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The scribes and
the Pharisees brought a woman taken in adultery.
Having set her in the midst, they told him, "Teacher, we
found this woman in adultery, in the very act. Now in our
law, Moses commanded us to stone such. What then
do you say about her?"
(John 8:3-5)
Before we rush to judgment, we must
realize that these scribes and Pharisees were men who had committed
their entire lives to seek to please God and live a life of perfect
harmony with God's commandments. They believed that sinners were
offensive and could not be tolerated by a holy God. They also longed
to witness the power of God unleashed in their world. Their life
passion was to bring as many as possible into conformance to the laws
of Yahweh so as to secure His favor for their nation. And really, how
much difference is there between their desires and what we see today
among those who long to see the kingdom of God established in our
world just as they did?
It can be easy for
us to make negative assumptions about scribes and Pharisees, partly
because of all the bad press they got from Jesus, yet truly they had
very similar goals as many religious people have today. They
earnestly wanted to see God's kingdom set up on earth and to have
God's authority recognized and submitted to by God's chosen people
around them so that evil could be curbed and so that the world would
be a safer place for good people to thrive and flourish.
What were the
underlying motives of these men who arraigned this sinner woman
before Christ, demanding that He pass sentence on her? We often fail
to look past our disgust at their insensitivity and callous disregard
for her feelings or plight, yet in doing so we may well be found to
be passing judgment on the scribes and Pharisees just as they were
passing judgment on this woman.
Were not these men
zealous for the sacredness of God's law? Were not they concerned that
the ways in which Jesus appeared to be relating to the laws given
them by Moses were a dangerous threat undermining respect and fear
due to God? We tend to imagine sinister motives in the minds of these
men without noting their real concerns. They were simply carrying out
the same mission that many of God's leaders and prophets had done for
thousands of years, seeking to defend truth against the inroads of
lax morals and compromise that undermined the fear of the Lord they
believed necessary in order to be honored by God as His chosen people
on earth.
From our
perspective two thousand years later, we have difficulty appreciating
their side of this story, lost sight of in part by the way these
stories are written about them. While it is true they had selfish
motives and misunderstood the love of God in their fervor to uphold
the laws of Moses, what we read are stories written from a
perspective strikingly different than how most everyone perceived
things at the time. Even the disciples who wrote these gospels had
not yet seen the truth about God's character when these events took
place. It was not until much later that the light brought to our
world by Jesus gave them a startling new view of what was really
going on, and that is when they shared these stories with us through
their writings. But at the time these things took place it is very
likely the minds of the disciples were just as confused about the
mission of Jesus as were many others, because the questions and
doubts constantly circulated by the religious teachers of the law
raised serious concerns that what Jesus stood for could not possibly
be reconciled with the truth as taught by Moses and the prophets.
What
we see in the lives of Jesus' disciples as they watched Him interact
with God's 'chosen people' on earth was the same tension that
many of us feel when we attempt to see how God relates to law. The
arguments have not abated since
then but have changed in focus. Yet we retain similar confusion as to
the methods God chooses to overcome evil just as did people in the
days when Jesus walked this earth. There is no shortage of questions,
doubts and confusion today over how to explain stories such as this,
because it still seems clear to us that in order for God to overcome
evil in this world, something more substantial than simply dismissing
crimes is needed. Without infliction of serious consequences and
punishment there will not be enough fear generated to prevent people
from continuing to sin.
A fresh heresy
Satan brought in to counter the truth as revealed in Jesus is that
God had to punish Jesus for our sins so He could forgive those who
come to Him in repentance and claim the blood of Jesus to cover their
sins. This subtle lie is deeply embedded in general theology, yet it
neutralizes the real power of the cross because it fails to challenge
our beliefs about how God relates to sin. Because we cling to similar
notions about how sin must be overcome as did these pious religious
experts of old, we too become entangled in confusion because the very
remedy provided by God to cure us from sin is misrepresented as being
something entirely different from the truth. In this view, salvation
fails to address the deeper issue of how we perceive the true nature
of the problem with sin. Because of this, in diagnosing problem of
sin incorrectly we fail to recognize the only effective solution,
even if it is right in front of us. In fact, misdiagnosing sin and
God's solution can lead us to imagine that the effective cure for sin
brought to us by Jesus may appear to be part of the problem to be
solved so long as we refuse to appreciate the true nature of sin and
the function of law.
The
true religion of Jesus can be just as much a threat today as it was
to the religious leaders in Jesus' time. We may think we are
different from the religious zealots of His day because we think we
don't have the same prejudice they had. Yet the deceptiveness of
religion seduces us into a sense of false security, for any time we
imagine that God must be appeased to have
His mind changed in the least relating to His disposition towards us,
we have misdiagnosed the core problem
of sin. Salvation is not about changing God's mind but all about
changing ours.
One of the most subtle falsehoods
inherent in every world religion is the belief that
some way must be found to influence and alter God's disposition
towards us. Many insist that one must repent and ask for forgiveness
before God will accept and save us. Yet repentance simply means to
change the way we think about something or someone. When we imagine
that sin causes God to gets angry at people who break His commands
and is compelled to punish them, we will consequently assume we then
have to find some way to change His disposition towards us in
order to get on His good side so we can have life instead of
receiving our due punishment of death by execution (or worse yet
punishment in non-death by being tortured endlessly in fiery flames
of hell for eternity).
The scribes and Pharisees who brought
this woman caught in the very act of sinning before Jesus were
pressuring Him to conform
to their views of
how God keeps order
by enforcing His laws.
Like most of us today, they believed that unless
laws are enforced there is little incentive for sinners
to avoid sinning and chaos will ensue. Thus in their minds, the
teachings and practices of Jesus in relation to sin and sinners
created a very dangerous attitude toward law and order that if
allowed to infect the minds of people would have a
sure result of destroying social order and effective authority based
largely on fear of punishment. Without sufficient fear of punishment,
they believed it would be impossible for God or anyone else to
prevent the chaos of rampant evil from overrunning society. Thus by
insisting that Jesus make a clear choice to enforce law in a simple
case from the law of Moses, they could clarify publicly where He
stood in relation to God and law-enforcement.
Before we write
off the scribes and Pharisees as merely hypocrites, we need to
consider how their thinking is very similar to our own perceptions.
While they may have been extreme examples of self-righteous bigotry
and rigid legalists, in condemning them we may be discovered to be
doing the very same thing as they were doing.
Therefore you are without excuse, O
man, whoever you are who judge. For in
that which you judge another, you condemn
yourself. For you who judge practice the same
things. We know that the judgment of God is
according to truth against those who practice such things.
Do you think this, O man who judges those who practice such things,
and do the same, that you will escape the
judgment of God? Or do you despise the riches of
his goodness, forbearance, and patience, not knowing that the
goodness of God leads you to repentance?
(Romans 2:1-4)
Notice something very interesting that
suddenly shows up if we reword this last sentence just a bit.
The goodness of righteous people
can lead God to change His mind (repent) concerning them.
Is this not the subtle
presumption of most religions? To put it very bluntly, what many
assume is that we are supposed to acquire enough goodness in
ourselves that we can lead God to repentance, to get Him to change
His mind about us so we can avert His threats of punishment.
Simultaneously we resist suggestions that what is really needed is a
change in our mind about God and the way He sees us. Yet because of
our fear of judgment and punishment, we imagine that while God does
have a disposition of kindness towards sinners, at some point He will
change and execute 'justice.' Therefore we must find some way to
placate His agitation before then to make Him safe for us to live in
His presence.
Do you see the
problem in all this? The focus is more on changing God's mind than
changing our thinking about Him. Every false religion including most
of Christianity, focuses on how to effectively change God's
disposition towards us so we can become acceptable to Him. Only the
religion of Christ clarifies that the problem of sin is entirely a
result of false perceptions we have about God that make us afraid of
Him and thus filled with resistance to the life-giving love He longs
for us to enjoy.
So long as we
worship a god who demands perfect obedience before he is willing to
accept and love us, we worship a false god – pure and simple. Yet
the very fact that such a statement can elicit a strong reaction
inside some of us, a protest that somehow obedience must be present
in order to be accepted by God, only belies the fact that a key
element is missing in our understanding of the gospel. This story
confronts this very thinking in a dramatic way, for there is hardly a
more explicit example of the contrast between love and law that can
be found anywhere.
It is
easy to imagine that we need to change God's mind about us by
carrying out the demands of His laws, be it the laws through Moses or
other moral laws we attribute directly to God. Based on our premise
that God's laws must be enforced or they are powerless, we assume
that God's disposition towards us is darkened by our transgressions
of His laws. Furthermore, we often assume we must help God get other
people to stop sinning as well so we can earn His favor to be
restored to our country, our church or whatever group we believe God
supports. This is readily seen in the popularity of much of what we
see going on around us today in politics and religion. Yet it is all
predicated on unchallenged assumptions about how God
relates to law-enforcement and sin.
We must come to
see more clearly the fundamental flaw in this thinking. John writes
that God is love and that God is light with no darkness at all in Him
(1 John 4:8,16; 1:5). Here we find the key shift that needs to take
place in our perspective – that the problem of sin has nothing to
do with changing God's attitude towards us in any way. Rather, the
entire problem of sin is rooted in the way we perceive how God feels
about and relates to us. Believing lies about how God feels about us
lies at the very root of all sin, for sin is distrust of God from
lies believed resulting in malfunction in the life. This is precisely
what Paul is exposing throughout this entire passage spanning several
chapters at the beginning of Romans. Paul is saying that whether we
malfunction as open rebels and sensational sinners, or whether we
choose the route of piety and striving to maintain a holy, upright
life to change God and be accepted by Him, we are all caught in the
very same trap and both classes are in danger of missing salvation
entirely, even while we feel secure we are on the inside with God and
have our ticket to heaven.
In
this story from the life of Jesus we find these two categories
clearly represented. The woman caught in adultery can easily be
identified in the list of open, lurid sins in the last half of Romans
chapter 1. In contrast, the men who zealously arraigned her before
Jesus to be judged according to the law represent the kind of pious
people Paul addressed at the beginning of chapter 2. Yet Paul
explicitly says that such religious piety is in fact no different in
its core cause than the open sinners they feel compelled to expose
and condemn, for in actuality we are all malfunctioning for the same
reason, and until we come to acknowledge that we remain blind to our
true desperate condition of lostness.
do you despise
the riches of his goodness, forbearance, and patience,
not knowing that the goodness of God leads you
to repentance?
Imagining
that God is upset
with sinners while favorable toward good people is a symptom of
mistaken beliefs about how God thinks. This is because we base our
logic on false presumptions about what constitutes justice and the
very nature of sin itself. So long as we insist that sin is primarily
about rule-breaking and that justice demands punishment of sin before
God's law can be satisfied, we remain immersed in the mindset
inherited from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and cannot
see the truth as it is in Jesus who represents the Tree of Life. And
so long as we maintain this distorted view of how God relates to sin
and sinners we will imagine that His mind must be swayed in some way
to be led from anger to favor and will insist that justice involves
imposed punishments and rewards.
This
is what underlies our faulty thinking that someone else's
righteousness can lead God to repentance instead of the other way
around. Misapprehensions about sin and about God cause us to live in
fear rather than in His love. But fear has to do with punishment and
prevents true love from being perfected in our heart because we are
clinging to lies that inhibit us from resting in the pure love of the
Godhead.
We
must come to see the fallacy of imagining we have to lead God to
repent of His wrath towards us because of our sins and be converted
to repent of our own twisted thinking that makes us continue in this
line of dangerous illogic. No amount of perfect law-keeping on
anyone's part – including the perfect righteousness of Jesus as our
substitute – can have any affect on changing God's mind towards us,
for that completely misses the original problem of sin involving
distrust of God's heart. God is never the one who needs to repent but
rather sinners – bad sinners and good ones alike – need to repent
of all the suspicions, slander and lies circulating about Him and
most often promoted by religion.
Will
we be willing to repent
of
trying every way
possible to get God to
repent? It will do
no good, but rather is a dangerous distraction, to try to lead God
into changing His mind about us by impressing Him with our righteous
law-keeping. That is not the truth about salvation for it misses the
real point of the original problem, and worse yet it prevents us from
seeing our own desperate condition, fooling us into imagining that we
are more secure than we really are in heaven's eyes.
What
is most needed is a massive shift in our foundational perceptions
about the real nature of our problem with sin and how God views us.
God is not antagonistic toward sinners because God is nothing other
than pure love. This does not mean He never gets angry or hurt, but
it does mean He never takes offense, something most people have
difficulty accepting. Because God never takes offense there is never
anything for which He needs to change His thinking, for God cannot be
changed by anything we do, say or feel that could ever in the
slightest way lessen His passionate desire for us to be reunited into
the deepest intimacy of love with His heart.
This
is a vital perspective we need to rediscover in this story, for
unless we begin to catch a glimpse of the true methods of God and His
heart of passionate love for abusers as well as for victims, we
continue to be blind to the true nature of our problem and will rely
on vain methods to be reconciled with God.
We
must see in this story that Jesus was just as passionate to win the
heart and mind of each scribe and Pharisee involved in this episode
as He was to save the life and soul of this woman entrapped by these
evil men intent on killing her to vent their animosity toward Jesus
through law-enforcement. We may find it difficult to feel sympathy
for legalistic, hateful bigots, yet God sees the damage that sin has
caused in every one of His children. Yet even so, in no way is His
heart altered in His desire to heal them just as much as He desires
to rescue the victims of their exploitation and dark views of
justice.
What
we find in this story is a confrontation between the power of the
kindness of God in contrast to the false notion of commerce-based
religion where God must be paid off
in order to get Him to change His thinking. Anything involving
earning and deserving
anything from God involves commerce morality and originates from the
kingdom of darkness. Heaven does not operate on the principles of
commerce with debts and credits and keeping score. Heaven is all
about life and relationships and restoring everyone possible back
into pristine relationships of mutual love and joy. And while not
everyone will be willing to embrace that way of life, it is the only
way that that can restore true harmony and peace to the universe as
it once enjoyed before the beginning of the rebellion.
So
what is the core cause of sin
that must be addressed for sinners of both types in order to be
restored into harmony with the mind and heart of God? The core issues
are found both in Romans 1 and 2.
For I am not ashamed of the
Good News of Christ, for it is the power of God
for salvation for everyone who believes; for the Jew first, and also
for the Greek. For in it is revealed God's
righteousness from faith to faith. As it is written,
"But the righteous shall live by faith."
(Romans 1:16-17)
Paul
is keen to point out that the true good news has
inherent power within it to salvage us, and that good news is about
God's righteousness that can be fully trusted. That is the short
version. Jesus came to explicitly reveal this amazingly good news
about God, and when we truly embrace Jesus' version of God it seems
almost too good to be true.
What
follows this verse is part of the core cause that obscures
the good news that God is nothing but good. As we continue to cling
to lies we hold about God, we eventually force God to respect our
choice to repel His love and we reject His protection over our lives.
If we destroy all our capacity to respond to love through repeated
rejections of His overtures to draw out our affections, we can lose
all capacity to appreciate His affection for us until we finally
damage our heart so thoroughly it becomes irrevocably hardened and
makes it impossible to change/repent. Throughout this process God is
has to sadly withdraw His protection from us resulting in
increasingly ill-effects from our wrong choices because we are
released to deeper and deeper levels of darkness and dysfunction.
Whether this result of sinful living comes out as open rebellion and
gross immorality, or whether it expresses itself as pious
self-righteousness in vain attempts to impress God, either way the
root cause is the same – exchanging the truth about God for lies
that harden unbelief
and distort our ways of perceiving Him.
For the wrath of God is revealed
from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who
suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because
that which is known of God is revealed in them, for God revealed it
to them. For the invisible things of him since the creation of the
world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are
made, even his everlasting power and divinity; that they may be
without excuse. Because, knowing God,
they didn't glorify him as God, neither gave
thanks, but became vain in their reasoning,
and their senseless heart was darkened.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
and traded the glory of the incorruptible God
for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds, and
four-footed animals, and creeping things.
(Romans
1:18-23)
Whether
we experience the symptoms of the disease of sin in the forms
described later in chapter 1 or as described in chapter 2, the root
cause is the
same: the real truth about God is suppressed by false notions about
His righteousness. In promoting false ideas about what true righteous
is, we dishonor God's reputation and rob Him of His glory. Believing
dark views of God also results in lack of appreciation and gratitude
to Him as we become fools by making God out to be like us or
worse.
Do you think this, O man who judges
those who practice such things, and do the same,
that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you despise
the riches of his goodness, forbearance, and patience, not
knowing that the goodness of God leads you to
repentance? But according to your hardness and unrepentant heart you
are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath, revelation,
and of the righteous judgment of God;
(Romans 2:3-5)
We
find here the
core of the problem that was addressed previously, the specific
things we reject about God in exchange for the lies in religion that
mingles good and evil in our ideas of how God feels towards us. So
long as we discredit or cast doubt in the slightest on the true
riches of God's goodness, self-restraint and patience, we mingle
darkness with light and create fear in place of love.
The
woman caught in adultery was living a life full of fear and shame,
not knowing the truth about God's real disposition of pure love
towards her. Because the truth of God had been exchanged for lies
that produced fear of punishment along with feelings of shame and
worthlessness, she was easily exploited by religious men who
themselves had also exchanged the truth of God for lies, whether or
not they were the very same lies as were hers. Both sides lived in
fear, believing that God needed to have His mind changed in some way
before things could get better in their lives.
These
pious men who felt
compelled to enforce the laws given through Moses designed to keep
law and order in society were caught in the very same mindset as the
woman they were condemning, for in despising the riches of the
goodness, forbearance and patience of Jesus with sinners, He was
being ungodly and needed to be exposed as a fraud as they believed
Him to be. Because He did not share their stern views of God as one
who must condemn sinners and reward good people, they viewed Jesus as
a huge threat to the established system of law and order. Jesus'
teachings and methods threatened to undermine the very authority of
the God they believed had to have firm control. Because they
exchanged the truth of God for lies about Him, they failed to
appreciate the truth that Jesus was bringing to them and they hated
Him for refusing to endorse their teachings and enforce their laws.
Whether
we feel disdain towards someone guilty of adultery or towards
religious prigs eager to harshly punish a victim of sin, our own
penchant to judge anyone in this story exposes the fact that we too
to some extent have exchanged truth about God for lies that may seem
on the surface to be obviously true. Yet these very lies that cause
us to imagine we need to lead God to change His mind about us blind
us to realizing that it is our thinking alone that needs a radical
change in how we perceive God rather than His mind that needs to be
changed about us.
But all things are of God, who
reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ,
and gave to us the ministry of reconciliation; namely, that God
was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not reckoning to them
their trespasses, and having committed to us the word of
reconciliation.
(2 Corinthians
5:18-19)
Determined
religious
defenders of law here demand that God in human flesh take a stern
accounting of a woman's trespass against a law they believed God gave
originally. Yet they utterly failed to see that they were equally
guilty from heaven's perspective of distorting the truth about God's
character and disposition towards sinners. By demanding punishment
for sin they imagined they were only doing what they believed God
expects. Yet in reality they had exchanged the truth of God's love
for the lie that justice demands punishment for every sin. Jesus
longed to open their minds and win their hearts just as much as He
sought to protect the woman caught in sin and also restore her to
true love. If these men had accepted the kindness Jesus offered in
the way He dealt with their sins, they could have repented and
received life directly from the Source just as the woman found
deliverance.
Only
the truth about the goodness of God has power to change lives and
transform a character to prepare one to thrive in the presence of
God's intense purity and love. We must renounce every lie we have
inherited or embraced that displaces the truth about God in our heart
until we are fully restored to the freedom and fulness of joy for
which we were created. The more clearly we see the true goodness of
God, the more stunning it appears until it can almost be scandalous
to our normal way of thinking. Yet the revelation of truth as it is
in Jesus is the real gospel that has the power to save
in such a way that we may be fully rescued from the slavery of
darkness and fear in which we have lived all our lives.
But when the kindness of
God our Savior and his love toward mankind
appeared, not by works of righteousness, which we did
ourselves, but according to his mercy, he saved
us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing by the
Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly, through
Jesus Christ our Savior; that, being justified by his
grace, we might be made heirs
according to the hope of eternal life.
(Titus 3:4-7)
