‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
76th teaching
6.2.2014
“Restoring the
Image”
Review:
So we’ve been studying
Christology, this new section of Theology that deals with Jesus Christ, knowing
Him, who He is and what He is, learning about His Person, His character, His
nature and so on. Christology is the science of Christ, getting the facts of
Christ, discovering what can be known about Christ. We’ve come to the end of
the first part of Christology, which remember we called this first part “the
identity of Christ”.
“The identity of Christ” forms the basis for an
introduction into Christology and soon we’ll get into the second part of
Christology. So far we’ve asked the question “Who is Jesus Christ”. That was
our very first study, you’ll remember. Then we discovered how got Christology,
how this science developed through the years. Then we used the Tetralemma as a
structure for the following studies, try to uncover whether Jesus was a Liar, a
Lunatic or a Legend borrowed from ancient myths and folktales. We then spent a
whole night learning about the Historical Jesus, that Jesus of Nazareth was a
real Man who lived and walked the earth, who died and rose again.
And finally, last time we met, we ended up with
the only possible conclusion from the Tetralemma. If Jesus was not a liar nor a
lunatic nor even a legend then He must be what He claimed to be: Lord God
Almighty.
Our topic from last time was discussing the
Lordship of Jesus Christ. What is the Greek word for Lord? When Paul talked
about being likeminded, he suggested esteeming others as better than yourself;
therefore, what is the great enemy of likemindedness in the church? What does
it mean to say that the Lordship of Jesus gives us a balanced view of Him? Who
in the New Testament saw Jesus both as the humbled Man and as the exalted Lord,
and had a powerful reaction to the sight? And the clear application of the
Lordship of Jesus is that we would come to obey Him as Lord. There’s no point
in merely calling Him “Lord”. He isn’t out merely to get a title. Rather we
need to submit to Him as our Master.
End
of Review
Let’s
open with a question: What is a goal
of salvation?
You could say: Getting to heaven, or
the other side of it: Keeping out of hell. You could say: Having fellowship
with God, restoring relationship with God. What about: Becoming more like
Jesus.
Tonight I suggest to you that this is
one of the goals of salvation, a work of God within you where He is making you
more like His Son, holy, pure, just, loving, kind and so on. And whatever God
allows to occur in your life as a Christian, whatever His Lordship decrees for
you to experience, is a part of this massive life-project that He’s working
out. Note, that can mean some unpleasant experiences. That can mean some grief,
some loss, some confrontation or pain.
But get this: God is more interested
in your holiness than your happiness.
“God doesn’t want me to be happy?”
That’s not what I said. Rather, I said your holiness is more important in God’s
eyes than your happiness. For you might live a tremendously, though only
superficially, “happy” life full of sin and then die and spend an eternity in
isolation in hell; in other words, you might have fleeting happiness, a
happiness that comes and goes without ever being holy. But if you’re holy, if
you’re being made into the likeness of Jesus Christ, then you’ll have both the
holiness and the happiness, both in this life in learning contentment with what
you have and joy in His presence and fellowship, and then ultimate happiness
and real bliss in the heaven-bound
life to come.
C.S. Lewis said: “Aim at heaven and
you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.” In the same
way, aim at holiness and you will get happiness thrown in. Aim at happiness and
you will neither be holy nor happy.
God doesn’t want just happy people,
blissfully ignorant people, a church full of slumbering idiots and babies lying
in cribs. He wants a holy people. I
Peter 1:16, “For it is written: ‘Be
holy, because I am holy.” God wants people that will be holy, people set
apart from the world, though ridiculed and rejected even as He was, a people
who will understand a profound impact upon history, a deep and lasting joy in Christ,
and a destiny above the stars themselves. Thus God is working toward that goal
of making us holy and we need to join in and cooperate with Him.
Now let me give you a little
“behind-the-scenes” on tonight’s study. As you know, we had this past week off.
No study. Next week, as I announced, there’ll be no study again. So I said to
myself: “Self, you just finished teaching an introduction to Christology. Now
you can go ahead and jump into the next section of it, but then there’ll be a
gap and that first study in the new section will be isolated. So why not give a
parenthetical study instead?” So that’s what I decided.
Tonight’s study is sort of a bridge
between what we’ve covered and what we’re going to cover, and I think that
tonight we’ve got an appropriate topic for that purpose. We’ve discovered the
identity of Christ and just who this God-man is, but before we get any further
into the science of Christ and learn about His nature and character, we ought
to take a pause and realize that we’re not studying this as we would any other
science. You might study biology or chemistry or astrology, but you don’t
actively try to imitate the things you’re learning about. Unless you’re crazy,
nobody would learn about marine biology and then go out and try to live like
what they’ve learned about, live like a crab or a mollusk or a cuttlefish. Nor
does anyone who studies the periodic table take up Helium or Xenon as their
moral exemplars. Nobody takes cues on how to live their lives from Aluminum or
Iron. They’re mere chemicals! And unless you’ve got some weird ideas rolling
around upstairs, you’ve got to realize that you can study stars all you want
but you can hardly hope to ever imitate them.
Thus Christology is unique among the
sciences because it is both a field of study and an example of how to live our lives. We both learn about Christ
and also learn to be like Christ.
Tonight’s study is entitled:
“Restoring the Image”. The New Testament articulates this idea of being like
Christ is several ways, but we’re going to follow this concept of an “image”
being restored in order to get a grasp of the subject.
Turn to II Corinthians 3:7-18
“But
if the ministry of death, written and engraved on stones, was glorious, so that
the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of
the glory of his countenance, which glory was passing away, how will the
ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious?”
So Paul the apostle here is making a
contrast between the ministry of death and the ministry of the Spirit.
First, what is the ministry of death?
Clearly, it was the Law, the Ten Commandments. He says it was written and
engraved on stones and he mentions it in relation to Moses. Paul also calls the
Law the ministry of condemnation. Basically, he used these titles in reference
to the Law because that’s what the Law did, it condemned people to death for
breaking commands. That’s all it did. It pointed out the flaws. It didn’t offer
any help on how to keep away from sin. It just said, “don’t do it”, but if you
did it: death.
Secondly, the ministry of the Spirit.
This is the working of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life, a work not of
laws but of grace. The ministry of the Spirit under the new covenant produces
love in the Christian life, enabling us to keep the laws of God, since the
greatest commandments of the Law are love God and love your neighbor as
yourself.
Now Paul says that there was glory and
beauty to the ministry of death. Even though it was gruesome, it was still
beautiful. Moses, you might remember, came down from the mountain and his face
was literally glowing after talking with the LORD. But that glory was passing
away.
And since even the ministry of death
had glory, a fading glory, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit, a
work of grace and life, be more glorious and beautiful?
v.9,
“For if the ministry of condemnation had
glory, the ministry of righteousness exceeds much more in glory. For even what
was made glorious had no glory in this respect, because of the glory that excels.
For if what is passing away was glorious [referring to the ministry of
death], what remains is much more
glorious [the ministry of the Spirit]. Therefore,
since we have such hope, we use great boldness of speech—unlike Moses, who put
a veil over his face so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at
the end of what was passing away.”
Since the new covenant and the
ministry of the Spirit is better and more enduring and glorious than the old
Law, Paul says he and other Christians can preach with boldness. We know that
we have an enduring covenant. We don’t have to hide the passing away of
anything or the fading of any luster or glory, unlike Moses, who he says veiled
his face so that the children of Israel couldn’t see that the glory was fading
once he came down from the mountain. Through the Law, they could only get a
transitory and temporary glimpse of the glory of God before it faded away and
Moses’ face ceased to shine.
Now Paul adopts this veil of Moses’
face as an analogy:
v.14,
“But their minds were blinded. For until
this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament, because the veil is taken away in
Christ. But even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil lies on their heart [speaking
of the unbelieving Jews]. Nevertheless
when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.”
And suddenly all of it makes sense.
All the references to Jesus in the Old Testament, all the prophecies, all the
foreshadowing, all the Scriptures of the Old Testament find their place and
make sense in pointing toward their fulfillment in Jesus. Maybe you’ve even
experienced something like this yourself. I remember my early excitement to
read the Bible and seeing it come alive to me, speak to me and become real to
me in my earliest Christian days. It’s as if words which were meaningless
before suddenly had new meaning. That’s something like the veil being taken
away in Christ.
v.17,
“Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where
the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all with unveiled face,
beholding as in a mirror are being transformed into the same image from glory
to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
A.W. Tozer once wrote: “God wants us
to recognize that human nature is in a formative state and that it is being changed
into the image of the thing it loves. Men and women are being molded by their
affinities, shaped by their affections and powerfully transformed by the
artistry of their loves. In the unregenerate world of Adam this produces day by
day tragedies of cosmic proportions!”
We are each becoming something. What
are you becoming? Who are you becoming more like? If we are truly shaped by our
affections and affinities, transformed by our loves, then what or who do we
love most? That will answer the question of what we are becoming.
But God wants us to become like His
Son. God desires to transform us into the same image… which image? His image!
And our wrestling with sin, our sinfulness, our learning holiness, our
practicing Christlikeness all takes part in this great process of being
transformed into His image.
The ministry of death could enforce
law-abiding people, but not transformed people. The ministry of the Spirit, the
work of God within you, transforms you to be more than just “law-abiding” or
“rule-keeping” but altogether different people, we become like the Lord
Himself.
Bible teacher David Guzik wrote this:
“Everyone wants to know, ‘How can I change?; Or, everyone wants to know, ‘How
can they change?’ The best and most
enduring change comes into our lives when we are transformed by time spent with
the Lord. There are other ways to change (guilt, willpower, coercion), but none
of them are as deep and long lasting as the transformation that comes by the Spirit
of God as we spend time in the presence of the Lord. Yet, it requires
something. It requires beholding. The
word means more than a casual look, it means a careful study. We all have
something to behold, something to study. We can be transformed by the glory of
the Lord, but only if we will carefully study it.”
Let’s do just that. We have a few
points to walk through:
1. A Fascination with “Image”
2. Renewing God’s Image
3. The Imitation of Christ
1. A Fascination with “Image”
2. Renewing God’s Image
3. The Imitation of Christ
1.
A Fascination with “Image”
There’s no doubt about it. Our modern
world is fascinated by and obsessed with the concept of “image”. I remember
when we first moved here from Hawaii. I was seventeen and I remember seeing a
billboard for the first time in downtown Los Angeles. Never saw billboards in Hawaii.
I even said “Wow, look! Real billboards!”
You needn’t look farther than
billboards, roadside advertisements, to recognize that the world is fascinated
with “image”, with looking a certain way, resembling certain people, having
certain hairstyles, wearing certain brands, accessorizing in a certain way and
so on. Essentially we’re told “be like this image, this beautiful person, or
you might as well be dead”.
So women, buy these products, these
cosmetics and clothes, style your hair in a certain way, be practically
anorexic, be immodest, heck, be a temptress and a diva, and let all your beauty
be outward, because “girl, you are woman, you are strong!”
And men, don’t forget to also keep up
on your own products, but not on shaving, chicks dig the 5 o’clock shadow, and
make sure everything on you is chiseled, heck, worship your own body, and be no
more articulate than what is necessary for a pick up line, brood with mystery,
glower with your steely gaze and look positively disinterested and unattached
in every situation that you can.
But while the world is obsessed with
its idea of the perfect “image”, and it can be hard to tear our gaze away from
it, we recognize that the word of God, not exactly a visually glamorous thing—though
attempts have been made to make it so—this Book of books has much to say on the
concept of “image”.
Proverbs
31:30, Women… “Charm is deceitful and
beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” I Peter 3:3-4, “Do not let your adornment be merely outward—arranging the hair, wearing
gold, or putting on fine apparel—rather let it be the hidden person of the
heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is
very precious in the sight of God.”
And men… I Timothy 6:11, “But you, O
man of God, flee these things and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love,
patience and gentleness.” I
Corinthians 16:13-14 (ESV), “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act
like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.” Does the Bible
tell you to “be a man”? I think so. Man-mode it!
The Bible encapsulates far more than
just visual, physical “image”. The people we are to be are men and women of
God.
Romans
12:2, “And do not be conformed to
this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove
what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”
I find it incredibly revealing that
this passage in Romans speaks of being transformed, how? By the renewing not of
your body or of your habits or your lifestyle, but by the renewing of your
mind. To renew means to restart, reestablish, to resume an activity after an
interruption.
Our thoughts get interrupted all the
time, don’t they? The lusts of the world and the things our society cares
about, like “image”, get crowded into our thoughts until we can’t think about
anything else. How we need our minds renewed, to think on God and the things of
God, to restore and recover our thoughts from the passions and pursuits that
the world around us waves before us.
In order to not be conformed to the
world, to be holy and set apart to God, it starts with our minds. Think about
what you think about. What are you putting in your attic? What thoughts do you
entertain?
It’s not enough to ask: What kind of
movies do you watch? Or what kind of music do you listen to? Although these are
important, these are questions that monks in church history past long ago
confirmed are irrelevant. The monks that isolated themselves still dealt with
sinful thoughts, though they never watched a single film or listened to a
single secular song in all their isolation.
Realize, a lot of the battle is fought
up here in your thoughts.
2.
Renewing God’s Image
So you all know that the book of
Genesis details the act of Creation and how God made man and woman, human
beings, in His own image. Our race was originally created with a nature that
was made in the image of God. But when Adam sinned and the whole of humanity
with him, then that image of God was not removed but defaced and ruined by
another element that became a part of man’s nature, which is our sin nature.
We talked about this some months back,
how humanity, as a part of God’s Creation, was really a work of art stemming
from an infinite Mind of creativity. But that work of art was eventually ruined
and corrupted by sin. But God’s other work of art, the Church, is a project in
which God is undertaking a restoration of that image.
Remember that we read there in II Corinthians 3 about us being
transformed into the same image, His image, the original image of God that we
were created in, which was then ruined, and which is now being restored,
painfully and painstakingly sometimes even as somewhat might painstakingly
labor over a ruined piece of historical art in order to restore its colors,
texture and vibrancy to what it used to be. In Christians, this is a continuous
process. It’s a project that goes on and on.
The New Testament uses three keywords
to describe different aspects of salvation. The keywords are justification,
sanctification and glorification.
Question: which of these three words
means the process we’re talking about tonight, the continuous process of being
made like Christ?
It’s sanctification.
It has been said: “Justification is
being saved from the penalty of sin, sanctification is being saved from the
power of sin and glorification is being saved from the presence of sin.”
Justification is a one-time thing. When you’re saved, God declares you
righteous and gives you His own righteousness, and saves you from the penalty
of sin, death in hell forever. Glorification is also a one-time thing, which
will occur when we die and enter heaven and receive new bodies without any
presence of sin. But of the three, sanctification is a process which continues
throughout the Christian life in which the Spirit of God shapes us into the
image of His Son and we become more Christ-like. God wants us to become like
Jesus, His Son in whom He is well-pleased. I
Thessalonians 4:3, “For this is the
will of God, your sanctification…”
Now sanctification is a greatly
misunderstood and misrepresented process. A lot of times I think that’s because
sanctification isn’t an emotional process. Conversion and justification can
sometimes be an emotional experience, but not necessarily sanctification. Often
times we may not even notice that God is using a circumstance to mold and shape
us. We may not even know when sanctification is happening.
But my question is: how does
sanctification happen?
Note that how we attempt to answer
that question may lead us down several different paths: one of laziness and
indifference and wishful thinking, or the other path of cold, hard legalism and
self-righteousness, or still a third path which represents the normal Christian
life as seen in the New Testament. Let me explain.
How does sanctification happen? Well,
there are only three possible answers.
Answer one: sanctification happens
because God does it all. It’s a work of grace after all and a work of grace
cannot be of works or there would be no more grace. So sanctification is all
God’s responsibility and we have no part to play in it at all. We’re sort of
like animals in a lab being experimented on, totally powerless to stop or aid
the process whatsoever. With a mentality like that, we might end up being very
lazy and indifferent Christians, not really caring about our current holiness,
since that’s God’s job anyways.
Or answer number two: sanctification
happens because we do it all. God set the machine in motion but then you and I
keep it running. God saved us but we have all the responsibility in trying to
live up to his demands and trying to please Him and trying to be holy. With
this mentality (which I think is extremely popular) we might be constantly
wracked by paralyzing guilt and shame every time we fail, or when we succeed
too much we might become brutally legalistic toward others, beating the
children of God because they can’t live up to our self-imposed standards and
self-righteousness. This sounds a lot like the mentality of the Pharisees. That
was their thing, to be as outwardly holy as they possibly could compared to
everyone else.
There are many Christians living in
either of these two categories: the lazy or the legalistic lifestyles, because
of the way they answered the question: how does sanctification happen? The one
thinks “ah, it’s all God’s job” and their flesh adds: “so why bother about it?”
The other thinks “oh my, it’s all my
job!” and so they work their hardest to please no one but themselves.
But the third answer I think is the
correct one. How does sanctification happen? How does this process go about?
How do you become more Christ-like? Answer: it is both God’s responsibility and your responsibility. It is
cooperation. It is a partnership.
How so? Someone might say “But I
thought salvation was by faith alone, no works!” And indeed it is. I’m not
saying it isn’t.
But sanctification takes all the working of God’s Spirit AND the surrender of ourselves. Sanctification
requires both God’s work and the Christian’s yielding to His Spirit.
Sanctification is a co-op project.
Apologist Norman Geisler writes: “The
path to sanctification is set forth in Romans 6: Knowing we are dead to sin through Christ, reckoning this to be a fact, yielding
ourselves to God’s righteous demands. Thus, purification does not follow
automatically from justification. It involves cooperation on our part; we must
yield to God’s sanctifying grace.”
We simply allow the Lord to work.
When I was a child, I occasionally
went out to watch my dad work on something, the car maybe or some other
project, and as many people did when they were little, I thought “hey, maybe I
can help!” And so I asked him if I could. He’d hand me a tool or ask me to pass
him one before I quickly grew bored and my father’s workspace became my new
play area.
Now that’s cute at first, watching a
little kind “pretend” to fix invisible machines with his father’s tools, but
eventually it can get in the way. Eventually it can get a little obnoxious.
Eventually, if dad ever wants to get back to work, he’s got to either get the
kid to cooperate or get him to get out of the way.
Are you being made like Christ? If
not, maybe it’s because you’re getting in the way. Maybe it’s because your ego
is taking up all the workspace. Maybe it’s because when your heavenly Father
wants to get to work in you, you tell him that you can do it, and then he has
to watch you fumble around with rules and laws and church and social groups and
pretending and a kind of superficial holiness… rather than letting His Spirit
come inside and do all the renovating Himself. Hey, if you want a job done, get
a professional to do it. God is the ultimate professional.
Really, all you have to do in the
Christian life is provide Him with the workspace (your life) and the right
tools to work with, the resources of, for example, His Word. You want
sanctification to take place? You want to be like Christ? You want to stop
being a dead-beat, lame, confused and ineffective Christian?
In John 17:17, Jesus prays: “Sanctify
them by Your truth. Your word is truth.”
Reading this book, behold God’s glory,
aids and enables the transformation. This book is like a breath of air that
fans the flames. This book is like a foundation upon which a sturdy house can
be built. If we want to be like Christ, it will come through the resource of
His Word and the application of His Words to your life by His Spirit.
And by this tool, God’s Spirit strips
away the ugliness of the ruin of sin, the chipped paint of our transgression,
the dust of our depravity, the corruption of our own natures, and the beauty of
the image of God will shine through.
3.
The Imitation of Christ
So we understand that sanctification
is a cooperative process that includes God’s work and our surrender to it, in
order to become more like Christ. God will do it but you’ve got to be willing
to go along for the ride, with whatever His treatment prescribes.
It’s interesting to me that Satan’s
error was wanting to be like God . Isn’t that the same as sanctification? Nope.
Because the devil wanted to do it his way, through a power grab, through pride.
In true sanctification and Christ-likeness, God does the work and we merely
surrender.
Theologically, being like Christ is
known as the imitation of Christ. It is the practice of following the example
of Jesus Christ. Inherent in the definition of a disciple is that a disciple follows somebody or something. If we
call ourselves Christians, then by necessity we claim that we are following
after Christ. And as his disciples, we are becoming more like our Teacher in
learning from Him.
Romans
12:1-2, we referenced part of it earlier: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you
present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your
reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed
by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and
acceptable and perfect will of God.”
Guys, notice that he says it is our
reasonable service. That word service
can also mean worship. Another translation reads “act of intelligent worship”.
That’s beautiful, right there. It is only reasonable and only intelligent to
surrender our lives and our bodies as holy and acceptable to God. Did He not do
the same for us? Would you take His sacrifice greedily and make none of your
own?
There’s an old song that asks: “You
wanna be transformed and stay the same?” Well, do you? If you’re a Christian,
well, this is the Christian life, yielding to the working of God’s Spirit, a
living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.
The idea is expressed elsewhere in
another passage. Turn finally to Matthew
22:15-22.
“Then
the Pharisees went and plotted how they might entangle [Jesus] in His talk. And they sent to Him their
disciples with the Herodians, saying, ‘Teacher, we know that You are true, and
teach the way of God in truth; nor do You care about anyone, for You do not
regard the person of men. Tell us, therefore, what do You think? Is it lawful
to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”
Clever girl!
You see how they were trying to catch
Him? Knowing that Jesus didn’t care tuppence for titles or the positions of men
in authority, they tried to catch Him denying the authority of Caesar, which
they could immediately report to the Romans and given His popularity as a
Teacher, He would be swiftly punished. Or if He said to pay taxes and respect
Caesar, then He would risk losing His Jewish audience that was not exactly on
friendly terms with the Romans.
Notice Jesus’ wise answer: “But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and
said, ‘Why do you test Me, you hypocrites? Show Me the tax money.’ So they
brought Him a denarius. And He said to them, ‘Whose image and inscription is
this?’ They said to Him, ‘Caesar’s’. And He said to them, ‘Render therefore to
Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’
When they had heard these words, they marveled, and left Him and went their way.”
The denarius they brought to Jesus
bore the image of Caesar on it, there was a kind of resemblance portrayed on
the coin. It also had the inscription of Caesar’s name or title. Jesus means
“Look, this coin bears both the Roman king’s image and his name. Give it to the
Roman king. But give to God the things that belong to God, the things which
bear both God’s image and His name.”
We are Christians, ladies and
gentlemen. We bear God’s image as it is being restored through the long process
of sanctification. And we also bear His
name. We call ourselves Christians: little Christs.
II
Timothy 2:19, “Let everyone who names
the name of Christ depart from iniquity.”
Give to God the things which are
God’s, the things He died for: ourselves. This is part of our cooperation in
sanctification, the process through which we become like Christ by
surrendering, giving ourselves to Him. And hey, it is an intelligent and
reasonable act of worship.
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