Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. (Romans 1.24-25)

In the verses that precede this quote, Paul says that sinners are “without excuse” before God (v20), because “what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (v19).  To a degree, man has little need of God’s specific instruction, knowing by nature that some things are right and others are wrong.  In the immediate context Paul mentions idolatry, and as the chapter continues he adds to the list sexual perversions, hatred and its relatives, sins that spring from pride, and more, wrapping up the list by pointing out that “they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die” (v32).  Yet all of these sinful, destructive behaviors are prevalent around us, and are increasingly represented as positive virtues!

Fundamentally this makes no difference from the perspective of each individual’s eternal judgment—God’s decree applies to everyone, even those who never hear it verbally expressed.  His basic expectations from the beginning have been for man to acknowledge and honor him, obeying the conscience he built into his creation, which tells us that it’s wrong to take over God’s role and force the world to serve us.  But in the grand scheme of things, many factors influence us, and lead to a greater likelihood of success or failure in submitting ourselves to God.  A society, culture, or government that actively prohibits the sharing of God’s word will keep it away from people who would otherwise learn the truth and obey.  One that promotes sin and calls it righteous will ensnare some who otherwise would follow their conscience and shun those evils.

As long as our own circumstances are wholesome and conducive to sharing the truth of God’s will, it’s easy to turn a blind eye to the plight of those not afforded the same blessing.  But there’s a relationship between what goes in and what comes out.  It’s especially easy to see when we consider parenting.  Ultimately, each child will make his own decision whether to submit to parents, civil authorities, and spiritual authorities, but parents exert a profound influence, for good or ill.  Conscientious parents undertake the process of making decisions for and about their children with great care, because they recognize what’s at stake.

“Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company ruins good morals’” (1Co 15.33).  The picture here is a person of good morals who associates with those of unseemly character, and is influenced to go in a direction he would not have gone, if only he’d kept better company.

None of this a great surprise.  As long as we focus on the negative aspects, it’s easy to see the connection between the wrong friends and the wrong behaviors.  But the opposite is true, as well.  When we associate—either by choice or due to circumstance—with people of good morals, and especially with people who profess Christ, obey his commandments, and aren’t shy about telling us so, it’s easier to keep ourselves holy and please God—not easy, but easier.

It’s important that we recognize this now in particular, because failing to acknowledge our own society’s historical affinity for God’s word and commandments will leave us underprepared to weather the storm that began decades ago and is likely approaching its climax.  We live in a land shaped for 500 years by the actions of men who, notwithstanding their many faults, concerned themselves generally with spreading the gospel of Christ to pagan cultures.  This goes all the way back to Christopher Columbus, whose end goals included helping Europeans fund military operations to recapture Jerusalem from Muslim hands, as well as bringing Christianity to the nations of the eastern hemisphere.  From the Conquistadors to the Pilgrims, from the Quakers to the Abolitionists, from the Second Great Awakening to Trustbusting, from Prohibition to the Civil Rights Movement and more, our public history is a record of the changing tides of ostensibly Christian ideas—some well-founded in Scripture, others far less so. 

Nationwide polling shows continued decline in Americans’ belief in God, the Bible, the sinless and resurrected Christ, the gift of salvation—essentially the entire gospel.  Meanwhile, the culture continues to smear Christianity and push forward radical misapplications of ideas about equality and compassion that (somewhat ironically) they ultimately and unknowingly learned from God’s word, passed through intermediaries.  God alone knows where this tendency will lead, or whether the populace in general will follow blindly down the path to destruction (Mt 7.13), or dismiss the lie and hold up the standard of God’s truth, instead.  What will be your part in this unfolding story?  Will you go along with the many, even though Jesus said, “Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets” (Lk 6.26)?  Will God eventually give you up “to dishonorable passions” (Ro 1.26)?  Will you be one of those who knows better but remains silent for fear of reprisal, tacitly going along to get along?  Or will you be one of those who rejects the evil influence and risks paying a high price for the sake of Christ? 

“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man!” (Luke 6.22)

Jeremy Nettles

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. (Genesis 12.1-4)

When Abram (hereafter “Abraham”) first received this call, he was already an old man.  This makes all the more impressive his willingness to uproot his life and household to travel—on foot, let's remember—to a new land he’d never seen.   But it also highlights the absurdity of another one of God’s promises: “I will make of you a great nation.”  The text tells us ahead of time why this is such a problem: “Now Sarai was barren; she had no child” (Ge 11.30).  So, how’s this going to work, exactly?

Abraham and Sarai (hereafter “Sarah”) surely recognized the implausibility of having any children at this stage in their life—Sarah was 65 at this time.  We would have understood if they’d used that as the excuse not to obey God’s instruction to “go.”  How often is this the thought process for people today?  But Abraham and Sarah didn’t disobey.  Instead, they went where they were told.  No big deal is made about their faith in God or his promises at this early stage, but the proof is in the pudding, and even though the things God told him were ridiculous, still they went.

This is repeated in stronger terms some years later when Abraham, getting even older and closer to death, received another vision from God, including a more explicit promise: “your very own son shall be your heir” (Ge 15.4).  In case Abraham and Sarah had begun to think their descendants would be metaphorically descended from them and not actually related genetically, God has made it quite clear.  And although Sarah was now approaching the age of 75, nevertheless Abraham “believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness” (Ge 15.6). 

But while God made the promise clearer, you may notice that there’s still some ambiguity in it, as there will always be if we scrutinize thoroughly enough.  God said that Abraham’s very own son would be his heir, but he didn’t actually mention Sarah by name in connection with this promised child.  So, after ten years of waiting in faith, what did Abraham and Sarah end up doing?  They brought in Sarah’s servant Hagar to act as a concubine.  Oh, dear.

Was this right?  It’s important to take into account that it was a very different time and different circumstances, as well as the fact that God remained fairly quiet on the topic of polygamy between Eden and Jesus, tolerating it under the Law of Moses and giving only subtle hints to Abraham that he didn’t like it (Ge 17.18-19).  With all that said, no.  It wasn’t right.  By all appearances, Abraham and Sarah had lived a lifetime of monogamy, without children and apparently content to accept that fact, prior to being told offspring were on the way in what they must have assumed were their twilight years.  Why the sudden push for children, to the point of committing a destructively immoral act?  Let’s examine Sarah’s reasoning:

“Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” (Genesis 16.2)

Oh, dear.  Were they so presumptuous as to try to help God?  In a way, yes; but that’s not a completely fair assessment.

Consider this: given that God had promised them offspring, what would have happened if Abraham and Sarah had remained celibate from that day forward?  God can do what he wants, of course, but he also expects his followers to cooperate with him!  The end would have been the same as if they had flatly refused to go where God directed and deliberately rejected his rules, and yet no one would accuse them of trying to help God by human means, on the basis that they engaged in marital relations, as if that undermined their trust in God’s promise.

But in this case Abraham and Sarah misunderstood the type of cooperation God expected.  We might say that they missed the mark.  That’s actually the etymology—the literal and original meaning—of the biblical words for sin.  חָטָא-ḥāṭā’ is the Hebrew catchall for “sin” in the Old Testament, and ἁμαρτάνω-hamartanō fulfills the same purpose in the Greek New Testament.  Both are most easily understood as archery terms, in which some arrows will go where the archer wants, and others miss the mark.  When described like this, sin seems almost unimportant—no one can hit the bullseye with every shot, so what’s the big deal?

Well, if you’re hunting food for your family, and you miss the mark, it’s a problem.  If you’re defending your city and you miss the mark, it’s an even bigger problem.  Still worse, regardless of context, when you miss the mark and instead hit something or someone else, it’s a problem!  Whether the sin was fully deliberate or not, there are consequences.  In the case of Abraham and Sarah’s adulterous plan, they had a good aim: a son born in accordance with God’s promise.  But they made a mistake, and missed the target, and the repercussions are with us to this day.  Hitting the mark takes knowledge, understanding, focus, deliberation, and practice.  Let’s do our best to stop missing it.

Jeremy Nettles

“‘Thus says the Lord God: I will gather you from the peoples and assemble you out of the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel.’ And when they come there, they will remove from it all its detestable things and all its abominations. And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.” (Ezekiel 11.17-20)

With its talk of unity and a heart directed toward serving God, this passage evokes many New Testament principles, even though it’s found in the Old.  In fairness, the entire Old Testament was constructed in order to pave the way for the New, but parts of it are difficult to comprehend—perhaps especially those that in some sense straddle the line between Old and New.  Most of Ezekiel fits into that category, and as a result it doesn’t get its fair share of study; but it contains important lessons both for the Jews during their captivity to Babylon, and for us today.

Before this oracle, one of the leaders of the people remaining in Jerusalem died, and although those leaders had been rejecting God’s law and creating more and more trouble, the prophet Ezekiel still mourned his death, taking it as a sign of God’s judgment on his people.  He asked God, “Ah, Lord God! Will you make a full end of the remnant of Israel?” (Eze 11.13).  God responded with the wonderfully encouraging promise with which we began.  In short, his answer was, no.  Rather than giving Israel what they deserved, he intended to gather the far-flung exiles from the lands where they’d been scattered, and bless them.  This is even more extensive than we might at first realize. 

When the northern ten tribes, the kingdom of Israel, had been conquered by the Assyrians in the 720’s BC, much of its population was deported to various regions, in keeping with Assyria’s divide-and-rule policy.  The Bible doesn’t record the details of where these Israelites ended up, and it also does not record any major return of those exiles to their native homeland.  What it does record, in fact, is a general lack of desire among the Babylonian exiles to return to Jerusalem and Judea, even when Cyrus and the Persians proclaimed the freedom to do so.  It’s only natural—they’d lived in their new homes in Babylonia for generations by then, and while the return “home” had been everyone’s goal, it wasn’t exactly an easy task to accomplish!  Thus, the Jews remained, for the most part, scattered where they’d been taken by various conquerors.

Thus, it’s an astonishing promise God made, to gather his people “out of the countries where [they] have been scattered,” and plant them back in their ancestral homeland (Eze 11.17).  It’s especially important to note that, as with many other times when God made this promise, he didn’t limit it to the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, but referred to “the whole house of Israel” (v15).

Has this happened?  Well, that depends on how you’re looking at it.  Whether the exiles in the far reaches of the diaspora chose to return following Cyrus’ decree, they had the ability and the legal right to do so, en masse, at that time.  Was God promising to force the Israelites home against their will?  No, it’s presented as a great blessing, not a burden.  In fact, while the great majority refused the call, many thousands did return and set up a new Jewish state in the land promised to Abraham and his descendants.  But, as usual when we discover underwhelming short-term fulfillments of grandiose promises from God, he wasn’t just talking about the physical.  He had in mind the spiritual, too.  This collected nation of God’s people were to have a new heart and a new spirit.  That sounds suspiciously like the new covenant God promised through the prophet Jeremiah, saying, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Je 31.33).  This also pertained to “the house of Israel” (v33a), and if the promise to “forgive their iniquity” and “remember their sin no more” (v34) wasn’t enough to clue us in, the New Testament tells us explicitly that this prophecy always meant the covenant that Christ would later inaugurate (He 8.6-13).  In the same way, this prophecy from Ezekiel isn’t just for the people of Israel, it’s for us!

Does that mean God no longer cares about his promises to the Jews?  Paul holds out hope.  He writes that “a partial hardening has come upon Israel” (Ro 11.25), and that God is eager to graft them back into the tree of Christ’s kingdom (vv23-24), hinting at the possibility of a greater degree of conversion to Christ, to come at some point in the future.  Up to now, we haven’t seen much of that, but it’s a worthy goal and prayer.  By and large, the Israelites have rejected their own Messiah.  The very next sentence in the prophecy we’ve been considering tells what God had in mind for the Israelites who refused to walk in his ways:

“But as for those whose heart goes after their detestable things and their abominations, I will bring their deeds upon their own heads, declares the Lord God.” (Ezekiel 11.21)

It’s easy to read that and come away with the conclusion that they simply got what they deserved.  But didn’t we find this prophecy is about the kingdom of Christ, more than the kingdom of David?  In fact, the same threat looms over our heads, if we seek to retain our old, stony heart.  Let God’s word and Spirit soften your heart and mold your goals and purposes to walk in his ways.  Adopt the unified heart and spirit of the people of God.

Jeremy Nettles

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”

But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10.25-29)

Rather than providing a dictionary definition of the word, πλησίον-plēsion-“neighbor,” or appealing to the context surrounding the lawyer’s quotation from Leviticus 19.18, Jesus answered his question by telling a parable, which we know as the parable of the good Samaritan.  In the story, a man is savagely beaten and left for dead, then ignored and avoided by two men who present themselves as righteous and holy.  Finally a Samaritan sees him, recognizes his need, and helps him even though it inconveniences himself.  Then Jesus asked, “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” (Lk 10.36).

We’re left to conclude that the character worth emulating is the Samaritan, and that’s exactly what Jesus then commands the lawyer to do, before Luke moves on to the next episode.  But wait a second!  Was that the answer to the lawyer’s question?  Not really, no.  He had asked, “who is my neighbor?”  This was prompted by the commandment to love one’s neighbor, so what he really means is, whom must I treat with love?  Jesus’ answer was that the Samaritan, “the one who showed him mercy” (v37) was a neighbor to the man in need.  So, he should love…Samaritans?  Or perhaps it’s broader than that—maybe Jesus means you should love anyone who shows you mercy.  But that doesn’t make any sense!  Rather, it makes perfect sense from a fleshly perspective, but it’s not what Jesus himself preaches elsewhere!  Just a few chapters earlier, he said, “If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them” (Lk 6.32).

We can understand this better by recognizing that, if I’m your neighbor, then you’re my neighbor, too.  This reciprocity means that by being a neighbor to the traveler, the Samaritan was recognizing the traveler as his own neighbor, and implementing God’s instruction by acting in love toward him.

That’s a start, but it’s still an incomplete explanation.  Weren’t the priest and the Levite, who avoided the man and passed by on the other side of the road, under the same obligation?  Could they defend their actions before God on the grounds that Jesus said they weren’t the man’s neighbor, and therefore had no obligation to love him?  No.  So why did Jesus say this? 

As he often did, Jesus was gently correcting the lawyer, who was “desiring to justify himself” (v29).  Jesus clearly knew that, and his parable wasn’t intended as a direct answer to the question posed; rather, it provided the answer to the question the lawyer should have asked—“what does it mean to be a neighbor.”  Why wasn’t the first question the right one?  Because the answer is too easy and too obvious, and it wouldn’t get to the heart of the matter.  The lawyer asked, “who is my neighbor?”  The straight answer is simple: everyone you meet.  You ought to love them all as yourself, regardless of whether they’re kind to you, whether they show mercy to you, whether you like them, and whether they can repay you.  They’re all your neighbors.  But now the question changes to something else: what does it mean to love my neighbor?  And that is the point of the parable.

We often approach God with some kind of question, and just like children with their parents, we have such a poor understanding of what’s really happening that we don’t even know what to ask.  This shouldn’t surprise us; Paul tells us that “we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us” (Ro 8.26).  This is broader than our questions and includes our requests, but it’s the same idea—we just don’t fully understand.  And there’s no reason we should!  We’re flesh, and he’s Spirit.  Thank God we have a mediator who does understand!  Jesus was active in the creation of the universe, and observed everything that has taken place since.  The only potential gray area would be the few decades he spent living as a man—to what extent he “emptied himself” (Php 2.7), we don’t fully know.  Even during that time, not only did he demonstrate a level of understanding far superior to the people around him, but on resuming his proper position at his Father’s right hand, he reassumed all that he had put off in becoming a man.  But this same time spent in the flesh allows him to fully sympathize with our shortfalls.  He’s not angry with us for not always knowing the right thing to ask.

Parents are proud of their children when they ask a question that reflects a genuine attempt to apply what they’ve been taught, even if they don’t have quite the right words to express it.  It reflects growth, and shows that they’re not only becoming more mature, but are maturing in such a way that, if the trend continues, will lead to a steadfast relationship of love and pride between parents and child in the long term.  We don’t have the right words, and we won’t until we see our Father face to face.  Until then, let’s do our best to ask the right questions, and let’s take God’s hints about what those right questions are, from his word.

Jeremy Nettles

“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” (John 6.63)

The last issue of Iron Sharpens Iron asked the question, “are you fleshly, or spiritual?”  We drew a distinction between these two mindsets and motivations, and highlighted a problem for even those who are already Christians: they’re still infants in Christ—still fleshly.  Of course, most of these people don’t realize it.  It’s not that they’re unaware of the need to be transformed—they became Christians, after all!  But many Philosophy 101 students become hilariously overconfident in their ability to argue logically and effectively; and as a result they end up making fools of themselves.  In the same way, many new Christians, having “tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come” (He 6.5), come to believe that they’ve experienced the fullness of the kingdom of God and its good fruits, when in fact the seed planted in their hearts has only just begun to sprout.  Will there be any depth to their roots?  Will the thorns choke out their attempts to bear fruit over the course of their life?  Will they bear fruit a hundredfold?  We don’t yet know.  To continue the comparison to Jesus’ parable of the sower, these new Christians have received the word with joy—a good start!  But they’re in only the earliest stage of this new life, and we shouldn’t expect them to be mature. 

What kinds of mistakes is the spiritual infant likely to make?  We can see, through some careful reading in 1 Corinthians, several examples.  First, let’s remember from last time that Paul has lamented the Corinthian Christians’ fleshly mindset, saying, “I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh” (1Co 3.2-3a).  He’s not done with this topic though!  The very next thing he says is this:

For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human? (1 Corinthians 3.3b-4)

He’d spent the first two chapters of the letter telling them to cut it out with their internal divisions, putting themselves into competing factions.  Along the way, he discussed their elevation of earthly wisdom, when they should have been seeking God’s.  Where is their focus, then?  On the pursuit of wisdom.

In itself, that’s a good thing, of course—provided it’s pursued in line with God’s instructions and revelations.  But is that what the Christians of Corinth were doing?  Let’s take a quick trip through the rest of the letter, and see.

Chapter 5 outlines a perverse sexual scandal that the church has not seen fit to address.  Chapter 6 indicates that they’ve been taking fellow Christians to court over one grievance or another.  It also implies very strongly that they’ve been visiting prostitutes.  That’s a shock to us—Christians?!—but Paul, in the course of his argument to show them why this is so terrible, gives us an indication of what made them think this was acceptable.

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. (1 Corinthians 6.12-13)

The ESV puts the key phrases in quotation marks.  Of course, those aren’t present in the Greek manuscripts—punctuation was used sparingly, if at all, during the time the New Testament books were written, and in most of the manuscripts there’s no punctuation to be found (there aren’t even spaces between words!).  But it’s a good conclusion that Paul is putting these words into their mouths, as if they support the Corinthians’ freedom—as they saw it—to sin.  Why would they believe such a thing?  Some help comes from the next chapter, where we find this:  “Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: ‘It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman’” (1Co 7.1).  One faction at Corinth was championing celibacy; another was encouraging fornication—and both claimed to have been transformed by Christ!

This sort of thing continues through the rest of the letter, including the extended discussion of food offered to idols in chapters 8-10, and the extended discussion of supernatural spiritual gifts and their use in chapters 12-14.  What had happened?  The Christians of Corinth got wrapped up in the metaphysical musings of human philosophy, to the extent that they detached the spiritual from the physical.  For some, that meant freeing their physical bodies to do whatever they wanted, on the grounds that it had no bearing on the spirit.  For others, it meant freeing their minds from the physical through asceticism.  Neither of these is what Christ wanted!  Both extremes—the overly-permissive and the overly-restrictive—would have answered, “No!” to our question, “Does the flesh matter?”  They were both wrong.

In this very letter, what did Paul say about the flesh?  “I discipline my body and keep it under control” (1Co 9.27).  The flesh is not to be the focus, but it does matter.  The flesh is where the spiritual transformation plays out, in our actions in the physical world.  We are not to be enslaved to the flesh; rather we are to put the flesh under the control of the spirit.  What you do in the flesh matters.  What you do in the flesh answers for all the question, “are you fleshly, or spiritual?"

Jeremy Nettles