Salvation Doing

Matthew 19:16-17 NIV

 Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?"  "Why do you ask me about what is good?" Jesus replied. "There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments."

How Is Your Salvation Coming Along?

The other day I took our dog Salsa out to run around and sniff things.  I usually don’t make her go on a leash.  I like for her to have freedom to use her mind and to act upon the external stimuli she discovers.  Dogs need the opportunity to think in new settings and explore.  No one else in the family can let her go off leash in the neighborhood because I am the only one who has absolute control over her.  When I call to her, no matter how far away she has wandered, if she can hear me, she will come running.  Sometimes I can tell she doesn’t want to come and her mind is trying to decide if she will keep up her sniffing where she is or return to me.  Rarely does she hesitate for long.  As I stood outside and watched Salsa wander about, suddenly her head jerked up to attention, her nostrils flared and in a split second she shot off into the street.  We live on the corner of two busy neighborhood streets that have significant blind spots.  Cars shoot through the intersection with almost no warning and there are no stop signs to slow them.  Suddenly Salsa was in the middle of the intersection going full bore after a squirrel.  I yelled for Salsa to stop but her mind was settled and she ignored my shout.  My screams to come back had no impact on her.  Salsa chased the squirrel madly through the street and to the foot of a tree where the squirrel escaped her fury.  It was only after she was foiled that the dog returned to me, obedient once again.  I learned something about Salsa that day.  She will obey me up to the point that some desire more powerful than her wish to please me comes to her.  Salsa is still obedient; it is though, to something other than me.

Obedience is fickle not just when it comes to dogs but to people also.  There are powerful forces that impact the direction obedience takes.  Of course, people are much more sophisticated than dogs and our rules of obedience more complicated but there is a pattern we find when it comes to obedience that may be important to explore.  Why is it that a man who loves his wife will leave her for someone else even though he knows the damage it will cause and how many people he respects will be upset with him for leaving her?  How come a patient will decide not to take the medication given her despite the authority of the doctor and her knowledge medicin?  Why do children disobey their parents even if they might face dire consequences for their actions and how do you explain speeding on the freeway when tickets are so expensive and the hassle of traffic school so aversive?  What is it about disobedience that makes it such a universal habit of people?  Why do we chase squirrels into busy intersections?  Today we weill deal with part of the answer to this question.

Perhaps you, like me, find it interesting Jesus’ response to the young man who asked Him how to gain eternal life.  "Why do you ask me about what is good?" Jesus replied. "There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments." (Matthew 19:17 NIV)  The Lord connects surprisingly life with obedience to the commandments of God.  This is particularly disconcerting given what we think we know about eternal life based on the promises found in the Bible; that it is a free gift of God that comes to us through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16 NIV) (John 3:16  For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. (Ephesians 2:8-10 NIV) But here in Jesus’ reply it seems that obedience to the commandments of God is required for eternal life which is the opposite of what we have all been taught!  The confusion is understandable but not necessary.  Let us look a bit more closely at this terse response of the Lord to the young man wanting to know about eternal life.

It is helpful if we consider the tenses of the verbs in this passage.  Literally the Greek text reads, “If you want into life to enter, keep the commandments!”  “If you want” is in the present tense which indicates continuous action.  In other words He is telling us, “If you continually want eternal life” or “If you always want to have eternal life” or “If eternal life is forever on your mind”, then He says, “to enter, keep the commandments.”   The second and third parts of this are tricky and it takes careful thinking to see this clearly.  “To enter” is in the aorist tense which describes a moment in time rather than continuous action.  The same is true of the command of Jesus, “Keep the commandments!”  This also is in the aorist tense and indicates a moment in time.  Now that we have gotten the technical part of the Greek language out of the way, let us examine the gist of Jesus’ words.

Eternal life is continuous and we have it as a result of the gift of God dying to take away our sin and being raised to life that we through His life might have the same eternal life as God.  Now the point Christ makes is this.  Eternal life is worked into us by God as a gift.  It is worked out of us by us in our doing.  Through Christ we always have eternal life but it is experienced in moments in time as we live out in practical and real ways the life God gives us.  How do we live out the eternal life we have in Christ?  Jesus said we do it by keeping the commandments.    The Apostle Paul put it this way.  “As you have always obeyed…continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who works in you…” (Philippians 2: 12-13 NIV) In other words, God gives you salvation.  You work out that salvation in your everyday life by doing what God tells you to do.  The reason you can obey Him and work out the salvation you possess is because it is God who is working in you in all you do as you obey Him.  Let us use an everyday example to illustrate this.

Suppose you want to make your favorite dinner and in doing so there are specific ingredients and spices and types of dishes you like the most.  You prefer it all cooked in a certain way but for some reason you have forgotten all this and now are dependent on someone else to guide you through it.  Of course it would be wise to carefully take into consideration everything that guide has to tell you for it is in your best interests to follow to the letter what you are told.  In our case, we have lost our memory or our sense of everything that makes eternal life, life.  We don’t know what it is because Sin has warped our grasp of it.  The Lord however does know what that life is and how it is put together and so He has given us commands that make that life come together in a practical way.  That is what the commands of God are, the way of Life…the way of the Eternal Life.

Without spending any time reflecting right now on what those commands that make eternal life real life are, we can take a moment to consider a case study on the application of obeying the commands of God and seeing life come out of it.  The fiancé of Mary, the mother of Jesus was described by Matthew, one of Jesus’ Disciples as a “righteous man”!  (Matthew 1: 19)  What does that mean?  It means he obeyed the commands of God.  Now what did Joseph know of God, eternal life and all God wanted to make of him?  Not very much probably!  But he was about to discover a great deal about God’s life with him.  He may not have been the first man ever to find out before he got married that his fiancé was pregnant with someone else’s child but he certainly was given the most unusual explanation for it.  Mary of course “was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 1:18 NIV)  This would have seemed like utter nonsense to Joseph but he was a “righteous man” and so he decided in his best sense of what the scriptures taught of how to live and conduct one’s business that he would quietly divorce Mary rather than make all sorts of public accusations and bring her up to local authorities for stoning.  He could have done this of course and certainly none of his friends would have faulted him for it but he knew about love and mercy and he knew about the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

It was in Joseph’s righteousness that God, opened up to Joseph His plan for Joseph and Joseph’s fiance.  It came in a dream.  But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins." (Matthew 1:20-21 NIV)  We mustn’t succumb to the temptation to quickly run right through all that happens here because the account is so familiar to us.  It is a perfect lesson on the value of obedience.  Joseph had a dream…all of us have had dreams and nearly all of the dreams we have we give little if any notice.  They are generally an absurd tangle of material coming out of our unconscious.  In Joseph’s case…at least this time, a dream was a revelation of God to him.  Any of us, with only the information Joseph had in his grasp, would not have faulted Joseph if he had ignored the dream and proceeded with his plan to quietly divorce Mary.  Joseph though was a righteous man and careful to do what God said to do.  He was determined to keep the commands of God and this, He realized, was a command of God.  It was a strange command and one that on the surface appeared to be asking too much of Joseph but it was a command nonetheless and so he did it.  He obeyed.  When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife.  But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus. (Matthew 1:24-25 NIV)

Not long after that Joseph had another dream and God opened Himself up to Joseph even more of his plans and told Joseph that he needed to take his young family to Egypt because King Herod was going to try and kill the baby Jesus.  What did Joseph gain in all these “obeyings”?  Jesus defined eternal life in a way we don’t often consider.  Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. John 17:3 NIV Eternal life is continual intimate knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ.  In our case study, Joseph did what God told him to do (i.e. followed a command), and the Lord revealed more of Himself to Joseph.  If eternal life is knowing God more and more as we go along, and if in obeying the Lord’s commands for us, we dive deeper and deeper into eternal life, then the reward for doing what God tells us to do is that we grow closer to Jesus.  Consider this as you take one of God’s commands to obey.  “God is love.”  Thus, the command you are given is given to you because of God’s love and when you obey it, the outcome of obeying will be something due to God’s love for you and in obeying you are filled even more with His love than you were before.  Go to God and ask Him to show you a command He wants you to obey.  He will reveal something to you.  Don’t hesitate, do what He tells you to do.  It may not seem practical, the command.  It may even seem to be mean for God to make the requirement.  But if you do the command, if you obey God in it, you will like Joseph, discover that God’s love for you is greater and more wonderful than you ever knew before.