The sum of what I have learned

Hey there,

So, if you've been reading my blogs lately, you'd know that I've been writing about something I have been learning lately. You'd also know that it is a little confusing and unclear as I was still trying to understand what I was indeed learning. I believe the Lord has given me that understanding to put it all together and make sense of what I had come to realize.
So, the path to understanding started by asking myself "Why? Why do we as humans always want to understand things? Why do we always want to understand what to do, what not to do, what God allows, and what God doesn't allow? Why do we always want to understand 'how' to live out a life that is 'for' God? Why do we want to understand what His standards are?" The reason I had begun asking these questions was because something deep inside of me was tired of simply understanding what I should and shouldn't do. That kind of understanding has proven to be useless to me for becoming the man I truly want to be. This you know from my posts, I was tired of simply understanding things, I wanted my faith go so far beyond simply understanding and simply being obedient to the standards that I have come to understood are set by God. In answering this question "Why do we always want to understand things?" the Lord revealed something that I had completely missed.
You see, all throughout the New Testament, the Lord tells us that the Law He gave to the Israelites was meant to prove a point to us, that we couldn't fulfill the law, that no matter how 'perfect' we were, we'd never be perfect enough because we'd always be lacking in one small area somewhere. I take my example from those very complex verses found in Romans 1:18 through to 8:17. For simplicity sake, I will only quote those verses that speak the most about what I am going to say, as I can't really quote 5 whole chapters. Case in point, Romans 3:19-20 "Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin." Through the commandment we only become conscious of our sin, in itself it holds no power for us to conquer sin. Romans 7:18 "...For I have the desire to do what is good, but not the power." I then began to ask another question "Where does sin come from then if God only introduced the Law to make me aware of my sinfulness?" And the answer to this took me back further, right to the beginning, to the very cause of our disobedience to Him. God created Adam and Eve and placed them in the Garden. He also created every living tree and animal and placed them in the garden as well. Two of those trees were in the centre. One was called "The Tree of Life" and the other "The Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil" God told Adam that he was not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil but mentioned nothing about the Tree of Life. Genesis 2:16-17 "And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." In this statement, I have always asked God why he only commnded them not to eat from the one tree but not the Tree of Life and the answer that came to me was this. Before Adam and Eve ate from the tree, I believe they spent many hours and days walking through the gardens talking with God and communicating with Him. They spent time in communion with God, in HIs presence BEFORE they understood His nature and His holiness. However, God knew that if they ate from the tree of the good and evil, they would come to understand who He was and what His holiness required of them for them to stand in His presence. Genesis 3:6 " When the woman saw that the fruit was pleasing to the eye and also desireable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it." What wisdom could that be other than the 'wisdom' of the standards that God has for us to be in His presence? It was not necessary for Adam and Eve to understand these things, for in understanding, our natural tendancy is to then try and fulfill those standards ourselves. I might add here that it is only God who can live up to His 'standards'. Indeed, it is not something He meets by trying Himself, it is simply in His nature. "God does not conform Himself to those standards, He is the standard." That is a quote from A.W.Tozer I think, I cannot remember what it is called. Why could adam and Eve be in His presence before they ate the fruit? well, I can only guess it is because they met those standards not because they tried, but because it was simply in their nature as well. This will be more clear as I go on, bbut they met those standards by default, because they were spending time with God and had His life in their hearts. From Adam to Moses, man was not aware of their sinfulness. Indeed, they may have known deep in their heart what God's standards were, but they did not know how they broke those standards, so He sent Moses and the Law to show us how utterly sinful we are, to show us where and how we break those standards. Romans 5:12-14 "Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned— for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come."
Just to clear something up, let me ask a few more questions. Why, if there was no written 'law', was Adam's sin and the sin of all those to follow him, counted against them? If the verse above is correct, "But sin is not taken into account when there is no law." why were the patriarchs and the people before Moses judged as being sinful in the eyes of God? You can look it up yourself, but there is a verse where Paul discusses the gentiles and how some of them are more righteous than the Jews because they obey the Law without knowing what the written law is, simply because 'it is written on their hearts.' So, I think the case is the same with the rest of mankind, even though we might not have the written law like the Jews, we do know in our hearts what is right and what is wrong.

So all this being said, you might be wondering how then we can be obedient to these standards, if the Law that was meant to show us clearly what they were and how we broke them, didn't bring the power necessary to be obedient. Well, therein lies why Christ came for us and how the rest of Romans falls into place and begins to make sense.

As I said, I cannot quote all of Romans, you will have to read it yourself and pick out most of things I refer to. For the sake of arguing why Christ is the key to all this, take a look at Romans 5:6 "...when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly." You see, what I have come to know and understand includes so much more than just the Ten Commandments and the O.T. law. Even today, I see Christians entering into a religion where they say they are free from the Law but decieve themselves into simply changing the context of those commandments into a N.T. light. Things like "What would Jesus do" still imply me trying to fit myself and do for myself what I think Christ would have done in the same situation. It's still a standard we live by. We say to ourselves "To be a christian means we have to do this and this and this and this." We have masked them and instead of calling them 'commandments' we call them 'ideals and morals'. Christ came to set us free from having to perform, from having to meet a set of standards. Romans 3:27 "...For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law." If I begin to sound like Paul, it is because I finally understand what he meant. So we are justified by faith apart from observing the law, there is nothing we can do oursleves that can justify us more. To me, that has come to mean that I no longer have to try and comform myself to "WWJD?" I am not justified by trying to do that. I am set free from having to conform myself to any set of standards and I am justified by faith. You might ask then, as Paul brings up a couple times elsewhere "Well does that mean then that I can ignore the law and do what I please? Does that mean the Christ came to abolish the law?" By no means whatsoever! This may sound contradictng, but we still have to meet those standards; God is still God, He did not change Himself so that He can accept sin in His presence. And Christ most certainly did not come to abolish the law, he rather came to uphold the law. Take a look at Romans 3:31 "Do we then nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the Law." And in Romans 2:13 it says "For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the Law who will be declared righteous." Now, this is where I began to ask myself, and I ams ure you have too, that if I am justified by faith apart from observing the law, why is it that Paul says it is only those who obey the law that will be declared righteous? Why does he say that by being justified by faith, we uphold the Law? How can the two exist together? It seems impossible doesn't it? But that's because i was thinking of this purely in human terms. The key's to this mainly lie in Romans 6-8. I already quoted text from Romans 7, that very confusing capter that can e summed up to this. "I have the will, the desire to do what is right because the Law made me aware of my sinfulness, but the power to do what is right is not there. The power to do what is right does not reside in the Law because the sinful nature caused the law to rise up in us all kinds of sinful passions." Of course, that is paraphrased. Now the answer of this for me was to remeber the role of Christ. This is where all of this, everything that I have said, all comes together and makes me boil over with excitement. You see, in what the law was powerless to do, Christ came in power and set us free. It is through His power that we can meet the standards of God. Hear me out, I know you've heard all this before and are probably thinking "so what?". It took a radical and dramatic shift into how I see all this playing out to make me realize what that power actually is. You see, it is recorded all over the N.T. especially Romans, that Christ came to give us a new nature, that we live by the Spirit and not the sinful nature etc. What is that new nature? Was it not God's desire to have us restored as we were before the fall of Adam? Why are we Justified by faith and not by works? This nature that is described in the N.T. is the nature that Adam and Eve had before the fall, it is God's desires, God's heart implanted in our own heart. Why does this matter, how do we fulfill His standards? It becomes not something we do on our own strength, indeed, Adam and Eve did not even know they were fulfilling His standards the whole time they were walking with Him. You see, as we spend time with Christ, we should, through His power, be conformed to those standards WITHOUT US EVEN KNOWING IT. Instead of something we TRY to do, it becomes something we do by DEFAULT. Because we're in His PRESENCE. When I understood that, I began to understand why it is not necessary to know right from wrong but because of Adam, we now know the difference. You see, by having faith in Christ we are justified. We uphold the law and agree that it is good not because we try, but because it becomes something we do by nature. It doesn't nullify the Law or God's standards in any way shape or form. THAT is true faith, that is why I want to never stop pushing into Christ and getting to know Him. You see, when we push into Him, our desires change. We stop wanting to do those things of the sinful nature because we know more and more what those do to us and how much it hurts God to see us in them.
Some would ask, "Then does this not take away from our freedom of choice? If we obey God's commandments by default, by nature, then why does that not eliminate our free will?" It doesn't. I will use the pizza example again. I used to love Pizza, I ate it a lot when i was growing up. However, I developed an intolerance to lactose 2 years ago and now, whenever i eat pizza, i get incredibly sick. As a result, I choose not to eat pizza because I simply have no desire to. My choice to eat or not eat is there but I choose not to because I know it will make me sick and I have no desire. In fact, I don't even consider eating cheese topped pizza an option anymore, simply because I want nothing to do with it. That is the same with this, we can still choose to be disobedient, but as we press into Christ, that urge and desire becomes less and less and we begin to consider, like me with the pizza, that sin just isn't even an option anymore. So we obey by nature, by default not because we desire to meet a standard but because God has so impacted our hearts that we don't even consider that separating ourselvs from Him is a viable option anymore. Not anything we do, but what God has done in us. I hope that is much clearer than all my other posts. I must get to bed soon.
Just do this for me, pray and ask the Lord to show you what is truth and what is not. And then, take what I have said here, about how we're justified by faith and yet still uphold the law and read Romans 1 through to 8:17 and maybe you will come to understand as I have.
God Bless
Gregory