Some people can’t acknowledge
that their loved one had no relationship with Jesus and they rationalize the
person is still heaven bound simply because they were a good person. They hold
on to the hope that good deeds and righteous acts are more important than
obedience. The word of the Lord came to Ezekiel about the house of Israel, “Therefore,
son of man, say to your countrymen, ‘The righteousness of the righteous man will
not save him when he disobeys…If I tell the righteous man that he will surely
live, but then he trusts in his righteousness and does evil, none of the
righteous things he has done will be remembered; he will die for the evil he
has done.” (Ezekiel 33:12a-13 NIV).
1 comment:
Gail;
-----Satan picked himself up to God’s place, or so he attempted to do. Jesus laid Himself down from God’s place. What Satan did was the substance of death. What Jesus did is the substance of life. Death is chaos through detachment. Life requires precise correlation and interaction. John said three things bear witness to Christ, the Spirit, the water, and the blood. Blood is a precise measure of chemicals in water. If we mixed the exact quantities of blood’s every chemical into a beaker, we would not have blood. We would have a slurry chemically the same as blood, but structurally different. To have blood, we would need to somehow arrange every atom and molecule of the slurry into the incredibly complex and intricate structures of hormones and cells, with all their biomechanical inner-works right down to the exactly precise DNA of each. Still we would not have blood, because blood does not just sit motionless. All its microscopic machines are in motion, each doing its own responsibility to the whole, each responsibility done in correlation with and contribution to all the other machines’ motions, summing into blood’s purpose. This complex unity is life. The unrelated, independent motions of each and every atom and molecule of the slurry is death; it is chaos. Life is the laying down of unrelated independence to rise up into a related whole. Death is throwing down the whole to rise up as self.
-----The only act we can do to be saved is the act of life. It is to lay ourselves entirely down to rise up in the whole. Christ is the whole. In Him, through Him, and by Him are all things. The only way to defeat Satan’s introduction of death into God’s perfection was for God to defeat it with life. So He threw Himself completely into death for the whole, which was a perfectly living thing to do, making a living path through death for returning all things to the Father. The only way we can walk Christ’s path through death is by doing the same living thing He did, for that is the path. If traversing death were done by our own being good, then we would not be totally thrown down, and as such, we would not be on the path. As blood testifies, absolute precision is the necessity. And only Christ can supply that precision.
-----We’ve been somewhat remiss in transmitting the gospel of grace. We speak so much about coming to Christ. But coming to Christ is the mixture of two things: 1) abandonment of self, and 2) attachment to Christ. Surely we mean abandonment of self when we say come to Christ, because we know it that way. But the abandonment is not on the face of the expression like the attachment is. Therefore, confusion about works is given opportunity. All of the good works and righteousness of the world are like the chemicals in the pure water being in the exact proportions of blood’s chemicals. They’re just a slurry. Even if incredibly we lay ourselves down in our good works enough to do every one only for the help and benefit others, we’ve just arranged the slurry into the complex structures of blood. Yet it’s still not blood. It is the attachment to Christ which makes all of the astounding motion of eternal life happen within that machinery of what you do. For Christ is the pattern of life’s motion, the elemental meaning of it. And that is why we must come to Him for our mechanisms of effort to be actually alive. Laying self down to put Christ on is the only functional pattern of life.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment