Thursday, August 15, 2013

Easy Morality vs. True Morality

I once spoke with a Christian who was studying to enter the pastorate who told me that he was "almost completely sanctified." I have great respect for the person, however, it is a great theological error.

The reality is that the law has often been drummed down to it's simplest form. The teachings of Jesus often cease to be hard and instead seem impossibly easy.

One will be told that texts which seem to be incredibly difficult to live up to in fact mean something completely different and in fact very easy to live by.

The funny reality of life is we often see exactly what we wish to see. The bible is full of difficult teaching from cover to cover. But humanity finds ways to interpret the difficulty in such a way that the teaching becomes very easy.

The reality of this is the fear of what will happen if we realize the degree of our sin. Of course the whole point of the bible is to teach us the degree of our sin!

The point is that grace which is infinite and free and knows know bounds is offered by accepting the live and sacrifice of Jesus. The law is impossibly difficult because our status before God was never meant to depend on our keeping of the law.

We should wish to keep the law, but it is not what saves us. It is the work and death of Jesus which saves. The law suggest who we should try to become.

Of course we cannot become in this life what the law suggests because it is too hard. This is good news, because if it was not too hard to achieve we might try to fulfill the law ourselves and not trust Jesus which would be a great error.

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