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.
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