Have you ever heard a preacher say something like, “Repent now! Believe now, or else!”
“Or else, what?” They usually have a sign in one hand and a bullhorn in the other.
Saint Paul wrote, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”[i]
I will repeat it so that we know where the starting line is.
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”[ii]
Paul has spent the last seven chapters building to this crescendo of Grace.
“Therefore,” because of the previous seven chapters, because Sin is bad and Grace is good, because we have been rescued from death by Christ Jesus, the judgment that was expected, the condemnation deserved is no more.
Because of God in Christ doing what we could not do, that being perfectly fulfilling God’s Law, we can now live a Spirit-filled life.
Therefore, because the Spirit of God that raised Jesus from the grave resides in you, God will give life to your mortal body.
Paul is systematically laying before us the implications of the Good News of the Gospel.
Jesus perfectly upheld the Law on your, on my, behalf, freeing you and me from the weight of the Law so that now we can live a life full of God’s Spirit rather than a life of judgment and condemnation. The “old law” said to do these things to be in fellowship with the Lord. But Paul lays out “new life in the Spirit” that says what must be done has been done for you.
If there were bad news, it would be this: a Romans 8 mentality will not sell in Western Christianity. We are looking for someone to blame for our predicament, and in order to blame, we first judge.
Recently, no one tapped into this vein of American Christianity better than Mark Driscoll. Driscoll is the former pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington, which as of 2015, dissolved or rebranded its campuses after Driscoll was ousted as their pastor.[iii]
In a sermon titled “Jesus Sweats Blood,”[iv] Driscoll said, “God hates, right now, personally, objectively, some of you.” And if some in the congregation found solace knowing others sinned more than they, Driscoll added God “doesn’t care if you compare yourself to someone worse than you,” God “hates them too.”
“God hates you,” Driscoll proclaimed.
And before you dismiss Driscoll as a lunatic, fringe pastor, you should know that 10,000 people heard that sermon in-person while tens of thousands liked and shared the sermon online.
Driscoll’s head is on my Mount Rushmore of what’s wrong with American Christianity. But that does not mean messages like his are not immediately dismissed by the congregations subjected to this theological and exegetical malpractice.
No one got up and left.
In a sermon where I denounced American Christian Nationalism as a heresy, I received more than a few nasty emails and had a congregant walk out of the sanctuary in the middle of the sermon.
Driscoll said, “God hates you. God hates the you you really are, the person you are at your deepest level.”
And that Sunday, at the end of that sermon, somewhere near ten thousand people said, “Amen.” If you are unaware, “Amen” means “that is true.”
But it isn’t!
When it comes to Paul’s crescendo of Grace, Driscoll, and Christians like him miss Paul’s grand “Therefore.”
It’s as though they skipped Romans 8, not to mention chapters 1-7, as they did their theological gymnastics to get to the position of that while Sin is bad, Grace could be even worse.
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”[v]
You know this already, but I have to say it anyway, Driscoll is wrong, and preachers like him are harming the Church.
Who is against us?
Who will condemn?
Who is our rescue?
A wrathful God is both mesmerizing and terrifying.
Two Fridays ago, Allison, Camden, and I watched Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. You remember that installment, right? Indiana Jones, Marion, Brody, and Sallah are on a journey to find the Ark of the Covenant before Belloq and the Third Reich. The Ark was the container used by ancient Israel to carry the tablets received by Moses from God with God’s top-ten inscribed on the stone.
Belloq and the Nazis should have known what would happen should they mishandle the Ark.
Indiana Jones knew something would happen. Jones must have paid attention in Sunday school because he knew to close his eyes while Belloq and his crew of Nazis were, like Uzzah, struck dead for mishandling the Ark.
2 Samuel 6 – the Ark was being transported to Jerusalem at the request of King David when the oxen-powered cart jostled the Ark. Uzzah, one of the men accompanying the Ark, reached his hand out to prevent the Ark from falling. God struck Uzzah dead and struck fear into David.
It is not difficult, given the complex stories from our holy scriptures, like Uzzah’s death, along with Hollywood’s depictions of a vengeful God, or even the way many in the Church trade Grace for condemnation to conclude that God has an ax to grind with you and me. The razor-sharp end of that divine ax is often depicted as an eternal fiery punishment. Many within Christ’s body will portray God as a “sadistic monster who abhors sinners and dangles them over a fiery pit.”
If it were up to me, I would cast pastors like Driscoll as the Nazis in the next Indiana Jones flick.
It is preachers of false gospels like Driscoll whose face I would like God to melt. But as soon as I have done that, as soon as I have painted him the guilty one, I have fallen under that same condemning judgment. The scandal of Grace is that there is, therefore, now NO condemnation. Not for Mark, or me, or you. In Christ, we have not only been permitted to touch the ark of God's commands but we have also been welcomed to behold the face of God, to partake of his body, his blood. He has come to reveal to us the good news of our un-condemnation.
This is the scandal of Grace – God’s love for scoundrels and sinners alike.
The scandal of Grace, according to the late Robert Capon, is that “God's Grace is not a reward for the righteous, but a gift to the unworthy. It is not a wage to be earned, but a scandalous overflow of love. Grace is God's relentless pursuit of the broken, the lost, and the undeserving. It is the audacious declaration that there is nothing we can do to make God love us more, and nothing we can do to make God love us less. Grace is the wild, reckless, extravagant love of a God who refuses to give up on us, even when we have given up on ourselves.”
The Good News is that when we reach the end of the crescendo of God’s Grace, we do not find condemnation; rather, we step into new life.
Another pastor I consider to be my pastor, Pastor Brian Zahnd, grew up with and began his preaching career proclaiming a message of God’s wrath and vengefulness. In a life-altering act of repentance, Zahnd traded the vengeful, scare-the-pants-off-of-you God of his youth and early ministry for the God reflected in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
In his memoir, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, Zahnd, echoing Saint Paul and the Book of Hebrews, writes, “God has a disposition toward sinners, and it’s the spirit of Jesus. This is the beautiful Gospel… God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus; we haven’t always known this, but we do now. God is like Jesus! God is not a sadistic monster who abhors sinners and dangles them over a fiery pit.”[vi]
A wrathful God may make for a good Hollywood script or be good for building a toxic mega church that will eventually collapse under the weight of its toxicity, but that god is not the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ – the One who promises that nothing and no one can separate us from his Grace, through whom we are held together.
Who is against us? No one.
Who will condemn? Certainly not God.
Who is our rescue? It’s not who will rescue us because Jesus has already rescued all of us.
[i] Romans 8:1 NRSV
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Check out “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” podcast from Christianity Today - https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/
[iv] https://www.christianpost.com/news/mark-driscoll-sermons-tells-mars-hill-congregation-god-hates-some-of-you-video.html
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Zahnd, Brian. Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God. Waterbrook. 2017.Pg 11.
The Grand Therefore