(even better) Good News!

I was thinking about the subject of "holidays" early this morning in that half sleep, half awakeness that sometime accompanies early morning. I realized that there is a common thread running through all holidays worth celebrating, and that thread is thankfulness.

The first and obvious display of this commonality is Thanksgiving, in which we give thanks to God for everything he has bestowed upon us. We give thanks for our parents on Mother’s Day and Fathers day. We give thanks for our country and the freedoms we enjoy on the Fourth of July.  At Christmas, we celebrate and give thanks for the indescribably great gift of God’s son coming to earth as a human.

Easter (or Resurrection day, depending on your preference for the importance of names) is the time when we give thanks for God’s son Jesus dying on the cross, bearing the sins of the whole world.

I think that far too often in our nation we reduce and dilute the richness of the story of the Passion. When we are asked for the reason for Easter we parrot our scripted reply of “Jesus died for my sins, paid my debt, and I can be with Him heaven when I die.” While perfectly correct and full of truth, it is only part of the story. There is even more that has been done for us! I know that I forget and need to be reminded.

Let’s go back to the fall.

“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.” G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy

This is an interesting viewpoint on the Fall. Since that time when the “actors and stage managers made a mess of things,” we have all become sinners. Not just those who, because of our sanitized Christianity, we deem worthy of bearing an emblemized title of SINNER written in red across their shirt. We have ALL, at one time or another, sinned and fallen far short of the tall measuring stick of the law. And as it says if James 2:10, “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.”

Want to try to keep the hundreds and perhaps thousands of laws in the old testament? Let’s say you decide to “keep the Sabbath.” What would that look like? A mere cursory look over the Old testament will prove the hundreds of laws necessary to properly keep the Sabbath. It is simply not an option to pick and choose the easier Sabbath laws and leave the others.

"Keeping the Sabbath" is not an isolated law. They’re all chained together to make The Old Testament Law: the laws of purification, sacrifice, stoning adulterers, and cleanliness. You can’t pick and choose one over the other like a salad bar. It’s like a chain-you break a link and the chain is rendered nonfunctional. 

Thanks to Jesus and His work, we no longer have to live under the heavy weight of the law.

 Jesus came to fulfill the law and the prophets. We are no longer under the letter of the law, but under grace. The law does not cease to exist, but it ceases to exist as it applies to me, a believer in Christ trusting in him alone for my Righteousness, not in how I’m doing compared to the law, which is impossible for me to fulfill. I am Righteous because of Jesus’ work on the cross and for believing on his name, regardless of how much I have performed or marked off “religious checklist.” There is great rest and freedom in trusting in God and not our feeble works.

Allow me to quote Chesterton once again. He and I go way back…

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

 I think the Old Testament was a bit like this. In hindsight, it looked brutal, bloody and barbaric. It had a purpose, fulfilled it, and along came Jesus and now we are on to better things: LIFE IN CHRIST. We have “gotten round the front,” so to speak.

To illustrate the point of the “old” law no longer applying to us as believers, for a moment let’s imagine you are in a grade school, 8^th grade. It comes to the end of the school year and you graduate from the 8^th grade into the 9^th grade. You move to a new place, a new school, new jurisdictions, and new people. It is similar to the old school you attended in some ways and different in others.

Has the 8th grade ceased to exist? No. It’s still there. You can drive by and see the building. But it has ceased to exist as it applies to you. You are in the 9^th grade now, free from the constraints and restrictions of the 8th grade. This analogy is not perfect (find one that is!) but it does illustrate the point that we are graduated out of the Old Testament and Old Testament Laws into the New Convenant in Jesus’ blood. The old laws have not ceased to exist, but they do not apply to us any longer because we have “graduated” from that system because of the blood of Jesus.

For sin shall not have dominion over you: for you are not under the law, but under grace. Romans 6:14

The good news is that Jesus gives us power over sin NOW. Not in future when we will be with him in glory, but NOW.

Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him,

knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more.

Death no longer has dominion over Him.

For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all;

but the life that He lives, He lives to God.

Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 6:8-11

 “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”

Romans 6:1-4

I think that Satan likes us to keep our head in the clouds, literally. He wants us to dream of what’s to come and not realize the truth we can be living NOW. I find this happening  to me more often than it should. I need these truth filled verses ever before me!

Romans 6:21-23

What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.  But now having been set free from sin, and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life. ²³ For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is a freedom that I strive to remind myself of every day, not just on a day that has been qualified for “holiday status” in this nation.

“Blessed is the one
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the one
whose sin the Lord does not count against them
and in whose spirit is no deceit.”

Psalm 32:1-2

We are blessed! Let’s reflect on that fact today and every day.