Great news, folks! I’m working on the layout this week for the upcoming Wesley Bros publication: Submitting to Be More Vile (pre-order through Abingdon Press here!). So I’m sharing with you an old favorite of mine, updated with a new summary of a John Wesley sermon I find helpful for our present conversations in Methodism. This week’s sermon is #62, The End of Christ’s Coming, where Wesley explores the purpose of the Incarnation.
“The person who practices sin belongs to the devil, because the devil has been sinning since the beginning. God’s Son appeared for this purpose: to destroy the works of the devil.” -1 John 3:8, CEB
Great writers across religion and time have striven to convey the ways virtue makes life beautiful, and how vice deforms humanity and creation. We commonly understand that peace accompanies a virtuous life, while misery tends to follow vice. Paul sums up the plight of all who wish to live virtuously, “So I find that, as a rule, when I want to do what is good, evil is right there with me.” Even when we hunger and thirst to live virtuously, the best of humanist self-help falls short of providing a true remedy.
Good to Guilt. (What Nerds Call Theological Anthropology)
In order to understand why Christ came to be our remedy, we need to begin at the beginning, and understand God’s purpose in creating us. The biblical witness teaches that the Lord God created humanity imago dei, in the natural image of God. God, who is Spirit, made us more than mere animal by in-spiriting us. The essence of the human spirit, made in God’s image, is first understanding (or intuition), second a desire to delight in all that is good, and last the liberty and agency to choose between those desires that uphold what is good and refuse those desires which destroy.
These spiritual qualities of understanding, desire, and liberty are what we naturally share with God, but we are also made in God’s moral image. This means we were made to love and enjoy what is virtuous, holy, and righteous. The human soul and body combine to find our truest happiness in the heart and ways of God. But we were not given the infinite knowledge or power of God. The beauty of our physical limitations in time and space means in our pursuit for all that is beautiful and good, we might mistake evil for good. None of us are all-knowing, and so even the best of us might choose to do evil believing that we were actually doing what is good. (Check out this article for an excellent review of the early church father’s development of thought around all this stuff).
Christians tend to understand “the devil” to be a fallen angel, a spirit being who abused his liberty to oppose God and lead creation in a rebellion against God. It seems that the devil’s heart is to think too highly of oneself, to move past one’s inherent dignity given by God and proclaim, “I will be like God.” The story of the serpent in the garden opens our eyes to the devil’s common deception of humanity. An external power desires to deceive us, and so mingles truth with lie so that we might question whether God really wants what is best for us. The next step is to simply convince us that we, like the devil, must be wiser than God, for who can know better what a created being needs than a created being? The moment we act upon this temptation is the moment of death, for it destroys our ability to be truly happy, sabotages our ability to fellowship with God, replacing trust with shame, replacing love with fear, replacing understanding with a desire to hide, replacing life with death.
Guilt to Grace. (What Nerds call Soteriology)
Jesus was not an idea. Jesus was not God’s change of plans. From before Creation, Christ was. The only language we can wrap our minds around is to call Christ, as the gospel writer says, “the only-begotten Son.” The Son of God is not separate from God. The Son of God is not a second God after the Father. The Son of God is how we know God is not a concept, but a knowable Person. And in the fullness of God’s timing, the Son of God walked this earth as one of God’s own covenant people, an Israelite named Jesus of Nazareth.
He did not appear as a perfect book handed from heaven. He did not appear as a self-help guide to virtuous living or basic instructions before leaving earth. He appeared in relationship, born of a woman, in a Jewish community, a wandering teacher leading a ragamuffin band of liberals and conservatives, fundamentalists and hippies, cultural elite and blue collar low-brows. He taught with unparalleled wisdom. He healed with unprecedented wonder. He never gave a straight answer, preferring stories to rules. He challenged the religious establishment who thought they were the most faithful representation of God on earth. He challenged the political rulers who believed they weilded the power of God on earth.
He proved what it looks like to live an entire life leaning on God’s understanding above our own. Yet he was rejected by both the religious and the political leaders, and condemned to crucifixion, the death of those who commit treason against the empire. By willingly submitting himself to this death, Jesus as both fully human and fully God becomes the One through whom God and humanity are made right with each other. God once and for all revealed that there is no reason for us to be enemies, for Christ’s death for us reveals a God who loves, that God would go to the greatest lengths to prove to us that love. That God raised Christ from the dead is proof that this is more than dogma, but the deepest truth about our existence.
That God would put on flesh and become subject to our self-righteousness and pride, even unto death from the very hands God had made, reveals to us that humility and compassion, mercy and love are the very heart of God. Salvation happens when we recognize the God-ness of Jesus, when we see God not as an idea of love or an example of living well, but as a person to know and enjoy forever. When we see the resurrected Christ and proclaim with the disciples, “My Lord, and my God!” a real change comes over us.
Grace to Gratitude (What Nerds Call Sanctification)
The very Spirit of God was unleashed into the world through Christ’s death and resurrection. To those who are being saved, the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead is raising us from death to life. By rejecting the devil’s deceptive trap that I can be like God through my own power, and by accepting the freedom that Christ alone is my virtue, I welcome the forgiveness and mercy of God that convinces me to reject shame, fear, guilt, and hiding. By clinging to Christ, I stand securely in God’s presence, not in arrogance for my own goodness or accomplishments, but in humility that Christ would die, even for me. In this security, I trust that despite my imperfections, Christ has restored in me the image of God that was dehumanized through the lies of the devil. Through Jesus Christ, the fullness of God fills us, the breath of the Holy Spirit carries us like the wind where God would lead us in this world. Your life is now hidden in Christ, who sets you free to live in victory over your own pride, arrogance and self-righteousness. Your life is now eternal and expanding in love for God and neighbor even as it is set on the straight and narrow path of Christ alone. To live in holiness and happiness now is to follow the Spirit’s lead with a grateful heart. The world will know you are Christ’s disciples by the way you love one another.
So don’t confuse the gospel for any of your causes, don’t mix the truth with even the purest and most faithful-sounding lie. Do not imagine that right-living is the heart of the gospel. Honesty, morality and justice are excellent but cannot precede or replace the gospel. And before you conservatives get all excited as if I just denounced the “social gospel,” let’s talk about how you have replaced the gospel with “orthodoxy,” as if assent to all the right ideas is any better or different than doing all the right things. Insisting on right words or on right actions are just a tiny part of the whole, and adventures in missing the point.
Christ. Alone. Christ in relationship, not in concept. Christ alone utterly destroys the works of the devil, both in you and in this world. God is able to do far more than we could ever ask or imagine…here and now, through the Holy Spirit at work in you through Jesus Christ. That is the simplicity of the gospel, and the entire reason Christ has come. So put this promise to the proof. Boldly approach the throne of grace every day, because God deeply loves you and has shown you the way to true liberty and joy. And that love can not fail.