In Matthew 5 Jesus makes this statement, "unless your righteousness
exceeds that of the Pharisees, you have no part in the kingdom of God".
Take an honest look at this passage and you will see that what Jesus is really
saying is that everyone is an
adulterer, everyone is a liar and everyone is a murderer. His view of the
law is so high that it includes our thoughts and motivations. If these are off,
we’ve violated the whole law. Oh, and He tops his sermon off with this little
exhortation, “be perfect, therefore, even as your heavenly Father is perfect.” What
kind of a teaching is this anyway?
Suppose you tell a 5 year old to start up a 747, get it airborne and then
land it safely. The child will do one of two things. Child A will either try to
figure it out by pushing some buttons and flipping switches in the cockpit. Even
if he somehow turns on the plane and pushes the throttle forward, he will only
manage to crash it into something eventually. Child B will look at the enormity
of this request and immediately recognize its impossibility. He will come back
to the real pilot with shrugged shoulders asking for help and guidance. He knows he can't do it by himself.
Jesus lovingly invites people to fail. His gentle teaching method is to get
them to realize for themselves the futility of ever meeting His standards (His law).
Rather than asking the question, "Good teacher, what must I do to be
saved," he wants them to come to a low place where they must ask a better
question: "is there any way I can
be saved? After seeing the failure that your perfect standards have made of me,
is there any hope for a wretched failure like me?" This is the right
question, a question that reveals the ripe condition of a person’s heart to
hear the good news that there is a way , there is salvation for the sinner,
healing for the broken, grace for the lawless, hope for the murderer, light for
the lost. But it is not in us.
Only because of our unity with Christ are we able to say that all His
righteousness is our righteousness. Only because of our oneness with Him can we
possibly stand before the holy, righteous and just God with confidence. Only
the gospel of grace grants us this blessed unification, which means our
salvation. Only in Him do we have
life. It is only as part of one body with him that we are perfect, even as He
is perfect. Though sins remain, when we are in
Christ God sees our sins no more, reckons us as perfect, legally justified
and worthy to share in Christ’s inheritance. Apart from Him, though, we have
no case in court against our failure, no advocate to defend us against our sins, and we can bear no fruit to justify ourselves. So, justly we die.
The grave importance of our unity with Him is precisely why Jesus makes
such a radical, borderline offensive exhortation in John 6:53-54, saying, “truly,
truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his
blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood
has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day." This very
statement caused many of his early disciples to turn away and no longer follow
him. But lets follow Jesus’ metaphor for a minute. What happens biologically
when you eat, let’s say, a piece of fruit? Molecules and nutrients are
transferred from the fruit to your body. The fruit literally becomes part of
your body. It’s strange to think that we literally are what we eat. Our eyes, for example, consist of food that we
have eaten. Proof of this is that when you cease to eat your body eventually
starts to break down and decay. In the same way unless we are constantly eating
Christ spiritually, recognizing our unity with him, reminding each other of his
life, death and resurrection, having fellowship and worshipping together in His
Name…etc., we start to break down and decay spiritually. But I will argue, that
there is no delicious food like Christ, and that once one has tasted Him one
becomes a hopeless glutton. When He is the Center of our existence, the Anchor
of our souls, the Object of our trust, our All in all, then He becomes part of
us spiritually, in the same way the fruit becomes part of the body physically.
We literally consist of Christ-ness, or Jesus-stuff. His nature becomes our
nature, and the more we eat of Him the more our will is conformed to His. Even
His glory dwells in us, as He says in John 17:22-23, “The glory that you have
given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them
and you in me, that they may become perfectly one…” Our unity with Christ is our
only hope of salvation. No more is it about what I have done, or have to do to
be saved. It is about what has already been done by Someone else for me. It is
merely a gift to be received.
In Genesis God points to a tree and says to man, “eat of the fruit of this
tree, and you will die.” Thousands of years later God points to another tree,
and says to man, “eat of the fruit of this
tree and you will live. Forever.”
