Nielsen’s Nook

The Mercies of God as the Basis for Sanctification and Paul’s Urging

Paul had written to the church at Rome. That church had some life in it in its own right. He was hashing out some of the main points of the Gospel for them and he turns to urge these good Christian people towards their created purpose. In the language of the Westminster Confession we might summarize this call or urging the Apostle Paul makes as, “I urge you to be sanctified in body and mind for that is the most human thing you can do!”

But if we’re not careful, if we don’t take the context and what has come before Romans 12:1-2 in to consideration, we might miss the very basis by which Paul expects Christians to grow in grace in demonstrating more clearly the likeness of God in greater fellowship with Him.

There are two indicators in the passage that I want you to recognize. The first and most obvious is the word translated “therefore”. That clues us in that Paul’s assertions about mind-body sanctification are predicated upon or assume more basic building blocks of faith.

The second indicator is the phrase translated “by the mercies of God.” The word here for “mercies” or “compassions” is a word unique to Paul excepting one occurrence in the Epistle to the Hebrews and it points us back to the ideas in the previous chapters of the Epistle. There we find that God was not content to give everyone over to the lusts of their flesh to defile their bodies and demonstrate their minds as failed.

God in his mercies was pleased to change the very desire structure of our hearts. In binding us to Christ by faith alone we have been justified as Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.

Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai ehad (Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is alone God). This famous sentence from Deuteronomy 6:4 seems to give us a rubric for understanding the book of Deuteronomy, if not our entire lives as those created by the LORD.

J. G. McConville, in his commentary on Deuteronomy, sees Deuteronomy chapters five and six as a single literary unit.¹ I find this resonates with my own thinking more globally about the meta-narrative found in the scriptures and is not disharmonious with approaches like that found in the IVP Dictionary of Biblical Imagery in which Deuteronomy five is said to be “a miniature version of the book as a whole”.²

The thought that impresses me is how easily we drive a wedge between the content of the two chapters. In chapter five we find the reiteration and reapplication of the Ten Commandments to the Israelites at the end of their 40 years of wandering in the desert. In chapter six we find the concern to be the worldview of covenant keeping as a means of true life.

The Ten Commandments are unfortunately left in the realm of abstract moral principles for most of us. Certainly do not covet is a bit abstract. Do not covet Jim’s wife is more concrete, but we still do not have a handle on what exactly coveting looks like. Certainly we would recognize the results of coveting if Sam were to engage in an adulterous relationship with Jim’s wife; however, the adultery is an effect of a more intimate and sinful disposition.

The Ten Commandments find their concreteness in the person of the LORD, our God. They describe One who is perfectly content in Himself and thus never covets, for example. They implicate us because we are created in the image of this One LORD, to live in the likeness of Him described in the Ten Commandments, thus living in consequent fellowship with Him. Concretely, breaking the Law of God is a direct and personal affront to the most holy LORD, exercising a desire to distance ourselves from God.

In this way, we can find that some kinds of obedience serve actually to distance ourselves from the LORD. We go to church on Sundays, perhaps the exceptionally spiritual go Wednesday evenings. But do we go to get God off our backs or do we go because we can’t help but worship the one our soul loves? When I see a police officer on the highway, one of my immediate reactions is to press the brakes a bit to slow down. This is a sort of obedience, making sure I am under the speed limit. However, it is obedience for the sake of avoiding a relationship with the lawgiver, which is in this case the State.

God has not made a covenant with his people so that we can do enough to call ourselves his. He has made and fulfilled a covenant with us in the person of Jesus that we might live out the likeness of God in fellowship with him from the heart. We are not more justified when we obey the Lord as Christians, but we do grow in grace and the appropriation of the Spirit of the LORD at work in us to will and to act (Philippians 2:12-13). Consequently, if we find our dispositions to the LORD different on Monday than they are on Sunday, we should be alarmed and we must ask the LORD to dilate our hearts that we would love loving him all the more.

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¹ J. G. McConville, Deuteronomy, Apollos Old Testament Commentary; 5 (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 139.
² Leland Ryken, Jim Wilhoit, Tremper Longman et al., Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, electronic ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000, c1998), 205.

In lieu of the reflections I have posted on The Beatitudes recently, I thought I would post the sermon I had the privilege to preach this morning. May it edify Christ’s Church and challenge the skeptic towards the loving arms of his or her Maker.

• “Processing with Righteousness”, Matthew 5:1-12 [Listen]

Two and a half years ago I was overwhelmed by the Sermon on the Mount. An elder at my church took a few of us aside on morning a week over pancakes and taught us. Like many of us, this elder had read the Sermon on the Mount and been disturbed. We surely don’t measure up to the standards of the Kingdom of God. Righteousness is something that we are shown to lack, and yet Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:20 that if we haven’t righteousness that abundantly surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will in no way ever enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The scribes and the Pharisees were regarded as the most righteous people Jesus’ original hearers would have known. How could anyone be counted righteous before God?

The act of God justifying a sinner is where we find those who haven’t righteousness being accepted as righteousness. My confession of faith, the Westminster Standards, expresses it this way:

Justification is an act of God’s free grace unto sinners, in which he pardons all their sins, accepts and accounts their persons righteous in his sight; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but only for the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to them, and received by faith alone.[1]

Jesus comes to us as the Incarnate Word of God and in his perfect obedience, both active and passive, he purchased a people for the Father. Humanity was created wonderful, as the image of God, to live out the likeness of God in fellowship with Him. However, what we find is that as the image of God we live out an unlikeness to God and consequently live in dislocation from Him:

…the transgression of the commandment [not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden] was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again.[2]

In the Incarnation we see both exaltation and humiliation. Christ comes and takes upon himself flesh. That God would become a human being most definitely exalts humanity immeasurably. Nevertheless, in becoming a human being (the image of God), Jesus lives out the perfect likeness of God, which was received by the Father a “full satisfaction” for the debt of sin of His people. The abundance of Jesus’ perfection and obedience, exposes our poverty, our unlikeness, bringing with it a balanced humiliation.

Apart from Christ, we are slaves to the unlikeness of God. It is like a great Egyptian taskmaster that takes away the straw, while cracking the whip across our backs to build more bricks (c.f. Exodus 5). Where we cowed to the whip in our weakness, Christ lay hold of the Egyptian taskmaster and threw him down, beating him with his own whip.

[Jesus] has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled, and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be.[3]

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Herod the Great decreed that all the male children two years of age and under in the region where Jesus had been born. Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt, having been warned in a dream (Matthew 2:19-23). Jesus comes out of Egypt, through water (Matthew 3) and then into the wilderness (Matthew 4) before he ascends the Mount from which he might bring a New Covenant with its blessing for obedience and curse for disobedience.[4]

And so Jesus presents to us that declaration of the New Covenant:
³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
⁵ “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
⁶ “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
⁷ “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
⁸ “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
⁹ “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
¹⁰ “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
¹¹ “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. ¹² Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.[5]

While the Incarnation humiliates us, showing to us our utter poverty, we find that the motive of the Incarnation was not spite but love. For God, made himself lowly, poor in spirit, emptying himself of his divine rights and became a man. He came to his own and his own rejected him. Jesus wept. And is there any doubt that our Lord was meek? That he was one who was absolutely submitted to another? Had he not come to do his own will but that of the Father? While we hunger and thirst for righteousness that we do not have, He hungers and thirsts for the righteousness of his Father. It is our Lord who has been merciful to us. It is Jesus who is alone ceremonially pure, who has seen the Father. It is Jesus who is alone the peacemaker who restored the fellowship of his people with God through the blood of his Cross. The one who is himself Righteousness, was crowned not with gold and gems but persecuted with the thorns that cursed the ground that Adam walked.

It is this one, the Righteous One, who has humbled himself and in becoming a man he proclaims to us the New Covenant. It is in this proclamation of the New Covenant that the one who made himself poor, declares to those enslaved to the unlikeness of God, that there is blessing for the poor, for those who mourn, for the meek, and the hungry. Indeed, we find that the Incarnate God has made a way for the captives to be free. That way is by grace alone in Christ alone through faith alone. For paupers have nothing else by which to lay hold of the Incarnate God who came near to save a people for himself.

[1] Westminster Larger Catechism, Question 70. I took the liberty to modernize the language a little bit here.

[2] St. Athanasius. On the Incarnation : The Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 29-30.

[3] St. Athanasius. On the Incarnation : The Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 35.

[4] N. T. Wright. Matthew for Everyone. 2 vols. 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004) v1, 37.

[5] Matthew 5:3-12 (ESV)