Sheep and Goats, Law and Gospel

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:  And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.  Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?  When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?  Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?  And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.  Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal. Matthew 25:31-46

 

The Parable of the Sheep and Goats occurs at the very end of a long discussion by Jesus that is traditionally called the Olivet Discourse after the location where it was given, the Mount of Olives.    This sermon occupies two chapters in the Gospel according to St. Matthew.   Much more abridged versions of it can be found in the Gospels according to SS Mark and Luke.   It was given on the Tuesday of Passion Week, that is, the Tuesday after His Triumphal Entry to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and prior to His Crucifixion on Good Friday.   The occasion of His giving this sermon was His having told His disciples that not one stone would be left on another of the Second Temple, prompting the disciples to ask Him when this would be and when would be the time of His Coming.

 

The Olivet Discourse as a whole has long been a hermeneutical conundrum.   Is it eschatological, that is to say, talking about the events that will take place at the very end of temporal history at what we after the Ascension would call the Second Coming of Christ?   Is it historical, that is to say, discussing events that took place within the first century, specifically when the Roman army led by Titus crushed the Jewish rebellion and destroyed the Temple.  Much of the language within the Sermon is apocalyptic, suggesting that it is eschatological.   The context, however, suggests the historical interpretation since it was certainly the events of AD 70 to which Jesus was referring when He predicted the dismantling of the Temple.

 

The closest thing to a traditional consensus is to say that the Olivet Discourse pertains to both the events of AD 70 and those that will occur at the end of time because the disciples had, without realizing it, asked a question about both by conflating the Destruction of the Temple that Jesus had been talking about with His Second Coming which, of course, they would not have conceived of as a Second Coming at that point in time.    Accepting this consensus does not solve the interpretive problem, however, because the question then becomes how does the Discourse pertain to the events of the first century and those of the end of time?   Is it a matter of everything in the Discourse having a double reference, first to the events of AD 70 and second to the events surrounding the Second Coming?   Or does part of the Discourse refer to the Destruction of the Temple and part to the end of time?

 

Something in between these two seems the most likely answer.  The parts of the Discourse that most obviously are speaking of the Destruction of the Temple could easily be understood as having a secondary reference to the Second Coming.   There are other parts of the Discourse, however, where the reference to the end of time is quite clear but which would require a great deal of text-torture to fit the events of AD 70.  The Parable of the Sheep and Goats is one of these parts.

 

The Parable presents us with a different sort of interpretive conundrum.   It seems to be teaching that salvation is a reward for good works.   How do we reconcile this with the rest of the New Testament that teaches that salvation is a gift and not a reward for works?

 

A few observations are in order.

 

The first is that the Parable is about the Last Judgement.   This is why works are in focus here.   Works are the subject matter of all judgement, temporal or final.   That is the nature of judgement.   To judge is to pronounce what someone has done to be either good and praiseworthy or bad and worthy of condemnation.   The question, therefore, is not so much how this Parable squares with the New Testament teaching of salvation by grace but how the idea of a Last Judgement squares with the idea of salvation by grace.   The Parable, as we shall see, sheds a lot of light on the answer to this question.

 

The second observation is that in the Parable the works are not what determines who is a sheep and who is a goat.   It is amazing how often this obvious detail is overlooked.   The Parable does not say that the Judge will say to some people, “I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me and for this reason I count you as my sheep” and that He will say to others “I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not and for this reason I count you as goats”.   No, they are divided into sheep and goats first, then the judgement of each takes place.

 

The reason that it is important to note this is because of our third observation: the Parable does not say that the corporal works of mercy were done only by the sheep and never by the goats.   What it says is that in the Judgement the goats will be held strictly accountable and condemned for the slightest neglect or failure to do these works.   The sheep, on the other hand, will receive a very different sort of Judgement in which they are rewarded for the slightest example of their doing such works.

 

The difference in the way the two groups are judged is precisely the difference between Law and Gospel.   In the Law, God establishes His standard of righteousness, holds people strictly to account, and “whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all” (Jas. 2:10).   The goats are those who receive Judgement according to the Law.   This is the Judgement that those who reject the Gospel will receive.

 

The Gospel is the Good News to people who deserve the Judgement the goats receive, and that is all of us, that God has given us His Only-Begotten Son to save us from our sin and the destruction it brings upon us through His death on the Cross for our sins and His Resurrection.   The salvation proclaimed in the Gospel is free and is received by believing in the Saviour given.   To believe in the freely given Saviour and His salvation, however, one must abandon all claim to reward based on his own merit and pronounce himself worthy of condemnation.   Hence the surprise on the part of the sheep to hear their works brought up in a commendatory way.  The sheep are those who had renounced their works, renounced the idea that they could merit any reward from God, pronounced themselves to be unprofitable servants, and put their trust in the freely given mercy and grace of God in Jesus Christ.

 

That the Judge does commend their works and speak of their entrance into His Kingdom as a reward is itself an act of mercy and grace.   Their works most certainly did not merit this.   Held up to the strict scrutiny of the Law they would merit only the condemnation the goats received.   The Judge, not as Judge at His Second Coming but as Saviour at His First Coming, had taken their sin upon Himself that He might share His righteousness with them, and the cleansing of His blood had removed the sin from their works, that He might now at the Last Judgement, in an act of pure grace, commend them for the works that did not merit such commendation and could not be so commended apart from His saving mercy.

 

 

The Bad News and the Good News

There is a common trope in which someone says “I’ve got some good news and some bad news” and then tells both in such a way that the good news doesn’t really seem all that good.   For example, he might follow up by presenting one piece of news which horrifies his listener who then says something to the effect of “that’s terrible, what’s the good news” only to be told “that was the good news!”

 

God’s Word also contains good news and bad news.   Indeed, the very name of the good news in God’s Word is good news, for this is the meaning of the Greek word “euangelion” and the English word “Gospel” that translates it.   In a much older form of English the word good was distinguished from the word god by a long o rather than a double o and the word spel meant tidings or news.   Good news, therefore, was Godspel, which eventually contracted to our Gospel.   The bad news is not named bad news, but it is bad news.   By contrast with the good news and bad news in the popular trope, however, the bad news does not detract from or overshadow the goodness of the good news, but rather makes that goodness shine all the brighter.   It is because of the bad news that the good news is good news.

 

The bad news of the Bible is called the Law.   The Bible speaks of the Law with several different but related meanings.   The Law can be a Covenant, the Covenant God made with Israel at Mt. Sinai.   It can also be the books that contain that Covenant and the historical narrative of its coming to be starting from the Creation of the world and ending with the death of Moses on the eve of Israel’s entering the Promised Land.  Used in this sense, the Law is one of the major divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament.   Since the other parts of the Old Testament point back to the Law in various ways its name is sometimes used as shorthand for the whole of the Old Testament Scriptures.   Sometimes, however, the Law is used in a more abstract sense than these.   In this sense it means God expressing Himself and relating to people in His capacity as Sovereign Ruler over all His Creation, requiring that they do or don’t’ do certain things, promising the reward of blessing if they obey and threating punishment if they disobey.   The principle of the Law used in this sense is captured in Leviticus 18:4-5:

 

Ye shall do my judgments, and keep mine ordinances, to walk therein: I am the LORD your God.  Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall live in them: I am the LORD.

 

The Law is bad news because since the Fall of Man brought sin upon the entire human race nobody can meet the Law’s requirements.    Some people think that God accepts less than perfect performance of the righteousness He requires in the Law.   Such people have not thought this through very well.   If someone were brought before a human judge and charged with having brutally murdered his neighbour and this man’s lawyer were to argue that yes, his client has committed murder in this one instance but it needs to be weighed against all the people that he did not kill, we would regard the judge as incompetent and unfit for his office if he were to accept this spurious reasoning and set the defendant free.   Since we expect better than that from human judges, how much less ought we to expect that the Supreme Judge Who is perfect in His Justice will act in this manner.    The Apostle James tells us:

 

For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. (Jas. 2:10)

 

In actuality, of course, our sin is much greater than that of St. James’ person who has offended in only one point.

 

The core of the Law, as God handed it down to Israel through Moses at Mt. Sinai, is the famous Ten Commandments.   These God had written on two stone tablets.   Although the book of Exodus doesn’t spell this out, tradition and reason tell us that the first four were on the one tablet and the last six on the other.   This is because the first four Commandments are all about duties directly to God, whereas the last six are about duties to God that also affect our fellow man.   Here are the Commandments as they can be found in the twentieth chapter of Exodus following the preamble that reads “ I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”:

 

First Table

 

1.      Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

2.      Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

3.     Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

4.      Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

 

Second Table

 

5.       Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

6.      Thou shalt not kill.

7.      Thou shalt not commit adultery.

8.      Thou shalt not steal.

9.     Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

10.  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

 

While certain commandments pertain particularly to thoughts (the tenth) and words (the ninth), the righteousness that God requires of people consists of keeping each of these in thought, word, and deed.   This is a point Jesus stressed in the ethical component of His teachings over and over again.   God demands of us a righteousness that is internal as well as external.   In the Sermon on the Mount He taught that being angry with someone without a cause violates the sixth commandment and that that lusting after a woman violates the seventh.   In Matthew 12:36 He warned “That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment”.

 

It has been often noted that the Ten Commandments are overwhelmingly negative in tone.   With the exception of the last of the first table and the first of the second table they are all prohibitions, “thou shalt nots”.   Jesus, famously, summarized the Commandments, and indeed, the entire Old Testament, in two positively worded commandments.   Asked what the great commandment in the Law was, He said “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” (Matt. 22:37).   This commandment comes from Deuteronomy 6:5 where it immediately follows after the Shema, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” in the preceding verse.   Jesus went on to say:

 

This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matt. 22:38-40)

 

Unlike the Ten Commandments as worded in Exodus, both of these Commandments are positives, thou shalts, rather than thou shalt nots.   The truth of what Jesus says about all the law hanging on these can be seen in that the entire first Table of the Ten Commandments is summed up in the first and greatest commandment and the entire second Table is summed up in the second.    By reducing ten mostly negative commandments to two entirely positive ones, ones that are all about love even, Jesus does not make the Law any less bad news, however.    Note that the extent of the love required in these commandments is specified.   We are to love God with all our hearts, souls, and minds, in other words with all our being.   Can any of us say that we have loved God to that extent for even a second in our entire lives?    If we cannot say that then we must confess that we have been and are in constant, unremitted, violation of the greatest of God’s commandments our entire lives.

 

Jesus’ two commandment summary of the Law, therefore, must not be understood, as many unthinkingly misunderstand it, as a softening of the message of the Law.   It is not the Gospel that Jesus summed up in the two commandments, but the Law, the bad news.   Indeed, stripped down to its very essence in the two commandments, its message of bad news is more glaring, more obvious.   The message is that we must abandon all hope that when we come to the end of our lives and stand before our Creator and Judge to give an account that we will be able to present to Him in our account of our lives the righteousness that He is looking for, the righteousness that will satisfy His demands.     This is the bad news message of the Law.   The message is what it is, it needs to be said, not because of a defect in the Law, not because God’s standards are too high, but because of a defect in us, because we are sinful and wicked.

 

The bad news of the Law is the dark background against which the good news of the Gospel shines bright.

 

We turn now to that good news.   The most well-known and well-loved verse in all the Scriptures, John 3:16, has often been called “the Gospel in a nutshell” and deservedly so.   That verse reads:

 

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

 

The Gospel starts with the love of God.   The bad news of the Law tells us that we are sinners who cannot meet the righteous standards of our Creator.    The Gospel tells us that nevertheless God loves us.   Furthermore, it tells us that because God loves us, He acted.   He gave us a gift.   Not just any gift, He gave us that which is most precious to Him, His only-begotten Son.   Not His “one and only Son” as recent mistranslations would have it – God has plenty of children by creation and adoption – but His only-begotten Son, His only non-created, natural Son, Who shares His essence, and is therefore Himself God, not a different God, for God is essentially One, but the same God as His Father.  

 

When the Bible says that God gave us His only-begotten Son this means that He sent Him into the world to be born into the human race and become One of us.   The account of how He did so is a very familiar one.   A little over two thousand years ago the angel Gabriel was sent to a virgin named Mary with the message that she was highly favoured by God and that the Holy Ghost would come upon her and cause her to conceive and bear a Son Whose name was to be Jesus and Who would be the Son of God.   An angel was also sent to her fiancé Joseph to assure him that Mary had not been unfaithful, that her child was the Son of God, and that he was to take her as his wife and raise the child.    The couple, who were descendants of King David, had to travel to Bethlehem due to a census ordered by Augustus Caesar and while there, the Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus in a stable, for there was no room in the inn.   Angels appeared in the sky nearby and announced the birth of the Messiah – the long promised Saviour King of David’s line – to shepherds tending their flocks, who went to see Him and found Him where the angels said they would, lying in a manger, wrapped in swaddling clothes.   Wise men from the east, guided by a star, arrived with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to pay homage to Him.   The story of these events, recorded in the early chapters of the Gospels according to Saints Matthew and Luke, has been told around the world on the anniversary of their occurrence for two thousand years.   God’s gift of His only-begotten Son was the world’s first Christmas gift.

 

The purpose for which God in His love gave us His only-begotten Son is clearly stated.   That purpose was that all who believe in God’s Son would not perish but have everlasting life.   Everlasting life here does not mean merely life that lasts forever, but life in the eternal Kingdom of God, from which all evil is forever banished.   It is the opposite of what it means here to perish, i.e., to go before God as one’s Judge, weighed down with the guilt of all one’s sins, receive the sentence justly due those sins, and face the eternal consequences of one’s wickedness.  

 

Now, since the message of the Law, the Bible’s bad news, is that we are all sinners who deserve to perish, how does God’s Christmas gift to the world of His only-begotten Son effect its intended result that we, instead of perishing, have everlasting life in His eternal kingdom?

 

The events we remember at Easter are needed along those we commemorate at Christmas to complete God’s message of good news.

 

In the fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul declared “unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand” (v. 1).   Here is that declaration:

 

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time. (vv. 3-8)

 

The list of witnesses is the evidence St. Paul gives for the truth of the Gospel he preached, which consists of the events remembered on Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday – the death of Christ for our sins, His burial, and His Resurrection.   Jesus Christ died for our sins.   He had no sins of His own.   While the eternal Son of God became truly One of us when He entered the Virgin’s womb and was born into the human race, the Holy Ghost, the third Person of the Trinity Who worked the miracle whereby the Son of God became Man, prevented His human nature for bearing the taint of Adam’s Original Sin.    The devil tempted Him to sin, as St. Mark mentions in his Gospel with fuller accounts provided by SS Matthew and Luke, but He did not succumb to the temptation.  He “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).    Therefore, when He allowed Himself to be crucified that He might die a criminal’s death, it was for our sins that He died.   St. Paul elsewhere says:

 

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.  (2 Cor. 5:21).

 

St. Peter put it this way:

 

For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: (1 Pet. 3:18)

 

Jesus, the Son of God, the only Man Who could face the Law and meet its demands, took the guilt of our sins upon Himself and paid for them, so that He could share His Own perfect righteousness with us.    Death having no claim on Him other than our sins which He freely took on Himself, having paid for our sins with His death, He defeated death and rose again from the grave, never to die again.   His eternal resurrection life, He shares with us along with His righteousness.

This is how in the events of Easter weekend, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, accomplished the end for which God had given Him to the world as the first Christmas gift.    The account of Jesus Christ, from Christmas to Easter, is the Bible’s good news, the Gospel.   It is good news because it tells us how God in His love, has given us a Saviour Who met the need which the Bible’s bad news, the Law, has revealed in us, our lack of righteousness due to our sin.

 

The Gospel, the good news, operates on a very different basis from the “this do, and thou shalt live” basis of the Law, the bad news.   The Gospel, in its unadulterated, Scriptural, form does not first tell us about Jesus, then call on us to perform some act on our part in order to benefit from Christ and His work.    In the Law God says “do”, in the Gospel He says “it is finished”. The Gospel is good news to everyone who believes it for it is to those who believe the Gospel, who believe in Jesus Christ Whom the Gospel is all about, that the promises of the Gospel, such as that of everlasting life in John 3:16, are addressed.    The Law is powerless to produce in us the obedient righteousness it requires of us (Rom.8:3).    The Gospel creates in us the very faith to which it speaks by providing us with Someone in Whom to believe.

 Believe in Him.

 

For God So Loved the World That He Gave His Only-Begotten Son

The most familiar and beloved verse in all the Holy Bible is the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John.   It has been called “the Gospel in a nutshell” and “the Bible in miniature”.   Here it is in the English rendition of the Authorized Bible:

 

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

 

One would think that if there was any verse in Scripture that all Christian believers would agree should be beyond acrimonious disputes about interpretation it would be this one.   That is not however the case.   There have been several such disputes about this verse.   We shall examine three of those here, each having to do with a different word in the Greek text.   Here is that Greek text:

 

Οὕτω γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον, ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν,

 ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ' ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον.

 

The above is the text as it appears in the Textus Receptus, the text underlying the Authorized Bible.   The Nestle-Aland and UBS critical editions have Οὕτως instead of Οὕτω as the first word and leave out the αὐτοῦ.   Neither of these differences affects the meaning of the text.   Οὕτως and Οὕτω are two different ways of spelling the same word.   Most often the former is used before words beginning with vowels and the latter before words beginning with consonants but it is not a hard rule.    αὐτοῦ is the word that means “his” in “his only begotten son”  (1) but this meaning is implicit in the text even without it.  

 

The easiest of the disputes to dispense with is the one pertaining to the seventh word in the verse, κόσμον.   This is the word for “world” and in the first clause of the verse it stands as the direct object of the verb ἠγάπησεν (“he loved”), with ὁ θεὸς (God) as the subject.   A certain type of Calvinist objects to this word being taken in its ordinary sense in this context but it conflicts with his idea that God only loves a tiny portion of the people of the world, His elect, and hates all the rest, having unalterably determined their eternal damnation from before the beginning of time.    This kind of Calvinist argues that κόσμος does not always mean the world in its entirety but can be used in a more limited sense.    This is true, but it by no means follows from this that the term can be used in the specific limited sense that the Calvinists imply, i.e., as referring to God’s elect.   Technically, the basic meaning of the word is “order”.   It can have the subordinate meanings of “good behaviour” and “government” and can even mean such things as “ornament” and “ruler”.  From the basic meaning of “order”, however, it developed the sense in which it was used in serious abstract thought, i.e., the world or universe, considered in regards to its structure and order.  It is in this sense and its subordinate meanings such as “the present world” (as opposed to that of a future age) “mankind in general” (as opposed to a specific people) and the like that we find it in the New Testament.   “Mankind in general” is the sense in which most people would understand this word in John 3:16 and it is itself a subordinate sense to “universe”.  If the common understanding is erroneous, a strong case could be made based on passages like the eight chapter of Romans that the error is in understanding κόσμος in only this limited sense rather than as meaning all of Creation which clearly is part of God’s redemptive plan.   Another limited sense of the word that is prominently used elsewhere in the New Testament is as the designation of the spiritual forces arrayed against God’s kingdom operating in and through human society.   This could hardly be the sense in which the word is used in John 3:16.   What both of these limited senses of the word have in common is that they both refer to something that is so large in scale that calling it by the name of the whole created order does not seem ludicrous or inappropriate.   This could hardly be said of the hyper-Calvinist interpretation of the word in John 3:16.   Yes, hyper-Calvinist is the appropriate term for the interpretation that “world” in John 3:16 does not mean the whole of mankind but only a select number chosen from out of the whole.   “Hyper-Calvinist” suggests taking the ideas of John Calvin and taking them to an extreme beyond what he himself taught.   Here is what Calvin himself had to say about this in his Commentary as translated by the Rev. William Pringle:

 

That whosoever believeth on him may not perish. It is a remarkable commendation of faith, that it frees us from everlasting destruction. For he intended expressly to state that, though we appear to have been born to death, undoubted deliverance is offered to us by the faith of Christ; and, therefore, that we ought not to fear death, which otherwise hangs over us. And he has employed the universal term whosoever, both to invite all indiscriminately to partake of life, and to cut off every excuse from unbelievers. Such is also the import of the term World, which he formerly used; for though nothing will be found in the world that is worthy of the favor of God, yet he shows himself to be reconciled to the whole world, when he invites all men without exception to the faith of Christ, which is nothing else than an entrance into life.   (bold indicates italics in the original, underlining indicates what I wish to emphasize).

 

Calvin went on to mention election in the sentence that immediately follows this quotation, but unlike many of his followers he had the good sense not to force its intrusion into the meaning of the universal terms within the verse.

 

The next controversy that we shall look at pertains to the word μονογενῆ.   It is the singular masculine accusative form of μονογενής, a third declension adjective belonging to a class of adjectives that are highly irregular even for the third declension.  This is the word translated “only-begotten” in the Authorized Bible.   A great many today insist that this is a mistranslation and modern versions tend to use “only”, “one of a kind” or “unique” in place of “only-begotten”.   I have addressed this in the past in the context of discussing the closely related contemporary theological problem in which many recent prominent evangelical leaders have denied the doctrines of the Eternal Generation and Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ and taught instead Incarnational Sonship while claiming to be sound Trinitarians, a problem compounded by the fact that an even larger number of evangelical leaders who do not reject Eternal Generation and Sonship have nevertheless accepted the claims of the Incarnational Sonship teachers to be orthodox Trinitarians.   The Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ is part of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, of course.   The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not merely that the three co-equal, co-eternal, Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are One in Being, but Three in Person, so that as Persons they are distinct from each other, but each is fully God, and the same One God as the other two.   It is also that the three have distinct relations to each other.   None of the three are created, all have no chronological beginning but are co-eternal, however, the Father is neither begotten nor does He proceed from another Person, whereas the Son is begotten of the Father (eternally, not in a moment of time to which there was a before), and the Holy Ghost proceeds in a manner distinct from what the Son’s being begotten denotes from the Father (the entire Church affirms this, the Western Church adds “and the Son” which the Eastern Church considers to be heresy).   If you fail to see the importance of this, note that Incarnational Sonship, taught by the late Walter Martin, and John F. MacArthur Jr. before he recanted, confuses the Persons of the Trinity.   The Agent in the Incarnation is identified in the Gospels of SS Matthew and Luke as the Holy Ghost, and if Jesus’ being the Son is due to the Incarnation and not to His eternal pre-Incarnation relationship with the Father, that makes the Holy Ghost the Father. 

 

With regards to the word μονογενής the claim is made that while this was previously thought to have been formed by adding μό̂νον (only) to γεννάω (beget) it was actually the noun γένος rather than the verb γεννάω that went into the compound adjective’s formation and since γένος means “kind” the adjective means “one of a kind” or “unique” rather than “only-begotten”.   This first thing to observe about this argument is that even if it is correct to say that μονογενής is formed from γένος rather than γεννάω, the conclusion by no means necessarily follows.   While γένος can be translated “kind” this is somewhat misleading.   The first meaning that Liddell and Scott give to this word is “race, stock, kin”, and the other meanings given are arranged in such a way as to indicate that they are all derivatives of this primary meaning.  A clarifying subhead to the first meaning emphasizes that it refers to “direct descent” as opposed to “collateral relationship”.   The second meaning given is “offspring, even of a single descendent”, which the subhead “collectively, offspring, posterity”, and the third meaning is “generally, race, of beings”.   The meaning “class, sort, kind” is the fifth in the list, and the subentries to it demonstrate that even here it is classes, sorts, and kinds of things that are biologically related that is primarily intended.   The significance of all this is that γένος is a noun that incorporates the verbal idea of γεννάω in itself.   This should surprise nobody as the two words are closely etymologically related.   It is not that γένος first means “kind” or “sort” in a general sense and “race” or “kin” is derived from the general meaning through specific application.  It is the other way around.  The word γένος first denotes groups that share a common biological descent and it is by metaphorical extension that the more general sense is arrived at.   In other words the meaning of γεννάω cannot be eliminated from μονογενής simply by tracing the second part of the compound to γένος rather than to γεννάω.

 

A look at how μονογενής was used both in the New Testament and in ancient Greek literature as a whole shows that those who object to rendering this word “only begotten” have no sound scholarly reason to do so.   The adjective appears nine times in total in the New Testament.   Five of these, including the one we have been discussing, refer to Jesus Christ as the μονογενής Son of God.   One is a reference in the book of Hebrews to Abraham’s offering of Isaac.   The other three, all in the Gospel according to St. Luke, are references to children – the son of the widow of Nain, Jairus’ daughter, and the possessed son of the father whom Jesus encountered upon coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration – and in each case μονογενής was used to indicate that the child was the only child of his or her parent.   This same pattern occurs throughout Greek literature as a whole.   The adjective μονογενής is almost as tied to nouns like παῖς, τέκνον, υἱός and θυγάτηρ (child, child, son, daughter) as Homer’s πολύφλοισβος (much roaring) was to θάλασσα (the sea).   This is a strong indicator that the primary meaning of the adjective pertains specifically to children and that when it is used in a more general sense this is the secondary meaning derived from the primary.  

 

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this insistence that μονογενής means “one of a kind” rather than “only begotten” has less to do with Greek scholarship than with hyper-Protestantism.   Orthodox Protestantism rejects the errors that are distinctive to Rome, especially the Rome of the late Medieval Period, but accepts what is genuinely Catholic, that is to say, the doctrines, practices, etc. that belong to the whole Church going back to the earliest centuries before the major schisms.   Hyper-Protestantism goes beyond this and opposes much that is Catholic as well as that which is distinctively Roman.   Orthodox Protestants confess the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.   Hyper-Protestants do not all reject the Nicene Creed per se, but their thinking is filled with all sorts of wrong ideas that generate suspicion of the Creed as being too “Catholic”.   It is from this sort of thinking the idea has gained traction in certain evangelical circles that one can have orthodox Trinitarianism without the doctrine of Eternal Generation.   The Fathers of the Nicene and Constantinopolitan Councils of the fourth century had it right, however.   It is because we confess about Jesus that:

 

τὸν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς γεννηθέντα πρὸ πάντων τῶν αἰώνων

 

(He was begotten of the Father before all worlds),

 

and that He is:

 

γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα

 

(begotten, not made),

 

that we can confess that He is:

 

ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί

 

(of one substance with the Father).

 

The final dispute that we shall look at concerns the first word in the Greek text, οὕτω.   Again, it makes no difference to the meaning of this word whether it is spelled with the final sigma or not.   This is the word rendered “so” in the Authorized Bible.   It precedes the word for “for” in the Greek, γὰρ, because γὰρ cannot stand in the first position in a Greek clause, although “for” has to stand in the first position in English to convey the same meaning as γὰρ in Greek.   It is frequently maintained that the Authorized Bible misrepresents the meaning of this word in its rendition of the first clause of the verse “For God so loved the world”.   Worded this way, “so” is an expression of extent or degree.  “For God so loved the world” means the same thing as “For God loved the world so much”.   οὕτω, however, means “so” in the sense of “thus” or “in this manner” and so, we have often been told, the Authorized rendition is inaccurate.

 

That οὕτως does indeed mean “thus”, “in this way” or “in this manner” is not in dispute, nor even that this is the primary meaning of the word.   The problem with those who insist that it must have this meaning in this verse is that they maintain that it cannot have the meaning “so much”.   This is demonstrably false, and furthermore, this verse employs the very construction in which οὕτως is most likely to have the meaning of “so much”.  

 

The word οὕτως is the adverbial form of οὕτος.   οὕτος is a demonstrative, or if you prefer the term with Greek rather than Latin roots, a deictic.   Usually classified as pronouns, demonstratives or deictics are words that serve as both pronouns and adjectives.   Unlike most adjectives, however, which ascribe qualities such as “hot”, “red”, “wet”, etc. to nouns, demonstratives point to nouns.   We have two of them in English, each with a singular and plural form – this/these and that/those.   This/these points to something near or pertaining to the speaker and so could be said to be first person.   That/those points to something remote from the speaker and could be said to be third person.   When we need a demonstrative that is second person, that is to say, pointing to something near or pertaining in some way to the person addressed we can use either this or that for this purpose.   In Greek there are three distinct demonstratives, one for each person.   οὕτος is the second person deictic, the one that point to something near or pertaining to the person addressed.  It is also the one that is generally used when you want to point back to something that has just been said, as opposed to pointing forward to what is about to said.  For the latter, the first person personal pronoun which is the definite article compounded with the suffix – δέ is normally used.   Adverbs ordinarily differ from their corresponding adjectives in application rather than meaning.   Think of “quick” and “quickly”.  We use the word “quick” in sentences like “Bob is a quick runner” which ascribe the quality of quickness to persons or things.    We use the word “quickly” in sentences like “Bob ran quickly” which ascribe the same quality to the verb rather than the noun.   Adverbs can also modify adjectives, other adverbs, or even entire sentences such as “Quickly, Bob ran to the bank and took out $100 dollars then went to the store and bought himself an apple” (Bob clearly lived in a time of Trudeau-era inflation).    Just as adding “ly” turns any adjective in English into an adverb, lengthening the final omicron in an adjective into an omega turns it into an adverb in Greek.   This is what we see with οὕτος and οὕτως.   οὕτως, therefore, in its most basic sense, is an adverb that points to verbs, adjectives, clauses, sentences, etc. in the same way that οὕτος points to nouns.   It is to οὕτος, what “thus” is to “this”.

 

While it might seem like that clinches the argument for those who claim that that the οὕτω in John 3:16 means “in this manner” rather than “so much”, note that even in English “thus” is not limited to this meaning.   It is frequently used with the meaning of “therefore” and with reference to extent rather than manner.   “Bob ran thus far” would be an example of thus used with reference to extent.   A familiar example is the saying frequently used in “line-in-the-sand” moments, “thus far, no further”, which is actually a paraphrase of Job 38:11.      Similarly, while the οὕτως was primarily used with reference to manner, this was by no means its only use.  Its second meaning, like that of its English counterpart, was “therefore”, and its third meaning, as given by Liddell and Scott, was “to such an extent, so, so much, so very, so excessively”.   The first example the lexicographers give of this meaning is from the third book of Homer’s Iliad.  This is where Priam, king of Troy, has summoned Helen to the walls and asked her to identify for him a particular warrior among the Achaeans who has caught Priam’s eye.   It turns out that Agamemnon, son of Atreus and commander of the Greek army is the one indicated.  The relevant verse is verse 169 where Priam spells out why the king of Mycenae has so caught his eye:

 

καλὸν δ᾽ οὕτω ἐγὼν οὔ πω ἴδον ὀφθαλμοῖσιν,

 

which means “but so handsome [a man], I have not yet seen with my own eyes”.   

 

Although οὕτω here is modifying an adjective, καλὸν, rather than a verb as in John 3:16, it has precisely the meaning that some have foolishly claimed it cannot have in the Scriptural text.  

 

That οὕτω had not lost this meaning by the time the New Testament was written can be seen in the third verse in the third chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians.   This verse begins with the question:

 

οὕτως ἀνόητοί ἐστε; 

 

which means “are you so foolish?”   I have never heard anybody try to argue that οὕτως means “in this manner” here.   With the exceptions of one or two which paraphrase the question so that it is impossible to tell what meaning they ascribe to οὕτως, (2) the English translations all treat it as an expression of degree or intensity here.   See also Revelation 16:18 which ends with the words: σεισμὸς, οὕτω μέγας – “so great an earthquake”.   Here the οὕτω modifying the adjective μέγας (great) cannot be anything but the intensifier “so” as in “so much”.   Other New Testament examples that I will not go into at length are Galatians 1:6, 1 Thessalonians 2:8, and Hebrews 12:21.

 

Now, showing that οὕτω can mean “so” in the sense of “so much” is not the same thing as showing that this is what it means in John 3:16.   We have seen that its primary meaning is “in this way” or “in this manner” and, although that meaning would clearly be absurd in Iliad 3.169 this is not the case in the Gospel verse.   Is there any reason for thinking that the meaning of “so much” rather than “in this manner” is what is intended in John 3:16?

 

The answer is a clear yes.   In Greek, as in Latin and English, there is a category of subordinate clauses that we call result clauses.   These can indicate such things as what would naturally be expected to follow from the action of the main verb, whether or not it actually did, and what the actual result of the action was.   There are words that appear in the main clause of sentences that contain result clauses that indicate that a result clause is coming.  οὕτω/ οὕτως is one such word,   Then there are the words which begin the result clauses themselves.   The main one of these is ὥστε which means “so that”.   ὥστε is a compound of ὡς (as, so, that) which can also be used for this purpose.   There is also a kind of clause called a final clause, not because it occurs last in the sentence which may or may not be the case but because it expresses the end in the sense of purpose of the action of the main verb, or, in other words the result that the doer of the action of the main verb intended.   There are a number of words that can begin this kind of clause, the main one being ἵνα which means “in order that”.   If you look above to the Greek text of John 3:16 you will notice that it contains both a result clause and a final clause.    ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν is the result clause.  The final clause is ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ' ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον.

 

If the final clause were the only subordinate clause in the verse then those who maintain that οὕτω means “in this manner” here would have a much stronger case.   However, between the final clause and the main clause, falls the result clause beginning with ὥστε.   It is when it is used in conjunction with ὥστε like this that οὕτω most often means “so much” rather than “in this manner”.   The two words work together to create the sense of “so much X that Y”. 

 

One example of this from ancient Greek literature is found in the first book of Herodotus’ Histories.   In his account of the life of Croesus, king of Lydia, Herodotus relates a lengthy exchange between the king and Solon, the Athenian reformer and lawmaker.  Croesus asked Solon whom he judged to be the happiest man he had ever encountered.   Solon, not unaware that Croesus expected to be named himself, nevertheless answered Tellus the Athenian, and gave his reasons.   To the follow-up question about who the second happiest was, Solon answered that it was Cloebis and Biton, and explained why.   This irritated Croesus who then asked “ὦ ξεῖνε Ἀθηναῖε, ἡ δ᾽ ἡμετέρη εὐδαιμονίη οὕτω τοι ἀπέρριπται ἐς τὸ μηδὲν ὥστε οὐδὲ ἰδιωτέων ἀνδρῶν ἀξίους ἡμέας ἐποίησας;” which means “O Athenian stranger-friend, is this our happiness so cast away into nothingness to you that you made us less worthy than ordinary men?”

 

Countless other such examples could be given.   This is a very common construction in ancient Greek literature.   Note that in the above example the verb in the result clause, ἐποίησας, is in the indicative mood, which is the basic mood of the verb,  the one used when making ordinary statements about things as they are, as opposed to things which might be, which one wishes would be, etc.   In result clauses a natural but not necessarily actual result is placed in the infinitive, an actual result in the indicative.   When the “οὕτω … ὥστε….” construction employs the indicative in the result clause this raises the likelihood of it being used in the “so much…that” sense to near certainty and this is what we see in John 3:16 where the verb in the result clause is ἔδωκεν, an indicative aorist meaning “he gave”.

 

I am not going to belabour the point much further.   Unlike the first two interpretive problems, this third one does not have much theological significance.   Saying that God gave us His Son as our Saviour because He loved us so much does not exclude saying that the manner in which He loved us was that He gave us His Son or vice versa.   Indeed, since expressions with double meanings are fairly common in St. John’s Gospel – a much discussed example is ἄνωθεν with the double meaning of “again” and “from above” which is a key element in the same discussion in which John 3:16 occurs – not a few have suggested that both senses of οὕτω are being simultaneously intended in this verse.   The reason that I thought this worthy of as lengthy a treatment as I have given it is the frequency with which I have encountered the idea that in John 3:16 οὕτω means “in this manner” rather than “so much” asserted with a dogmatic authority that the facts simply do not bear out.   It seems evident to me that this dogmatism comes from either a) the plethora of Bible-study tools currently available that allow people to pontificate about what “the Greek” means without actually studying it, b) the curious and utterly wrongheaded contemporary notion that the Greek of the New Testament is best studied by itself without reference to any other ancient Greek literature, or c) the combination of the two.   Somebody who studies New Testament Greek and only New Testament Greek might very well be unfamiliar with the “οὕτω … ὥστε….” construction.   John 3:16 happens to be the only verse in the entire Johannine corpus where ὥστε appears.   Needless to say, this very common ancient Greek construction is rare in the New Testament.   This, however, makes it that much more important that we pay attention to how it was used in other ancient Greek literature because when an author uses it rarely, or, as in the case of St. John here, only once, this is a good indication that it was chosen specifically because the established meaning is one that the author wished to particularly emphasize.

 

  

 

 (1)   This word is the genitive (possessive) form of αὐτός the word for “self”, which means “same” when used as an attributive adjective, and which also stands in for the third person pronoun (except when that pronoun is the subject) which is how it is used in John 3:16.

(2)   The Orthodox Jewish Bible, for example, rephrases it from a question into a statement “you lack seichel”.   The adverb in the question disappears completely when this is done.  Seichel, if it is not already obvious, is the opposite of foolishness.

The Most Powerful and Meaningful Event in all of History

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the best attested event of history.   There are numerous examples of individuals who set out to debunk Christianity but ended up as believers when confronted by the overwhelming evidence for the Resurrection.  Arguably St. Paul was the first of these, although the manner in which he set about the debunking as well as that in which he was confronted by the evidence are not exactly typical of all the others who come to mind.   It is attested by the Empty Tomb, the numerous eyewitnesses, and the transformed lives of those who like Saul of Tarsus encountered the Risen Christ and were never the same again.   Jesus, from the beginning of His earthly ministry when He cryptically alluded to it by saying that He would rebuild the Temple in three days in response to those who confronted Him after the first cleansing of the Temple in the second chapter of St. John's Gospel to His referring the Pharisees to the "sign of Jonah" much later in His ministry, pointed to the Resurrection as the only sign that those who demanded one of Him - Who had been performing miracles all around them - would receive.   He knew how well attested it would be and based the credibility of all of His claims upon it.

It is an event that the New Testament attributes to each of the Persons of the Holy Trinity.   When He said that He would rebuild the Temple in three days, of course, Jesus claimed it as His Own work, as He did on a later occasion where He said He had the power both to lay down His life and take it up again (Jn. 10:18).    In the sermons recorded in the Book of Acts the Resurrection is usually attributed to God the Father.   In the epistles the Holy Spirit is often said to be the Agent in the Resurrection.    All of these are true and this demonstrates the involvement of all Three Persons in this event.  This was also true of the original Creation of the world.   This is unlikely to be a coincidence.   In numerous passages Jesus is called the first fruits of the General Resurrection.   Since the latter event is connected with the aspect of Redemption in which the whole world is recreated anew the active involvement of the Three Persons in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is parallel to their active involvement in Creation.

This is far from being the only meaning ascribed to the Resurrection in the New Testament.   In addition to being the most attested event in history, it is the most meaning-packed event in the Bible.

In St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, for example, the first reference to the Resurrection is in his summary of the Gospel in his summation.    In this the Resurrection declares Jesus to be "the Son of God with power" (v. 1:4).   This does not mean that the Resurrection made Jesus the Son of God as some versions of the Adoptionist heresy taught.   Jesus has always been the Son of God, eternally the Son of the Father, as is quite clear in the language used about the Father and Son throughout St. John's Gospel.   What St. Paul was saying corresponds to what Jesus was saying in pointing to the Resurrection as the sign confirming His authority and claims.   It declares Him to be the Son of God with power - it is the visible, incontrovertible, evidence.

A few chapters later in the same epistle, in another brief summary of the Gospel, St. Paul tells us of something else the Resurrection declares - our justification.    This comes at the end of the fourth chapter, a chapter begins with St. Paul borrowing the same terminology and same Old Testament examples that St. James the Just employed in the second chapter of his epistle, generally accepted as the first of the New Testament writings, to make the point that faith cannot produce practical righteousness on its own without works.   Asserting that he was in no way contradicting St. James (Rom. 4:2), St. Paul explains that the justification that he has been discussing, that which is by grace - God's favour freely given rather than earned (vv. 4-5) - on the basis of the redemption and propitiation of Christ on the Cross (3:24-25), and which establishes us in a right standing before God, is not like Jacobean practical righteousness - it is something God has accomplished and given to us, that we are to believe and trust in.   The chapter concludes with this summary of the Gospel: 

Now it was not written for his [Abraham's] sake alone, that it [righteousness] was imputed to him; But for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification. (4:23-25)

Here, as later in the tenth chapter of the epistle, St. Paul gives the Resurrection the full force of the entire Gospel message.    Faith is believing on Him that raised up Jesus, as in the tenth chapter it is believing in your heart that God raised Him from the dead.    In the final verse in the passage we see why the Resurrection can encapsulate the entire Gospel in this way.   Jesus was delivered for our offences, that is to say, it was because of our sins that He went to the Cross and died.   For, in this verse, means "because of" and that is true of the second "for" as well.   Jesus was raised for - because of - our Resurrection.   Had the work not been finished as Jesus declared it to be at His death - had our sin not been paid for in its entirety - the Resurrection could not have occurred.  The Resurrection, therefore, is the proof and declaration of our justification having been completely accomplished by Jesus at the Cross, just as it is the proof and declaration that He is the Eternal Son of God.

Shortly after this, St. Paul provides yet another meaning for the Resurrection.    In explaining why being at peace with God because of His freely given grace does not mean that we are permitted to sin, he discusses the meaning of baptism, the rite in which one formally joins the Christian faith community, the Church.   Being baptized into Jesus Christ means being baptized into His Death (6:3).   This  means that Christ's Death is our own death and as it was to take away our sin that He died we are to reckon ourselves to be dead to sin on account of it.   However, St. Paul immediately adds, if we are joined to Jesus in His Death, we are also joined to Him in His Resurrection.   While one implication of this, which St. Paul expounds upon at length in the fifteenth chapter of I Corinthians, is that we shall all be raised bodily like Christ, in the sixth chapter of Romans another implication of our union with Christ in Resurrection is explored, namely that it is  Christ's Resurrection life that we are to live out by faith as our New Life in Christ.

This is merely a sample of what the New Testament says about the Resurrection and is not intended to be exhaustive, not even of the epistle to the Romans.

What other event in all of Scripture is so packed with powerful significance?

Happy Easter!

He is Risen Indeed!

The Cross is Where Law and Gospel Meet

 

The cross is universally recognized as the main symbol of Christianity.    This seems strange to some since the cross was the instrument by which Jesus Christ was put to death.   The New Testament itself makes it a symbol of the Christian religion however.  St. Paul writing to the Galatians said “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Gal 6:14).   Indeed, the association was made by Jesus Christ Himself.  When He asked His closest disciples first, Who men said that He was, then second, Who they, that is His disciples themselves said He was, He received St. Peter's confession "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God" (Matt. 16:16)  Praising this response as having been revealed by the Father, He then began to explain to His disciples that His being the Christ meant that He would go to Jerusalem, be put to death on the Cross - a particularly cruel form of execution ordinarily reserved for the worst of criminals - and would rise again from the dead on the third day.  (Matt. 16:21)   He then told them that if they wanted to be His disciples they must deny themselves, take up their crosses, and follow Him.  (Matt. 16:24)    Taking up the cross was not a reference to wearing a cross as a piece of jewelry.   It was a reference to the condemned criminal being forced to carry the crossbeam to the execution site, as He Himself was forced to do (with Simon of Cyrene being forced to help Him).  (1)

 

 

In a book that was quite popular when I began my theological education, John F. MacArthur Jr. used Jesus' call to take up the cross to hopelessly confuse Law and Gospel.    The book received the endorsements of all sorts of evangelical celebrities and even contained an introduction by an orthodox Anglican priest, the late J. I. Packer, who definitely ought to have known better.  (2)   While I am more reluctant to speak negatively about MacArthur after his behaviour of the last two years – the Solzhenitsyns and Niemollers and Wurmbrands who stood up admirably against the Satanic public health totalitarianism usually came from among the heretics and schismatics whereas the leadership, even that which is ostensibly orthodox, of Apostolic Churches behaved abominably - the confusion of Law and Gospel is deadly error, which is particularly obnoxious when it is tied in to a theology of the cross.   It is in the Cross of Jesus Christ, which bears the shape of the meeting of two paths, that Law and Gospel meet, and it is because of the Cross that they must never be confused.

 

 

Law and Gospel, when juxtaposed and contrasted, refer to the two Covenants, the Old Covenant God established with Israel through Moses at Mt. Sinai and the New Covenant He established with believers in Jesus Christ - both individually and collectively as the Church - through Christ's Death on the Cross and Resurrection.   The Law Covenant takes its name from the Books of Moses in which the terms of the Covenant are set out.   The Gospel Covenant takes its name from the Christian kerygma - the message of Good News that we proclaim to the world about how God has sent the Promised Redeemer, His Son Jesus Christ, how He has accomplished the salvation of the world through His Death on the Cross, and how He rose again victorious over death.     The emphasis in the contrast is on the opposite principles by which the two Covenants operate.   The principle upon which the Law operates is exactly what its name would indicate.   God commands and requires obedience, men obey and are rewarded and they disobey and are punished.   It is summed up in the words "do and live" (Rom. 10:5, Gal. 3:12).   The principle upon which the Gospel operates is that of grace - God's favour, freely given in Christ.   The Gospel tells us that God’s grace has been given to us in Christ, we receive it by faith, by believing the Gospel.  It is summed up in the last thing Jesus Christ said on the Cross before committing His Spirit to the Father – “It is finished” (Jn. 19:30).

 

 

St. Paul explains the contrast between the two principles this way:

 

 

For what saith the scripture?  Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.  Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.   But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.  (Rom. 4:3-5)

 

 

Later in the same epistle he declares the mutual exclusivity of the two principles.   In talking about the “remnant according to the election of grace”, i.e., ethnic Israelites who believe in Jesus he says:

 

 

And if by grace, then it is no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace.  But if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work. (Rom. 11:6)

 

 

St. John expresses the contrast at the beginning of his Gospel:

 

 

For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.  (Jn. 1:17)

 

 

The mutual exclusivity of the principles of Law and Gospel does not mean that there was no grace in the Old Covenant or that there is no law in the New.   The Tabernacle/Temple, with its daily sacrifices, and especially the Day of Atonement was all about the forgiveness of sins and reconciling the offender to God which is only accomplished through grace.   These did not accomplish the removal of sin, but they pointed forward as St. Paul explains in his epistle to the Hebrews, to the One Sacrifice of Christ at the heart of the Gospel which did.   Jesus, after the Last Supper in which He instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist declaring the Cup to be the “New testament in my blood, which is shed for you” (Lk. 22:20), gave to His disciples a New Commandment “That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (Jn. 13:34), a Commandment both similar and different to the Two Greatest Commandments in which He declared the whole of the Law to be summed up.   What the mutual exclusivity does mean is that the Law and the Gospel have their own ends to accomplish, that neither can accomplish the ends of the other, and that it is disastrous to try and accomplish the end of the Gospel by means of the Law.   When the Law is used for its own end rather than that of the Gospel the two complement each other.

 

While the Law forbids sin and requires righteousness it is incapable of producing the righteousness it requires (Rom. 7).    This is not the end for which the Law was given.   In contrasting the glory of the Law with the greater glory of the Gospel St. Paul described it as the “ministration of death, written and engraven in stones” and the “ministration of condemnation” (II Cor. 3:7, 9).   This is the end for which the Law was given.   It was given to condemn.   As a Covenant, the Law was made with a specific people for a specific time.   Its message, however, is for all people in all times, and that message is to the effect of “this is the righteousness God requires, you do not measure up, you are a sinner, you are condemned”.   The condemnation in the Law’s message for us is not a maybe condemnation – “you might be condemned if you don’t shape up”.   It is a certain condemnation, a judgement that is already past, a sentence hanging over all of our heads.

 

 

The Gospel tells us that God, out of His Own love and mercy, has done everything that needs to be done to rescue us from this condemnation.   He has given us His Only-Begotten Son as the Saviour He promised back when our first parents fell into sin (Gen. 3:15)   That Saviour, Who was without sin (Heb. 4:15, I Pet. 2:22) took our sins upon Himself when He was nailed to the Cross (I Pet. 2:24) and by His Suffering and Death, a work of perfect redemption (Rom 3:24, I Pet. 1:18-19) and propitiation, i.e., turning away of wrath (Rom. 3:25, I Jn. 2:2) He obtained for us the righteousness of God (II Cor. 5:21, Rom. 3:21-22, 26).   That the work of salvation is complete and nothing more needs to be added to it was proclaimed by Christ as He died (3) and by His Resurrection (4).   This is God’s free gift to us (Rom 3:24, 6:23, Eph. 2:8) proclaimed in the Gospel to all who believe.    Believing is not something we do to add to or complete what Jesus has done.   Faith merely receives what is brought to us through the proclamation of the Gospel.   (5)   The salvation proclaimed in the Gospel is as certain as the condemnation proclaimed in the Law.

 

 

When Law and Gospel are used for their own distinct purposes these messages complement each other.   God, through the message of certain condemnation contained in the Law, works repentance – brokenness, humility and contrition – in our hearts, preparing them for the message of certain salvation proclaimed in the Gospel by removing the impediment to faith that is our own self-righteous delusion that we can earn God’s favour.   Through the Gospel, when it is received in faith, God works love in the hearts of believers (1 Jn. 5:19), which love is the source of the only human works that are in any way acceptable to God.

 

 

When Law and Gospel are mixed the certainty of both messages is compromised.   The Law, adulterated in this way, ceases to be the message of certain condemnation to the sinner.   The Gospel, similarly adulterated, ceases to be the message of certain salvation to the believer.   Both become the same message in which both condemnation and salvation are uncertain.  

 

 

It was by going to the Cross that Jesus fulfilled all the demands of the Law.   It was by fulfilling the demands of the Law at the Cross that Jesus gave us the Gospel.    It is in the Cross that Law and Gospel meet each other and we should not try to force them to meet anywhere else.   The call to discipleship illustrates the point very well.

 

 

Contrary to the way it is explained in the typical sermon, i.e., your “cross” being some non-specific burden that is particular to yourself, Jesus’ original hearers would have understood the call to deny themselves, take up their crosses, and follow Him quite literally as a call to follow Him to their deaths.   Since it was made in the context of predicting His Own Death and Resurrection an obvious opportunity to do just this was provided along with the call.

 

 

At the Last Supper Jesus told His Apostles that they would be scattered like sheep and that St. Peter in particular would deny Him three times.   St. Peter vehemently vowed that though he were to die with Jesus, he would never deny Him.   All the others joined in and said the same thing.   Of course, things turned out exactly as Jesus predicted.   The Apostles scattered after the arrest at Gethsemane, St. Peter followed Him to Caiaphas’ palace, where he denied knowing Jesus three times before the cock crow signaled the dawn.   None of the disciples were crucified with Him that day.  

 

That is not where the story ends, however.    Jesus went to the Cross Himself.   He completed the work of salvation for the Apostles and for the rest of the world.   He died – and then He rose again.   The Cross led to the Empty Tomb.   The Empty Tomb led to the Ascension from the Mount of Olives.   The Ascension led to the sending of the Holy Spirit on Whitsunday.   At Whitsunday St. Peter proclaimed Christ to the multitude and three thousand were converted.   Later, after healing the man lame from birth, he proclaimed Christ to the crowd at Solomon’s Porch in the Temple.   He and St. John were arrested and brought before the priests and the Sanhedrin who ordered them not to speak or teach in Jesus’ name and they answered that they “cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard” (Acts. 4:20).   Arrested again and miraculously delivered from prison, the Apostles were brought again before the Sanhedrin where St. Peter with the others declared “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).   Much later, St. Peter was indeed crucified as a martyr for Christ, as Jesus Himself predicted when after His Resurrection He forgave and restored him (Jn. 21:18-19).  

 

 

It was the Cross that made the difference.   Up to that point, the call to discipleship operated on the principle of Law which cannot produce that which it demands.   Then Jesus fulfilled the Law at the Cross and ushered in the Gospel.   Under the Gospel, discipleship operated on an entirely different basis, the basis of grace and liberty and the power of the Holy Spirit, and what was demanded under Law was produced under the Gospel.

 

 

Had a certain evangelical celebrity from Sun Valley, California understood this he would have written a very different book indeed.

 

The Law and the Gospel meet in the Cross.   Don't try to bring them together anywhere else.

 

 

 

 

(1)       The multiple references to the carrying of the transom, both in Jesus' call to discipleship and in the Gospel accounts of His and Simon's being made to do so, demonstrates that the  familiar T/t - shaped complex cross was the Cross of the Crucifixion and not the crux simplex or "torture stake".   All the earliest writers who make any allusion to the kind of cross used indicate that it was the T-shape.  Claims to the contrary arise from the delusions of hyper-Protestants like the nineteenth century Rev. Alexander Hislop who start from the premise that the Catholic - not just papal, but actually Catholic, held by all Churches everywhere since the most ancient times - understanding of everything is wrong.  In Hislop's case he thought that everything Catholic was not just wrong but a fraud designed to pass off Babylonian paganism as Christianity.  He saw the T in the familiar cross shape as a reference to Tammuz, the Sumerian/Babylonian deity with some similarities to the Adonis of Greco-Roman mythology after whom the Babylonians named a summer month which name was borrowed by the Jews for their tenth civil month/fourth religious month in the Babylonian Captivity and remains the name of that month in the Jewish calendar to his day.   Hislop, on the basis of no evidence other than his own conjecture and imagination, identified the mythological Tammuz with the son and supposed reincarnation of the Nimrod mentioned in Genesis as an early king of what became Babylon.   All of this deserves to be mocked as the risible nonsense that it is.

(2)       The same year (1989) that this book, The Gospel According to Jesus, was published, MacArthur was defending his "Incarnational Sonship" doctrine before the Independent Fundamental Churches of America.   Incarnational Sonship is a gross heresy.   By denying the Eternal Sonship affirmed in the Nicene Creed and deriving Christ's Sonship from the Incarnation it implicitly teaches Sabellianism by confusing the Persons of the Father and Holy Spirit, the Latter being the Agent in the Incarnation.   MacArthur has since recanted this view.

(3)       “It is finished” also has the sense of “paid in full”.

(4)       “Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification” (Rom. 4:25).   The parallel structure of the verse indicates the second “for” has the same sense as the first.

(5)       Proclaiming the Gospel is something done both by individual believers and by the Church collectively.   With regards to the Church it is a more formal Ministry than it is with the individual believer.   Proclaiming the Gospel is part of the Ministry of the Word which includes preaching in the sense of giving a sermon, teaching if that is distinguished from preaching, and even just the reading of the Scriptures.   The Ministry of Sacrament is another form of proclaiming the Gospel.    Unlike the Ministry of the Word, which involves Law as well and is the Ministry where the danger of confusing or mixing the two must especially be guarded against, the Ministry of Sacrament is pure Gospel.   In Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the physical elements of water, bread, and wine become vessels through which the Word of the Gospel is conveyed tangibly.   The Absolution is another form of proclaiming the Gospel although it is a bit of a stretch to maintain that it is also another Sacrament as our Lutheran friends do seeing as there is not really a physical element comparable to water, bread, or wine.   It is part of the Ministry of the Keys, the Gospel Key that is the counterpart to the Discipline/Excommunication which is the Law Key, and as such belongs to the Apostolic Government of the Church.   Those who have inherited the errors of the Puritans, and specifically the Puritan error of associating the priestly office with the Law and the prophetic office with the Gospel - it is obviously the other way around, the prophetic office being all about rebuking people for sin, the priestly office being all about provision for forgiveness of sin – would regard the sacerdotal assertions in this footnote as legalistic.   Ironically, these also generally follow the Puritans in advising people to look to their own works for evidence of their election, which is another way of telling people to put their faith in their own works.   With regards to individual believers, proclaiming the Gospel is less of a formal Ministry and consists of verbal communication – although the quote attributed to St. Francis of Assisi (amusingly fact checkers assert he didn’t say it even though what they really mean is that no evidence exists from his own time that he said it which hardly constitutes proof of the negative assertion – they would be on firmer ground if they could find an alternative attribution) “Preach the Gospel at all times.  If necessary, use words” bears keeping in mind.   So does the similarly themed poem that includes the lines “The Gospel is written a chapter a day/In the deeds that you do and the words that you say/Men read what you write whether faithless or true/Say what is the Gospel according to you?”