Monday, September 5, 2016
512 - Selling Salvation
Spirituality Column No. 512
September 6, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
September 6, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Selling Salvation
By Bob Walters
“For
the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are
eternal.” – 2 Corinthian 4:18
Everyone wants to define God in
understandable terms.
In plain English, please.
That today’s Bible is translated
from ancient languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, various dialects, etc.)
muddles the “plain English” demands of folks who “just don’t get” the Bible,
Jesus, sacrifice, salvation, God’s perfect plan or the Holy Spirit’s indwelling
in our lives.
For these loving matters of eternal
weight, secular culture craves light explanations that remove gray areas,
doubts and rebuttals. They have to see
it to believe it. Therefore folks lament
that they can’t see God, never met Jesus and assign unholy properties to the Holy
Spirit. They find the Bible confusing,
divine grace untrustworthy and faith a non-provable mental exercise.
As for God’s gift of grace and
salvation through Jesus Christ, there are folks who “get it” (meaning they see
the unseen), folks who want to get it but don’t, folks who don’t care, and
folks who care deeply to prove it all untrue.
Satan himself is in that fourth group, is demonstrably successful among
the last two, impedes the last three, and messes with all four. Popular culture, “the world,” largely looks
at Jesus and receives Him not (John
1:11). So we believers scramble to come
up with explanations in worldly terms that provide “visible” – meaning “familiar”
– reasons for faith.
Marketing – buying and selling – is
a common cultural construct so we’ll say “Jesus died to pay for our sins.” Sin is bad, and if we do something bad, we
have to pay for it. But in divine terms,
if Jesus is part of the Trinity, never did anything bad, and is fully God as
well as fully man, then on the cross who was paid, why, and with what?
God
(Jesus) paid God (the Father) for our (humanity’s) sins by killing Himself?
The marketing argument fails. People pay for stuff all the time, so do we understand
salvation as a transaction; something to be bought?
Obviously, this isn’t like the world
means “bought.” Salvation – restoring
our relationship with God – is given and received by the divine grace of Jesus
Christ, something I can’t see, explain, or buy.
I just have to trust Jesus that it is there.
How do I know? I just know.
That’s the truth. Grace is the
unseen answer.
Yes, the Bible uses marketing
metaphors: “bought with the blood,” “purchased at a price,” etc. But it’s not like paying the cable bill or
buying groceries. Jesus died to defeat
sin’s penalty of death; He arose to open a priceless door, our door, to heaven.
Desperate as we are to glorify
Jesus, plain English fails. It is His
word deep in our hearts, not on the tips of our tongues, that saves us. And it’s not for sale.
0 comments:
Post a Comment