OBEDIENCE IN LIGHT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS BY GRACE THROUGH FAITH (Episode 1)

Jesus is LORD before and after he is SAVIOR

For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of One shall many be made righteous” (Romans 5:19).

The story of salvation is a story of a loving God who created man in his likeness. And that meant that man was created with the ability to choose against God his creator. Man is a freedom of choice being and he used his volitional abilities and chose against his creator and ended up at a point of no return.

It was a point of no return both in thought and in action. And that is what we call the FALL.  God is love and love does not have any law and neither does it have any rule. All that is in love is what I call: NATURAL AUTHORITY. Natural Authority is not like our world hierarchy system where ranking is earned or deserved. But natural authority is the creator to creature relations.

The fall of man is at the point where man ceased to look at himself as a creature and God as the creator, but when the creature deems itself as the creator of itself, and this is what the DISOBEDIENCE that Apostle Paul talks about in Romans 5:19 is. Disobedience is an attitude that a creature has towards its creator. It is not what a creature does or doesn’t do, but rather an attitude. It is due to this attitude towards its creator that the creature (man) did whatever it did. That is the mystery that establishes a cosmic power known as SIN that man got himself entangled into and could not save himself from.

God is the source of everything living and non-living, and God created everything out of NOTHING (EX-NIHILO). A disconnect between God the creator and the creature means that creation degenerates back to its original state (pre-creation) and that is NOTHINGNESS. It is this nothingness we know as DEATH eternal. And that’s where our disobedience takes us to.

This degeneration back into eternal nothingness was and is not due to any moral violation but due to that disconnect (attitudinal rebellion) between the source of life or existence (who is God) and the creature (who is a man). So the whole world, due to the attitude of man (creation custodian), vanishes into nothingness not because of what it has done but because the custodian has disposed of his creator.

This God who is love had created everything replaceable except for man. Isn’t it good news for you my reader to know that you are irreplaceable? You are not just special, but you are the only one in the universe eternally and there was, there is and there will never be any other you. If you take on Jesus Christ as your savior, you are saved forever and if you don’t trust and obey him, you are lost into nothingness forever.

Humanity was and is not replaceable and because God had a relationship with this man, he wanted to restore this relationship. To do this, however, he (God) had to become like him (man). He had to feel like a man feels, think like man thinks, have the same strength and vulnerabilities that man had, be exposed to the same influences that the man he wanted to redeem was, and only then could God prove to be the redeemer of this fallen man. Only by this, could God be love and at the same time be just.

So God squeezed his divinity into the created and became a creature and that is what we know as the miracle of the incarnation (John 1:1-3, 14, Philippians 2:5-11, Hebrews 2:17; Revelation 5).

All this, he did because he is LOVE and he being love and us being conscious beings, meant that he could not dictate our salvation but rather negotiate it. It was upon him, liberating us from the ditch, setting us free but our salvation depended on whether we chose him as our Lord and Savior or we opted back to the ditch. Now, this is what we mean by the difference between Redemption and Salvation (I will say more about this in the next series).

For now, with that background at hand, I would like to focus on the point that Apostle Paul makes in Romans 5:19. What man messed due to his disobedience, Jesus Christ as the second Adam fixed it with nothing but through Obedience. Obedience is at the center of man’s problem and God’s solution. The major problem here is that when we talk of OBEDIENCE or DISOBEDIENCE, what comes to a theologically immature mind (like mine) is THE LAW.

This is very unfortunate and absurd for people to associate the Biblical concept of OBEDIENCE to the LAW. (This too, I will address in the next series). What I want to emphasize here is that the role of the incarnate God in the redemption of man was to do what the man he comes for, had failed to do.

It is important to point out that, man primarily had not failed by the STANDARDS OF LAW (for there was no law=Galatians 3:17), and secondly, if the fall was due to a law, then that would make the crime of man a moral crime; which by all means this can be forgiven by an all-merciful God and all sinners are in heaven. Man’s fall is by the STANDARDS OF NATURAL AUTHORITY RECOGNITION.

As I pointed out earlier, man, in attitude and by all measures had ceased to recognize his creator as LORD. He had become independent and become his own god and lord. He had succumbed to the devilish temptation of:

“You will surely not die but become like God” (Genesis 3:4-5).

I find no better scripture that illustrates the danger of this fall of man as 1 John 2:22 that says:

“And who is a liar? Anyone who says that Jesus is not the Christ. Anyone who denies the Father and the Son is an antichrist”

Denying God as the LORD (Hebrew= Adonai; Greek= Kurios) resulted in the power known as Harmartia—a cosmic sin-power whose praxis is in immorality (Paraptoma=wrong deeds) and environmental dilapidation (Genesis 3:17-19). Humanity denied God as Lord and creator and through that denial, rejection and disobedience, we (human race) became sinners condemned to death eternal, regardless of whether men practised this attitude or not (Mathew 5:28).

This is why according to Apostle Paul, our Salvation is a two procedure arrangement as it is put in this text:

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9 NLT).

First, you change your attitude and recognize the LORDSHIP of God (that is reconciliation), then you believe that he RESURRECTED (that is salvation).

Jesus is not just your SAVIOR, he is also your LORD before and after he has become your SAVIOR. It is under the LORDSHIP of God that our obedience is called for. The Bible uses two terms to explain the Lordship of God, one is in Hebrew (Adonai) and the other is Greek (Kurios).

Adonai is the Hebrew word translated “Lord” and is used most often in Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Amos and many other places in the Old Testament.  Adonai is the Hebrew word Adon, meaning “lord” or “master”.

The idea it conveys is not so much about how inferior we are but how distant in nature and capacity God is from us, how transcendent he is to all known limits, how majestic, glorious, immutable he is, how incomparable and sovereign God is. He is the lord and we can only recognize this through our obedience and submission to his will.

The New Testament Greek version of the Old Testament (Septuagint) Adonai is Kurios. The root meaning of the term means ‘Power‘, ‘Authority‘, and ‘Might‘. It conveys an ownership by all judgment and justice. In other words, while there are many lords on earth, only God is our rightful owner and Lord.

The difference between the Lordship of God and that of other earthly masters is that the authority of God over us, is natural (who he is), while the earthly masters, lordship is something they have earned or levied.

In the Bible, however, the same terms are applied, you just need to focus on whom lordship is attributed to and get to know the quality of their lordship. In the Old Testament, Adonai is used of the relationship of a master to his slave (Genesis 24:9, 10, 12, 14, 27; Exodus 21:4, 5, 6) and of a husband to his wife (Genesis 18:12; Jude 19:27; Psalms 45:11).

In the New Testament, Kurios is used in some places to refer to God (Luke 1:32; 2:9; Acts 5:19) and also of Jesus (Romans 10:9; I Corinthians 12:3; Philippians. 2:11; Revelation 19:15). The dual use of the word in this way teaches the Deity of Jesus; the inescapable conclusion is that Jesus is God (Titus 2:13) and therefore the lord who demands our obedience.

It is also used to mean human masters or owners (Matthew 10:24). Even husbands are called by the word Kurios (1Peter 3:6). Paul uses the plural of kurios to refer to idols (1Corinthians 8:5). If our obedience to these lords make us disobedient to God our rightful Lord and savior, then that obedience to our civil leaders, to our religious doctrines, and all traditions leads to nothing but eternal death.

As a pastor and a preacher of Righteousness by Faith, I have hit a hard-rock teaching people about the Biblical truth about the importance of obedience. They have all sorts of paranoid arguments and resistance and I couldn’t do it any better, apart from doing these series of OBEDIENCE in light of RIGHTEOUSNESS by GRACE through FAITH.

Let me say this as I conclude:

When I was a boy, I obeyed my parents because of what I thought they would do to me if I did not. Now this attitude towards obedience is not restricted to kids alone but even to grown-ups. We obey traffic rules and all sorts of legal systems because of the fear of the consequences enforced by the existing authorities. This is what I call: PENAL OBEDIENCE. It is tied and restricted in the legal system and oriented by the fear of the punishment.

The other side of the coin of obedience is when both kids and adults obey due to the rewards and awards to the obedient from the authorities. Just like we promise our toddlers Ice Cream if they stop yelling for five minutes, so are we obedient in our adult lives because of the favours we anticipate. This is what I call: REWARD OBEDIENCE. It is an obedience and devotion established and motivated by a materialistic need.

It is essentially not because we recognize the Lordship of the authority but instead our focus is on the reward or the penalty. We actually do not even have to agree with them at all, all we need to be sure of is what they can do to us in relation to how we treat their directives. If the authority is God, then, those under penal obedience obey God because they don’t want to go to hell, and those under reward obedience, obey God, not because of who God is but because of what God has and can offer.

The Bible teaches us that, true obedience is the obedience of faith-Hupakoen Pistis (Romans 1:5; 16:26). It is an obedience inspired by recognizing that God is the creator and we are his creatures. It is a recognition of who he is and who we are. It is a result of our love relationship with who God is regardless of the state of affairs in our lives.

Jesus once said: “if you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). He did not say keep my commandments to love me, the commandment keeping is dependent on the love (attitude) for him. Another thing is that he did not call us to keep Laws but rather commandments. Laws are robotic but commandments are human and inspirational. Laws tell us what is and what to do, but commandments tell us what ought to be done. Commandments are the “every day” and “in every situation” will of God.

As Christians, we do not refer to the letter of the law to do or not do but rather we refer to the will of God and ask ourselves: WHAT WOULD JESUS DO in such a situation. This is not just situational ethics but instead graded-absolutism of the will of God in our daily lives. We must remember that: JESUS IS LORD before and after he is SAVIOR of our lives. And the will of our Lord must be obeyed. Next, I will handle the two extremes: Legalism and Grace.

God bless you, I invoke TRUTH, REASON and FAITH

Pr. I.T.WHITE

The Gospel Hawker