesleyan tradition is to realize that getting our ideas straight does not stand at the heart of sanctification. Modern psychological study has confirmed what was there in the Bible all along. Our actions flow from a deeper part of our being than intellectual ideas, although sometimes deeper motivations are disguised as ideas. 

Studies show that our ideas are more often "fronts" for deeper emotions, drives, and desires -- often without us even knowing it. Jesus (unsurprisingly) was correct when he said that our moral identity flows from our hearts, not our minds (Mark 7:21). Similarly, Romans 12:2 is not talking about ideas but the renewing of our attitudes -- as is seen in the examples Paul plays out in the next three chapters.

If our lives and relationships change, our ideas will change. But it seldom really works the other way around. Ideas are weak motivators in themselves. It is only when they are "fronts" for much deeper impulses and drives that they become immensely powerful.

10. Similarly, emotions in themselves are neither good nor bad. They just are. It is what we do with them that is the moral element. For example, I can feed my anger. That is a choice. But anger in itself is not a sin (Eph. 4:26).

Our body's biochemistry has an obvious effect on how we are feeling. If a person struggles with blood sugar, they might feel sad or angry when their blood sugar is out of balance. These are challenges their body chemistry may present to them. Many of us will know the idea of someone being "hangry" because they need to eat. These feelings are neither good nor bad morally, although they can cause us to face moral choices.

11. But the moral center of a person is his or her will. Despite how we feel, what choices do we make? Despite the desires we have pushing us in various directions -- often different directions at the same time -- what will we choose? Even when we have bad ideas that conflict with the love of others, will we act in love when it comes to making the choice. We are assuming the power of the Holy Spirit to make the right choice.

This view of moral choice is set out well by James 1:13-15. "Stop saying when you are tempted that 'I am being tempted by God.' For God is not tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one. Each person is tempted when he or she is carried away and enticed by his or her own desire. Then when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin when it has grown up brings forth death."

From these verses, it is clear that temptation is not sin. Indeed, even the desire to do the wrong thing in itself is not sin (although it is sin to feed it and not work toward eliminating it). Sin takes place at the moment of choice to act on that sin, first in our minds and then in action. Sin in its most significant sense is an intentional choice contrary to what we know to be the right choice.

12. So, what is a fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ? First, it is of course someone who has a relationship with Christ and is "in" Christ. It is not about merely knowing theology about Christ or merely having orthodox beliefs. There are plenty of people with orthodox beliefs who don't know Christ. Jesus mentions them in Matthew 7:21-23. It is not focused on having "all knowledge" or understanding all "mysteries" (1 Cor. 13:2). It is not focused on having great spiritual gifts like prophecy or tongues-speaking or a faith that moves mountains (13:1-2).

It is about knowing Christ and being found in him (Phil. 3:9-10). It is about having the Spirit of Christ within us (Rom. 8:9-11). It is for our fleshly selves to be crucified and for Christ now to live through us (Gal. 2:20). It is to begin the journey back to the Garden of Eden and the restoration of our original humanity. It is the beginning of the restoration of the image of God in us.

I have not mentioned the restoration of the image of God in us to this point. It is somewhat abstract but, yes, we are restored more and more to God's likeness (Col. 3:10). We become more and more like Christ -- who loved not only his friends but his enemies as well.

We can begin to walk again with God in the Garden like Adam and Eve did in the cool of the day. We become friends of Christ (John 15:15). We dine with him as friend with friend (Rev. 3:20).

In the Bible, the image of God has three principal connotations. In Genesis 1:27, it is primarily about the place of humanity in relation to the creation, often called the "political" image. However, in the New Testament it has much more to do with the honor and dignity humanity has as a reflection of God. We are not to curse others because our neighbor is created in God's likeness (Jas. 3:9).

Colossians 3:10 and Ephesians 4:24 seem to connect our "new self" as a believer to being holy, which we might call the "moral" image. This aspect of God's image relates directly to our moral living, and as usual Paul pictures it as something that happens with our conversion. Only 2 Corinthians 3:18 pictures this transformation into the image of Christ as something that takes place in multiple stages. 

13. From a practical perspective, being a fully devoted follower of Christ is a matter of our choices and the accumulation of our choices that becomes our character. In our choices, a fully devoted follower of Christ is someone who lives by the principles of Colossians 3:17 and 1 Corinthians 10:31.

"So everything, whatever you do in word or deed, do all things in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" (Col. 3:17).

"Therefore, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all things to the glory of God" (1 Cor. 10:31).

Paul's instructions are to surrender all our decisions to the Lord. He commands us to make every choice a choice for God. We can only do this by the power of the Holy Spirit. Our part is to co-operate with God's will, to surrender our every decision -- and every outcome -- to God. We live day to day out of faithful allegiance to Christ (Rom. 14:23). We choose to enter into his rest every day that is called today (Heb. 3:13).

14. How do we get to this point of relationship? As we have said repeatedly, it will usually involve a crisis moment of surrender. There are exceptions. There are those rare people who have a moment of realization that they have reached a new level of relationship with God without hardly noticing when it took place.

In A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Wesley mentions that it is sometimes imperceivable. He writes, "But in some this change was not instantaneous. They did not perceive the instant when it was wrought. It is often difficult to perceive the instant when a man dies; yet there is an instant in which life ceases. And if ever sin ceases, there must be a last moment of its existence, and a first moment of our deliverance from it." [4] He is arguing that there must have been a moment when we became a fully devoted follower of Christ, even if we are not fully aware of it.

No matter. It is not worth squabbling over such things. The key is that all believers must either come to such a point of full surrender, or their spiritual life will turn toward decline. And if we do not turn around at some point in that decline, we will inevitably fall away (Heb. 6:4-8)...

[3] At least on the surface, our brains appear to be the place where these functions take place. We can hypothesize that the soul circumvenes in some way on our physical brain. However, at least on the surface, it does not seem needed to account for any function -- there is no gap for which the existence of the soul accounts. It is thus a matter of blind faith if one believes it is important to be literal. Some Christians see even the soul as another picture rather than a literal entity. Cf. Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker Academic, 2008). They account for resurrection as God's creation of a new body (perhaps starting with the remains of our previous one). Some have even suggested that God creates a temporary body to account for an intermediate state between death and resurrection. This debate is not really essential for our topic.

[4] John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, 12.11.

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Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)
3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)

4.1 What is the flesh? (part 1)
4.2 The oxymoron of a "carnal Christian" (part 2)

5.1 The order of salvation (part 1)

5.1 The "order" of salvation (part 1)

Previous links in this series at the bottom.
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1. We come now to the final stage of our journey. We have mentioned most of the key biblical texts. We have looked at most of the theological elements. We have reminisced a little about the way holiness has been preached in its more and less reasonable forms. We have touched at least a little on the question of how Christians have claimed to experience sanctification in the past. How can we tie all these things together?

Wesley, of course, put it all together in an ordo salutis, an "order of salvation." [1] First, salvation begins with God. Although many of us have a tendency to throw the phrase "free will" around, Christians do not officially believe that humans have unassisted free will. Wesleyans do believe in a kind of free will but it is not "unassisted." It is not something we have in our own power.

This matches Paul's "natural" or "unspiritual" human in 1 Corinthians 2:14, who does not understand the ways and thinking of God. And it also includes the unfortunate person of Romans 7 who wants to do the good but does not have the spiritual power to pull it off. Calvinists have a term for this. Humans in their default state are totally depraved.

Wesley did not really disagree with John Calvin (1509-64) on our depravity, our inability to do good in our own power. For Wesley, we are not absolutely depraved, but we are thoroughly depraved. Sin has touched every aspect of human life to where we are "fallen" across the board. No one can be good enough on their own to deserve or earn God's favor.

The basis for this theology is of course found in Romans 3:10-18: "There is no righteous person, not even one" (3:10). "All have sinned" and are in need of God's mercy and forgiveness. We cannot earn our way into God's kingdom (Eph. 2:8-10).

2. However, Wesley differed from Calvin from this point on. For Calvin, our inability to choose God in our own power led him to see our salvation as entirely God's choice, the work of God's singular will ("monergism"). Either God flips the switch or he doesn't. We have no real part in the matter except that we are the puppet of his will. Even if we feel like we are making the decisions, we aren't. God is.

In Calvin's system, God's grace -- his unearned favor toward us -- is both unconditional and irresistible. If God has chosen you, you will be saved. You will persevere to the end.

About fifty years later, Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609) would suggest a slightly different process. Building on Augustine's notion of God's prevenient grace -- God's grace that reaches out to us when we are unable to reach out to him -- Arminius suggested that this grace made it possible for us to choose. So while Calvin's sense of grace was all or nothing, an on-off switch, Arminius (and later Wesley) saw this as a grace that empowered our wills so that we can cooperate with God's grace ("synergism" or working together).

This system goes beyond the biblical texts -- as did Calvin's system. Both approaches do their best to fill in the blanks, to stitch together the biblical texts. In the case of Arminius, he is trying to take seriously texts that indicate anyone can be saved (e.g., 1 Tim. 2:4) and that our will plays a real role (e.g., 2 Pet. 1:10). The "Wesleyan-Arminian" approach has far fewer problems, in my opinion. Ultimately, the Calvinist approach makes God too responsible for evil and sin.

3. So, the first step in Wesley's ordo salutis was prevenient grace. God makes the first move. God empowers our will to begin to cooperate with his grace. We may not even know the Spirit is drawing us. We may not know that God is lining up our circumstances. But the Spirit is plugging us in, and we are beginning to power up.

The next steps on the journey in the order of salvation are justification and regeneration. Justification is when we are legally pronounced "not guilty" because our sins are forgiven (Rom. 5:1). Righteousness is "imputed" to us legally. 

Then in regeneration, we are given new life. We are "born again" (John 3:7). We are empowered to walk in the Spirit. We can be victorious over Sin. Righteousness is "imparted" to us.

As we have seen, Wesleyans would rightly say that we undergo initial sanctification at this point of conversion as well. We are set apart to God by the Spirit (2 Thess. 1:13), and our sins are cleansed (Acts 15:9; Heb. 9:14). We receive the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). We are baptized in the Holy Spirit (Luke 3:16). We are filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:4). This is the true moment when we are baptized into Christ and become part of the people of God.

4. However, whether you are Calvinist or Wesleyan, this is not the end of the story. After this beginning in the faith, one experiences progressive sanctification. There will inevitably be areas in which you need to grow spiritually. Even though you may be victorious over temptation, you may find that it is still sometimes a struggle. 

Even more -- as we have seen -- some still find themselves in a carnal No Man's Land. They are stuck in the "evil I don't want to do I do" zone of Romans 7 even though it should not apply to the believer. Such individuals need another filling of the Spirit because their power connection is spotty. Their relationship with the Lord would seem to be defective.

Progressive sanctification is the practical necessity that many if not most Christians experience where they must continue to give the territory of their lives to Christ. It is a practical rather than theologically necessary category. In theory, we should give everythng to Christ that we know to give when we become a believer. From that point on, we would immediately give to Christ anything new as we become aware of it.

In practice, our surrender to Christ is often defective even after we have believed on him. We turn out to be babies in Christ in need of milk, not yet ready for the meat. Progressive sanctification is the growth in giving our lives to God that often still needs to take place after we have believed.

5. Philippians 3:12-16 is often thought to give a biblical picture of this movement forward in our Christian life. The popular reading of these verses is not quite right, but it is not far off. "Not that I have already been perfected, but I am pursuing it if indeed I might take hold of that for which I was taken hold of by Christ. Brothers and sisters, I do not reckon myself to have taken hold of it, but one thing I do. Forgetting what is behind and reaching for what is ahead, I am pursuing the goal of the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus" (3:12-14)

Then, with the goal in mind, he pictures continual progress moving foward. "Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in someway you are thinking differently, God will reveal this to you. Just keep going to the measure you have already attained" (3:15-16). 

These verses present a picture of us growing in faith. As God reveals areas of growth to us, we advance in our faith. We don't lose ground but walk in faith to the degree we have already growth.

However, one aspect of these verses is also frequently read out of context. Many Christians are all too quick to point out that Paul says he's not perfect. You may have heard the slogan, "I'm not perfect, just forgiven." The interpretation fits the narrative that Romans 7 is Paul still struggling with sin.

It's also wrong. The verses before Philippians 3:12 were about resurrection. Paul is hoping he will be faithful enough for God to consider him worthy of resurrection (3:10). [2] After all, even in 3:14, he mentions the "upward call" as that toward which he is striving. 

So when he says he has not yet been perfected, he is referring to the resurrection, not perfection in his moral walk with Christ. He starts off the verse by saying, "Not that I have already received [the resurrection]." Once again, our glasses have read into Paul something that is contrary to his theology. Paul does not in any way consider himself a moral failure at this point. Indeed, he goes on in 3:17 to consider himself a model, an example for them to follow.

These verses are a model for growth in Christ and progressive sanctification. However, they are not an excuse for sin in the life of a believer.

6. In practice, this progressive surrender of our lives often comes to a head. Sin's last stand. We have already mentioned the image of progressively giving to Christ more and more of our spiritual house. Last year, we wrestled over the closet. This year, we wrestled over the attic. Each time, I came to a point of "fish or cut bait." Each time, I came to a point of crisis in which I fully surrendered another aspect of my life.

It doesn't have to be this way, of course. Theologically, I could have given God everything I knew to give from the very moment of saving faith. This is how it ideally should be. Just, for some reason, it doesn't always seem to happen that way.

Then came the Battle for the Basement. There was that one thing I wanted to cling too. Perhaps psychologically I needed to cling to it for some reason. Preachers of sanctification used to threaten (unhealthily) the question of whether you were willing to be a missionary to some remote part of the world -- back in the days when plane flight around the world wasn't nearly as common.

But what if God wasn't calling you to be a missionary to Africa? One wonders if there were ever any individuals who ended up as missionaries in those days, not because God called them, but because of some mental struggle they had over being a missionary that some preacher put on them.

Once a person has fully surrendered themselves to Christ -- signed over the deed to the property, as it were -- it is now possible for Christ to take fully hold of them, as Philippians 3 intimated. We cannot have the fullness of the Spirit if there are parts of us we are not letting the Spirit fill. So, if our part is full surrender and "consecration" of ourselves to God, God's part is our entire sanctification. "May the God of peace himself sanctify/make you holy entirely" (1 Thess. 5:23).

Then beyond that point, Wesley believed we continued to grow in grace as long as we live on this earth. Then, when we die or when Christ returns, we are glorified.

7. I'll confess that, while the above sequence makes a good deal of sense, there is still something that makes me a little uneasy about it. I think there are a couple reasons. For one, we are pressing the Scriptures into a system they were not originally part of. To some extent, we are taking the verses out of context. 

The second reason is that the path we all take as individuals is likely messier than Wesley's tidy system. To some extent, I've already tried to complexify it a little. Once upon a time, I found it helpful when Chris Bounds suggested in conversation that it may be more of a "via" salutis than an "ordo" salutis. A "via salutis" would be a way of salvation rather than an order.

What I took him to mean is that we have here the pieces, the elements of salvation. But the order in which they are experienced or the way in which we move through them may be a little different from person to person. Indeed, we likely will need to be filled with the Spirit over and over again. New things come into our lives after we have signed over the property to Christ -- like adding a room or a patio in the back. 

Old struggles may return. Perhaps the cares of life have exhausted me. Perhaps they are threatening to choke me spiritually. Perhaps I have been neglecting my relationship with Christ. Old temptations can return...

[1] See especially his sermon, "The Scripture Way of Salvation."

[2] Notice that Paul does not consider himself "eternally secure." He sees his Christian walk as one of continual striving, "pressing on" toward the goal of the upward call in resurrection.

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Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)
3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)

4.1 What is the flesh? (part 1)
4.2 The oxymoron of a "carnal Christian" (part 2)

4.2 The oxymoron of a "carnal Christian" (part 2)

Previous links in this series at the bottom.
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7. Romans 6-8 gives the theory. We see the frequent reality in practice in 1 Corinthians 2-3. The typology built out of these verses is well-known in holiness circles. The "natural" human does not receive the things of God (1 Cor. 2:14). The "spiritual" person does (2:15). The Corinthians are somewhere in between. They are "fleshly" or "carnal" Christians (3:1).

Again, Paul is not setting up an ordo salutis here, an "order of salvation." More on that in the final chapter. But we can see hints of Wesleyan theology in Paul's rhetoric with the Corinthians. 

We all start off as the default human. We are under the power of Sin. We cannot help but sin whether we want to or not. At worst, we "do not receive the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolish" to us (1 Cor. 2:14). We "are not able to know them because they are spiritually discerned."

The adjective Paul uses here is almost untranslatable: the "natural" person. The King James used "natural." The Revised Standard used "unspiritual." But the word is psychikos, "soul-ish," which is pretty much meaningless to us in English. My sense is that Paul is thinking of the part of us that we share with animals, the living being part. I decided to go with "natural" here, our default person. Yes, it does typify a person without the Spirit.

In short, this person is not a believer. He or she is not "saved." He or she is not a Christian.

8. The Corinthians should be spiritual. After all, they are believers and thus have received the Spirit. They have been set apart by God, "sanctified." Paul actually addresses the congregation as sanctified in 1:2. They are certainly not entirely sanctified! But like all Christians, they were set apart as God's property when they believed and received the Spirit.

It's worth a quick reminder of Paul's theology of the Spirit and coming to be in Christ. The Holy Spirit is God's "seal" of ownership on us (2 Cor. 1:22). Without the Spirit, we do not belong to Christ (Rom. 8:9). The Spirit is the "earnest" of our inheritance, a guarantee of our destiny, a downpayment of glory (2 Cor. 1:22). The Corinthians were thus set apart as belonging to God, "sanctified," when they came to Christ.

Romans 6 and 8 tell us what this state should look like for a believer. Sin should not rule this person's body -- or mind, for that matter. This person is no longer a slave to Sin, thanks be to God! By the power of the Holy Spirit, this person is able to do the good that God wants them to do and that they want to do. This person is consistently victorious over temptation.

This person has a complete love. They do not merely love their friends and those who love them. They love their enemies as well. This is not a syrupy feeling. This is a will to do the loving thing when the choice presents itself. This person fulfills the righteous requirement of the Law (Rom. 8:4) because the Holy Spirit has written the law of love on their hearts (Rom. 2:15; 13:8).

If the Corinthians had been spiritual like this, they would not have fought with each other over who had led them to Christ (1 Cor. 3:4). They would not have thought themselves to superior to other believers because they had more knowledge (8:1) or had spiritual gifts that others didn't (e.g., 14:21). Rather, they would have loved each other (1 Cor. 13).

9. In short, the Corinthian church was an oxymoron. They were Christians in the flesh -- something that isn't a thing. Somehow, they were stuck in the middle. They had been initially sanctified by the Spirit and set apart to God. They had been baptized into Christ...

... and then they argued over whose baptism was more significant because of who did it! They were "stuck." They were in-between, an anomaly. They had the Spirit but they weren't spiritual. They were sealed by the Spirit but still in the flesh. "These things ought not to be!" (Jas. 3:10).

To describe this "shouldn't be" phenomenon, several New Testament authors drew on the well-known trope of a baby drinking milk rather than meat. Paul says, "I gave you milk to drink not solid food because you were not yet able" (1 Cor. 3:2). 1 Peter encourages its audience to long for the pure milk that babies drink so that they can grow up. Hebrews 5:13-14 compares its audience to children who should have switched to solid food a long time ago but are still on milk.

This is not a state that can normally continue forever. While Wesley over-systematized and raised the bar too high for "going on to perfection," the basic concept is on the money. The carnal Christian needs to move on to maturity. If they don't, they will eventually fall away from God altogether (Jude 24). You cannot be both in the flesh and in the Spirit indefinitely, for these two are at war with each other (Gal. 5:17).

10. The war of the flesh against the Spirit can involve many battles. The Spirit says to do x, but the flesh wants to do y. No battle has taken you that God can't make a way to win (1 Cor. 10:13). The promise of God is that you can win every battle. Under normal spiritual circumstances, you can make the conscious choice to do x every time by the power of the Holy Spirit.

A war can be won even if you lose a few battles. But the more battles you lose, the more in danger you are of losing the war. God has not only given us the Spirit, but the Church -- fellow soldiers to hold us accountable and fight the battles with us. We don't have to lose. We should expect to win.

What is particularly serious is when you lose the same battle over and over again with some "besetting" sin. We'll think a little about addictions and an impoverished will in the final chapter. There are times when God uses the body of Christ to come alongside you because you are extraordinarily pinned down behind enemy lines.

Yet if the problem is that you have a divided will and are a "double-minded" person (Jas. 1:7), your soul is in grave danger. The second and third soils in the Parable of the Soils tell of those who initially receive the word with joy but then either wither because they have no root or because the cares of the world choke them (Mark 4). 

The double-minded person should not expect unending forgiveness when there is no genuine repentance. "Let him or her ask in faith" (Jas. 1:6). And if a person continues to try to use Christ's sacrifice for the same sins over and over again -- not because of genuine addiction or disempowerment but because of a lack of wholehearted allegiance -- let not that person think they will receive anything from the Lord (Jas. 1:7). They have used up their sacrifice (Heb. 10:26). 

In context, James 1:2-8 is talking about a time of trial and testing. God will help you through if you genuinely want help. Ask for wisdom in the trial, and God will give it (1:5). But you must really want God's help. If you're not sure, you're double-minded. A few verses later (1:13-15), James makes it clear that God is not at fault if temptation leads you to sin -- you are.

11. We can thus affirm in an unsystematic way what Wesley was trying to get at with his doctrine of Christian perfection. It is often the case that those who have believed in Christ find themselves in a carnal No Man's Land. They still identify with the person in Romans 7 who wants to do the good but finds themselves in a horrible war with their flesh. And they sometimes lose.

Is there no hope for something more? Is it not possible that the power of the Spirit might take the journey to the next level? Are we doomed to stay on milk our whole life on earth, or might we actually by God's power and grace be able to eat some spiritual steak!

It will take complete surrender to God. It will take full allegiance to Jesus as Lord.  Only then can we be filled with the Spirit to the top of the cup, the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

Getting there will likely take some battles. The Battle-of-This-Thing-I-Don't-Want-to-Fully-Give-God. Then do you remember the Battle-of-the-Next-Thing-I-Didn't-Want-to-Fully-Give-God? Then surely there is a point where you have surrendered everything you know to surrender. As Keith Drury put it, you have given God full access to all the rooms of your house. But now will you sign over the deed to the property? [9]

Is not this moment of choice what Wesley and all those holiness preachers were preaching? God will not give us all of him if we haven't given him all of us. "There remains, therefore, a sabbath rest for the people of God" (Heb. 4:9).

Yes, these verses were taken a little out of context. [10] Yes, Wesley overly systematized it. But if we can step back just a little, there is a profound truth here.

And we'll likely have to give more to God again later. We may have to give the same things to God again. That is different. Our power over the flesh is only as sure as we are plugged into a relationship with the Spirit. If we loosen the connection, lessen the relationship, Sin lieth at the door. New things come into our lives -- we have to give them too.

There is no "I'm done now." Every day that is called "today," we enter his rest again (Heb. 3:13). We are Pilgrim until we reach the heavenly city.

In the final chapter, I hope to tie all these threads together into what I have heard Chris Bounds call a via salutis ("way of salvation") rather than an ordo salutis ("order of salvation"). I also want to address some of the concerns of our modern world like addictions. Finally, I want to mention an aspect of holiness that we Westerners are prone to overlook -- corporate holiness.

[9] Keith Drury, Holiness for Ordinary People 2nd ed. (Wesleyan Publishing House, 2004).

[10] In context, Hebrews is telling its audience to recommit their faith to God every day. The author is urging them not to fall in the desert on the journey to the Promised Land. The final Sabbath rest, it would seem, is when we finally make it to the kingdom of God.

 ______________________________________

Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)
3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)

4.1 What is the flesh? (part 1)

4.1 What is the flesh? (part 1)

Previous links in this series at the bottom.
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1. Romans 6-8 gives the theory. Before we receive the Spirit, we are under the power of Sin. We cannot do the good even if we want to. We will inevitably sin.

However, once we have the Spirit of Christ, the situation changes. We are rescued from the power Sin has over our flesh. We are empowered to keep the righteous requirement of the Law and to love our neighbor. Where we couldn't keep the essence of the Law before, now we can by the power of the Spirit.

Paul goes further in 1 Corinthians 10:13: "No temptation has taken you except what is common to humanity. But God is faithful. He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able to resist. But with the temptation he will make also a way to escape so it is possible for you to bear it." He is telling the Corinthians that it is not inevitable that they will succumb to temptation. God will make a way of escape so that they do not sin.

It's important to note that Paul was not really setting up a system like I am in these comments. In Romans, he is trying to make it clear that his teaching does not advocate sin or the breaking of the Law's essence. Rather, his theology of the Spirit actually makes Law-keeping possible where it otherwise wasn't. It is a general framework rather than an absolute system.

In Corinthians, he is concerned that some in the church are compromising their loyalty to God by visiting the temples of other gods and partaking of meals there. We know from Romans 16:23 and an inscription that some of the believers at Corinth were actually involved in city government. [4] It is possible that they saw such participation as crucial to their participation in city life. Paul is saying God will make a way for them to get around such things.

2. The Corinthian church is a good example of how human practice often doesn't match the theory. In theory, the Corinthians should have been full of the Spirit from their earliest moments in the faith, from their baptism. Filled with the Spirit, they should have immediately found themselves living a life above temptation and filled with love for one another.

Instead, they formed divisive factions in the church. They were jealous of each other and had selfish conflicts. 1 Corinthians reveals to us a thoroughly "carnal" church -- a church that was operating out of the "flesh" rather than the Spirit. At every turn, it seemed, they were letting their "flesh" run the show rather than the Holy Spirit.

3. But what does Paul mean by "flesh"? The first version of the New International Version (1984) often used the phrase "sinful nature" to translate this Greek word sarx. In doing so, it was passing along over a thousand years of tradition going back to Augustine (354-430) and continuing in Wesley (1703-91), who used terms like "inbred sin" or the "carnal mind." "Carnal" means "fleshly" -- you can see the similarity to words like carnivore, someone who eats meat.

The fundamental meaning of sarx is "skin" and thus "flesh." There is an inevitable dualism hiding in here between the flesh and the Spirit that we often find in the New Testament texts (e.g., John 3:6). Currently, many biblical interpreters and theologians are allergic to this sort of dualism, but the biblical texts themselves don't care. Paul was no Gnostic, but he did often use a dualistic framework.

So, it is clear that Paul connected the human propensity to sin with our bodies. Romans 6:12 -- "Do not let Sin rule in your mortal bodies." "Present your bodies a living sacrifice" (12:1). "Who will rescue me from the body of this death." [5] 

It is no coincidence that the word flesh is a bodily term. Unlike the Gnostics, Paul and the New Testament authors did not consider our fleshly bodies to be inherently sinful, but they are "weak." "The spirit is willing indeed, but the flesh is weak," Jesus says in Mark 14:38. Our "flesh" is the most productive point of attack for Sin.

You'll notice that I have sometimes capitalized Sin. When I have referred to a sin act, I have left the word in lower case. However, when I have been referring to Sin as a power over us, I have capitalized it. Paul says in Romans 7:23, "I see a different law in my members warring against the law of my mind." This other law is the force of Sin over my body. Notice again, the "members" here are the members of my body.

Krister Stendahl well pointed out decades ago that Paul does not see our minds as the point of weakness. [6] The person in Romans 7 wants to keep the Law. They serve the Law of God with their minds (7:25). Unlike Augustine, who saw my "I," my will as the point of corruption, Paul sees my body, my "flesh" as the point of weakness.

See the dualism. There is my spirit. There is my mind. There is my will. These want to serve the Law of God. Then there is my body, my flesh, my "members." Sin takes hold of them and thwarts my attempt to do the good. My spirit is willing, but my flesh is weak. This is how Paul presents the conflict. [7]

4. This is different from Augustine. Indeed, Augustine has made it difficult for us to hear Paul on his own terms. Augustine did not know Greek and famously misinterpreted the Greek of Romans 5:12: "Just as Sin entered the world through one human -- and death through Sin, and thus death passed to all humans because all sinned." What Paul was saying is that Paul brought the power of Sin into the world leading all humans to sin. We all sin like Adam and, therefore, we all die like Adam.

But Augustine misread the words I have translated as "because" in the verse. He understood the last part of the verse to say "in whom all sinned." That is to say, Augustine believed that we sinned "in" Adam along with Adam.

Herein is the doctrine of original sin as Augustine understood it. For Augustine, we all share the guilt of Adam's sin because we sinned in Adam. One of the purposes of infant baptism was then to wash away the guilt of original sin.

But Paul knows none of this. Paul does not consider us guilty of Adam's sin. There is no original sin in us in Paul's thinking. Rather, we sin like Adam because Adam introduced the power of Sin into the world, a power of Sin over our bodies. All have sinned and, therefore, we all die. We do not die fundamentally because we are guilty of Adam's sin.

Paul uses the word flesh in many ways. In its most basic meaning, it simply refers to our skin or is a synecdoche for our bodies. In that use, it has no connotation of sin. Jesus Christ descended from David "according to the flesh" (Rom. 1:3). There is no sense of sinfulness here whatsoever.

However, in Romans 7-8, flesh is my skin under the power of Sin. This is the sense that Paul uses in Romans 8:8: "Those who are in the flesh cannot please God." My flesh has a propensity to give in to temptation. Therefore, Paul admonishes his churches not to be "in the flesh." "You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit since the Spirit of God dwells in you" (Rom. 8:9).

5. This clearer understanding of Paul's imagery immediately clears up many of the debates I grew up hearing about. "Does God eradicate the sin nature in entire sanctification or is it merely suppressed?" The Keswick view of sanctification was considered to be a sub-orthodox view because it saw us continuing to struggle with Sin after sanctification. [8] The orthodox Wesleyan view was that the root of Sin was removed at sanctification. Our hearts were cleansed of inbred sin.

But this entire debate is askew from the very beginning. We cannot get out of our skin or bodies. They are always with us. In that sense, Sin is always lying at the door, waiting to take control again if we do not continue to walk in the Spirit daily.

I find the image of plugging into the Holy Spirit much more fruitful. It focuses on the positive power of the Spirit rather than the negative removal or suppression of a supposed sinful nature. When we are filled with the Spirit, we are plugged into God as a power source. The inherent weakness of our flesh is overcome. We are not slaves to the power of Sin but slaves to the power of righteousness by the Spirit. We are empowered to love God and our neighbor.

But as we know about power, it has to be re-supplied. In this case, it has to be continuously supplied. I have a laptop whose internal battery is defective. It works fine as long as it is always plugged in. Unplug it, and it dies immediately.

"Walking in the Spirit" (Gal. 5:16) is about being continuously plugged into God. The power of the Spirit means that Sin has no force over our flesh. We want to do the good, and we are empowered to do the good.

But if we unplug -- or if our connection to the Spirit is "spotty" -- our flesh will quickly become susceptible to the power of Sin again. It's as simple as that. No need for arcane discussions about eradication versus suppression. 

Sin is not a thing. It is not some lump of coal that must be removed by spiritual surgery. Sin is much more the result of the absence of good than the presence of something. This is how Sin can exist without God being its creator. God created the possibility that Sin would arise in the absence of good. He did not create a thing called Sin. 

6. A final note seems in order in relation to Mildred Bangs Wynkoop's theology of love. Wynkoop's theology emphasizes the relational nature of holiness. She also moves beyond Paul's dualism to a more holistic transformation of the heart. In the final chapter, I will also try to move beyond Paul's categories to discuss the transformation of our hearts in more holistic terms.

For now, I want to affirm her emphasis on relationship. When I talk about plugging into God, the conversation can seem rather impersonal. But God is a person, and the Holy Spirit is a person. When I talk about plugging into God, I am not talking about impersonal forces. We plug into God by having a relationship with him. We plug into the Holy Spirit by having a relationship with him...

 [1] At the very beginning, Paul locates the audience among the Gentiles (1:6. 13). In 11:13, he also arguably addresses the audience as primarily Gentile (2:17 is a hypothetical). In 15:15-16, he connects his role as apostle to the Gentiles to his letter to the Romans. His ethical instruction throughout also assumes a core sense of the Law rather than a fully Jewish sense, which would involve circumcision. It is an implicitly Gentile-oriented perspective. An uncircumcised Gentile de facto could never keep the Jewish Law, yet Paul assumes this possibility (2:26). The only factor in favor of a significant number of Jews in the audience is Romans 16, which more likely was a letter of commendation for Phoebe to the Ephesian church.

[2] E. P. Sanders argued that the reason Paul chose this command in particular was because it was the one commandment that was more internally oriented. Almost all of the others can be kept perfectly in concrete terms (not murdering, not stealing, not taking oaths, not giving false testimony). In Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Fortress, 1983).

[3] I should throw in here that Wesleyan theology also expects victory over sin from the moment one receives the Spirit at conversion. A key difference at entire sanctification is that victory over temptation should cease to be a struggle.

[4] An inscription mentioning that a pavement was funded by Erastus is visible still at Corinth. It is often thought that this is the Erastus mentioned as the city's treasurer in Romans 16:23.

[5] I've heard some "preacher's stories" about someone having to carry a dead body on their backs. This is completely made up. The verse is rather straightforward. Our bodies are a weak point when it comes to the power of Sin.

[6] Krister Stendahl, "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," in Paul among Jews and Gentiles (Fortress, 1976).

[7] We might note that Paul probably was not functioning with a sense of creation ex nihilo. He simply doesn't address that question. However, given the assumptions of the time, he may have seen God more as the redemptor of our bodies -- the "re-organizer" of them as it were -- rather than the one who designed their fundamental nature and characteristics.

[8] The Keswick view originated in the "higher life" movement in England in 1875. Its key leaders included William Boardman and Hannah Whitall Smith.
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Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)
3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)

3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)

Previous links in this series are now at the bottom.
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11. I sometimes think that Paul must turn over in his grave (or perhaps do flips in heaven) when he sees how so many have misinterpreted Romans 7 to mean exactly the opposite of what he was trying to say. The conundrum he presents in 7:7-25 is a hypothetical person who wants to keep the Law but lacks the power to do so because he or she does not have the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately, the picture has resonated so strongly with the experiences of so many Christians that they can't seem to read the plot to its resolution in Romans 8.

In my opinion, Paul's position on sin in Romans 6-8 is not remotely ambiguous. After all, how does he start this section? "Should we remain in sin so that grace might abound? Absolutely not!" (Rom. 6:1). It sure sounds like he does not believe sin should typify a believer.

Let's try that again in Romans 6:15: "Should we sin because we are not under Law but under grace? Absolutely not!" Hmm. That's strange. Sounds like he's saying sin should not typify the life of a believer. 

How about Romans 6:12: "Do not let Sin be ruling in your mortal bodies." Very strange. It sounds like he is saying that my body should not participate in sinful activities. That sure sounds like sin should not typify the life of a believer.

Romans 6:13 confirms this understanding. "Do not continue to present your [body] members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness but present yourselves to God as living from the dead and your members to God as instruments of righteousness." This is not about a legal fiction where, as Luther said, we are both "sinner and saint at the same time as long as we keep repenting." [10] Paul is talking about the way we concretely live in the world -- how we use our "members," our body parts.

12. While I'm on this point, let me make a quick side trip to Galatians 5:16: "Walk in the Spirit, and you will never fulfill the desires of the flesh." It is worth noting the grammatical constructions here. The first verb is a present imperative -- an ongoing command -- "Be walking." The result is a clause known as the "subjunctive of emphatic negation." It has two words for not in it, which in Greek is an emphatic "no."

Once again, Paul seems to say in strong terms that sin should not typify the life of a believer. This is not a legal fiction, as Luther argued. In Hebrew, "walking" is the word for ethics (halakah). This is about how you live. After all, what are the fruit of the flesh? Galatians 5:19-21 tells us. The deeds of the flesh range from sexual immorality to idolatry.

As a side note, I believe part of our problem in appropriating Scriptures like these is that Western culture has become so introspective, particularly after the Romanticism of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Whereas Paul's understanding of something like envy was probably much more concrete than the "navel gazing" that we hyper-individualistic, introspective Westerners might think. Even Jesus' focus on the heart in Matthew 5 was not likely as hyper-introspective as we can be.

We remember that Paul thought he did pretty well at keeping the Jewish Law before he gave his allegiance to Jesus. In Philippians 3:6, he says that he was "blameless" when it came to the righteousness in the Law. [11] It is a reminder that, in the minds of most Jews at this time, keeping the Law to a standard acceptable by God was considered achievable. 

13. My puzzlement at the popular misinterpretation continues as we work our way through the last part of Romans 6 and into the first part of Romans 7. Paul repeatedly contrasts what we "used to be" before the Spirit and what we are "now." Take a look at these contrasts:

• "Thanks be to God because you used to be slaves of Sin... having been freed from Sin, you became slaves of righteousness" (6:18).
• "Just as you presented your members as slaves to uncleanness and lawlessness leading to lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness" (6:19).
•  "When you were slaves of Sin, you were free to righteousness. But now, having been freed from Sin and having been enslaved to God, you have your fruit to holiness" (6:20, 22).
• "When we were in the flesh, the passions of sins (aroused through the Law) were working in our members results that bore fruit to death, but now ... we serve in the newness of the Spirit" (7:5-6).
• "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. God has accomplished the impossibility of the Law that was due to the weakness of our flesh...  so that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us" (Rom. 8:2-4).

Notice how consistent Paul's repeated sense of sin, righteousness, and holiness is throughout Romans 6-8. We used to be slaves to Sin. Our "members" -- our bodies -- used to do things they shouldn't do. We were in the flesh.

But now, we are set free from the flesh. We are no longer slaves to sin. We are now slaves to righteousness. This is a result of the Spirit. Our members -- our bodies -- now produce fruit of righteousness and holiness in our lives.

14. We need to emphasize the point. Over and over throughout Romans 6-8, Paul repeatedly says that believers should no longer be slaves to the power of Sin. We should step back and point out why this was important to his overall argument in Romans. His opponents were accusing him of teaching "let us do evil that good may come" (Rom. 3:8). He had a bad reputation among Jews, as James reminds him in Acts 21:21 -- rumor was he was telling Jews not to keep the Law. They saw him teaching a sinning religion.

Accordingly, Romans 6-8 have as their primary rhetorical goal to show that his theology is not "pro-sin." Those who say that he encourages people not to keep the Law are dead wrong. "Do we nullify the Law through faith?" he poses in Romans 3:31. "Absolutely not!" he responds repeatedly. [12] 

Paul is absolutely against sin. That is his point in these chapters. In that sense, the popular interpretation of Romans 7 is diametrically opposed to Paul's fundamental purpose in this section.

15. With this overwhelming context in mind, let's finally turn to Romans 7:7-25. In these verses, most Pauline scholars believe that Paul is picturing the situation of someone who wants to keep the Law but does not have the power of the Spirit in order to do it. [13] Let's track his train of thought.

7:14 -- "The Law is spiritual, but I am fleshly (carnal), having been sold under Sin." We should immediately sense that something is up. Why? Because throughout the last part of Romans 6, he aligned being a slave to sin to the time before we came to be in Christ. 

In fact, in the verses right before this one, he has been talking about the beginnings of his spiritual awakening. "I wouldn't have known sin except for the Law" (7:7). "I was alive apart from the Law once" (7:9). He's telling his past story. [14]

So when he gets to 7:14, he is talking about our default human state starting out -- not his present condition. [15] He is not talking about the state of the person who has been baptized into Christ and has received the Spirit. He is telling the story of "everyman" in his or her spiritual pilgrimage. We all start off "in the flesh," a slave to Sin.

7:15, 19 -- "I don't know what I'm doing, for I don't do what I want to do but I do what I hate... I don't do the good I want to do, but I do the evil I don't want to do." As with 7:14, Paul is dramatizing the plight of the person who wants to do good but cannot actually do it because they are still a slave to sin. They have not yet been freed from the power of Sin and become a slave to righteousness.

A quick reminder of 6:17 is in order: "Thanks be to God because you used to be slaves of Sin but you obeyed from the heart the type of teaching to which you were committed. And having been set free from Sin, you were enslaved to righteousness." See where Paul has located himself in the storyline in the last part of Romans 7? It is before a person has come to be in Christ.

In fact, this same progression -- leading to the "Thanks be to God! -- takes place at the end of Romans 7. The struggle of the person who is a slave to Sin reaches a climax. 

7:22-25a -- "I delight in the Law of God in my inner person, but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and making me a captive to the law of sin that is in my members. O wretched man am I! Who will rescue me from the body of this death? Thanks be to God! Through Jesus Christ our Lord!"  

The drama now reaches its peak. Note again. In Romans 6 Paul has implored the Romans not to let sin reign in their "members," in the actions of their bodies. If Paul were talking about his current experience in these verses, he would be in a lesser spiritual state than he is instructing the Romans to be.

No! This is the situation of the person who is still a slave to Sin. This is a person whose "members" are still instruments of unrighteousness. He gets to the same climax alluded to in Romans 6:17 where, "Thanks be to God!" the new believer is set free from the power of Sin. How does this happen? It happens "through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Romans 8 follows directly on this victory! [16] "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus for the law of the Spirit of life has set you free from the law of Sin and death!" We have now reached the resolution of the tension Paul portrayed in the last part of Romans 7. The situation of when we "used to" be slaves to Sin is resolved. We are now at the part of the story where we have been freed from Sin and are now slaves to righteousness.

Indeed, now we can keep the Law by the power of the Spirit! "God has accomplished the impossibility of the Law that was due to the weakness of our flesh...  so that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us" (8:2-4). Sin no longer reigns in our mortal bodies. We no longer yield our members as instruments of unrighteouness. We are no longer sold under Sin. 

Indeed, we are no longer "in the flesh," for "those who are in the flesh cannot please God" (8:8). Now, we are "in the Spirit" because the Spirit of God dwells in us (8:9). Note that Paul expects this to be true of all believers. He is not describing what he thinks will take place after a second experience. In a perfect world, this situation would be true of everyone in Christ.

However, as we will see in the next chapter, the problem is that we often find Christians who are still to some degree in the flesh. In Romans 6-8, Paul gives the ideal and the way it should work. But leave it to the Corinthian church to mess things up! In the next chapter, we will see how it is often necessary for us as believers to move on to the spiritual from the carnal. Once again, we find a place to argue that most Christians can find themselves at a second moment of grace.

16. We shouldn't leave this chapter without a quick mention of Romans 12:1-2, a classic entire sanctification text. "Present your bodies as a living sacrifice -- holy, pleasing to God -- which is your appropriate worship. And stop being conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mindset so that you can verify what the will of God is -- the good and pleasing and complete will of God."

Do you see that this instruction alludes back to Romans 6? In Romans 6, Paul urged the Romans to present their "members" as instruments of righteousness leading to holiness. He told them not to let Sin reign in their mortal bodies. As he now starts the exhortation of Romans 12-15, he returns to that theme. Our bodies -- which were formerly slaves to sin -- must now be given completely to God. Our flesh is crucified (Gal. 2:20). We die to Sin and now live to God (Rom. 6:2). We are no longer conformed to this world.

Now, we walk in the Spirit and do not fulfill the desires of the flesh (Gal. 5:16). Our mindset is transformed and renewed. Note that Paul is not focusing on ideas or worldviews here. The transformed mind to which he refers is made clear in the chapters that follow. Far from ideology, he has in view a mindset of mutual submission and love of one another. Indeed, Romans 13:8 sums up what a renewed and transformed mind is -- it is a mindset of love toward others.

Now we can not only see clearly what the good, pleasing, and complete will of God is. We are now empowered to do it through the power of the Holy Spirit. God has made possible the impossible through the sin offering of Christ Jesus so that we can now fulfill the righteous requirement of the Law.

Of course, experience demonstrates that most Christians are not quite there at first. In theory -- in theology -- we all should be. But in practice, there is often a middle zone where a Christian is still fleshly or carnal. It is to this uncomfortable middle zone that we turn next.

[10] simul iustus et peccator, semper repentans.

[11] One of the most transformative articles on my interpretive journey with Paul was Krister Stendahl's "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," now in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Fortress, 1976). 

[12] The difference between Paul and some other Jewish believers is that he did not consider Israelite-specific laws to be binding on his Gentile converts. He also seemed to believe that the unity and mission of the church took precedence over keeping these Israelite-specific laws. Although he did not express it in this way, he was laying the seeds of what later Gentile Christians would think of as the "moral law."

[13] It's an ancient literary device known as prosopopoeia.

[14] I actually think he is telling the story of everyone, not his story specifically, but I don't want to distract from the main point here.

[15] I have heard individuals say something to the effect of, "He is using the present tense. Therefore, he is talking about his current state and what is happening in the present." I'll try to be kind. This statement reflects an utter lack of understanding of Greek tenses. They are not primarily about time. In fact, some argue they are not about time at all. In any case, the Greek present tense can be used in several ways (including to talk about the past). This argument doesn't even pass first-semester Greek.

[16] You might note that I have left off the final part of 7:25 for clarity's sake: "So then, I myself with my mind serve the Law of God but with my flesh the law of Sin." This sentence summarizes the pre-faith condition of the person who does not have the Spirit but wants to keep the Law. However, because this summary comes after the climax of Paul's train of thought, some mistakenly think it condemns us to never have victory over the power of Sin. Again, this interpretation completely undermines Paul's train of thought in these three chapters.
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Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)