The centripetal force of Christian doctrine is always to the right or left away from the central issue. The reason for this I believe is that at it's core the truth of the gospel is juxtaposed between the perfect justice and judgment of God as reflected in the moral law of the Old Testament on the one hand, and the perfect love and compassion of God as reflected in his substitutionary death on the cross as an atonement for our sins on the other. Only in Christianity do you find a God who dignifies his perfect sense of justice and truth by his incredible sacrificial love that satisfies that justice. Islam has a God of justice without the love, Buddhism and Hinduism have the sense of sin and imperfection without the sense of justice or truth.
But history has shown that adherents of Christianity are always spinning off into one direction or the other. "A loving God would never send people to hell" one group will say, ignoring the fact that it is in God that we live and breath and have our being and that none of us really has a clue what it would be like to live even one second on this earth without God's sustaining grace- and that many of us are already creating our own hell on earth by our rebellion against Him.
Another group says "A true Christian is one who does 'such and such'" as if that particular cultural preference somehow trumps the clear and central truth of justification by faith alone and that we in our fallenness have the ability to even know our own sin apart from His grace.
This is the situation that Paul confronted with the church in Galatians and the Jerusalem counsel. At a very strategic and important point in early Christian history, there was a group of false teachers who tried to say that in order for a person to be a Christian they had to first be a good Jew- and by that they meant to follow the customary laws of the Old Testament- including circumcision.
Paul's response was very direct and forceful. He was disgusted that the Apostle Peter was at first giving in to this doctrine:
When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, "You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs 'We who are Jews by birth and not 'Gentile sinners' 16know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified. (Galatians 2:11-14)
Here Paul is obviously not saying that the moral law has no say in personal holiness (we know this by his other teaching), but that the non- moral law- the cultural and customary laws that distinguish the Jew from other cultures, should be seen for what they were in the Old Covenant as pointing to a time when we would be freed by His grace. He is saying in other words that the gospel of Jesus Christ that we are justified by our faith alone, not by our works, is capable of moving into any culture- Jew, Greek, African, Babylonian, European etc without being encumbered by cultural biases.
So- what do you think- is this understanding of the true gospel under attack today?
Absolutely. It is constant.
To see how ugly and disgusting religious legalism that loses the true meaning of the gospel can get, consider what came out in the Daily Oklahoman in a full page add last week paid for by some Churches of Christ in our city. These churches spent thousands of dollars to send a message to our community.
A community that is mostly lost and mostly disgusted with organized religion anyway. A community that needs to the truth of the gospel. A community that could care less about their petty cultural biases in worship.
And what was that message?
That they were really ticked off with a local pastor and were hereby declaring him a "false teacher".
And why did the entire readership of the Daily Oklahoman need to know this? Why do they consider him to be a false teacher? Not presumably because he had reversed the gospel (the true meaning of "false teacher"), understand, but because he was leading his church to bring some musical instruments into the building during one of their worship services.
This group needs to hear Paul say, "We have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified.
I am not Church of Christ and do not agree with their doctrine- so I don't have a dog in the hunt. But when this group brought this document into a full page add in our newspaper, they crossed a line that has ramifications for all believers.
For those who wonder why we must constantly be on the defense against religious legalism and stand for the true meaning of the gospel by keeping it real- this is only the latest example.
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