Nielsen’s Nook

Romans 8:3-4 (English Standard Version)
For God has done what the Law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

If the Law of God is merely the prescription of what we should do in order to be righteous, then we do well to take these verses to mean 1) that the Law was powerless to change our behavior, 2) that Christ came to behave well in our place, and 3) that He came to condemn our misbehavior. There are certainly parallels and trajectories familiar to us all who live in the present time which compel us to receive such interpretation. This is a common strain of thought.

However, let me suggest what I believe is a more biblically consistent understanding. If the Law is taken as the marvelous indicative description of God’s character then we as His image are implicated in an imperative that is captured in Matthew 5:48:

It is not all of creation that has its purpose or goal (τελειος) of existence as the reflection of the likeness of the Almighty. This is a unique calling bestowed upon humanity, not merely in the abstract but in the warp and woof of everyday life. So what we find is that Christ came as a sin offering (i.e., for sin) not simply that we might behave better but that the dignity of humanity might be restored to the New Humanity that was formed out of Christ, the New Adam.

Christ came as one of us, being exactly like us in everyway excepting sin. He alone was the one man, being the image of God (c.f., Heb 1:1-4) who was perfectly like God. In this way, we see a picture of not only who God is, but also we see a beautiful portrait of the Truly Human. The righteous requirment of the Law is not primarily the keeping of rules but the emmulation of the righteousness of the Archetype. That is the photograph is only truly beautiful when it corresponds most clearly to the thing photographed. If we were to take a picture of a placid mountain landscape and then look at the photo only to see black streaks all through it, we would think something was wrong. We could tell that the image had connection to the landscape, but it was not much like it now that it contained all the black streaks or pixelations.

Christ is the pristine picture of the Father, which is perfectly what a human being was created to be. It is the restoration of a greater dignity to humanity generally and a perfect dignity returned to His progeny. It is this principle of dignity restored of which we see the effects in those who live according to Spirit. Certainly behavior is changed. Certainly our affections have a very different object. But the primary focus is the restoration of Humanity to be the image that is also like the God who created them. This restoration is certainly not finished; however, one day when God punctuates His redemptive sentence we will see a humanity being finally restored of which one may ask, “Is it real or is it memorex?”