Spiritual Warfare?
One of the funniest cartoons I ever saw showed a pompous lawyer reading a client’s last will and testament to a group of greedy relatives. The caption read: “I, John Jones, being of sound mind and body, spent it all!”
When Jesus Christ wrote His last will and testament for His church, He made it possible for us to share His spiritual riches. Instead of spending it all, Jesus Christ paid it all … He wrote us into His will, then He died so the will would be in force. Then He arose again that He might become the heavenly Advocate (lawyer) to make sure the terms of the will were correctly followed
In the original Greek these twelve verses constitute a single complex sentence. As Paul dictates, his speech pours out of his mouth in a continuous cascade. He neither pauses for breath, nor punctuates his words with full stops. Commentators have searched for metaphors vivid enough to convey the impact of this opening outburst of adoration. ‘We enter this epistle through a magnificent gateway’, writes Findlay. It is ‘a golden chain’ of many links,2 or ‘a kaleidoscope of dazzling lights and shifting colours’. William Hendriksen likens it to ‘a snowball tumbling down a hill, picking up volume as it descends’,4 and E. K. Simpson—less felicitously perhaps—to ‘some long-winded racehorse … careering onward at full speed.’ More romantic is John Mackay’s musical simile: ‘This rhapsodic adoration is comparable to the overture of an opera which contains the successive melodies that are to follow’.6 And Armitage Robinson suggests that it is ‘like the preliminary flight of the eagle, rising and wheeling round, as though for a while uncertain what direction in his boundless freedom he shall take’.
A gateway, a golden chain, a kaleidoscope, a snowball, a racehorse, an operatic overture and the flight of an eagle: all these metaphors in their different ways describe the impression of colour, movement and grandeur which the sentence makes on the reader’s mind.
IN the Greek, the long passage from verses 3–14 is one sentence. It is so long and complicated because it represents not so much a reasoned statement as a lyrical song of praise. Paul’s mind goes on and on, not because he is thinking in logical stages, but because gift after gift and wonder after wonder from God pass before his eyes. To understand it, we must break it up and take it in short sections.
In this section, Paul is thinking of Christians as the chosen people of God, and his mind runs along three lines.
(1) He thinks of the fact of God’s choice. Paul never thought of himself as having chosen to do God’s work. He always thought of God as having chosen him. Jesus said to his disciples: ‘You did not choose me but I chose you’ (John 15:16). Here precisely lies the wonder. It would not be so wonderful that we should choose God; the wonder is that God should choose us.
(2) Paul thinks of the generosity of God’s choice. God chose us to bless us with the blessings which are to be found only in heaven. There are certain things which we can discover for ourselves; but there are others which are beyond us. People can acquire certain skills, can reach certain positions, can amass a certain amount of this world’s goods by their own means; but by themselves they can never achieve goodness or peace of mind. God chose us to give us those things which he alone can give.
(3) Paul thinks of the purpose of God’s choice. God chose us that we should be holy and blameless. Here are two great words. Holy is the Greek word hagios, which always has in it the idea of difference and of separation. A temple is holy because it is different from other buildings; priests are holy because they are different from ordinary men and women; an animal to be sacrificed is holy because it is different from other animals; God is supremely holy because he is different from us; the Sabbath is holy because it is different from other days. So, God chose Christians that they should be different from other people.
Here is the challenge that the modern Church has been very slow to face. In the early Church, Christians never had any doubt that they must be different from the world; they, in fact, knew that they must be so different that the probability was that the world would kill them and the certainty was that the world would hate them. But the tendency in the modern Church has been to play down the difference between the Church and the world. We have, in effect, often said to people: ‘As long as you live a decent, respectable life, it is quite all right to become a church member and to call yourself a Christian. You don’t need to be so very different from other people.’ In fact, Christians should be easily identifiable in the world.
It must always be remembered that this difference on which Christ insists is not one which takes us out of the world; it makes us different within the world. It should be possible to identify Christians in the school, the shop, the factory, the office, the hospital ward, everywhere. And the difference is that Christians behave not as any human laws compel them to, but as the law of Christ compels them to. Christian teachers are out to satisfy the regulations not of an education authority or a headteacher but of Christ; and that will almost certainly mean a very different attitude to the pupils under their charge. Christian workers are out to satisfy the regulations not of a trade union but of Jesus Christ; and that will certainly make them very different workers. Christian doctors will never regard a sick person as a case, but always as a person. Christian employers will be concerned with far more than the payment of minimum wages or the creation of minimum working conditions. It is the simple fact of the matter that if enough Christians became hagios, different, they would revolutionize society.
Blameless is the Greek word amōmos. Its interest lies in the fact that it is a sacrificial word. Under Jewish law, before an animal could be offered as a sacrifice, it had to be inspected; and, if any blemish was found, it had to be rejected as unfit for an offering to God. Only the best was fit to offer to God. Amōmos thinks of the whole person as an offering to God. It thinks of taking every part of our life, work, pleasure, sport, home life and personal relationships, and making them all fit to be offered to God. This word does not mean that Christians must be respectable; it means that they must be perfect. To say that Christians must be amōmos is to banish contentment with everything that is second best; it means that the Christian standard is nothing less than perfection.