From ABC News:

There were no tears when Sharon Singleton got called into her boss’ office to be told her job had been eliminated. Those came later. While Singleton, one of 11 employees let go by the city of Lathrop, Calif., took a day off to figure out her next step, her colleague was quietly deciding to give up her own job to save someone else’s. Patricia “Patti” Overy, a mother of four, said she too was shocked by the layoffs, which claimed two members of the close-knit finance department where she had done accounting work for seven years. Her job was spared. “I started kind of doing a little soul searching and looking at my situation,” Overy said, “and went home and talked with my husband.”

Check it out.

Wow. Makes the heart glad to read a story like this. Blessed to be a blessing.

“I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but I will not be mastered by anything. You say, “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy them both.” The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit. Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins people commit are outside their bodies, but those who sin sexually sin against their own bodies. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

—1 Corinthians 6:12-20 (TNIV)

Here we have the biblical response to those who mistakenly argue that our bodies are ours and we have the right to do with them what we please. Paul would beg to differ. To the contrary, he reminds us that our bodies are God’s, not our own, and we are not to do anything that would dishonor God by dishonoring his temple (our bodies in which the Holy Spirit lives).

I don’t know about you, but I am glad my body belongs to God. I wish I had taken this teaching more seriously when I was younger. It may have prevented me from living the profligate lifestyle I lived. You see, I have tried that old “self-help” program and it has been a disaster. I need God’s Presence in me so that he can transform me to become like Jesus. I want that very badly because I want to enjoy a real relationship with my Creator who loved me and gave himself for me on the cross to make it possible for me to have that relationship in the first place.

Paul lays out three great biblical teachings in this dense passage. First, we see the biblical teaching on resurrection. We are not going to spend eternity with God as some disembodied spirit. We are going to one day enjoy new resurrection bodies, the kind that our Lord Jesus has. Paul explicates this elsewhere in 1 Corinthians 15.

Second, we see the value of God’s created order. Because we are promised resurrection bodies, we are reminded that God values his creation and plans to redeem it, not destroy it. We get a wonderful vision of this in the last couple of chapters in Revelation. Check it out. Because God values his creation, so should we. That means we need to roll up our sleeves and be extensions of God’s love for his broken and hurting world.

Last, we see a wholesome and winsome vision for Christian marriage and sexuality. Note carefully the self-giving essence of love that exudes from this passage. We are not to focus on ourselves but on others. We are not to delude ourselves into thinking we are gods over our own bodies, but rather our bodies are vessels in which the Living God wants to dwell. Paul refers us back to Genesis 2:24 by reminding us why God created male and female and his purposes and will for his gift of sex to us. Sex is a good and God-given gift, intended to be used in a permanent monogamous relationship between one man and one woman, i.e., marriage. As Paul further explicates in tomorrow’s passage, husbands and wives are to submit their bodies to each other. But first and foremost, both are to submit themselves to the headship of Christ. So while Paul does argue elsewhere for male headship in the family, this passage reminds us that he surely did not have in mind a headship that was authoritarian, demanding, cruel, or abusive, but rather one patterned after the headship of Christ, who loves his bride, the Church, and gave himself up for her.

If you want to know the secret to a happy marriage, here it is in all its Christian glory.

Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor practicing homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

—1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (TNIV)

Actually, this passage was omitted from the Daily Office and I find that irritating because this is just one of many other examples of “hard passages” being ignored in the Office’s reading schedule. That is not to our benefit. Enough of my personal rant, however.

Here is a self-assessment for you. How did you react when reading this? Were you indignant? Depressed? Did you think Paul is being too judgmental? Or were you able to get to the last sentence and give thanks to God for his great gift to you in Jesus? If you did not experience the latter, you probably have some work to do on your pride because it is likely pride that made you bristle at what Paul has to say to us here.

But here’s the thing. Paul is talking about all of us, whether we fall explicitly into one of the categories he lists (I actually qualify on several counts—I hate it when that happens). As he mentions in Romans 3:23, all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Consequently none of us will be allowed into God’s Kingdom because God cannot allow evil to exist in his Kingdom. If we think this through, this is actually a good thing because who among us would want evil or the brokenness of this world to exist in heaven for all eternity? But I digress.

If you were able to get through this whole passage to the final statement in today’s passage, you were able to see the Good News of Jesus Christ. The end game for Paul and the other biblical writers is not to make us feel badly about ourselves. The end game of Scripture is to help us see ourselves for what we really are: desperately broken, fallen creatures without hope. There is no such thing as being “kinda good.” God does not care if we are basically good people (or at least better than some of those really bad people—you know, those whose sins are not your sins) because God finds any sin grievous and cannot abide it in any form. Consequently we have no hope on our own. Until we understand our dire straights, we are not ready to hear the Good News. If we do not think we need a Savior, irrespective of the reason(s), we will not be ready to hear the message of the NT.

The biblical writers understand this and they love us enough to warn us about ourselves so that we will not perish. THAT’S their end game. We need a Savior and we have one in Christ. No matter who we are or what we have done, we can be redeemed through his blood. We can be new creatures. Yes, the Bible talks about some yucky things but it is to get us ready to hear our need for the Good News of Christ.

Whatever your reaction to today’s passage, think about it during this Lent. It will give you a good indication of the path you are on.

[The natural philosophers] become lost in their own ideas and claim to be wise, attributing to themselves things which belong to you. In an utterly perverse blindness they want to attribute to you qualities which are their own, ascribing mendacity to you who are the truth, and changing the glory of the incorrupt God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man.

—Augustine, Confessions, 5.3.5

Augustine here confirms the old adage that, “In the beginning God created man and ever since man has been attempting to return the favor.” I am thinking now of the strand of liberal theology that denies and distorts, often in perverse ways, NT atonement theology. A typical version of liberal theology that rejects the notion of Christ’s substitutionary atonement goes something like this: “We reject the notion of a bloodthirsty, vengeful God seeking ultimate satisfaction by torturing and killing his son.”

Indeed. I reject this kind of god and am likewise repulsed by this concept. Any sane person would be too.

There was a day when I was younger when I drank this silly kool-aid. Fortunately, however, God caused the scales to fall from my eyes so that I could see clearly the cross for what it is (at least as clearly as I am humanly able). For that kind of thinking is not remotely close to the biblical teaching of Christ’s atonement.

Rather, it seems to me that what we have here is a human attempt, whether conscious or not, to make God into our own warped image because sadly there are people who would take pleasure in torturing and murdering an innocent person. Moreover, this kind of screwball theology ignores the indissoluble nature of the Trinity, God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It implies that Jesus and God are separate in a way that denies the true nature of the Trinity.

If we begin to understand the nature of substitutionary atonement, however, we begin to see what a wondrous and awesome God we do have. He is not some doting old fella who cares little about human sin and forgives willy-nilly. Neither is he some vengeful, bloodthirsty god who derives great pleasure in punishing and torturing people.

Instead, the biblical teaching about the atonement is pretty straightforward. God is a holy God, a God of both justice and love (two complementary dimensions of his holy character). God takes human sin very seriously because he created us to have a relationship with him and sin perforce causes separation between humans and God and causes us to be alienated from him. Because of the Fall, we are not able to right this wrong on our own so that we can enjoy the kind of relationship with God we were created to have.

So God entered our history, took on our flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, and bore the punishment for our sins himself on the cross so that our exile and alienation from him would be abolished forever. In Christ we see God himself bearing his just punishment for our sins so that his holy justice might be fulfilled, for sin is terribly grievous and offensive to God and separates us from him. The cross makes it possible for us to approach God in faith so that we can once again enjoy a relationship with him, a relationship that our sin destroyed. It is God’s free gift to us and it is offered to everyone.

When we finally begin to understand what God has done for us in Christ, we cannot help but be thankful. Yes, the cross is a symbol of torture and shame. But it is also a symbol of God’s holy love for us and his justice. It reminds us that God did the impossible for us because he loves us passionately and wants us to live with him now and forever. Jesus didn’t go to the cross to die a meaningless death. He went to the cross to give us our only hope and chance to live with God forever. But unless we understand and believe that Jesus was God-man, the cross will never ever make sense.

As Augustine points out above, at least implicitly, whenever we deny or diminish the seriousness of human sin, or have a deficient or incorrect understanding of God’s holy love and wrath, or think of Jesus as anything other than the very Incarnation of God, our theology of the cross will surely be deficient and likely be a turn-off (and rightly so).

But when we understand all of the above, suddenly the cross becomes the very symbol of God’s unfathomable love for us. When I was a boy, whenever I read the Passion narratives, I used to root for Jesus and hope he would come down off the cross as his enemies mocked him to do. I don’t hope for that any more. Had he come down off the cross, we would all be toast and we really would have a vengeful and unloving god.

Yes, it is awful to watch our Lord suffer and die a terrible death on the cross. But when we realize that we are watching the Father’s great love for us being poured out on the cross for our sake and for love’s sake, it makes the spectacle a bit easier to bear. It also makes us want to fall on our knees in wonder, love, humility, and praise as we thank God for being the loving God he is, a God who desires that his creatures live with him now and forever.

Think on these things as you observe a Holy Lent this season.

[The natural philosophers’] irreligious pride makes them withdraw from you [God] and eclipse your great light from reaching themselves. They can foresee a future eclipse of the sun, but do not perceive their own eclipse in the present. For they do not in a religious spirit investigate the source of the intelligence with which they research into these matters. Moreover, when they do discover that you are their Maker, they do not give themselves to you so that you may preserve what you have made [namely, themselves]. They do not kill their own pride, their curiosity, their sexual indulgence, so that you, God, who are a devouring fire, may consume their mortal concerns and recreate them into immortality.

—Augustine, Confessions, 5.3.4

The more things change, the more they remain the same. I cannot help but think of the militant atheists, who in their arrogance, attempt to propagate their message of death by denying and attempting to debunk the Christian faith (or any faith for that matter). From this passage from Augustine, folks like today’s militant atheists apparently have been around for a long time since Augustine lived in the 4th century.

Couched in terms of rationalism and reason, their own arrogance cuts them off from the Source of their life. Not all atheists are arrogant, of course, but the most vocal give every appearance to be. Like Paul, I listen to their lies and weep because their arrogance and smug pseudo-intellectualism are the very mechanisms of their destruction. Surely, God weeps for them too because he created humans to have a relationship with him and does not want any to perish. This is why believers should pray each day for any and all enemies of the cross because we should love them enough to want them to enjoy life, now and forever.

The way to Christ is first through humility, second through humility, third through humility. If humility does not precede and accompany and follow every good work we do, if it is not before us to focus on, if it is not beside us to lean upon, if it is not behind us to fence us in, pride will wrench from our hand any good deed we do at the very moment we do it.

—Augustine, Letter 118, 3.32

How should we prepare ourselves for loving God? By loving each other!

—Augustine, Commentary on the Epistle of John, 5.7.2

As far as it lies in the power of the physician, he has come to heal the sick. Whoever does not observe his orders destroys himself. Why would he be called the Savior of the world except because he saves the world? [emphasis mine].

—Augustine, Tractate on the Gospel of St. John, 12.12

Faith, which believes in the justifier [God], is the beginning of justification [a declaration that we are not guilty in God’s sight] before God. The root of righteousness does not spring from works; rather, the fruit of works grows from  the root of righteousness [justification by grace through faith].

—Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans

It must be realized that the true sign of spiritual endeavour and the price of success in it is suffering. One who proceeds without suffering will bear no fruit. Pain of the heart and physical suffering bring to light the gift of the Holy Spirit, bestowed in holy baptism upon every believer, buried in passions through our negligence in fulfilling the commandments, and brought once more to life by repentance, through the ineffable mercy of God.

—Theophan the Recluse

Such a bargain here. In seeking to grow in our relationship with God, we are promised that we have to suffer. Makes us want to sign right up, doesn’t it? Yet hard as Theophan’s words sound to us, they point us to the plight of the human condition. Humans can only find life in God, the Source and Author of all life. Yet we muck about trying to find life elsewhere because we are rebellious creatures. We don’t want anyone to tell us what to do or how to conduct our lives.

Theophan points us to the seriousness of the human condition. The only remedy is to take our medicine and let God heal us in his way and in his time. Most of us would not hesitate to suffer at the hands of a doctor if we were convinced that in doing so he or she would heal us in the process. Why then do we shrink from doing what God tells us we must do to have real life with him?