31 December 2006

Meditation upon our Lord's Circumcision - From Yesteryear

Since the days of Abraham, a mark had been cut into the flesh of every Jewish male. A sign to identify him as one belonging to the people of God. A sign to show his obligation to keep the covenant God had given. A sign of obedience to God and to his law. Circumcision, the removal of the foreskin. It was a solemn rite performed on all Jewish males eight days after birth and with it went the giving of the child’s name.

The name Mary’s baby received was “Jesus” - a name given by the Angel before he had even been conceived in the womb. Jesus, which means, God doing his saving work. Fitting that such a name should have been the given the Child on this day. For the circumcision of Jesus shows how he would do his saving work.

In theology we speak of Jesus’ two-fold obedience to his Father. His active and His passive obedience. His active obedience is that He fulfills the law precisely as God the Father intended it to be fulfilled. He shows us what it means to live in covenant with the Father. His circumcision marks his life as an unbroken “yes” to the will of His Father. As he says through David’s prophesy in the Psalms: “Lo, I have come to do thy will.”

That Jesus obeys the will of the Father perfectly is the best of news for us. Because that obedience He renders was not done for His own sake, but for ours. He didn’t need it. He was perfectly submissive to his co-equal Father in heaven. But we needed it and so He entered into our flesh and blood that He might give the Father on our behalf the obedience that is His due from our flesh and blood. From the time of Adam and Eve, we have failed to render that obedience. We have failed to live in the total and complete “yes” to the will of the Father. We have lived instead the sorrow of our own “My will be done.” Jesus came not merely to show us another way - though He does that too - but above all to be our substitute. God’s Law accepts nothing less than perfection. 100% love. 100% obedience. Joyfully rendered at all times to the Father. That or the Law says we go to hell. No way out.

But Christ comes into our flesh to fulfil the demands of the Law perfectly for us. What we have not done and could not do in our sinful state, our Savior came to do for us. His “active” obedience. Here indeed is God at work saving. “Jesus.”

But the circumcision of Christ did more that put him under obligation to that active obedience. It also gloriously foreshowed his passive obedience. He came not only to do what we failed to do, but also to suffer the consequences for our failure. The penalty imposed by the law on any failure to keep it at any point is death. Death, both temporal and eternal. Hell, my friends, being cut off eteranlly from the Source of all joy and light and life. The wages of sin is death.

But there came this One who had no sin at all. Nor ever would. And yet into his flesh was cut a mark. His blood flowed. It was a promise of greater blood-shed still to come. The blood that would flow when that child grown to manhood would accept the Father’s will that He bear the guilt of the human race on the tree and so atone for the sin of all. Passive obedience. Suffering what was placed upon him. He getting what He didn’t deserve that we might get what we don’t deserve. Him bearing our hell that we might have a share in His heaven.

And that is how he would save: by perfectly keeping the Law for us and by bearing in his own body the penalty imposed upon our disobedience. Active and passive obedience: bound together in the circumcision of the Child. And so his name is Jesus: the God who saves.

Paul writes that what happened to Jesus that day when he was eight days old is given to us when we are baptized. He writes:

11 In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ,
12 buried with Him in baptism, in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.
13 And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses. (Col 2:11-13)

Thus your baptism cuts you off from your sin and its penalties. Brings you into Christ’s relationship with the Father so that He sees you as perfectly obedient, holy with the holiness of his Son. Thus your Baptism gives you life: life everlasting and life overflowing. A little Child sheds his blood today and embarks upon the path of obedience that will turn the world around and set his people free! Praise be to God! Amen.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

> And that is how he would save: by perfectly keeping
> the Law for us and by bearing in his own body the
> penalty imposed upon our disobedience.


Christ rendered to His Father perfect obedience *on behalf of us all.* Legally, that makes us all perfectly obedient. The Law demands either perfect obedience *or* penalty – not both. To require both would have been pointless, illegal, and unjust.

Obedience pleases God. Pain, suffering, and death, per se, please only our enemy.

I Samuel 15: 22 And Samuel said, Hath the LORD [as great] delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey [is] better than sacrifice, [and] to hearken than the fat of rams.

Happy New Year!
Anastasia

William Weedon said...

Blessed New Year to you too, Anastasia. Don't forget Isaiah 53:10!

Anonymous said...

Won't help. If you interpret that verse as having to do with Christ paying a legally-required penalty, you're still back to the same problem, which is that it just cannot be. The Law does not require *both* perfect obedience *and* penalty. To require both would be illegal, immoral, fattening, and a Very Mean God.

Well, scratch fattening. :-)

Of course there are a couple of other levels of interpretation that verse can legitimately take, both forensic and non-forensic...

Anastasia

Chaz said...

The problem isn't with the Scriptures, Anastasia.

If you want the Lord to say what you wish He'd said instead of what He actually said, nothing, God's Word or man's, will ever satisfy you.

Anonymous said...

No problem with what God says, Chaz. What God has said already surpasses all my wishes, hopes and dreams.

I'm just want us to be careful not to interpet what He says in a way that contradicts God's Law. Such an interpretation surely cannot stand.

Anastasia

Chaz said...

That is a difference between Lutheranism and Orthodoxy. Lutherans, realizing that our reasoned ideas about God are bound to be flawed, take Him at His Word and live with the tensions and paradoxes that might not make sense (to us).

I often notice a lot of correlation between Orthodoxy and Calvinism. There has to be a reason for everything and all the puzzle pieces have to fit together perfectly. If they don't, then they are shaved off so that they do.

Lutherans cite God against God because the Scriptures do. Those who norm their theology to reason can't live with such a God as that.

Anonymous said...

Yes, with a couple of caveats, you’ve stated a real difference.

The Orthodox, too, realize our reasoned ideas about God are bound to be flawed. We, too, take Him at His word. And we, too, live with the inevitable gaps in our poor, human understanding.

If we come across a flat contradiction, however, for us it’s a sure sign something is wrong. And it isn’t something wrong in God, because God is a God of reason; Christ, in fact, we call the Logos (Logic) of God. And it isn’t something wrong in the Holy Scriptures. For us, the idea of “citing God against God” is totally unacceptable (to put it mildly), because there is no contradiction in Him, nor does He ever speak against Himself. Only people do, and devils.

No, the problem is that we have misunderstood something. That’s what it means when we find an apparent flat contradiction in Holy Scripture. When we interpret one part of Scripture in a way that blatantly conflicts with another, we for sure are interpreting one or both of them wrongly.

But we find that with patience, prayer, struggle, and asking people holier than ourselves, the Christian *can* find the correct ways to understand the Holy Scriptures. When we earnestly seek, God gives us to find. And when we do, the apparent contradictions are indeed resolved, without shaving anything off except our own prior misconceptions – to lose which is always liberating for us, because invariably, they had been holding us back in spiritual growth.

Anastasia

Anonymous said...

> Lutherans cite God against God
> because the Scriptures do.

You can SAY you will faithfully affirm both sides of a contradiction, holding them in tension with each other. But you cannot LIVE a contradiction, cannot find a way to put into practice mutually exclusive doctrines. One or both of the conflicting doctrines will be abstracted from real life and reduced to an academic idea.

Let alone real life; such mental acrobatics cannot succeed even in your head. When one holds two incompatible doctrines, one or both will neutralize the meaning of the other (depending upon how you place your emphasis). In this case, the doctrine that Christ bears the legal penalty for our disobedience renders of no effect the doctrine that Christ obeyed perfectly on behalf of all; or else it empties of content the doctrine that God rewards and blesses obedience.

Don’t Lutherans have a kind of “rule” that whatever contradicts Scripture has to be error? The Orthodox do. That’s a hard and fast criterion for us, and we allow no exceptions, not even an exception for Scripture itself to contradict Scripture, because of course, every heretic comes wielding Scripture against Scripture.

If we say *some* contradictions of Scripture by Scripture are legitimate, how shall we decide which ones?

What happens to Sola Scriptura?

Or even just Scriptura?

Anastasia