October 26, 2011
Blameless
I think we all understand that when the Lord returns we will be held
accountable for our heart and soul, but I was a little uneasy to read Paul’s
thoughts on also being accountable for my body. I mean really. I’ve been
looking forward to dumping this ageing body with its additional pounds and I
fully expected to stand before the Lord as a heavenly new creation. Now I’m wondering
what kind of a diet I have to go on to keep my body blameless. “May God himself,
the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul
and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
(1 Thess 5:23 NIV)
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Gail;
-----Understanding the Bible is like sweeping the floor. Everything you know has to be swept into one pile before you can pick up. Consider blameless, then. What chance do any of us have of keeping ourselves blameless? In its concrete sense, to keep yourself blameless means you must actually sin no more. I speak in the actual sense of sin, hamartia, to miss the mark, to shoot an arrow at a target and miss the bulls-eye, to score high rather than dead-right-on, to make any minor mistake at all, no matter how insignificant. God doesn’t deal in degrees when preserving His heaven from sin. Any failure, fallacy, or slightest scratch or dent is imperfection. With God there is either imperfection or perfection, but not both. So, to be blameless you must be perfect. And you simply aren‘t going to do that until after you die.
-----Yet, Jesus said, “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Mat 5:48) So, what gives here? Two things. First, the other sense of perfect, blameless, and sinless we are. It is the abstract sense. Concretely, that is actually, we are not. But we don’t want to be imperfect, blameworthy, and sinful. We loathe it, and if we could we would go vomit it out of us. Moreover, the longer we live trying to do right and be good, the more we goof up and bumble. Then the more yet we loathe it. That is good, but still insufficient. When our loathing of it causes our cry out to God for the whole blooming matter to be fixed, then our desire has combined with our will to make that only effective action we can to actually perfect ourselves. Granted beyond this call on Christ for salvation is the struggle towards ever better obedience. But the struggle itself will never perfect us; it will only verify that our call on Christ is real. So, in that abstract sense, we have done the only thing we can do perfectly, call on Christ for help.
-----The second thing that gives is that we actually are perfected in Christ. It isn’t our immediate behavior or our temporal characters that are perfected, but it is God’s perception of them. When He looks at us He doesn’t see us missing the mark, which we still do very much; He sees us desiring to not miss the mark and depending on Christ to make our desires work that way on the Day such things will really count. So, even though we must actively desire and call, the actual working of the righteousness and keeping of us is a passive thing to us.
-----It is much less our role to keep our spirits, souls, and bodies blameless than it is His role to keep them blameless. That isn’t to say we are excused from living towards being blameless. If we excused ourselves from that we would be excusing ourselves from desiring blamelessness. Therefore we are blameless in that we press on in that direction, and He keeps us blameless actually. That is why Paul said, “...be kept blameless at the coming...”
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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