Who Leads Who?

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)