Prescription or Inscription? (Part 3 of 3) Will we obey an external law based on rules or an internal law based on a new nature? When God matures or transfigures His glory, mankind must not worship yesterday’s lesser version of it. If one adheres to the Old Covenant after the New Covenant has displaced it, after God has left that spot and taken His glory with Him to new ground, it becomes, indeed, the “commandments and teachings of men” based on the “elementary principles of this world.” It is to go back to beggarly things, to operate in “do’s” and “don’ts” and willful constructions of one’s own making, in substitute for genuine obedience and compliance in accordance with God’s current plan of redemption. It is, of course, deception and outright disobedience to comply with anything God has left off blessing. Indeed, the idea of “he who kills an ox is like one who slays a man” (Isaiah 66:3), was a problem to first-century Judaizers because they still had a difficult time leaving off sacrificing animals and other aspects of Judaism. Likewise, any Christian today who insists on working out their own salvation in a religious fashion, in a way which God has either abandoned or never endorsed, is doing violence to a genuine expression of Christianity. I leave it to Oswald Chambers to reiterate much of what I have written herein, namely, that a relationship with Jesus Christ is inscriptive, a catalyst for Christian character formation, and not a prescription of duty performances. He said, “Our Lord’s first requirement is a personal relationship to Himself, and then obedience to His principles... It is not a question of applying Jesus Christ’s principles to our actual life first of all, but of applying them to our relationship to Himself, then as we keep our souls open in relation to Him our conscience will decide how we are to act out of that relationship.” It is exactly because this prescription to duty is static and divorced from a relationship with its giver that such a construction of adherence can only become wooden and lifeless; and for the opposite reason, a clean conscience by the blood of Christ in real time and space is both fluid and always and forever pertinent (because it draws its power from the never-ending source of a marriage relationship between the redeemed soul and God). Though the Law is holy and just and ever obligatory upon us, those who foolishly attempt to obey its demand without first aligning themselves with the source of all power to perform it, namely by establishing and maintaining an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ, find themselves unable to endure to the end (and it is only those that endure to the end that are ultimately saved).
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 11:11:41 +0000
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