©2001 Larry Huntsperger
Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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2/4/01
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Getting It Right
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Romans 5:20
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2/4/01 Getting It Right
I am afraid we've gotten it all wrong once again.
By "we" I mean the human race,
though those of us who cluster under the
Christian banner
are not doing all that much better than the
norm.
We missed the whole thing
from the very beginning.
We are all assuming the central issues in life
focus on who's being good,
and who's being bad,
and who is accepted or rejected by God
on that basis.
We see God creating our world,
and then creating us and placing us in it.
Then we see Him
revealing to us the standards by which He
expects us to live.
Those who fulfill those standards
find peace and acceptance with God,
those who fail to measure up
face His wrath and rejection.
Those of us in the Christian community
modify this a bit
by recognizing that none of us have done it
"right" to begin with,
but if we accept the forgiveness
and the moral cleansing offered to us through
Christ,
we are given a second shot at doing it
better.
But our underlying perception
of our calling hasn't changed -
we see ourselves as created beings
pursuing greater goodness
so that we can then be accepted by an
absolutely and eternally good God.
Whether we pursue that goodness
through our own futile efforts,
or whether we pursue that goodness
through faith in Christ
and His life through us,
the accepted goal hasn't changed.
But what if we have it all wrong?
What if this whole thing,
from the very start,
has never been about being good or
bad?
What if it hasn't been about US at all?
What if it has been about something else altogether?
I may have learned something this past week.
I'm not completely sure yet,
because it is still too fragile in my mind
for me to grasp and hold onto with any
certainty.
But I'm going to attempt to share it with you this
morning.
Chuck's statement at the end of our discussion time
last week
nudged me along in this.
Do you remember what he said?
I think he said, "There is something greater than
perfection, something more important - the grace of
God... Grace trumps perfection!"
And then, when I started wrestling
with the Romans passage we are going to study
today,
this whole thing started expanding in my
mind.
Now, before I try to put into words
what I think I am seeing for the first time,
let's go to the passage
and see what's there.
You'll recognize at least one of the verses
because I refer to it often.
But until this past week
I never saw the context from which it came.
The two verses we'll be studying this morning
are the last two verses of Romans 5.
They read,
Rom. 5:20 And the Law came in that the
transgression might increase; but where sin
increased, grace abounded all the more,
Rom. 5:21 that, as sin reigned in death,
even so grace might reign through
righteousness to eternal life through Jesus
Christ our Lord.
And the verse I quote so frequently
is the first phrase of the 20th verse,
"And the Law came in that the transgression
might increase..."
The concept contained in that phrase
has profound implications
for our whole understanding
of our relationship to sin,
and to righteousness,
and to finding freedom from sin in our lives.
But that is not where I want us to start this morning.
If you were here last week
and were with us for our study
of the last half of Romans 5
you know what Paul does in those verses.
He sets up a comparison
between the two most significant men in history
- Adam and Christ.
As we walked through that comparison
we saw Paul telling us that
one man, Adam, did it wrong
and we all suffered the consequences.
But then one Man, Jesus Christ, did it right
and we all reap the reward.
One of Paul's main goals in the passage
is to show us how through Christ,
the "2nd Adam",
God took the failure of Adam
and not only patched it up,
but recreated it into a greater good
than would ever have existed
had Adam not failed in the first place.
But one of the things I saw this past week
that I never recall having seen before
was the context in which Paul makes that
statement, "And the Law came in that the
transgression might increase..."
Paul makes that statement
in the context of this comparison
between Adam and Christ.
In that context
he is telling us that God placed the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil
into the Garden of Eden,
and then told Adam
that eating of that tree was forbidden
for the very purpose of driving Adam into
rebellion.
If God would not have written
that one commandment for Adam,
if God would have created the Garden as He did,
placed Adam and Eve in it as He did,
but never declared that one tree as being off
limits,
then Adam would never have sinned,
and his offspring would never have sinned,
and the human race would have lived in
unbroken fellowship with God
in a perfect world
forever.
"And the Law came in that the
transgression might increase..."
Last week I mentioned to you
that God could have stopped sin in the world
simply by making Eve barren
following Adam and Eve's sin.
But the truth is,
on the basis of what Paul is telling us here,
we can back up one step further.
God could have prevented sin altogether
by not putting the forbidden tree in the Garden
and then giving Adam that one
commandment.
What was the tree there for, anyway?
It certainly wasn't there for food.
As far as we know,
it's only purpose was to provide Adam
with a line he was forbidden to cross.
Q. Does that bother you?
Do you find it unsettling?
Does it interfere with the concept of God you
have held up to this point?
If we believe
that this whole thing is about us
and about our performance,
and about our finding a way to become
righteous
so that we can then enter into union with God,
I think it will trouble us very much.
Even if we understand
that we can become righteous
through faith in Jesus Christ,
through having our sins posted to His account,
and through Him entering into union with God,
I think it will still trouble us.
Why in the world go through all of this pain,
and this suffering,
and this death,
and these fierce battles with God,
and with sin,
and with ourselves,
if we could have never left God in the first place
simply by His never having given us that first
commandment?
Now let me try and share with you
what I think I have learned this past week.
From the very beginning
this whole thing
has never been about us,
or about our performance,
or about our finding a way in which we could
become righteous
so that we could then return to Him.
From the very beginning
this whole thing
has always been about HIM,
about God Himself.
Now listen closely to what I'm going to say here.
God tells us
that He places a value upon His friendship with
us
that vastly exceeds anything we could even
begin to imagine.
He doesn't need us,
He is not dependant upon us,
and yet He loves us
and loves His personal interaction with
us
at a level we could not even begin to
comprehend.
Jer. 31:3 The Lord appeared to him from
afar, saying, "I have loved you with an
everlasting love; Therefore I have drawn
you with lovingkindness..."
Now, He knows each one of us perfectly,
as only a Creator could ever know His creation.
But He knew
it would be impossible for us
ever to get to know Him,
to discover who He really is,
to see into His heart,
to understand the depths of His true nature
unless we saw Him relating to us
in our failure,
in our shame,
in our self-inflicted pain an
suffering.
If we would have lived out eternity
having never rebelled against our God,
we could have understood
His absolute power,
and His infinite creative genius,
and His sense of humor,
and His obvious fondness for us
His creation.
But we could never have even begun to understand
the depths of His true nature.
We could never have understood
His heart of compassion,
or His absolute justice,
or His gentleness,
or His unending love for us.
We could never have understood His grace.
Most of what we know
about the true nature of our God
we could never have learned any other way
except through failure.
And from the very beginning
this whole thing has never been about us and our
performance,
it has been about a creative design of God
that made it possible for us, His creation,
to discover the depths
of the true nature of our Creator.
And the only way that could ever happen
is through His creating a world
in which we could see Him relating to us
in the face of our rebellion against Him.
And so, "...the Law came in that the
transgression might increase..."
This whole thing,
from the very beginning
is not about God making us good.
It is about His designing a world
in which we can discover
the depth of His goodness,
and His compassion,
and His love for us.
Our God wants a friendship with us.
But He wants a friendship
in which He not only knows us deeply,
but a friendship in which we know Him deeply
as well.
And there was no other way
for us to see into His heart
except through His creating a world in which
we could fail.
While I was writing up these notes
my little dog, Pepper,
announced that he wanted to go outside.
There was fresh snow everywhere,
and, on his little exploration around the yard,
his fur collected tons of snow.
He knows that when he comes in during the winter
he has to run up and down the carpeted stairs
several times
so that most of the snow bits drop on the
carpet,
and not on the kitchen floor.
Pepper is now 13 years old.
He still thinks he is a puppy,
but he has been putting on a little weight,
and he is not nearly as agile as he once was.
He came in, all covered with snow,
and trotted about half way up the stairs and
stopped.
I was standing at the bottom of the stairs
and he turned and looked at me
to see if he'd gone far enough.
I told him no, he had to go up the rest of the way,
and so he suddenly turned and bolted at top
speed
up the remaining stairs.
But he completely missed his footing
on the second step from the top
and somehow suddenly launched himself
into this terrifying backwards somersault
with his body upside down,
and his head facing straight down
the stairs.
I saw him flying through the air,
reached out to catch him,
and he dropped right into my arms.
For several minutes after that
I sat there on the stairs
with him pressing himself up against my
chest
as he cried in terrified relief.
There are things we can only learn about our God
when we come crashing down
from the top step in utter failure
and find His arms outstretched to catch us,
and hold us,
and calm our fears.
Do you remember those first 7 gifts
given to us by our God
when we enter His family through Christ?
Peace with God,
the discovery of His endless grace,
the assurance that God is always for us,
His commitment to use our pain for good in our
lives,
His Spirit revealing to us the depth of His
love,
freedom forever from His wrath,
and a spirit that exults in God Himself...
We could never have known any of those
except through experiencing His heart of
compassion
poured out in the face of our failure.
Certainly it is true
that our growing correct knowledge of our God
has a profound impact upon our behavior.
It changes us as nothing else can.
But the mistake we so often make
is believing that the change is what it's all about,
and it is not.
What it's all about
is God designing the only possible creation
in which we can discover
the true nature of the heart of our
Creator.
This world, as it now exists,
is nothing more than a fleeting blip in eternity.
But the understanding we gain while we are here
about the true nature of our God
is an understanding that could never be
gained
in the endless ages we will share with
Him
when we leave this planet.
Living a perfect existence
in the presence of a perfect God
in a perfect creation is wonderful.
But living that perfect existence
against the backdrop of a heritage with God
in which we discovered the endless depths of
His love for us
in the face of our open rebellion against
Him
is something altogether different.
And just so I'm not misunderstood,
let me state clearly,
I am not suggesting that our behavior doesn't matter.
Our behavior matters very much
for many different reasons,
some of which Paul deals with
as he moves into Romans 6.
But what I am saying
is that correcting or altering our behavior
never has been the central issue
in God's interaction with us.
The central issue always has been
and always will be our discovering more and
more
about the true nature of our God.
Some of the greatest of those discoveries we will
make
as we walk with Him
through the sometimes agonizing process of
rebuilding our damaged moral characters.
But even then
the rebuilding process
is simply one more tool
used by our Creator
in allowing us to discover what He
is really like.