The Beauty of Judgment

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Judgment is magnificent.

If you struggle to link the subject of that sentence to its predicate, you are not alone. Most Christians carry a negative connotation to judgment. Why would we praise something that conjures up associations of a self-righteous, discriminatory and ultimately condemning attitude?

That’s how many of us think about judgment. And we think we have the Bible on our side. Did Jesus not say, “Judge not, lest ye be judged”?

We’ll return to that statement. But before we do, let’s take note of another one:

“For I, the Lord, love judgment.”

That sentence comes from Isaiah 61. It follows the prophet’s famous declaration about the coming of Christ into the world—words that Jesus himself read from the temple scroll and proclaimed “fulfilled in your midst”.

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
    because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
    he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
    and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Continue reading and you run into the inevitable pair: Mishpat and tsedeq. Judgment and justice.

God loves judgment. He hates robbery and wrong. He will cover those who turn to him in a robe of justice. He will cause justice to sprout up before the nations. That’s the rest of the chapter.

If God loves judgment, why do we abhor it? What happened? Whatever we mean by judgment, Isaiah clearly sees it as perfectly aligned with the miraculous salvation he has just foretold.

According to that other great prophet, Jeremiah, to miss this is to miss the essence of who God is.

Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, judgment, and justice in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.

There it is again—mishpat and tsedeq, this time coupled with love.

One of the reasons why we don’t quite get this is that most Bibles render the above as “the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the earth”. Mishpat is typically translated as justice instead of judgment in modern translations, and tsedeq as righteousness instead of justice.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Translators acknowledge that judgment is a more accurate translation for the root meaning of mishpat, namely a legal decision or ruling. This explains why the King James Version translates mishpat as judgment/s almost 300 times out of its 421 appearances. However, they argue that justice is preferable in modern ethical contexts because “judgment” sounds like negative criticism or a harsh sentence in everyday English. Also, justice fits the regular Biblical association between mishpat and a stable social order where everyone is treated fairly. This is why the ESV translates mishpat as judgment/s less than a hundred times.

But there is another twist to all this—lesser-known and hardly spoken about. Translating mishpat as justice provides an opportunity to keep the word justice in the Bible. Tsedeq is no longer fulfilling that purpose as it is rendered as righteousness in modern translations for reasons all of its own. To have an English Bible without the word justice in it is, obviously, unthinkable. Whilst malice has certainly not played a role in the reshuffling of these words in our English Bibles, the result is certainly convenient.

The sophisticated argument used by translators is that of “semantic range”. The English “judgment” has become too narrow for a formidable word that has more to do with establishing a fair society than with harsh punishment. Mishpat overlaps sufficiently with justice to warrant its use in the place of judgment. So the argument goes.

But there is a problem. Justice also comes with a semantic range, and that range is sometimes too narrow to do what mishpat does in Hebrew. Sometimes the allusion to actual judgment—the proclamation of a verdict, the discernment of what is fair—is so unmistakeable that justice won’t work as a translation. The solution is to make a convenient exception in such cases: keep judgment as the translation. Hence the ESV’s ratio of one out of four.

But this leads to another problem. I am reading my Bible in English and I have someone else deciding for me which particular meaning of a single word in the original language applies to my reading. I find that intrusive and massively disturbing, like having an assigned interpreter to accompany me into the holy of holies. I would much rather have the semantic range of the English equivalent of that particular word expanded in my own brain than being handed a related but essentially different word to compensate for my ignorance. Solving my ignorance by removing semantic possibilities from the translated text is a convenient but dangerous shortcut. The challenge is to wrestle with the obvious question:

What kind of judgment does God love?

So I don’t like the word judgment. WHY? What am I not understanding about the original intent of that word? What is it about God that I am not getting? Why do I feel threatened by the notion of a just verdict? Why do I allow socially constructed connotations of a word to interfere with the voice of God in my life?

And, most importantly: How do I shut up all of that background noise?

We’ll get to that in the next post.

The Fulfilment of Justice

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If there is anything we learn from the events unfolding in Exodus 18, it is this: Judgment is hard work.

As we noted in the previous post, to do justice, justice must first be discerned.  In Hebrew, the discernment of justice is Mishpat—judgment that culminates in a verdict. Tsedeq is the implementation of that justice—a process of prevention and remedy to ensure the successful ordering of human relations in a community. Like the relationship between the head and the hand, we must understand before we do.

All of this is extremely hard work, and it requires immense resources. This is evident not only from Jethro’s proposed hierarchy of judges, but also from the machinery we have constructed to pursue justice in modern society. Think for a moment of everything that has to exist before a society can even begin to administer justice: departments of justice; courts and judges; prosecutors and defence lawyers; police services and investigators; forensic laboratories; prisons and correctional services; probation and parole systems; legal-aid institutions; social workers and welfare agencies; child-protection services; human-rights commissions; ombudsmen; regulatory bodies; tribunals and mediation services.

And behind all of these institutions are millions of people whose daily work is devoted, directly or indirectly, to the discernment, administration, protection and implementation of justice.

Justice is hard work.

The short narrative from the Exodus to the giving of the Law at Sinai reveals this. But it also reveals an intriguing symmetry. Consider the pattern: bread from heaven, water from the rock, protection from an enemy, and the establishment of a justice system. Each portrays an earthly need met by heavenly provision.

The message is clear: to establish a community and become a kingdom, we need to eat, drink, protect ourselves, and do justice. These elements are non-negotiable, whether we are journeying to the land of our kingdom or live there. To the secular mind they represent the difficulty of life: work, sweat, pressure. To a spiritual people they represent the curse of living outside the garden of God—an opportunity to relearn that life was never intended to be our burden. Life is not a thing to be sought; it is the very nature and essence of God.

The grumbling of the people preceded God’s provision. They were untrained in the life of faith. The wilderness was God’s design to teach them that life comes from God and not from the meat pots of Egypt. The wilderness represented drought, famine, threats from enemies, and the inevitable social consequences of these pressures: disputes among the people.

Little did they understand that their suffering was a prerequisite for their spiritual formation:

And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
(Deuteronomy 8:3)

There is something important to note here. These are words from above given by God. As such, the wilderness lesson was both a preparation for and reinforcement of what happened at Sinai. Also, these words are alive and have the capacity to fill and satisfy. This promise of life correlates with the Law’s testimony about itself: You shall therefore keep My statutes and My judgments (mishpat), which if a man does, he shall live by them: I am the Lord. (Lev.18:5 NKJV)

But this is not all. This profound lesson, of a word from God that is alive and comes down to people to give them life, was but a shadow of its own fulfilment. As we read in John’s gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... In him was life, and the life was the light of men... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us… Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you... “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world… I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst… Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.“

Notice how this thread is interwoven into what is arguably the greatest teaching ever heard by human ears—one that introduces the New Testament and took place on a mountain:

Blesssed are those who hunger and thirst for justice (dikaiosynē—Greek equivalent of tsedeq), for they shall be satisfied… Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your justice exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven… Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things will be added to you.

John’s logos—the Word of Life in the flesh—appears on a mountain and speaks about the justice of the Law. But he does so with a difference. He speaks about the Law being fulfilled and accomplished in a way that will surpass the justice of Sinai’s most famous and obsessively devoted adherents—the scribes and Pharisees.

The prerequisite for receiving this justice is an appetite for it—a hungering and thirsting that will take precedence over the physical need to eat and drink. This redirection of the human “Gentile” appetite is framed in the mountain teaching as an exchange of earthly treasure for heavenly treasure, and earthly reward for heavenly reward.

To drive the point home, the teaching is preceded by a vivid illustration: Jesus enters the wilderness for 40 days, matching the years of Israel’s wandering. He willingly subjects himself to the hungering and thirsting that befell them, and faces the inevitable temptation that comes with the force of the human appetite. The serpent appears, as he did in Eden’s garden, and repeats the promise that life and fullness can be found in that which is dead. But unlike the first couple, Jesus refuses to subject the passion of his heart to the desires of his flesh. Instead, he quotes the words of Deuteronomy’s lesson:

Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

The teaching that follows is an exposition of these words. Jesus leaves the wilderness, ascends the mountain, and speaks about the justice of the Law. Sinai is reenacted, but with a difference. The one who speaks is not Moses but Christ. The words are not dead but alive. The event does not signify the beginning of the Law but the consummation of the Law; not because justice will be abolished but fulfilled.

The fulfilment of justice will take place when the appetites of the heart are redirected to that for which the heart was created.

That is the message, and it prepares us for Paul’s towering declaration—a declaration that unlocks the mystery of the gospel::

Love fulfills the Law.

Those words are not a departure from Sinai. They are Sinai’s destination.

What Justice Looks Like

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AI-generated illustration

In my previous post, I asked a simple question: Why justice? The answer is equally simple: Justice enables relationships. It is the principle of fairness that makes community possible. This is why we find justice (or perhaps we should say efforts at justice) wherever we find community.

In this post, I would like to ask another question: What does justice look like? What are its elements?

The elements of justice are remarkably consistent across communities. We can divide them into two main categories: preventative justice (sometimes called primary justice) and remedial justice (sometimes called rectifying justice).

Justice as prevention is like a STOP sign. Its aim is to deter any action that may bring harm to another: Do not steal, do not murder, do not tell lies about others, and so on.

Justice as remedy is like the clean-up operation after an accident. This happens when the STOP sign has been skipped: If you have stolen, this is how to fix it. If you have murdered… and so on.

Preventative justice aims to keep a relationship intact. Remedial justice aims to repair a broken relationship. Preventative justice says, “Do not steal your neighbour’s sheep.” Remedial justice says, “If you have stolen your neighbour’s sheep, you have to give them back.”

For remedial justice to work, it must restore what has been lost. Its compensation must be proportionate.  But there is a problem: If you steal a sheep from your neighbour, you take more than a sheep. You also take your neighbour’s peace of mind. He now goes to bed worried that more of his sheep may disappear in the middle of the night. He worries about feeding his family because his livelihood has suffered. His wife blames him for not securing the fences. He treats his farm workers with suspicion. By enriching yourself unjustly, you have brought misery to your neighbour and his family.

Proportionate compensation demands that the perpetrator repair all of this damage. He has to clean up the whole mess that he has caused. He has to return the sheep along with a compensation—a “penalty” that will compensate the distressed neighbour not only for his lost sheep but for all the trauma the theft has caused the family. Remedial justice-codes typically add a percentage on top of the compensation to ensure proportionality. Leviticus generally requires the return of stolen property together with an additional one-fifth (20 percent).

But what do you do if you no longer have the stolen goods—if, for instance, you have invited your friends over for a massive barbecue and the sheep is no more? According to Exodus, the penalty for slaughtered or sold sheep is four to one. This means you have to pay your neighbour an amount equal to the value of four sheep. The math is intended to restore your neighbour’s equilibrium to the same level it was before the break-in. Your penance must restore the neighbour’s peace, and the sign that this has been accomplished will ideally be his willingness to forgive you. (“Well, this turned out better than I expected. I am better off than before. I might as well forgive the miserable wretch who stole my stuff. He has demonstrated his remorse by his repentance and proven it by his restitution.”)

The problem is that sheep thieves are not exactly known for doing the above. They fail to discern justice, and so they do not stop or clean up. They hide. We will say more about the relationship between injustice and concealment later on. Let us note for now that a shortage of justice-discernment calls for another remedy altogether: someone to do the discernment on behalf of the one who cannot do it for themselves.

In justice-talk, the discernment of justice has a name: judgment. Judgment is the ability to perceive what justice requires, and it is a prerequisite for doing justice. Justice therefore consists of two inseparable movements: first discerning justice, and then doing what it demands. The one who judges well will be distinguished in a community from those who don’t, and called on to share their wisdom with those who lack judgment. More often than not, they end up in governing positions.

For instance, a dispute between people will reveal differing opinions on who is guilty of misconduct and who is not, calling for an arbiter who can judge the situation on their behalf. Situations of conflict typically stem from a difference in justice-discernment between two parties and end up in front of a judge—or, in some systems, a jury—who can do the discerning for them. We call that judgment a verdict, and it overrides the subjective sensibilities of the conflicting parties, the idea being that the judge or jury possesses powers of discernment that are superior to those of the conflicting parties. Thus, verdicts are binding on those who receive them.

Verdicts are not only issued as remedies to injustice. They can also be preventative. It makes sense that a judge may grow tired of constantly sentencing sheep thieves in a community to pay compensatory damage to their victims, and instead issue a law that forbids the stealing of sheep. Laws are codified judgments that pre-empt the necessity of perpetual clean-ups. They are the STOP signs in a community, and they are often informed by the messes that keep on occurring in that community.

Once we understand the above, the Old Testament makes a lot more sense. The book of Exodus tells the story of a community of people who had been liberated from a life in bondage to a foreign nation, and that included being subject to foreign laws. Once freed, they immediately acquired a new liberty: the right to start discerning justice for themselves instead of having it discerned for them by Pharaoh.

Three chapters after the crossing of the Red Sea, we find the people coming to Moses to be “judged” by him. (Remember our earlier point: community building starts with finding justice.) When Jethro asks Moses why he was sitting alone and all the people were standing around him from morning to evening, Moses answers: “Because the people come to me to inquire of God; when they have a dispute, they come to me and I decide between one person and another, and I make them know the statutes of God and his laws.” Jethro then advised Moses to appoint fellow judges to assist him—men who “fear God, are trustworthy and hate a bribe.”

The hatred of a bribe is an interesting but obvious qualification. It suggests that there is a peculiar temptation attached to the task of discerning justice on behalf of others, namely to siphon compensation away from the victim of injustice, appropriate it for oneself, and reward amnesty to the perpetrator in return. Isaiah would write much later, “Woe to those who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of his right.” If there is anything that a judge should know, then it is that penalties are incurred for the sake of restitution—setting things right with the wronged—not for the benefit of the judge. More about this later.

Interestingly, in the next chapter (Exodus 19) Moses and the people find themselves in the wilderness of Sinai. God then called Moses up the mountain and began revealing his judgments to Israel, beginning with the Ten Commandments. The discernment of justice reaches new heights, with God himself taking over as the supreme judge. Exodus 20 presents God’s preventative judgments and Exodus 21 and 22 a string of remedial and restitutionary judgments.

In Exodus 21:1 these statutes are called ha-mishpatim—”the judgments”—plural of mishpat, a majestic word that means judgment or verdict and is coupled with the Hebrew word tsedeq (meaning justice) regularly throughout the Old Testament. The reason for the close relationship between these two words is obvious: To do justice you first need to discern it.

More about this in posts to come.

Why Justice?

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Revien and I have just returned from a green Kansas City where we attended the Just Love conversations with my friend and co-author Wayne Jacobsen—a 4-day get-together of fellow travellers who had read the book and wanted to connect to others to discuss its ideas.

The interaction has been amazing. We have made new friends, shared life stories and great pizzas, considered serious questions, and discussed Biblical themes in depth. We’ve laughed together and some of us have shed a tear or two.

You can click here to listen to a podcast where Wayne and I discuss the meeting.

Just Love was released in early March, and it has been exciting to see how it is touching people’s lives. The past few months have provided an opportunity to assess the book’s impact and the varied responses to it, and to begin bringing that conversation into this space.

The main thesis of the book is simple: The word righteousness, as it is generally used and understood in the English-speaking world, does not appear in the original languages of the Bible. In the Greek world of the centuries before and after Christ, the word we translate as righteousness—dikaiosynē—meant justice.

The easiest way to see this is to look at English translations of classical Greek literature, such as Plato’s The Republic or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The same dik-stem words that run like a network of arteries throughout the Greek New Testament and Septuagint dominate much of the conversation in these works, yet many of them are translated into English without a single occurrence of the word righteousness. Overwhelmingly, it’s justice.

In the modern English mind, righteousness and justice do not mean the same thing, which is what Just Love is all about. This is not a casual observation, but a disturbing revelation that offers insight into why the lifestyle described in Matthew 5-7 (the Sermon on the Mount) and Luke 6:20-49 is oftentimes seen as an unattainable ideal reserved for the super-spiritual, or an interim ethic for the period between the Old Covenant and the Day of Pentecost.

I mean, seriously, who lives like that?

Righteousness or Justice?

Let’s pause for a moment and think about righteousness. What do you think when you hear this word?

Over the past decade, I have asked a lot of people this question. Their answers presented righteousness as a two-pronged fork: some hear it as moral rectitude or even religious piety; others as acquittal, forgiveness, or right standing before God. The relationship between these two ideas is understood in different ways. Some see the latter as God’s gracious answer to humanity’s inability to achieve the former. Others see it as the empowerment that enables believers to begin living the kind of life demanded by the former. Still others place obedience first, viewing it as the path that leads to God’s acceptance.

The word justice shifts the focus away from the above. Rather than a moral ideal or salvific status, justice suggests a relational reality. This is how the ancients understood it. As Aristotle argues in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics, justice is the “complete virtue” because it is virtue exercised toward others. 

The implication is clear: For justice to be, you need an other. You can practice righteousness on a desert island, but not justice. Righteousness is associated with inward states and divine status; justice is concerned with the way you treat your neighbour.

This explains why justice is employed as a tool to order human relations. The relationship between justice and political order has been a central concern of human societies across time. In The Republic, Plato frames the question of the ideal state in terms of justice, treating it as the organising principle of both the individual and the polis. Justice, in this framework, is not an abstract ideal detached from lived reality but the condition that makes ordered communal life possible. 

This focus predates Plato by many centuries. One of the oldest legal codes known to humanity is a seven-and-a-half feet tall, charcoal-coloured, finger-shaped stone pillar (called a stele) unearthed in 1901 in Susa, Iran. Known to us as The Code of Hammurabi, it was penned by its name bearer in 1754 BC and is ancient Babylon’s version of The Republic. Hammurabi, the sixth Amorite king of the Old Babylonian Empire, claimed to have received his code and its 282 laws directly from Shamash, the Babylonian god of… you guessed it, justice. 

Hammurabi’s code was perceive to be grounded in divine authority. It reflects a worldview in which justice is not merely a human construct but a transcendent standard to be mediated through legal structures. Its provisions, which regulate matters ranging from property disputes to bodily harm, illustrate a consistent concern with proportionality, restitution, and social order—features that remain central to modern legal systems.

One of the reasons why Hammurabi’s code has attracted so much attention is that its content is remarkably similar to the laws of the Old Testament. (Law #196 reads, “If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.”) This has led some to suggest that the Israelites must have copied their laws from the Babylonians during the time of their exile, but that is to miss the point entirely. The similarity springs from a causality underlying both the Babylonian and Hebraic legal codes: the theme of justice—the very theme that dominates Plato’s Republic.

As Paul reminded the Romans, God has written his laws of justice on the hearts of the gentiles. The way they codify this universal inner consciousness is of lesser concern than the fact that their codes testify to a profound principle: Anyone who wishes to live peacefully with a neighbour must first bow to the call of justice in their hearts.

Across these traditions, a consistent pattern emerges: the establishment of a just society depends on the articulation and enforcement of just laws. Law, in this sense, functions as a formalised expression of justice, translating normative principles into enforceable rules.

Think about this. Societies do not create laws for the sake of righteousness; they do it for the sake of justice. A Department of Righteousness sounds like something one would encounter in an Orwellian novel. The connection between justice and law is obvious. To speak of governance is to speak of the institutionalisation of justice.

This structure is just as obvious in contemporary constitutional frameworks. Modern states typically distinguish between legislative, executive, and judicial functions, each of which plays a role in the realisation of justice. Legislative bodies formulate laws, executive authorities implement them, and judicial institutions interpret and apply them to concrete cases. While the terminology and institutional forms vary across jurisdictions, the underlying logic is consistent: law exists to secure justice, and the legitimacy of political authority is measured by its capacity to do so. It is no coincidence that 27 of the 45 US presidents were lawyers.

The relational character of justice is critical to the conversation I would like to have in these pages. Justice is not merely a personal attribute or moral disposition; it is a principle that structures interactions between people. It presupposes a community within which claims can be made, obligations recognised, and disputes resolved. For this reason, justice cannot be reduced to private virtue. It is intrinsically public, concerned with the ordering of relationships in a way that secures fairness, reciprocity, and social cohesion.

The historical record reinforces this understanding. From ancient Mesopotamia to classical Greece, from Roman law to modern constitutional democracies, the development of legal systems has been driven by the need to regulate human interactions in accordance with perceived standards of justice. These systems differ in their sources of authority—divine command, philosophical reasoning, popular sovereignty—but they converge on a shared premise: that a stable and flourishing society requires a framework within which justice can be articulated, administered, and enforced.

With this in mind, the towering presence of justice (tsedeq), judgment (mishpat), and Law (Torah) throughout the Old Testament makes perfect sense. Together they provide the framework for the establishment and ordering of God’s kingdom in ancient Israel.

Yet the Law and the Prophets, whose purpose was to establish justice and judgment in Israel, testify to a reality that is strikingly absent from the historic legal codes of the nations: the limitations of legal expressions of justice to bring about the relational reality God intended for his people.

Think about it. What ruler, if he were in his right mind, would issue a royal decree to order relationships throughout his kingdom, only to conclude by lamenting that the decree itself was incapable of producing the very thing it was designed to establish? That would be to undermine the entire project.

Yet this is precisely how the Old Testament is structured. Its message is unmistakable: legal systems can regulate what people do, but not what they desire. A person may conform to the requirements of the law while remaining inwardly disposed toward injustice. Legislation cannot reach the heart or redirect its loves.

Every civilisation recognised that justice requires law. Israel alone insisted that law is not enough. The Law and the Prophets therefore carry justice further than the nations ever imagined. They present their own legal code not as an end in itself, but as a shadow bearing witness to its own fulfilment.

We’ll explore that fulfilment in the posts to come.

A New Direction

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In my previous post, I referred to a monumental theological paradigm shift that I had undergone some years ago. I also mentioned that I had never felt the unction to speak about it on this blog.

The main reason is that I have been working through the massive implications of it all.

Added to this, as one gets older, your desire to throw the cat amongst the pigeons diminishes. You lose the taste for the dramatic and sensational. Your appreciation for the greater gifts of God escalates—relationships, nature, prayer, contemplation, simplicity, solitude, books that focus on what God has done rather than what we should do, and so on.

The point is that I have little appetite for controversy and certainly no desire to stir it up. Schopenhauer is often credited with saying, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” I do not mind ridicule. But violent opposition demands clarification—and clarification often hardens resistance, spiralling into verbal conflict that accomplishes nothing and ruins the hearers.

I read the other day that Keanu Reeves says he’s reached a stage in his life where he’s avoiding arguments, so “even if you say 1+1=5, you’re absolutely correct. Enjoy!”

“Yay,” I said, “I’m going to do exactly that.”

“No, you’re not,” a little voice whispered within.

I sighed and thanked the Lord. An aversion to theological quarrels does not mean compromising the truth; it means “speaking the truth in love”.

That’s the word I’ve been thinking about.

Love.

The more I thought about it, the more there was to think about. My shift turned out to be more of a continental drift than a hopscotch jump. Ultimately, it took me to a place where I could no longer use the exegetical and hermeneutical tools that I had been handed at seminary for unlocking the mysteries of God and his universe. The theological form I had inherited was inadequate for capturing or conveying what I was beginning to see.

During this period, two words began to play on my mind.

Parable.

Community.

The Power of Parable

I was reminded of Neil Postman’s analogy, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, of two Native Americans communicating via smoke signals, but finding it impossible to discuss deep philosophy this way. The form excludes the content, Postman said.

Postman was a disciple of Marshall McLuhan, the legendary Canadian philosopher who coined the adage, the medium is the message. According to McLuhan, the form of a medium of communication (television, technology, newspaper, pulpit) embeds itself in the content it carries and creates a structural influence that shapes perception more than the content itself.

Why is this relevant? Because it illustrates the futility of thinking and speaking about love outside the relational dynamic that is love. To do so is not to propagate love; it is to obscure it. Cognition alone is a poor wavelength for transmitting the language of love.

Parable makes it possible to circumvent those limitations. It makes dead words alive by subjecting them to stories of living people. Parable is incarnational. It can do more than speak about love; it can show it. And so, instead of writing about love, I wrote a story of a man who found love, a novel titled The Sinai Code.

In Community, for Community

But I did something else: I figured that if love must be embodied to be spoken truthfully, then it must also be explored and shared that way.

In community, for community.

And so, I reached out and shared my findings with a brother in the Lord, Wayne Jacobsen, whose writings had been resonating with my understanding of God’s love for a long time. Wayne is best known for his book He Loves Me!

This was his response:

One day, I received a fascinating email from South Africa. I had no idea who Tobie van der Westhuizen was or why he wanted to share with me a discovery he had been exploring for eight years. He wanted to know if his conclusions resonated with me. Did they ever! But it did take us some time to get there. His initial statement made me wonder if he was yet another kooky amateur theologian with some half-baked theological novelty. Tobie’s initial email cut right to the chase: “The word righteousness is not in the Bible.”

That email led to a friendship and, eventually, to our writing a book together, Just Love. These words, taken from the Dedication, say it all:

Whoever reads this book will soon realize it could not have been written by either of us alone. It is the shared witness of two lives that followed Christ on different continents for nearly a century between them. It reminds us that true community reaches beyond the limits of one mind or one lifetime. In these pages, two worlds merge—the world of reflection and the world of lived experience—and that meeting is no accident. Words are meant to become flesh.

If you are wondering about my kooky statement, “The word righteousness is not in the Bible”, you’ll have to buy the book 🙂 It will be available on Amazon.com within a few days. The official publication date is March 3.

A New Direction

The implications of the basic idea set forth in Just Love are far-reaching and call for further exploration and much reflection. For the past sixteen years, I have written on this blog about the Christian life and the organic nature of God’s church. I still intend to do so, but the focus will be different. In future, I will be exploring these and other issues in light of the discoveries that have changed my life beyond anything I could have imagined a decade ago—discoveries documented in Just Love.

As you may have noticed, the name of the blog has changed from naturalchurch to Justice of God. Stick around, and you will soon find out why.

Just love,

Tobie

When Your Aim Is Wrong

Tobie12 Comments

The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart. 1 Timothy 1:5

Is it just me, or have we all been duped?

Eight years ago, I stumbled onto something that made me question my entire so-called “Protestant heritage”. I am not quite ready to venture into that story here (I have been re-reading and re-highlighting my Bible since then, like an infant who has discovered a new toy, and I’m still stuck in the novelty of it all), but one thing I can share is the experience of being a Christian outside the warm fuzziness of a global identity with its own superheroes and folktales of historical conquests. These conquests, so the stories go, have kept the household of God firmly from sliding into the hellish cauldron of heresy that is the unfortunate and inevitable fate of those who dare set foot outside the community walls – walls carefully and lovingly constructed by the family fathers and ideological forebears whose insights are the lights of the city behind them.

It’s a rather desolate (albeit breathtaking) landscape out here, I must admit, and the journey is solitary at times. Most pilgrims who have walked these roads have disappeared through other doors. Doors with their own walls. Walls enclosing their own communities. Communities circulating their own folktales. Folktales with their own heroes. Heroes carrying their own lights.

But there are pleasant surprises here. Whilst the paths of this landscape are narrow, they are void of the abominable heresies warned against behind those walls. The pitfalls are plentiful, that is true, but you will steer clear of them as long as you remain on the trails.

Also, the pilgrims one encounters here are remarkably easy to communicate with, as if the exquisite nature of this place has brought them to a blissful state of rest that has banished all need for religious propaganda or its insignia. Conversations are not umpired by ecclesiastical allegiances, credal checkboxes or big-name dropping.

All of this has made me think of something: What if we have misunderstood sin?

Yes, we have heard ad nauseam that sin is to “miss the mark”. But which mark? What if we, in our neurotic efforts to hit the mark and escape the fires of hell, have been aiming at the wrong target?

What if, and this is going to sound crazy, we find ourselves one day arriving at another door – one leading to the wedding feast of the Lamb – with a smile of expectancy on our faces and a lifetime of testimonies of hitting the bullseye again and again and again, only to hear a single sentence uttered by the guardian of that door:

“You have not loved adequately.”

“Huh? What the flowers? What’s love got to do with it?”

“Everything.”

“I’m sorry. I am justified by grace through faith.”

“You have not loved adequately.”

“Wait, this is annoying. I am saved by grace. I am a Protestant!”

“A what?”

“A Protestant! I protest against a works-based gospel!”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Because works cannot save you. Ephesians 2, verses 8 and 9: ‘For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast!'”

“Have you read verse 10?”

“Verse 10?”

“Yes. ‘For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.'”

“Oh.”

“If you wanted to spend your life protesting, you should have protested against a works-free gospel, not a works-based gospel. Have you not read James?”

“I am a follower of Luther, and Luther did not like James. He called it a straw letter, because it suggests that we have to do works to be saved.”

“Luther was wrong. He missed the meaning of James’ letter.”

“Which is?”

“You have not loved adequately.”

“Oh no, here we go again. Are we speaking about the same James, the one who sounds like a legalist?”

“A what?”

“A legalist.”

“What is that?”

“One who keeps the law to get saved.”

“The James I speak about did not do that. He got saved to keep the law.”

“Ah. You see! He’s a legalist. Whether he kept the law to get saved or got saved to keep the law, he was still under the law. In any case, what has keeping the law got to do with loving adequately?”

“Everything.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, you don’t. James does not abolish the law. He speaks about the law in its fulfilled state. That is why he calls it the perfect law, the law of liberty, and the royal law, namely to love your neighbour as yourself. Breaking this law means your religion is worthless and your faith is no different from the faith of demons. The works James refers to are works of love.”

“Uhm, can’t we rather speak about Paul and his message of grace?”

“We can. Where would you like to start?”

“Romans, please.”

“Do you think Romans differ from James?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Yet Romans’ main point is exactly the same as James’.”

“No!”

“Yes. You have not loved adequately.”

“Where does it say that?”

“All over, but especially in Chapter 13. The entire law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” which means the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. Romans’ charge that we are all lawbreakers is just another way of saying we have not loved adequately. To be freed from sin in Romans is to be freed from the inability to love. To not love is to remain in sin.”

“Let’s rather go to Corinthians.”

“Sure. That’s where we read that even if I have all faith and have not love, I am nothing. Correct?”

“Let’s skip Corinthians and go to Galatians.”

“Ah, the calling to freedom in order to serve one another through love and so fulfill the whole law as expressed through a single word: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

“Uhm… Ephesians?”

“The letter that links Christ dwelling in our hearts through faith with being rooted and grounded in love?”

“Let’s forget about James and Paul and rather go to Jesus. He was all about grace and acceptance, wasn’t he?”

“The gospels? Would you like to start with Matthew, where we read that the Law and the Prophets can be summarised in the command to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and that those who did not do this will be called lawless and told to depart from Christ even if they prophesied and drove out demons and did many mighty works in his name? They did not love adequately, you see. Or should we start with the separation of the sheep and the goats on the Day of Judgment, where we see that the sheep are distinguished from the goats by their care for the hungry, the naked, the sick and those in prison? The goats… they did not love adequately. What about Jesus saying that all the Law and the Prophets hang on the two commandments to love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and your neighbour as yourself? Or perhaps you want to go to Mark, where we read that to love one’s neighbour as oneself is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices? Or Luke, who spoke about a Samaritan who understood the aim of the law better than a priest and Levite combined. He loved adequately, they did not. Or John, where Jesus introduced a new commandment to his disciples, namely to love one another as he has loved them. Maybe Acts, where Jesus is quoted as having said it is more blessed to give than to receive?”

“Stop, please. I thought people get saved by grace.”

“They do, but grace that does not enter your heart and flow from it as love is grace that cannot save. You shall know true grace by its fruit, and its fruit is works of love. If grace is powerless to transform you, it is powerless to save you from death. Inadequate love simply means never having been saved to begin with.”

“Why did no one tell me this?”

“Where you come from, they spoke so much about the forgiveness of sins that they had no time left to speak about what sin really is. They hit the mark, but the target… I’m sorry. It was the wrong one.”

Romans 7 and the Tenth Commandment

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Romans 7 has been the subject of huge debates throughout church history. In the process, some have been led to believe that their best hope of living a triumphant Christian life is to match the alleged experience of the defeated Paul who says in the chapter, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

I am currently presenting a Romans: The Big Picture course here in an icy Bloemfontein, and I thought I’ll post last week’s session as it deals with this topic. I believe that the key to unlocking Romans 7 lies in the tenth commandment of Exodus 20. That is what the video is alll about.

Sonship and Being

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The seed of the serpent can be recognised by one primary motive: it convinces the individual that his or her primary calling is to become somebody.

“Self Made Man,” Bobbie Carlyle, bobbiecarlylesculpture.com

This creation of an imagined being is the essence of idolatry. Those who are under the power of Satan is characterised by a supreme trait: the pursuit of becoming, what we usually refer to when we speak of self-actualisation or self-authentication.

This should not be difficult to understand. Once we assume the position of creator, we are instinctively driven to create a self.

We were never called to do this. To be created by God is to be called towards the acceptance of an identity, not an effort to construe it. This dream of becoming is a demonic deception and prohibits us from being. To be a son* does not happen as a result of the effort of the will, having been taught the characteristics of a son, striving to live up to the identity of a son, or any such thing. It is a reality that can only be attained to through a process of birth that is initiated by another.

This is where we go wrong. Our lack of a sense of self forces us to compensate by creating an ideal self in our imagination. This we do by borrowing from those who seem to have succeeded in their construction of a self. Our neighbour seems more concrete than ourselves, more actualised, more authenticated, and so we imitate our neighbour in the hope of becoming the self that we perceive the neighbour to be. This is where the prohibited motivation to desire the possessions, indeed the very life of the neighbour, arises.

The creation of a self is not a responsibility given to a son. The son’s responsibility is to obey the father, and to do so according to the sovereign timing of the father. The son should not try and improve on the father’s wishes and resist the father’s will by trying to construe a will that seems better for him. Neither should the son resist the will of the father because the father’s will seems too hard, too difficult or too unattainable. The son’s responsibility is to trust the father’s wisdom and initiative, and to yield to it on an ongoing basis. The son is not called to suppose or imagine what the ideal son looks like, and then separate himself from the father’s instruction in order to be free to pursue the goal of ideal sonship. The moment he does so he is acting contrary to his very identity as a son.

The deception in the garden took place because the serpent convinced the first son and the first daughter of God to pursue an identity independent from that of the one birthed from their father. The serpent succeeded in providing an image that was different to the one that God the Father had in mind. Surely Adam and Eve thought that the attainment of the image-ideal would be of such a nature that it would be acceptable even to God. In this sense the desire for self-authentication was so strong, and the anticipation thereof so clear, that it proved a greater reality than the prospect of death.

The greatest hindrance to effective Christian living is the demonic idea of creating a self. Unwittingly, multitudes of professed believers have borrowed this pagan ideal from those who do not know God as a father. We have adopted their idolatrous practices. We have followed in their footsteps. This we have done, not in a carnal sense but a religious one.

We have assumed, mistakenly, that conversion means to no longer pursue the creation of a carnal self but rather the creation of a spiritual self.

And so, we have juxtaposed carnality and spirituality at the wrong side of the equation. What we should have done is to draw a contrast, not between carnality and spirituality as the goal of our self-authentication, but rather between the acts of creating a self and accepting a self as it was originally created.

How does this work in practice?

The Christian begins his life confronted with the image of the ideal Christian. This image is proclaimed in books, from pulpits, by his spiritual peers and virtually everywhere that one goes in the Christian world. Unwittingly, the Christian is drawn into that place of comparison that happens when you view the ideal proclaimed by Christendom in the light of your own progress or lack thereof. The contrast between the ideal and the present self is undeniable, and the emotions evoked as a result of the inevitable comparison is compensated for by a virtuous and solemn dedication to commit oneself to whatever process is necessary to become like the image.

This is where Satan is more like an angel of light than anywhere else. Because the projected image of spirituality is so glorious and radiant in its appearance, and so unlike anything that comes from the realm of darkness, the Christian does not think for one moment that he/she is in fact beholding the image of Satan himself.

What we learn from this is that the devil’s primary objective in the life of an individual is not to dissuade that individual from pursuing a Christian ideal, as we are often taught to think. Rather, it is to convince the Christian that he or she is responsible for the crafting and sculpting of their own Christian identity.

Satan has little interest in what you create. His only interest is to turn you into a creator.

The fallacy that God has called us to change springs from this demonic deception. Nowhere in Scripture are we called to try and change ourselves, as though this is the great aim and goal of Christianity. What Scripture teaches is that we should live by faith in the work of God that no man can emulate. This is clearly depicted in the example of Abraham who understood that he did not have the ability to create life as a result of his body being as good as dead. Abraham had to look away from himself and to God. He had to trust God. He had to understand that God could call those things that are not as though they were. And, very importantly, he had to understand that he himself could do none of that.

This is what faith is all about. It is to look away from the self and to look towards God, the Creator. The object of faith is God himself, not some or other object created by the imagination, invisible to the naked eye, waiting for us to call it into existence in the way that God called the earth into existence. The error of modern-day faith is that it turns us into co-creators with God, instead of children believing on the finished, completed and perfect work of the Father.

Where does that leave the Christian, then? If I am not allowed to entertain an image of an idealised Christian self, then what am I left with?

The answer is simple: the glorious image of Jesus Christ, the perfect son of the Father who has accomplished everything necessary for sonship.

I am to behold Christ, not an imagined self created by my own desires.

The book of Hebrews depicts the Christian walk as a wilderness pilgrimage with the eyes focused on Jesus Christ, and reveals this as the substance of faith. Herein we are joined by all the faith heroes of the past. These men and women were looking for a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Their vision was in Christ and a future, heavenly inheritance. Their vision was never on some or other improved version of the self, not even a godly self.

The Bible makes it clear that we are given provision only for the day during our wilderness wanderings. This excludes any focus on a long-term project of self-improvement, no matter how sanctimonious such a project may be. Our calling is one of obedience for the day, nothing more.

The moment we envisage more than a mere day, we shall intuitively become aware of the fact that our provisions are not sufficient for our intended journey.

This explains the prevalence of spiritual anxiety amongst God’s children in our age. Inundated with sermons on self-improvement and adaptation to some or other Christian ideal, we are constantly reminded that our rations are insufficient for our pilgrimage.

*It goes without saying that the term sonship includes sons and daughters, and is used because it appears so in Scripture.

The Social Forces of Denominationalism

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by H. Richard Niebuhr

Christendom has often achieved apparent success by ignoring the precepts of its founder.

The church, as an organization interested in self-preservation and in the gain of power, has sometimes found the counsel of the Cross quite as inexpedient as have national and economic groups.

In dealing with such major social evils as war, slavery, and social inequality, it has discovered convenient ambiguities in the letter of the Gospels which enabled it to violate their spirit and to ally itself with the prestige and power those evils had gained in their corporate organization.

In adapting itself to the conditions of a civilization which its founder had bidden it to permeate with the spirit of divine love, it found that it was easier to give to Caesar the things belonging to Caesar if the examination of what might belong to God were not too closely pressed.

This proneness toward compromise which characterizes the whole history of the church, is no more difficult to understand than is the similar and inevitable tendency by which each individual Christian adapts the demands of the gospel to the necessity of existence in the body and in civilized society.

It has often been pointed out that no ideal can be incorporated without the loss of some of its ideal character. When liberty gains a constitution, liberty is compromised; when fraternity elects officers, fraternity yields some of the ideal qualities of brotherhood to the necessities of government. And the gospel of Christ is especially subject to this sacrifice of character in the interest of organic embodiment; for the very essence of Christianity lies in the tension which it presupposes or creates between the worlds of nature and of spirit, and in its resolution of that conflict by means of justifying faith.

It demands the impossible in conduct and belief; it runs counter to the instinctive life of man and exalts the rationality of the irrational; in a world of relativity it calls for unyielding loyalty to unchangeable absolutes.

Clothe its faith in terms of philosophy, whether medieval or modern, and you lose the meaning of its high desires, of its living experience, reducing these to a set of opinions often irrelevant, sometimes contrary, to the original content.

Organize its ethics – as organize them you must whenever two or three are gathered in tlie name of Christ – and the free spirit of forgiving love becomes a new law, requiring interpretation, commentary, and all the machinery of justice – just the sort of impersonal relationship which the gospel denies and combats. 

Place this society in the world, demanding that it be not of the world, and strenuous as may be its efforts to transcend or to sublimate the mundane life, it will yet be unable to escape all taint of conspiracy and connivance with the worldly interests it despises.

Yet, on the other hand, Christian ethics will not permit a world-fleeing asceticism which seeks purity at the cost of service.

At the end, if not at the beginning, of every effort to incorporate Christianity there is, therefore, a compromise, and the Christian cannot escape the necessity of seeking the last source of righteousness outside himself and the world in the divine aggression, in a justification that is by faith.

The fact that compromise is inevitable does not make it less an evil. The fault of every concession, of course, is that it is made too soon, before the ultimate resistance “to the blood’’ has been offered. Even where resistance seems to have gone to the uttermost the loyal man remembers that it might have been begun earlier, that it might have been continued a little longer, and that any compromise of the absolute good remains an evil. At last men must continue to condemn themselves not only for their failure to do what they could, but also for their failure to perform what they could not, for their denial of the absolute good whose categorical demands were laid upon their incapable will.

But compromises are doubly evil when they are unacknowledged, when the emasculation of the Christian ideal remains undiscovered and when, in consequence, men take pride, as in an achievement, in a defeat of the essential gospel.

Such unconscious hypocrisy not only bars the way to continued efforts to penetrate the stubborn stuff of life with the ethics of Jesus but is the author of further compromises made all too early. So it produces at last a spurious gospel unaware of its departure from the faith once delivered to the saints.

Denominationalism in the Christian church is such an unacknowledged hypocrisy. It is a compromise, made far too lightly, between Christianity and the world. Yet it often regards itself as a Christian achievement and glorifies its martyrs as bearers of the Cross.

It represents the accommodation of Christianity to the caste-system of human society. It carries over into the organization of the Christian principle of brotherhood the prides and prejudices, the privilege and prestige, as well as the humiliations and abasements, the injustices and inequalities of that specious order of high and low wherein men find the satisfaction of their craving for vainglory.

The division of the churches closely follows the division of men into the castes of national, racial, and economic groups. It draws the color line in the church of God; it fosters the misunderstandings, the self- exaltations, the hatreds of jingoistic nationalism by continuing in the body of Christ the spurious differences of provincial loyalties; it seats the rich and poor apart at the table of the Lord, where the fortunate may enjoy the bounty they have provided while the others feed upon the crusts their poverty affords.

For the denominations, churches, sects, are sociological groups whose principle of differentiation is to be sought in their conformity to the order of social classes and castes. It would not be true to affirm that the denominations are not religious groups with religious purposes, but it is true that they represent the accommodation of religion to the caste system.

They are emblems, therefore, of the victory of the world over the church, of the secularization of Christianity, of the church’s sanction of that divisiveness which the church’s gospel condemns.

Denominationalism thus represents the moral failure of Christianity. And unless the ethics of brotherhood can gain the victory over this divisiveness within the body of Christ it is useless to expect it to be victorious in the world. But before the church can hope to overcome its fatal division it must learn to recognize and to acknowledge the secular character of its denominationalism.

The Humility of the Apprentice: A Repost

Tobie8 Comments
Learner

This morning I meditated on the magnificent words of Isaiah 66:2:

But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.

I was taken back to thoughts that I penned down eight years ago on this blog…

What do you think of when you hear the word “disciple”?

If you are like most people the word will conjure up an ideal standard of Christian commitment. There are normal Christians, and then there are… disciples.

The conventional wisdom goes something like this: A disciple is one who has distinguished him or herself as wholly dedicated to the Lord. To become a disciple is the goal of Christianity, and discipleship is the means to get people there. We need to make disciples, not just converts. Once a person has attained to the status of a disciple he or she has fulfilled the intention of the great commission. A disciple is distinguished from a mere believer as the finished house is distinguished from its blueprint.

Does some of this sound familiar? Are you more or less in agreement with these statements? If so, you may have missed one of the central and most vital messages of the New Testament. By giving some special status to the term “disciple” you may very well have robbed yourself of the very thing that is intended by the word.

In the first place, the word has absolutely nothing to do with attaining to some spiritual level. Whilst it may have overtones of commitment and discipline (many people erroneously believe that the word disciple is a derivative of the word “discipline”), these have more to do with the actual meaning we have assigned to the word than the word itself.

The word disciple is a classic example of the confusion that arises when a Biblical word is not translated but transliterated, that is, the transcription of a word in one language into corresponding letters of another language without regard to the original meaning.

Disciple is a transliteration of the Latin “discipulus” which carries the same meaning as the Greek New Testament’s “Mathetes”, namely a “learner”, “student,” “pupil,” “apprentice,” or “adherent”. Of course none of these meanings are retained in the English word disciple.

Let us consider the implication of this for a moment. Don’t you think there is something slightly weird about a commandment to “go and make learners of all nations”? This would imply that people in a pre-evangelised state are not learners, and that the intention behind the so-called “Great Commission” is to turn them into ones.

But wait, it gets weirder. This would also imply that to become a disciple is not to live up to some level of commitment, but to be reduced to the level of one who needs guidance. It is to let go of preconceived notions and to open oneself up for receiving new information. To become a disciple is not to reach the end of the road, but to be placed at the beginning of it. It is not a destination, but a point of departure. It is not an accomplishment, but an emptying.

The Call to Learn

None of this should be surprising. The New Testament overflows with verses speaking about the necessity of learning:

• Repentance (metanoia in Greek, from meta and nous) means a “changing of the mind”.
• The transformation that follows repentance takes place through a “renewing of the mind” (Rom.12: 2).
• Spiritual warfare, according to Paul, has to do with breaking down strongholds, and such strongholds are defined as “arguments and opinions raised against the knowledge of God”. Paul further defines spiritual warfare as “taking thoughts captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4-5).
• In the same passage mentioned above, Satan is depicted as the one who leads people’s thoughts astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ (11:2) and who “blinds the minds of unbelievers” (2 Cor. 4:4).
• The New Testament depicts unbelievers as having been given up to a “debased mind” (Rom.1: 28), as walking “in the futility of their minds” and as being “darkened in their understanding” (Eph. 4:18).

This explains why Christianity is a lifelong process of learning. The subject matter, of course, is nothing but Christ himself, in whom “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge”, providing the rich resource for reaching the “riches of full assurance and understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery” (Col. 2:2-3). We are “taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus” (Eph. 4:21). In fact, he IS the truth, John says (John 14:6), explaining his earlier statement that “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17).

The incarnation of the Word is the objective dynamic in this equation. The process of “learning” is the subjective dynamic. The one cannot exist without the other.

And so Jesus says “learn from me” (Matt. 11:29), and Paul says “you have not so learned Christ” (Eph. 4:20). Jesus Christ is our curriculum, and he has preserved the revelation of Himself in the Scriptures outside of us, his Spirit within us and his Body around us. And so we have no excuse not to “learn him”.

If you were given the knowledge above and then the assignment to formulate a “great commission” for the church (without any preconceived ideas) you may very well have written it exactly as it appears in Matthew’s gospel. Clearly the first step on the narrow road leading to life is to become a “learner”. This is no accomplishment or badge of distinction, but rather a painful and humbling “letting go” of personal convictions, opinions, paradigms and the like.

It is to embrace the poverty of spirit prescribed in the first line of the Sermon on the Mount. It is to aspire to the education of Christ, and to say with him “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me” (John 17:16). It is to stop being Martha and to become Mary. It is to sit at the feet of Jesus and receive from him.

If you have not first become a learner you cannot progress any further on the path of liberation from your own dearly held convictions that have put your thought life into bondage, that determine your emotions and ultimately dictate your actions.