Welcome to Rightly Dividing where we marry theology and Scripture. The idea is to promote loving God with all our minds. Each short session we will take Scripture and tie it to the appropriate pieces of theology (the study of God and the doctrines of God).
This first session we discuss the covenant with man. We are introduced to the covenant with man in the Garden of Eden by principle. It is not until Hosea 6:7 that we see the principle defined.
So, do the temptations that Adam and Eve faced in the Garden have any relation to the temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness after his baptism and 40 days of fasting? Watch and see 🙂
Jesus completed, in the flesh, what Adam was unable to do.
Looking back on that one time when I lost two decades of writing. If, at some point in daily living, you struggle, like me, with accepting forgiveness, then let this be a lesson for both of us.
this writing has been read by the author
Several months ago about fifteen years of almost every word that I had written, vanished. They were lost. Gone! After hours of searching turned into days and then days of searching turned into weeks, hope waned. There were many thoughts and notions on how to retrieve those lost writings but with no positive result, I gave up.
This was no welcome defeat. Soon entered the typical stages of grief which is said with some humor but also a great deal of truth.
Mentally, I thought back to some of, what I considered, my better works. These writings can never be rewritten. This birthed sadness. In an age where seemingly everything on the internet never gets lost or deleted, some of the best of me, was lost and deleted.
Hate is a word not strong enough to describe what I think of my past sin. I despise what I was. I absolutely abhor it. There are moments that I reflect upon my past rebellion and ponder how I could ever conceive being associated with such degeneracy.
Equally, it is a constant struggle to believe that purification, justification and forgiveness was freely given to me. I can teach it. I can explain the theological truths of what is called propitiation. I love that word. Some English Bible translations have replaced propitiation because it was believed too complex of a word to be properly understood.
Propitiation means, wrath absorbing. God, being perfectly pure and holy, has a wrath against mankind. God’s righteous wrath is a topic of which many prefer not to hear. I can teach and explain how this wrath was appeased through Christ. He absorbed (propitiated) God’s wrath for believers.
Inasmuch as I can expound this thought and others as they relate to God’s saving grace, there are times where believing He can do that for ME is too difficult to accept.
I believe in God’s forgiveness. I believe in God’s grace. I believe in God’s mercy. I can’t believe it is for me. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!
Then I think on fifteen years of writings. Gone. Deleted. Where are they? There is absolutely, no trace of them. As far as the east is from the west, so far as these pages been removed from existence.
Sound familiar? If, at some point in daily living, you struggle, like me, with accepting forgiveness, then let this be a lesson for both of us.
God removes sin.
How can God remove sin? Does He just sweep it under the rug because we are all buddies now? No! He does it because, the wrath I deserved, He placed upon Christ. Ever question or ponder why Christ had to endure such extreme suffering? It is clearly because He was propitiating a holy wrath for unholy sin.
For our sake, God made Him who knew no sin, to become sin, so that IN HIM we may become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)
There will be a time where I will face judgement. Anyone who is reading this, you will also. It is inescapable. Not certain exactly what I will be thinking at that time. Maybe about all those despicable things I did. How great it would be for me to report that those despicable things I hate were JUST those things I did twenty and forty years ago. Not true.
Sadly, I don’t always love my wife like Christ loved the church. I say inappropriate things. I think inappropriate things. At times I treasure inappropriate things. Oh, at times, how I weep at my constant rebellion. Will I be thinking about such things at the judgement?
Here is the reality, just as much as all my writings are gone, so IS all my sin. All if it: past, present and future. That is how the propitiation of Christ works[1].
In one sense there is great sadness over the loss of all those past writings. In another, upon great reflection, a real life lesson unfolded reminding me something I once did, can literally be gone.
As far as the east is from the west, so my sin has been removed from me[2].