Reading the Bible for all the Wrong Reasons:

Chapter 7: Life in the Spirit

103 Chapter 7 Life in the Spirit The Gospel of Grace and Demand “Follow me,”said Jesus. The man seemed willing but asked one thing: “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” Jesus’ reply, however, was blunt: “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Luke 9:60). In ancient Jewish society, the burial of one’s parents was a sacred obligation. In denying this request, Jesus dramatically pronounced that loyalty to God takes precedence over any other attachments. Neither family nor social group, neither ethnicity nor country should undermine the absolute claim of the gospel. The grace it offers is radical, abolishing the guilt of one’s past and opening a new future. But equally radical is the demand it makes. And any impediment to meeting that demand becomes 104 • reading the bible for all the wrong reasons an object of idolatry and a violation of the first commandment—to worship God alone. When Christians say that they worship God, however, that does not automatically protect them against idolatry. Attachments to particular understandings of God have caused much evil in the world. Wars of conquest, terrorism, persecution, torture, enslavement, discrimination— all have been practiced in the name of God. We must therefore refine our definition of idolatry: any belief or commitment we are unwilling to examine is potentially idolatrous and an impediment to the work of the Spirit. In chapter 5, I suggested how an inadequate approach to biblical ethics leads to the abusive use of the Bible in relation to the status and role of women, divorce, and same-sex relations. In this chapter, I return to biblical ethics with a different agenda. One could get the impression from contemporary debates that the central moral issues in the Bible are those related to sex, but this is simply not the case. I hope now to get to the heart of biblical ethics by asking how the Bible’s message of grace and demand speaks to us today, by challenging our idolatries and offering us the abundant life of God’s new creation. Right Looking for Life in All the Wrong Places The Paradox of Finding Life The gospel message is inherently paradoxical. We find the paradox in its most dramatic form in Mark 8:34-35: “If any want to become my Any belief we refuse to examine is potentially idolatrous. Life in the Spirit • 105 followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” The point is that the narrow pursuit of self-fulfillment does not lead to true life. Only when we dedicate our lives to God do we discover our true identity and purpose. But this demand is also a word of grace, because it leads ultimately to self-fulfillment. The element of grace is even more apparent in Paul’s version of the paradox in Romans 6:3-4: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” Paul’s point is that through baptism, we die to sin and are empowered to live new lives. Thus, in verse 14, he assures his readers that “sin will have no dominion over” them because they are “not under law but under grace.” In Galatians 5:25, he describes this new freedom as life in the Spirit: “If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.” One dimension of life in the Spirit is the development of inner character; another is right action. Both are present in Romans 12:1-2, where Paul urges his readers to “be transformed by the renewing of [their] minds” in order to discern God’s will. Paul’s ethic is thus a Spiritdriven ethic of discernment, and the love-principle is indispensable to the discernment process: “for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:8b). Loving Others as Oneself In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, the Golden Rule in 7:12 summarizes the ethic of God...