Does Morality Bring You Closer To God?

A pastor tweeted the following:

"The Gospel reminds moral people that they are no closer to God than the most immoral person."

and

"The Gospel reminds immoral people they are no farther from God than the most moral person."

In my informal polling of fellow Christians I was not able to find anyone (other than my lovely wife) who disagreed with the above quotes. Some agreed outright, and others gave responses that were uncertain or conditional. But no one said, "That's completely wrong," or, "What rubbish!" or, "How can a pastor say that - the Bible teaches the opposite!"

So I think I have an uphill battle here as I try to make a biblical case for the relationship between morality and closeness to God. I will do what I can to persuade.

The Bible has much to say about moral and immoral behavior. It tells us to do the former and shun the latter. For example, Isaiah 1:16b-17a: "Cease to do evil, learn to do good," and 1 Peter 3:10b-11a: "Let him turn away from evil and do good." It would not be difficult (only time-consuming) to list a thousand Bible texts that tell us to do good things and not to do bad things. That message is on nearly every page and hard to miss.

The Bible also defines moral and immoral behaviors for us, and gives many examples. Again, we could cite a thousand texts. I will mention just one, Galatians 5:19-23, which analyzes goodness in terms of the fruit of the Spirit ("love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control") and wickedness in terms of works of the sinful nature ("sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these"). In addition to its lists of virtues and vices the Bible gives many stories - some historical, some in the form of parables - that show what moral and immoral behavior look like. King David committed adultery and schemed the death of an innocent man (2 Samuel 11). That was bad. The Samaritan generously helped a crime victim he found by the side of the road (Luke 10:29-37). That was good.

So the Bible commands us to be moral and not immoral, and it defines and illustrates morality and immorality so that we can see pretty clearly what we are supposed to do and not do. I do not think this is controversial.

My controversial point is this: in flat contradiction to the quotes above, moral people are closer to God than immoral people. Conversely, immoral people are farther away from him. So when Jesus says, "The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil" (Luke 6:45), we should understand that the good person is closer to God than the evil person. Likewise, the man who "delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night" is closer to God than the one who "walks in the counsel of the wicked, stands in the way of sinners, and sits in the seat of scoffers" (Psalm 1). The good Samaritan is closer to God than the selfish Levite. And so on and so forth.

Of course, "closeness to God" must be understood metaphorically. It is impossible to understand it otherwise, given that God is omnipresent. (Jeremiah 23:24: "'Do I not fill heaven and earth?' declares the Lord.") Technically, all things are equidistant from an omnipresent God. But I think most people grasp with intuitive ease the imagery of "nearness" or "closeness" to God as opposed to "distance" or "separation" from him. Devotional literature is full of such talk, as when William Cowper (1731 - 1800) bemoaned some sin that pushed the Spirit of God away:

Return, O Holy Dove, return
Sweet Messenger of rest
I hate the sin that made Thee mourn
And drove Thee from my breast

But does the Bible itself speak of moral behavior bringing us closer to God, and of immoral behavior separating us from him? Absolutely. It does so repeatedly.

Isaiah 59:2 says, "Your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear." The next verse gives examples of the immoral behaviors that create this distance from God: "Your hands are stained with blood, your fingers with guilt. Your lips have spoken falsely, and your tongue mutters wicked things." So lies and slander and the shedding of innocent blood make God go away.

So also does the sin of treating one's wife badly. 1 Peter 3:7 tells husbands to live with their wives in an understanding way and show them honor "so that your prayers may not be hindered." It sounds like God will not bend his ear quite so closely to a man who is mean to his wife.

Conversely, "The Lord is near [emphasis added] to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth" (Psalm 145:18). I believe the qualification "in truth" is important, because many call on God insincerely, and that insincerity is proven by their wickedness. For example, Isaiah 29:18: "These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me," and Luke 6:46: "Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?". While God separates himself from people who behave wickedly, he is near to those who call on him in truth - which is elsewhere spoken of as having "clean hands" or "pure hearts." See for example James 4:8: "Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded." James teaches that we can indeed get close to God, and that he will get close to us. But we must clean our hands and purify our hearts. Repentance is not optional if we want to be near God. It is necessary. "Without holiness no one will see the Lord" (Hebrews 12:14).

David's music director Asaph knew what it took to be near God. At the conclusion of Psalm 73 he wrote, "As for me, it is good to be near God" (verse 28), and "Those who are far from you will perish" (verse 27). Psalm 73 is particularly instructive in this regard because earlier in the poem Asaph expressed despair over the apparent futility of goodness. "Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure and washed my hands in innocence," he wrote (verse 13). Good behavior had not brought him good fortune. "All day long I have been afflicted, and every morning brings new punishments" (verse 14). Meanwhile, wicked, arrogant and violent people "have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from common human burdens; they are not plagued by human ills" (vs. 4-5). Had Asaph gone on to conclude that wicked people not only had better luck in the short term but stayed "just as close to God" in the long term as the pure-hearted, I suppose he might have "lost his foothold" altogether (verse 2), and succumbed to nihilistic despair or narcissistic self-indulgence. But by God's grace he did not slip into that foolishness. Nor did he trespass divine boundaries tempted by the beguiling thought: "If I behave immorally, I'll be no further from God than I was before!" Asaph knew better.

If it were true that "moral people are no closer to God than the most immoral person," then we might expect that the Bible's constant admonitions to behave morally would be followed by statements that gently break to us the news that - contrary to all hope - God will draw no closer to us if we obey than if we disobey. For example, Matthew 5:8 might read, "Blessed are the pure in heart, even though their purity of heart won't bring them any closer to God than the corrupt of heart." Or Matthew 5:9 might read, "Blessed are the peacemakers, despite the fact that God will remain just as distant from them as he does from the warmongers." But of course, that is not what Jesus said. He gave rather than withheld hope of God's nearness. He said, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," and "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God."

I would like to think that the biblical case for moral people being closer to God than immoral people has been sufficiently made at this point. If doubts linger, I can only say that there are many, many more Bible texts where those came from. But I will not belabor the point. The person who fails to see this doctrine in the verses above is unlikely to see it in a hundred more. Instead, I will try to meet some objections.

Some might point out that the pastor quoted above was not affirming that the Bible as a whole taught that the most moral person was no closer to God than immoral people: rather, it was the gospel in particular that maintained this.

But this objection cannot stand. First, it is not good theology to assume that the gospel contradicts what the rest of the Bible affirms. (It is bad pedagogy too! Pity the humble parishioner who, reading his Bible, must constantly remind himself, "Here is the principle clearly being taught - but I must remember that the gospel says the opposite." How is the poor man to know, at the end of his devotional reading, which end is up?). It is better to understand the gospel as fulfilling rather than contradicting the rest of the Bible's teachings. The Gospel writers themselves (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) regularly emphasized the theme of Jesus being the fulfillment rather than the rejection of biblical truth.

Second, it must be noted that the Bible texts cited above that establish the connection between moral behavior and closeness to God are taken from both the Old and the New Testaments. They were written both before and after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. The gospel changed many things, but it left this principle intact. To say that the relationship between good behavior and closeness to God was strictly an Old Covenant teaching (like circumcision or not eating pork) that the New Covenant rendered obsolete is simply false. Nor can we say that that "closeness to God" or "distance from him" is a principle that should be taught only to the redeemed, because unsaved people are all precisely the same distance from God. No fair reading of the texts can justify this distinction. If you look up and read the actual Bible verses - like the Sermon on the Mount - it becomes very clear that these warnings and encouragements were addressed to a mixed company of the saved and the damned.

Another response might be to say that the pastor quoted above "didn't really mean" that, according to the gospel, moral people were no closer to God than immoral people. Instead he "really meant" something else. This strikes me as misguided generosity. While it is a gracious instinct to re-interpret a sincere pastor's teaching so as to render it biblically orthodox, I'm afraid such an approach ultimately leaves us dull and no closer to the truth. It burdens us with the weary task of "guessing what he meant" rather than challenging us with the good work of "testing what he said." And maybe he actually did mean what he said! I have often found myself "reinterpreted" by people who refused to take my actual words at face value, and I have wanted to respond, "Could we review the audio tape?" or, "I chose my words carefully, and I stand by them and their plain meaning."

But in this case the actual wording in the slogans quoted above is so far from the Bible's regular teaching on the matter that we may have no choice but to do a little re-interpretation in order to get at the seed thought behind the unorthodox expression. In what follows, I will interpret the quotes above in terms of a common sermon illustration used by many evangelical preachers that depicts our standing before God.

It is called "the bridge" illustration. The idea is that our sins have opened an unbridgeable chasm between us and God. See Isaiah 59:2 above, "Your sins have separated you from God," and Romans 3:23, "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." We try to cross that bridge by our good behavior but can never get far enough. It is like sticking a six foot plank over the lip of the Grand Canyon - it won't reach the other side. Only Christ, by his righteousness and through his perfect sacrifice, bridges the gap. Through faith in him - not through sincere efforts to build ourselves a longer plank - we cross over the gap into eternal fellowship with God. Sometimes the distance between us and God is represented by the Pacific Ocean, which we try to swim across by doing good. Some bad swimmers only go 10 feet before they drown, while other very good swimmers go 10 miles or more. But none of them make it from California to Japan. The best swimmer and the worst swimmer equally need a boat to ferry them across the ocean. Mother Theresa and Adolph Hitler equally need Jesus to save their souls.

Seen from this perspective, the distance between extreme morality and extreme immorality dissolves into an irrelevance. Who cares whether you swim 10 feet or 10 miles? You are going to drown anyway. If you are going to get to Japan, there must be another way! The Christian answer is that Jesus is the Way.

And I agree that Jesus is the way, and I agree that "swimming across the ocean" is a futile idea. But the reason I still disagree with the doctrine that "moral people are no closer to God than the most immoral person, and immoral people are no farther from God than the most moral person" might be expressed through a question I would ask that presses the metaphor of the seemingly impossible ocean voyage: namely, "But what if God told us to get into the ocean and start swimming?" Because, metaphorically speaking, that is exactly what we see in Scripture.

Shortly before Jesus began his ministry, his predecessor John the Baptist "appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" (Mark 1:4). He was one of many figures in the Bible (and throughout history) who told people to be good. For example, he said, "Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none." Tax collectors asked him what they should do, and he said, "Don't collect any more than you are required to." Soldiers asked him the same, and he said, "Don't extort money, don't accuse people falsely, and be content with your pay." (See Luke 3:10-14). That is, he gave people moral rules, a set of do's and don'ts, and told them Messiah was on the way. Some confessed their sins, repented of them, and were baptized by John. Others, in particular the notoriously corrupt religious leaders of the day, felt that they had nothing to repent of and rejected John's baptism. Their inability to feel guilt was astonishing. Scripture characterizes them as men who, among other things, enriched themselves by defrauding vulnerable widows of their homes (Luke 20:47), ordered the execution of a man whose only crime was the experience of a miracle that led people to believe in Jesus (John 12:10-11), and deliberately sought false testimony against an innocent man so that he would be slowly tortured to death (Matthew 26:59). Small wonder John called them "a brood of vipers" (Matthew 3:7) and Jesus called them "sons of hell" (Matthew 23:15)! As a group (though certainly there were individual exceptions), they were profoundly corrupt and unable to see themselves as bad. Whenever I hear evangelical preachers depict Pharisees as "decent, moral, law-abiding men," I think, "Hmm - they must be reading a different Bible."

Scripture records a sharp contrast between people who took moral steps of obedience in response to the preaching of John and those who, despite listening to him, hardened their hearts and refused to repent of anything they did. The first group loved and accepted Jesus while the second group hated and rejected him. See Luke 7:29-30: "All the people, even the tax collectors, when they heard Jesus’ words, acknowledged that God’s way was right, because they had been baptized by John. But the Pharisees and the experts in the law rejected God’s purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptized by John."

The person who turns away from immorality when made aware of it is the one whose heart is most receptive to the gospel of grace when it comes. Just as deliberate sin hardens the heart and obscures spiritual sight, so deliberate repentance softens the heart and makes a person able to see that he is helpless apart from Christ. When C. S. Lewis reflected on his very reluctant conversion from atheism to theism and then to Christianity, he wrote, "It is significant that this long-evaded encounter happened at a time when I was making a serious effort to obey my conscience. No doubt it was far less serious than I supposed, but it was the most serious I had made for a long time." He learned from experience what his master George MacDonald taught so frequently: "Obedience is the opener of eyes."

And disobedience closes them. That is why I warn people to shun bad behavior of any kind. The quotes at the top of this essay are wrong - wrong through and through, utterly wrong, unbiblical, and dangerous to believe. If you behave immorally, you will not find yourself at precisely the same distance from God as the man who makes a sincere effort to obey his conscience. Instead, you will find yourself further away. Immorality will blind your eyes, darken your heart, and confuse your intellect. It may even send you so far away from God that he will some day grant your awful wish to spend your eternity apart from him.

So be good. For God's sake, be good.

When Warned About Your Boyfriend Or Girlfriend

A friend of a friend of a friend is a criminal. He has not been arrested yet, but it's just a matter of time. He has stolen cash and hundreds of dollars worth of goods. He's a compulsive liar. Alarmingly, he makes threats ("I'm going to slash his tires"; "I'm going to kill that guy"), and one wonders if it's just talk or if some day he will actually do it.

Here is the weird thing about him: he has girlfriend - pretty, lively, seemingly bright - who still has not left him. Other people have warned her about him, but she does not listen. She says she loves him. Until she got this boyfriend we all thought she was rational. But the fact that she keeps up a relationship with this clown proves otherwise.

When I heard about this case it reminded me of similar stories I have heard of or have had experience with. Many years ago when I was in college I fell in love with a girl, I'll call her Ellen, who, though not particularly beautiful, was funny, wise, godly, pleasant and extremely bright. Our relationship did not proceed to engagement and marriage because she made it clear she only wanted to be friends. Ok, fine, I dealt with that. But then not long afterward she fell in love with a young man (she told me so herself), and it was clearly someone she could never marry under any circumstances. I was mystified. How could Ellen - so wise, so well-grounded - fall for someone so wrong? I thought she was smart!

I have learned since that nothing makes a person dumber than love. Or maybe I shouldn't even call it love - more like affection, or infatuation, or the fear of being alone, or the raw desire to have somebody. This state of mind warps the ability to think well. The person whose character you are least able to judge objectively is the man or woman with whom you are falling in love.

That is why I want to offer this unbelievably simple advice to any young person who has not yet ruined his or her life with a bad relationship:

If anybody ever warns you that the person you are dating is no good, LISTEN!!! The odds are, they're right and you're blind!

I am not saying that such warnings are always on target. It is possible for a warning like that to come from someone who is jealous or delusional or just mistaken. But far, far more often these people who wave their red flags see something you don't see or are making excuses for. So listen. Listen to warnings. Never assume that the rank stupidity you have seen in others will not some day paralyze your brain too.

Years ago I knew a pilot who served in the first Gulf War. He told me that as part of his training he was put in a chamber and subjected to low oxygen - like that at high altitude - and instructed to monitor his thoughts so that he could recognize the symptoms of losing brain function so that, if it happened while flying a plane, he'd know instinctively to reconnect his oxygen mask or dive to lower altitude. He told me that the exercise didn't really work. He was given math problems to do, and though he thought he was getting the right answers, he found out later that he was writing gibberish. Only one thing indicated to him that he wasn't himself: he could not sign his name when asked to do so. I must be pretty far gone if I can't sign my own name, he thought.

A warning from a fair-minded person about a bad boyfriend or girlfriend is like that pilot's inability to sign his own name. It may be your only link to rationality. Take it seriously. Get to oxygen-rich atmosphere and dump the jerk.

God's Conditional Love

In the course of just a few days I heard the following from four evangelical preachers, three of whom are influential pastors of megachurches.

J. D. Greear (Senior Pastor, Summit Church, Raleigh) "In Christ there is nothing I can do that would make You love me more, nothing I have done that makes You love me less."

Pete Briscoe (Senior Pastor, Bent Tree Bible Fellowship, Dallas) "There's nothing I can do to make him love me more, there's nothing I can do to make him love me less."

Andy Stanley (Senior Pastor, North Point Community Church, Atlanta) "Do you know what the root, the heart, the pull-back-the-layers is when it comes to following Jesus? This is uncomfortable, but it will change you. And it will change us. I think it will change the world. God could not love you more. And there is nothing you will do and nothing you could do that will cause him to love you less. And the corollary is this: Every person you're ever eyeball to eyeball with God could not love more. And there's nothing they could do to cause God to love them less. Nothing."

Lay Preacher (Name withheld, Chicago area) "His love for us is unprovoked by us. He loved us before we existed, and even the very best things we do will not increase the love that God has for us. God does not love us because of something we did, something we said, something we thought, something we felt... - he doesn't love us any more for that. God's love is not influenced by us. It has nothing to do with who we were. God's love for us has nothing to do with who we are. God's love has nothing to do with who we're going to grow to be. Our efforts, our constitution, our make-up, our behavior, whether we find it very loveable or very unlovable, is completely irrelevant when it comes to God's love for us. He doesn't love us because of who we are. And in that sense God's love is very unconditional...Our condition, our behavior, our thoughts, our deeds, are irrelevant to whether God loves us or not."

I am withholding the name of the last preacher because he is not a vocational clergyman, has no seminary training, and as a layman was merely (and commendably) responding to an invitation to preach. So he is less accountable for his biblical illiteracy than the ordained ministers quoted above. In his case, the accountable ones are the pastors who allow him to address their congregation.

The source of the evangelical slogan, "Nothing you can do can make God love you more, nothing you can do can make God love you less," is, as best as I have been able to determine, Philip Yancey's 1997 book What's So Amazing About Grace? The original full quote is,

Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more - no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less - no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder.

In the last 15 years, Yancey's formulation - or some abbreviated version of it - has achieved near creedal status among American evangelicals. It would be hard to overestimate the enthusiasm with which it has been received. Andy Stanley, pastor of the second largest church in North America, says above that it represents "the root, the heart" of following Jesus. I have been asked to recite it out loud with other parishioners in a Sunday morning worship service. While in the church I grew up in we would say together, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord...", nowadays we are much more likely to affirm, "Nothing we can do can make God love us more; nothing we can do can make God love us less."

Is it biblical?

I will wait, while crickets chirp, for proponents of this doctrine to go fetch their Bibles and find even one verse in its 66 books that supports it. I should make plain that the issue is not whether God's love is great, patient, deep, kind, forgiving, full of mercy, eternal, prevenient (precedes ours), or beyond imagination. I happily grant all that. The issue is whether there are any conditions or degrees attached to it. Does the Bible say anywhere that God loves us all the same no matter what we do?

No. It doesn't. I can save you hours of vain searching. Or, if you prefer, go verify my flat denial by reading through the entire Bible at your leisure as carefully as you can. In the meantime, here are some Scriptures that teach the opposite:

Psalm 5:4-6: You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with you the wicked cannot dwell. The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; you hate all who do wrong. You destroy those who tell lies; bloodthirsty and deceitful men the Lord abhors.

King David would not have recognized as his Good Shepherd a god who loved the righteous and the wicked equally, unconditionally, and without regard for their behavior. David's God, Jehovah, though bounteous in mercy and slow to anger and quick to forgive, hated those who did wrong, and abhorred bloodthirsty and deceitful men. Can you imagine David enduring for one moment a sermon where the preacher maintained, "Our condition, our behavior, our thoughts, our deeds, are irrelevant to whether God loves us or not"? The shepherd king through whom Messiah came would have denounced such doctrine as a blasphemy against his holy God!

Psalm 86:5: You are forgiving and good, O Lord, abounding in love to all who call to you.

The Yancey doctrine would render this verse meaningless. How can the affirmation "God's love abounds to all who call to him" mean anything at all if God's love remains exactly the same whether you call to him or not? If nothing you do makes God love you more or less, then calling to him can have no connection whatsoever to his abounding love. The Yancey doctrine must regard this verse as odd as the assertion that the sun rises in the east on Tuesdays. Well, yes, I suppose it does. But why single out Tuesdays? The sun rises in the east every day. Chop off "on Tuesdays" and you have a meaningful sentence. In like manner, the Yancey doctrine needs to chop off "to all who call to you" in Psalm 86:5 in order for the verse to make sense.

Psalm 103:11: For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him.

More of the same. Here David is trying to make a point about God's love being connected to our fear of him, which the Yancey doctrine must blunt by correcting it to read, "...so great is his love, period," or, "so great is his love for those who fear him which is exactly equal to his love for those who do not fear him, because, as we all know, fearing him won't make him love us more or less."

Psalm 37:27-28: Turn from evil and do good; then you will dwell in the land forever. For the Lord loves the just and will not forsake his faithful ones.

I don't know how much plainer it can be. The Bible affirms that the Lord loves the just. To say that God loves the just and the unjust equally because his love is unconditional and nothing we do can make him love us more or less is absurdity to the point of farce.

Psalm 32:10: Many or the woes of the wicked, but the Lord's unfailing love surrounds the one who trusts in him.

Note the words, "the one who trusts in him." That's a condition. Those who do not trust in him are not surrounded with exactly the same amount of unfailing love.

There are plenty of verses like this in the Bible's wisdom literature, verses that stubbornly resist being shoehorned into the doctrine that God's love is unconditional, cannot be affected by us, cannot be increased or decreased by anything we do. How can such a doctrine stand when confronted by texts like the ones below?

Psalm 146:8-9: The Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down,the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the alien and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.

Proverbs 15:9: The Lord detests the way of the wicked but he loves those who pursue righteousness.

Pardon me for resorting to cliche, but this isn't rocket science. If you want God to love you, pursue righteousness. If you do wrong and become wicked, God will hate you (Psalm 5:5) and your way (Proverbs 15:9). It is right there on the pages of Scripture, again and again and again and again. Painful as it may be to acknowledge, the truth is that those who teach the unconditionality of God's love either do not read their Bibles or do not pay attention when they read them. This includes the vast majority of evangelical preachers today. I'm sorry, but someone had to say it.

Please do not think for a moment that God's love became unconditional when BC switched to AD and the Old Testament gave way to the New. The cross changed many things, but not this. The same affirmations about the conditionality of God's love are found in the New Testament:

2 Corinthians 7:9: God loves a cheerful giver.

These words can only be meaningful if God loves cheerful givers in a way or to a degree that he does not love grumpy givers, cheerful non-givers, or grumpy non-givers. I deny that this verse contains implicit qualifiers demanded by the Yancey doctrine: "God loves (exactly the same) cheerful (and grouchy) givers (and non-givers)." No, that is not right. The plain meaning must be allowed to stand and inspire many great and happy works of charity: Give cheerfully, and God will love you more.

Jude 21: Keep yourselves in the love of God.

This verse means, "Keep yourselves in the love of God."

An analogy might help. Imagine a commandment that said, "Keep yourselves fit and trim." We might not like that commandment, we might be fat and out of shape and want to stay that way - but there would be no doubt about what the words meant, and we would know exactly how to fulfill them. To keep ourselves fit and trim we must exercise and eat moderately. There would be things we would actually have to do and not do. But the Yancey doctrine must understand Jude 21 to be analogous to something more like, "Keep yourselves composed of atoms": an admonition to remain in a state from which you could not conceivably escape. And I think that's silly.

In this verse, Jude does not tell us how to keep ourselves in the love of God. But it wasn't necessary - his half-Brother had explained how to do that some years before:

John 15:10: If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love.

Jesus did not say, "Whether or not you obey my commands, you will remain in my love." We remain in his love, or "keep ourselves in the love of God," by doing what he said. The condition is explicit and unmistakable.

Two more. In the following verses, Jesus expresses a cause-and-effect relationship between our doing something and God responding to it. The cause is our loving Jesus. The effect is God loving us.

John 14:21b: He who loves me will be loved by my Father.

John 16:27: The Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.

Again, there is no mistaking the condition. In these verses, God's love for us depends upon our love for Jesus. (It is also true that our love for Jesus depends upon God's love for us - see John 6:44, Romans 5:8, 1 John 4:10: these two truths complement rather than contradict.) And loving Jesus is not expressed as having a warm fuzzy for him, valuable as that may be. Jesus' love language is always obedience: If you love me, you will obey what I command...Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me (John 15:15, 21a).

Maybe someday I'll go to an evangelical church and rather than being asked to repeat, "Nothing I do can make God love me more," I'll be asked to say together with my brothers and sisters in Christ, When I obey Jesus, God loves me.

Amen.

What Did Jesus Mean By "Makes Her Commit Adultery"?

There are four passages where Jesus talks about divorce and remarriage: Matthew 5:31-32, Matthew 19:3-9, Mark 10:2-12, and Luke 16:18. I give these texts in full at the end of this essay. Much has been written about them. It would take a book to begin to cover all the issues. My purpose here is modest: to explain just one phrase in those texts - "makes her commit adultery" - which appears only in Matthew 5:32. The verse reads,

But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

How could you make somebody commit adultery? And if you succeeded in making her do it, would she still be guilty of sin?

Context means everything here. The texts in Matthew 19 and Mark 10 show Jesus responding to a question put to him by the Pharisees: "Can a man divorce his wife for any reason?" (See Matthew 19:3 and Mark 10:2). The question was not innocent. An agenda of self-justification provoked it. Pharisees prided themselves on their obedience to the law. The law said, "Do not commit adultery," and no Pharisee ever wanted to be accused of cheating on his wife. But what if you're married and get tired of your wife and someone new comes along? No problem, said some Pharisees - just dump the first wife, give her a certificate of divorce (a legal document declaring her free to marry someone else), and then marry your second wife. That way you have not cheated on anybody.

Jesus said, in effect, No. You can't just dump a wife for no good reason and marry somebody else. That is still cheating. Even if you say, "But I gave her a certificate of divorce! She can go marry anybody else she wants, I don't care. I did the right thing by her." No, Jesus insisted, you have still wronged her. That's still your wife. Whether you slept with someone else while still married to her, or dismissed her with divorce papers and then took another woman - it's all the same. Either way it is still adultery.

I believe that is the essential point in all four passages.

But there are always complications. For example, what if the first wife wasn't innocent herself? What if she was sleeping around? Well in that case, Jesus said, the principle does not apply. You can divorce her. See Matthew 5:32 and Matthew 19:9 where he says you can't divorce your wife except on the grounds of sexual immorality. In 1 Corinthians 7:15, St. Paul gave another exception - abandonment by an unbeliever: "If an unbelieving partner leaves, let him do so. The brother or sister is not bound in such cases." The Bible does not address other possible exceptions. For example, what should you do if your husband gets drunk all the time and beats you and the kids? Or what should you do if your wife tries to poison you or concocts false evidence against you so that you go to prison? I think in such cases we are expected to use the wisdom God gave us.

But then there are other kinds of complications. I believe the phrase "makes her commit adultery" - odd to our ears - arises in response to a linguistic complication.

At issue is the definition of the word "adultery." What exactly does the word mean? For us I think it usually means "cheating on a spouse" - sleeping with somebody while married to someone else. The potential problem with this definition is that it implies that the same act may be adulterous for one partner but not for the other. For example, if a married man sleeps with a single woman, this definition means that he has committed adultery but she has not. (What she has done is wrong, of course, but we would use some word other than "adultery" to refer to it.)

A wider definition specifies not so much the person but the act as adulterous. In this understanding, adultery is the act that takes place when a married person sleeps with someone other than his or her spouse - regardless of the marital status of the third party. With this definition, in the example above, both the man and his single paramour would be guilty of adultery.

In Jesus' day, did the word "adultery" refer to the person who was doing the cheating or to the act where cheating was done?

I believe that best evidence suggests that the word itself was in flux, and, by Jesus' day, was acquiring its present meaning of "cheating on a spouse." This is the way Jesus uses the word in Mark 10:11 where he says, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her." That is, such a man is essentially cheating on his first wife.

But for a precision-minded scribe or Pharisee, Jesus' point might lose force on the simple ground that that's not what the word adultery means! The original definition of adultery was wider in that it referred to the act but more narrow in that it was gender-specific. That is, adultery was the act that took place when a married woman slept with someone other than her husband. It didn't matter if that other man was married or not. He was an adulterer if he slept with another man's wife. In Leviticus 20:10 the death penalty is invoked both for him and the adulteress.

With this older definition in mind, a Pharisee might think, "But how could my second marriage be adulterous if my second wife was a virgin? Yes, I will have slept with two women, but in no case did I ever sleep with another man's wife. Even on Jesus' own terms, then, I'm still not an adulterer." (It must be emphasized again that we are not here contemplating the morality of the action but only what to call it. In the minds of some, if a married woman has not slept with another man, then - by definition - no adultery has occurred.)

I believe it was to accommodate this older definition and head off the objection it might provoke that Jesus said in Matthew 5:32 "makes her [the ex wife] commit adultery" rather than "commits adultery himself." The idea is that the abandoned ex-wife will surely remarry. When she does, then the older defining parameters of adultery will have been met: she'll be sleeping with someone other than her husband because her "real" husband, the first one, left her.

Does that mean that such an abandoned woman should never remarry, because by doing so she would become a true adulteress herself? No, that utterly misses Jesus' point. Jesus assumes that she will remarry. His point is that the guilt of this "adulterous" act is laid at the feet of her scoundrel ex-husband. He cannot finesse his way out of the charge of adultery by saying, "I never slept with another man's wife, so I am not guilty of adultery." Even if we grant the narrow point that he hasn't slept with another man's wife, he's still guilty of breaking the seventh commandment because of the situation into which he has forced his ex wife.

I believe the best parallel to this usage of "make," "force," or "make out to be" is found in 1 John 1:10, which says, "If we say we have not sinned, we make him [God] a liar, and his word is not in us." The Greek word here for "make" is the same in Matthew 5:32. Can anyone truly make God a liar? Of course not. God does not lie (Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18 ). What St. John means is that when we contradict God we make him out to be a liar - it is as though we were saying, "God lies." But we are the ones in the wrong, not he. We bear the guilt, not he. In exactly the same way, a man who divorces his wife for no good reason makes her out to be an adulteress, even though in point of fact she is quite innocent. He bears the blame, not she.

I hope this helps.

Full texts are below:

Matthew 5:31-32:
31 It was also said, "Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce." 32 But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Matthew 19:3-9
And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” 8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

Mark 10:2-12
2 And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” 5 And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

Luke 16:18
18 Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.

What Gays Should Have Done At Chic-fil-A on August 1.

I think my gay friends made a couple mistakes in pushing back against Christians who thronged to Chic-fil-A on August 1 in support of CEO Dan Cathy's opposition to homosexual marriage. The kiss-in on August 3 didn't work well - I think it was needlessly provocative, and the meager participation only contrasted with the committed show of force on the other side. Another misfire was a captioned photograph I saw of a long line at Chic-fil-A that read, "You'd never see that many Christians lined up to help at a food bank or homeless shelter." That strikes me as a frontal attack on a well-defended point. Food banks and homeless shelters are a staple of Christian charity, and thousands of Christians work at them and support them every week. Even the small church I attend (about 25 people) has prepared over 1700 lunches this year for day laborers - many of whom are poor and homeless.

So I am going to tell my gay friends what I think they should have done to counter what may have appeared to them like a conservative Christian onslaught. Yes, I'm handing them a club and pointing out a weak spot and inviting them to swing away.

Gays should have very politely passed out the following survey to every adult standing in the long line at Chic-fil-A on August 1:

I am conducting a survey of people who place a high value on moral purity. Your answer is confidential and anonymous. Please do not sign your name. Thank you for your cooperation!

Did you keep (or have you kept) your virginity till marriage, and, if married, have you had sex only with your spouse? Please check one.

1) Yes.

2) No.

3) I prefer not to answer.

Then having thanked kindly those who participated, all that my gay friends had to do was publish the results. For example (to make up data): "I handed out 100 of these surveys to people standing in line at Chic-fil-A. Thirty responded, and of those 30, 10 said 'Yes,' 10 said 'No,' and 10 said 'I prefer not to answer.' Of the 70 who did not return the survey, an unspecified but large percentage shifted about and looked uncomfortable. Only 10 percent of those who seemed to support Dan Cathy's disapproval of homosexual activity were willing to affirm that they themselves had observed Christianity's traditional code of moral behavior."

Try the shame approach. If you shout at a conservative Christian he'll probably shout back (he's only human). If you flaunt in his face behavior he thinks is wrong he may turn away in disgust and think he's better than you. But if you can shame him with the realization that he does not live up to the standards he professes he might just get very quiet and leave you alone. And if he's a good Christian he will thank you and go off to say his prayers.

I wonder if responding to such a survey would have stricken consciences and even gotten some people to leave the line at Chic-fil-A on August 1. Maybe not. But there is a story recorded in John 8 where some men bring to Jesus a woman caught in adultery, and they ask him about stoning her, and he says, "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone." One by one they all walk away, presumably thinking, Who am I to condemn in another what I am guilty of myself? (It must be said that this story is of doubtful authenticity because it appears in virtually none of the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and most Bible versions now rightly put it in a footnote - but no one disputes it is a good story!)

Even if the survey I recommend above would not have thinned the crowd at Chic-fil-A, maybe at least it would have set some Christians to thinking about the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:3, "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" It is a good thing for Christians to consider whether they themselves have kept the teachings of Jesus. It is always better to look inward and grieve rather than outward and protest.

I am the first to acknowledge that Christian sexual morality is difficult, and that it is even - to the extent that our natures are corrupt - unnatural. Few people have lived their lives in consistent obedience to its rules, and even those who have managed to do so have found themselves stubbornly resistant to the will of God in some other area. But the difficulty of following Jesus Christ - the chafing, the going against our grain, the constant subjugation of our desires - should not surprise us. Jesus said that following him would be like picking up a cross daily and carrying it (Luke 9:23), and that anyone who was unwilling to do that was not worthy of him (Matthew 10:38) and could not be his disciple (Luke 14:23).

God alone knows how many true disciples of Christ waited for two hours on August 1 to get a politically-charged chicken sandwich. Their motives probably varied: some presumably saw it as a protest against gay marriage, others more as a support for Chic-fil-A in the face of the attacks it was enduring from politicians intolerant of Dan Cathy's convictions. But all the people in that line probably regarded themselves as Christians. And it is always fair for a Christian to be asked, by friend and foe alike, "Do you live by the standard you preach to others?"

"A Personal Relationship With Jesus Christ" Part 2

Shortly after posting my objections in the last essay to the phrase "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ," I read that pop star Katy Perry said in Part of Me 3-D, "I have a personal, one-on-one relationship with God, and it's continually evolving."

That comment pretty much sums up why I have lost all patience with evangelicals who talk about a "personal relationship" with God (or Jesus) while ignoring biblical terms like "holiness," "obedience," "submission" and "self-denial." Perry, like countless others, has learned to spout lame Christian jargon rather than Scripture. It would have been interesting if she had restricted herself to the Bible's own words in describing her connection to the Almighty. Then she might have said something like, "I show that I love Jesus by keeping his commandments" (John 14:21), or, "I deny myself and take up my cross daily to follow Jesus" (Luke 9:23), or, "I present myself to God as a living sacrifice" (Romans 12:1). Or maybe instead she would have been moved to confess, "My lifestyle proves that I am an enemy of the cross of Christ" (Phillipians 3:18-19), or, "Because of behavior like mine the wrath of God is coming" (Colossians 3:5).

Perry - as most people know - writes and performs songs that celebrate sexual immorality. The Bible denies that sexually immoral people have a relationship with God. Instead it says that God will judge them (Hebrews 13:4), that he will exclude them from his kingdom (1 Corinthians 6:9-10; Galatians 5:19-21; Ephesians 5:5), and that he will cast them into the fiery lake of burning sulfur (Revelation 21:8). Does that sound like a personal relationship to you? In the Bible it sounds a lot more like adversarial contempt!

But thanks be to God, all is not lost. If Perry - like any other enemy of Christ - repents of her sins and follows Jesus, she will be forgiven and will be received in love and will live forever. Jesus said, "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, and I give to them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand." (John 10:27). But if Perry persists in unrepentant sin, the Bible warns of a different destiny: "If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God" (Hebrews 10:26-27).

No, I'm not picking on Katy Perry. She's merely one among millions who think that "a relationship with God" is possible without holy living. It isn't. "Without holiness no one will see the Lord." (Hebrews 12:14).

I could tell you lots of stories of people who delude themselves into thinking they have a personal relationship with God when all they really have is his enmity and mortal opposition. An egregious example is my ex brother-in-law. When deserting my sister after telling her that he had had a long-standing affair, he explained, "I have this relationship with God that you just don't understand." It beggars belief - a man defies God's commands, commits monstrous acts of selfishness, dispatches his loving wife with cruel indifference, and still thinks he is on good terms with God! If he had only read what the Bible says, he would see there that God promises to sizzle his flesh in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. On Judgment Day, many who expect to indulge the delights of their "relationship with God" will instead hear him utter the terrible words, "I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness" (Matthew 7:23).

I'm afraid I am all too familiar with one source of the delusion that a relationship with God is possible without submission to his will. It's the bad preaching I hear in our cheap-grace churches and evangelical institutions, and the bad teaching I read in trashy evangelical literature. Some examples:

Alan Chambers of Exodus International, in a June interview for The Atlantic, denied that immoral lifestyles preclude a relationship with God. "Some of us choose very different lives than others," he said. "But whatever we choose, it doesn't remove our relationship with God...My personal belief is...while behavior matters, those things don't interrupt someone's relationship with Christ."

Donald Miller (author of Christian best-sellers Blue Like Jazz and Father Fiction) spoke of visiting a university frat house in order to talk to the students about faith and morality. One young man said to him, "I like sex. Do you think I'm going to hell or something?" (Context indicates that by "sex" he meant fornication, not marital union.) Rather than citing all the texts that affirm that fornicators will not make it into God's kingdom, Miller said, "I don't think having sex is the way you get into hell. Heaven and hell are about who you know, not what you do...Morality is more important and more beneficial than any of us know. But heaven and hell are something different."

The pastor of a church my wife and I used to attend recommended from the pulpit a book by Fil Anderson, Breaking The Rules: Trading Performance for Intimacy with God. This book is an abominable piece of filth straight from the pit of hell. It might more profitably have been titled, Defying The Commandments: Neglecting Goodness In Order To Have A Personal Relationship With God. Anderson seems unable to speak of disciplined submission to the will of God without belittling it with pejorative labels like "performance," "list-heeding," or "rule-keeping religion." He writes, "Consider the colossal burden of concentrating on the ought tos, shoulds, have tos and musts. It's time to leave that life behind...We no longer need to feel the pressure to do certain things in order to be in relationship with God." Really? We don't have to do certain things (like remain faithful to our spouses) in order be in relationship with God? My ex brother-in-law could not have said it better!

I will let these examples suffice. Time would fail me - and the effort depress me - to cite similar examples of cheap-grace rhetoric in the works of evangelical titans Max Lucado, Andy Stanley and Philip Yancey. So I'll leave it with this: the next time you hear an evangelical spout mindlessly unbiblical slogans like "It's not about rules - it's about relationship!" or, "Jesus invites you into a personal relationship with him just as you are," come back with the Bible's own words in 1 John 2:3-5a: We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, "I know him," but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. If we do not obey God's rules, not only do we not have a personal relationship with him - the Bible insists that we do not even know him!

Know the Lord. That is to say, obey him.

"A Personal Relationship With Jesus Christ"

Relationship rhetoric dominates the presentation of the gospel among Protestant Evangelicals today. I believe this is a bad thing, and we should adjust our rhetoric.

When I listen to the local Christian radio station, I often hear an announcer say, "If you would like to talk to someone right now about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, please call..." and they give the phone number. If you click on "Knowing Christ" at this station's website you will read, "The Bible, as God’s Word, proclaims how a person can come into a living and vital relationship with Jesus Christ." Later it says, "God invites you to come into a relationship with Him through faith in Christ’s death on your behalf." And it concludes, "If you put your faith alone in Christ alone, you will come into a loving and eternal relationship with Christ."

Where did this omnipresent word "relationship" (or the phrase "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ") come from?

It certainly does not come from the Bible. You can verify this for yourself very easily. Search the word "relationship" in an online concordance of the New Testament and you will get zero hits in all the literal translations - e.g. New King James, ESV, NASB, Holman and Young's. In the NIV the word appears just twice, but in neither case does it refer our relationship with God or Jesus.

Only in the free paraphrases (many, many steps removed from the Greek) do you see the word "relationship" connecting us with God. The New Living Translation uses the word this way eight times, and Eugene Peterson's The Message uses it 17 times. I have reviewed each of these texts carefully, and cannot find even one instance where the word "relationship" accurately reflects a close reading of the Greek text.

But does that matter? Just because a particular word does not occur in the Bible does not mean the concept isn't there. I believe in the Trinity even though the word "Trinity" never appears in Scripture, and I believe in plenary inspiration even though we have to cobble that doctrine together from several texts that never use those exact words. Maybe "come into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ" is like that - a handy phrase that, while not strictly biblical, is nonetheless useful because it accurately communicates a truth that we otherwise could not express succinctly.

But I am afraid I am not convinced by this defense of "personal relationship" usage and rhetoric. To me there are two very sound reasons for discarding the phrase entirely.

First, we already have several words in the Bible that express clearly and powerfully what we are supposed to do with Jesus Christ. That is, there was never a gap in the Bible's own language that necessitated the crafting of "have a personal relationship" with him. I cannot agree that the Bible's own words were vague or unwieldy or in any dire need of a robust summary.

Here are two good words that the Bible uses very often with respect to our relation to Divinity: "follow" and "obey." In the New Testament I count 19 instances of "follow" and 26 instances of "obey" (along with its cognates "obedient" and "obedience.") These are conservative counts. I eliminated all duplicate occurrences in the gospels, all concrete usages of "follow" (e.g. "they followed him around the lake"), and all instances of "obey" that had nothing to do with obeying God or Jesus (e.g. "Children obey your parents"). That still leaves dozens of passages like these:

Matthew 10:38:
And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

1 Peter 2:21:
For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.

John 3:36:
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.

2 Corinthians 10:5:
We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.

There are other good words in the Bible that likewise tell us what to do with Jesus, words like "trust," "worship," "thank," "love," "glorify," "praise," and "bow the knee to." If there exists in the English language a summary phrase that contains all these elements, "have a personal relationship with" is certainly not it. We would need something far deeper and stronger than that.

So my first objection to "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" is simple and procedural: We have plenty of good words in the Bible already - why not use them? My second complaint is more substantial and has to do with the weakness of the phrase itself. I'll be blunt: "have a personal relationship with" is mild, mushy, flimsy, non-committal, indefinite and so unclear that it is hard to see it as anything other than misleading. While "worship," "trust," "obey," "love," "follow," and "thank" are all meaty words you can sink your teeth into, "have a personal relationship with" dissolves on your tongue like verbal cotton candy. In the Bible's own words a man can read his mission clear, but our latter-day substitute is just a pastel blur.

And I believe that this lack of clarity provides for many people a fog of escape from the duty of submission to God's will. That is because "have a personal relationship with" says nothing about our position relative to God nor our obligation to serve him. We all have "personal relationships" with our spouses, children, parents, friends, coworkers and neighbors - but we do not worship, obey, follow, or pray to them. We do not seek to take every thought captive in obedience to them. That is, our standing before all others with whom we have "personal relationships" is qualitatively different from our standing before God. In all other instances where we use that phrase "personal relationship" there is an implied equal footing, an equality of status. (Our relationship with our children is no exception: though they must honor us as we honor our parents and as their children must honor them, our co-equal status as human beings provides the ground upon which the personal relationship is founded.)

I am afraid that the English phrase "personal relationship," is, in normal usage, so laden with the freight of ontological equality that it is difficult to keep that egalitarian inference from seeping into our minds when we use the phrase to connect us and God. I contend that this seepage is a real danger. Witness the alarming tendency even among confessing evangelicals to regard God as a personal friend who is free to make suggestions but is not the Lord of creation whose command is absolute. Jesus, in their view, is not someone to be obeyed but someone to pal around with. Lord willing, I'll write another essay soon with concrete examples that illustrate the ways in which "relationship" has replaced "obedience" for many modern evangelicals.

In the meantime let me tell you of a hope that I cherish. I have a dream that someday I'll turn on WMBI radio and the announcer will not be saying, "God wants to have a personal relationship with you," but rather, "God commands you to repent of your sins." And instead of, "If you would like to talk to someone right now about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ," he'll say, "If you would like to follow Jesus Christ, please call this number." I'll rejoice and say, "At last! They are using Jesus' own words. Perhaps revival is near."