Confronted by Grace E-Book

John Webster

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 382

Beschreibung

"I found myself joining in his joyful 'Amen!' to all of the promises that we have in Jesus Christ." --Michael HortonIn this rich collection of sermons, John Webster considers the power of the gospel and the truth of God's grace. Born from years of theological and biblical study, these reflections serve to challenge, stimulate, and inspire, demonstrating the grace of God at work in the complexities of life.By pointing us toward Christ, Confronted by Grace helps us grow in our understanding of the truth of the gospel.

Leseprobe

Confronted by Grace

Meditations of a Theologian

John Webster

Edited by Daniel Bush & Brannon Ellis

Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian

Edited by Daniel Bush & Brannon Ellis

Copyright 2014 John Webster

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

Previously published as The Grace of Truth (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Oil Lamp Books LLC, 2011).

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (RSV) are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Version. Public domain.

Lexham Editorial Team: David Bomar

Cover Design: Christine Gerhart

for my brother

Michael Webster

Contents

Preface

Part I: Gravity and Grace

Chapter 1: The Lie of Self-Sufficiency

Chapter 2: The Great Contrast

Chapter 3: Believe in the Lord Jesus

Chapter 4: Dead to Sin

Chapter 5: He Who Comforts

Part II: The Suffering Servant

Chapter 6: Hearing the passion

Chapter 7: Sin Shattered within Its Stronghold

Chapter 8: Lifted High in Humiliation

Chapter 9: Take this Holy Sacrament

Chapter 10: The Triumph of Divine Resolve

Part III: Hearing God

Chapter 11: Listen to Him

Chapter 12: Praising God

Chapter 13: Belonging to God

Chapter 14: Obeying God

Chapter 15: The Hearing Church

Part IV: Living by Promises

Chapter 16: God’s Sustaining Presence

Chapter 17: The Call to Remembrance

Chapter 18: The Nature of Faith

Chapter 19: The Way of Holiness

Chapter 20: Yes in Christ

Part V: Pressing On

Chapter 21: The Heart of Perseverance

Chapter 22: Endurance

Chapter 23: Waiting Patiently

Chapter 24: Christian Contentment

Chapter 25: Do Not Be Anxious

Chapter 26: The Day of God

Preface

PREACHING IS ONE of the principal ways in which the God of the gospel has dealings with us. The gospel’s God is eloquent: He does not remain locked in silence, but speaks. He does this supremely in the mission of the Son of God, the very Word of God who becomes flesh, communicating with human creatures in human ways, most of all in human speech. The Son of God comes as a preacher (Mark 1:38); this is a primary purpose and one of the most characteristic activities of his earthly ministry. His apostles, too, are summoned by him to preach the gospel: to speak from him and about him, to address their fellow creatures with testimony to the gospel. And this apostolic commission remains for the Church. Paul’s charge to Timothy—“Preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:2)—extends to the Christian community now, and faithfulness to the charge is basic to the way in which the Church fulfills its nature and mission as the community of the Word of God. The Church of the Word is a Church in which, alongside praise, prayer, lament, sacraments, witness, service, fellowship and much else, there takes place the work of preaching.

There are at least three elements to preaching. First: Holy Scripture. Scripture is the body of texts which God forms to be his “Word,” his communication with us in human language. In these texts, God teaches us, gives us knowledge—of himself, of ourselves, and of his ways with us. Preaching is not any sort of public Christian discourse; it is the Church saying something about the words of this text, on the basis of the words of this text, under this text’s authority, direction and judgment. Second: the congregation. At the Lord’s summons, the people of God gather in his presence. They gather in the expectation that something from God will be said to them—that however anxious, weary or indifferent they may be, the God of the gospel will address them with the gospel, will help them to hear what he says, and will instruct them on how to live life in his company. Third: the sermon. God speaks to the congregation through the human words of one who is appointed by God to “minister” the Word, to be an auxiliary in God’s own speaking. The sermon repeats the scriptural Word in other human words, following the Word’s movement and submitting to its rule. In this, the sermon assists in the work of the divine Word, which builds up the Church, making its life deep, steady, and vital.

The sermons in this book hardly match up to this understanding of preaching. Reading them through, I am acutely conscious that much could be said differently and better. Most of them were delivered in the years when I served as a canon of Christ Church cathedral in Oxford; a few were preached elsewhere. Daniel Bush and Brannon Ellis undertook the rather arduous task of editing the texts and preparing for publication, improving them a great deal in the process; I am grateful for their help.

Part I: Gravity and Grace

Chapter 1: The Lie of Self-Sufficiency

Matthew 21:33–39

There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country. When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, “This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.” And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.

Matthew 21:33–39

ONE WAY OF COMING TO UNDERSTAND the events of Holy Week is to think of them as the triumph of falsehood. Beginning on Palm Sunday with the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and over the next few days moving inexorably to its climax, the drama of the passion unfolds as one thing: as a consistent, willful, institutionally orchestrated rejection of the truth—as the acting out of a lie.

What unites the cast of characters which are assembling before us as we read through the narratives of the passion of Christ is this: all together—religious leaders, the disciples, the governing authorities in the person of Pilate, and the chorus of minor players—in their various ways conspire to deny the truth. They all choose darkness rather than light; they all fail to acknowledge what above all they ought to acknowledge, that in the man Jesus they are faced with the presence of God himself. And the events in which they are caught up, the putting to death of the Son of God, are as a whole and in all their detail the embodiment of the great lie, the ultimate untruth.

Why do we tell lies? We lie to evade reality; we lie because the truth is too painful or too shameful for us to face, or because the truth is simply inconvenient and has to be suppressed before it’s allowed to disturb us. We invent lies because, for whatever reason, we want to invent reality. And the false reality which we invent, the world we make up by our lying, has one great advantage for us: It makes no claims on us. It demands nothing. It doesn’t shape us in the way that truth shapes us; it faces us with no obligations; it has no hard, resistant surfaces which we can’t get through. A lie is a made-up reality, and so never unsettles, never criticizes, never resists, never overthrows us. It’s the world, not as it is, but as we wish it to be: a world organized around us and our desires, the perfect environment in which we can be left at peace to be ourselves and to follow our own good or evil purposes.

Lies are a desperately destructive force in human life. When they take the form of private fantasy, they rob us of our ability to deal truthfully with the outside world; but when lies go public, when an entire social group replaces reality with untruth, then the consequences are deadly. Sometimes, indeed, they can be literally deadly: Lies can kill. Lies work only when they remain unexposed. Once truth is allowed out, once reality is let in, then the lie just vanishes; the whole world of falsehood just crashes to the ground. And if the lie is to be maintained intact, then anything which speaks the truth has to be got rid of.

Totalitarian societies, dishonest businesses, abusive human relationships—they all depend on the exclusion of truth and truth-speakers, making sure that what really is the case isn’t allowed to come to light. Lies only work when they aren’t shown up for what they are; and that’s why lies always breed more lies, as we try to protect the world we’ve invented from being exposed.

At the heart of the story of the passion, therefore, is the confrontation of truth and falsehood. Why does Christ die? Why is he suppressed, cast out and finally silenced by death? Because he speaks the truth. He dies because in him there is spoken the truth of the human condition. He is the truth. In his person, as the one who he is, as the one who does what he does and says what he says, he announces the truth of the world, and thereby exposes its untruth. He shows up human falsehood in all its depravity. And he does so, not as a relatively truthful human person, nor even as a prophet inspired to declare what is hidden, but as God himself. His words, his declaration of the truth, are God’s declaration. He is therefore truth in all its finality; truth unadorned, truth which interrupts and casts down every human lie, every obstacle to seeing reality as it is. In him there is a complete judgment, an unambiguous showing of the truth from which we may not hide. It’s this which is at the core of the conflict between Jesus and Israel; and it’s for this that he is sent to his death. What is the final terror which he evokes in those who hear him? Simply this: “they perceived that he was speaking about them.”

Now, it is of this deadly struggle between truth and lies that we hear in Jesus’ parable of the wicked husbandmen or the wicked tenants. Taking up a familiar picture from Isaiah of the chosen people as a vineyard planted by God, the parable condenses into a single story the whole drama of conflict which is unfolding before us in the last days of Jesus. The situation we are in, Jesus tells his contemporaries, is this: The people of God, God’s chosen ones, are like a well set-up tenant farm, run by rogues who simply don’t want to pay the rent. Indeed, not only do they refuse to pay, they even want to obliterate the whole idea that they are tenants and that they are responsible to the farm’s owner. They want to go about their business as if there were no owner; and so when the owner sends his representatives, and even when he arrives in the person of his son, they act out the great lie they have built around themselves—they kill to get rid of any trace of the owner’s demands, and so try to make a reality out of the falsehood that this is their farm which is owed to no one. Such, Jesus says, is Israel’s situation; such is what is happening now in the life of the people of God. Truth, reality, the truth and reality of our situation as the people of God, are being overturned and replaced by a lie.

There are two things we must consider here if we are to let this story do its work among us. We must ask, first, about the nature of this final act of rebellion against God; and we must ask, second, about the identity of those who rebel in this way.

What is this act of refusal of God? At its heart, it’s a refusal to consent to the reality of their situation as those who owe everything to God. Like tenants who pretend that what they rent is really their own property to do what they like with, so Israel lives by denying the reality of God. Above all, Israel denies that they are what they are because of God’s covenant. God’s covenant is God’s utterly undeserved mercy, the abundant overflow of God’s free grace in which God makes Israel out of nothing. As covenant people, they owe their life to God’s giving, God’s work, God’s Word, God’s promise. In truth, Israel lives, not out of their own resources, but out of grace. And it is exactly that which Israel now denies, Jesus tells them. Israel replaces this truth by the falsehood which says: We are not the creatures of grace; we are not the Lord’s people; we are our own. This is our world, our society, our culture, our religion, ours to hold, ours to manage, ours to police, ours to possess at all costs. In effect, says Jesus, Israel is turning their back on their whole history, on the whole story of God’s dealings with them from the exodus until now, undertaking the final folly of declaring independence from God.

When that happens—when independence is declared—then the first thing that goes out of the window is obligation. The first and most tenacious lie that has to be set up is that Israel owes nothing to God. Once grace is spurned, law is abolished. But maintaining that lie can be done only at a fearful price. The lie can be kept intact only if anything which threatens to expose it is destroyed. Anything which sets Israel’s obligations before its eyes must be resisted and, in the end, obliterated—like the tenants who beat, and stone, and kill the householder’s servants and then, finally, his very son.

The voice of obligation—the voice that intrudes into the self-satisfied and closed life of Israel and forces it to remember the covenant in which it is bound to God; the voice of the prophets, and ultimately of Jesus himself—must be silenced. As we listen over the next few days to the story of the passion, it is precisely this that we see: the increasing silence of Jesus as he is handed over to those who can survive intact only if they push him away and ultimately destroy him.

It’s crucial, however, to grasp that this terrible falsehood presents itself as religion. The great wickedness of the events of the passion is not seen in the Gentiles who are caught up in the mess; it is seen in Israel. Israel’s rejection of Jesus is in the name of religion. What is it that Israel found so ultimately offensive in Jesus? Not, in the end, his call for holiness, or his acts of power, or even his prophecy. All that in some shape or form could be absorbed into the lie which Israel had become. No, what really offended was his declaration that Israel’s religious culture was itself a rebellion against God. What offended was his declaration that law was being reduced to performance. What offended was his denunciation of the whole cultural apparatus of holiness as a way of controlling God. Above all, what offended was his insistence that to be Israel they must listen, not to themselves, nor to their settled accounts of God, but to himself, to Jesus, as the one in and as whom God was now calling Israel to repentance. There is the offense—and therefore by oppression and judgment he was taken away.

Such is the refusal of God which we here witness. But who perpetrates it? Who are these wicked tenants who seek to possess what is not theirs? It’s clear that they are Israel, and Israel personified most of all in the persons of its leaders, the chief priests and the Pharisees. But if we are to hear the witness of Scripture properly, we need to be especially careful and clear at this point. Israel acts in the name of and in the place of all.

This collection of assorted religious leaders is not just a particularly wicked set of specimens, whom we can inspect and then congratulate ourselves by saying we would have done otherwise. Not at all: They act in our name, they take our place. In doing what they do, in acting out the lie of self-sufficiency, in rebelling against the covenant of grace, they are merely doing what we do. Israel here is humanity itself in its hatred of God. The story of the passion is thus not just the central episode of Jewish history, but of all human history. Here is acted out our rejection of God, our covenant-breaking, our falsehood. And what therefore is condemned is us.

These are, of course, hard thoughts: There is an almost unrelieved bleakness to the parable which, if we really hear it, ought to shake us. But over this passage, and indeed over the whole dark story of the passion, there stands one great Nevertheless, one great word of the gospel which pronounces that—despite everything, despite the worst that human wickedness can do—God’s covenant with humanity is undefeated.

That “Nevertheless” is declared to us in Psalm 80, which is one more variation on the theme of Israel as the vineyard planted by God. “You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it” (80:8); but it was smashed, looted, broken down. Where is hope to be found? It is to be found in this prayer at the end of the psalm: “Restore us, O LORD God of hosts! Let your face shine, that we may be saved!” (80:19).

What is the only hope? That the face of God may shine upon us. That God may so present us with the truth that our falsehood is put away. That God may restore us by interposing himself between us and our destruction. That God will intercept our death-dealing ways and give us life.

It’s the conviction of Christian faith that that prayer has already been answered, finally, fully and with absolute sufficiency, in the events of Good Friday and Easter Day. It’s the conviction of Christian faith that Israel was not allowed to destroy itself or to reject its God. It’s the conviction of Christian faith that human falsehood has been set aside once for all, that God’s covenant stands, and that we stand within that covenant by his mercy alone. And that is why we may approach Holy Week with this prayer in our mouths:

Turn again, O God of hosts! Look down from heaven, and see.… Then we shall not turn back from you; give us life, and we will call upon your name! (Psalm 80:14, 18).

Chapter 2: The Great Contrast

Romans 5:12–21

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.

Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 5:12–21

HERE IN THE FIFTH CHAPTER of the letter to the Romans the Apostle Paul is setting out a picture of human life as caught up in a great contrast between Adam and Christ. The contrast is between the first man and the last, between the first ancestor of the human race through whom it was corrupted, and the one through whom the human race is perfected. Adam and Christ are collective figures: They are not simply individuals in their own right, but rather they sum up humanity as a whole. Each forms one half of the contrast—between, on the one hand, the dark, destructive power of sin and unrighteousness, and, on the other hand, the omnipotent miracle of grace. For Paul, our lives and the lives of all around us are to be placed within this great contrast between sin and righteousness. In the end, all that really matters about human life in relation to God can be said by telling these two stories, the story of the first Adam who lays on us the curse of death, and of Jesus, the last Adam, the life-giving spirit (1 Corinthians 15:45).

We begin with the first Adam. “Sin,” Paul says, “came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12). Adam is the representative of human life under the dominion of sin, life under sin’s rule. Three things need to be said about sin here.

First, sin is original. Original sin isn’t something we invent each time we do it; it’s already there, within us, deep in the structure of human life—in ourselves, and in humanity as a whole. There is in each of us, and in human life and history collectively, a depravity, a warping of our natures against God, something so basic and radical in us that we not only commit sins, but truly are sinners to the depths. Sin is original because it’s the inescapable condition of human life which has broken loose with God.

It’s important to grasp that to talk about original sin is not to suggest that some distant ancestor Adam failed and we are mysteriously infected with his guilt and curse. Original sin isn’t a contagion or defect passed down through the generations of the human race until, finally, it reaches us and pollutes our lives also. If we talk that way, we all too easily make ourselves innocent: We’re not really guilty, but just polluted—victims of Adam and not Adam’s companions who willingly consent to Adam’s crime against God. It’s consoling to think of our sin in that way, simply because it lets us off the hook and holds another responsible for it. So Adam: “the woman whom you gave to be with me” is responsible for my sin (Genesis 3:12).

But this avoids the point of what Paul’s trying to get across to us. There are no innocents; no one has an alibi, no one can shift the blame from themselves, even onto Adam. We’re all implicated. There’s an inevitability to sin, but it’s not the inevitability of a disease passed down. Sin isn’t a fate before which we are passive, nor an inheritance simply handed over to us. This is the inevitability of sharing in fallenness, sharing in human corruption, following and continuing that drive of human life away from God. We aren’t just Adam’s heirs, condemned for a crime we didn’t commit; we’re part of that great company at whose head Adam stands, the company of wretched men and women who have turned their backs on God. “All sinned” in the sin of the one man.

Sin is original; it’s also deadly. Death came through sin, Paul says, and “spread to all” (Romans 5:12). Sin brings death because sin destroys that dependence upon God which alone gives life. We’re creatures. We have our lives at the hands of God; “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). To live is to live in relation to God, to live in communion or fellowship with the one who is our beginning and our end. Life isn’t our possession, something we own. We’re alive as we receive life from God, as the gift of his grace and mercy. God, the psalmist tells us, “holdeth our soul in life” (Psalm 66:9, KJV). But sin is the refusal to be held; it wrests free of the embrace of God. Yet free from God we’re cut off from life-giving communion with God, and so we put ourselves in the realm of death. We take ourselves out of God’s hands and place ourselves firmly in the hands of a ruthless and entirely successful killer. Or, as Paul puts it, sin always pays its wages, and the wages is death (Romans 6:23).

And third, sin is tyrannical. “Death reigned” (Romans 5:14); “death reigned through that one man” (5:17); “sin reigned in death” (5:21). Sin rules as a deadly tyrant. And so we suffer. We sinners are fools, and we’re wicked toward others. But we also cause ourselves the unspeakable misery of putting ourselves in the power of a despot. We do it ourselves; no one else does it to us. We hand ourselves over to the tyranny of sin freely and willingly, because we foolishly think that this is a slight price to pay for what we hope to gain by wriggling free of the will of God.

Pretty soon, however, we find that what looked like open fields of liberty and fulfillment and mastery of our own fate are nothing of the sort. We find ourselves in a gray and cramped and rather frightening world, in the clutches of demons. We find ourselves trapped; we have been deceived into thinking that we are enhancing our lives when, in fact, we’re binding ourselves to compulsion and falsehood and fear. Seeking to become gods and lords apart from God’s gift of true life, we’ve become the bonded slaves of a lord who does not seek our good, and whose gift is not life but death.

This is the first story of human life, the story of Adam, the story of human life under the dominion of sin and death. Talking in this way isn’t exaggeration. It’s simply the repetition of the judgment of the apostle that, apart from Jesus Christ, sin and death reign with a terrifying effectiveness. Nor is it pessimism. It’s rather the sober biblical realism which reminds us that apart from Jesus Christ we’re sinners in a world of corruption, held in the grip of a master about whom we know only this: that he is utterly malevolent, that he will harm us now and forever.

If we remind ourselves of all this, it’s not because we want to wallow in pathological self-accusation; it’s because we need to face the truth. We aren’t happy innocents who have got a bit lost in the woods; we aren’t victims on whom truly sinful people trample. We’re children of darkness (Ephesians 5:8); and there is no health in us.

But there is another way of telling the truth about human life. It’s not a story of sin and condemnation and death; its theme is acquittal, and its conclusion is the gift of life. This is the story of the great reversal of all that’s gone before: the overthrow of the order of sin and death, the casting down of the pretended lordship of evil, the setting up of the rule of righteousness. It’s the story of salvation—the story of what Paul calls the “free gift” that’s antithetical to the “trespass” (Romans 5:15), and identical with the name of the one man, Jesus. What are we to say about this second and last story? Once again, three things.

First, and most important, this story is preeminent, superabundant. It is the great reality. The two stories Paul is contrasting here—the story of sin and death, and the story of righteousness and life—are not dual aspects of the same reality, equal halves of a contrast. What is the balance of power between the first Adam and the last? The crucial phrase for Paul is “much more” (5:15, 17). How much more real and true and effective is the reality of Jesus Christ! His reality, the reality which he makes, is superabundantly real, real above all things. He isn’t one more thing alongside sin and death, a little ray of light in the general darkness of the human condition. He isn’t a solitary island of life in the midst of death. He is light. He is life. He is the death of death, the abolition of the rule of sin and the overthrow of its kingdom. He isn’t merely the “second” Adam, following from the first but no more significant. He is the second and last Adam.

Jesus brings to an end the deadly reign of the story of the first Adam and makes all things new. Grace abounds (5:20). Grace—that is, Jesus Christ and the salvation of God in him—is limitless, undefeated, supreme. In the light of the grace of God in Jesus Christ, we know this about sin: In one very real sense, it is a finished reality, it has been dealt with, it’s defeated. The first and the last thing that must now be said of us is this: We stand in the dominion of Jesus Christ, the kingdom of God and his Son, in which righteousness and life reign.

Second, therefore, the story of Jesus Christ means the triumph of righteousness. Jesus Christ is the “free gift of righteousness” (5:17) or “justification” (5:16, 18). The language is that of the law court. Paul uses it here to express the significance of God’s great saving intervention in human life in Jesus Christ. Jesus is our justification or righteousness in the sense that he is our acquittal. Because of him, because of who he is and what he has done, we no longer stand under “condemnation” (5:16, 18). The guilty verdict which we’d drawn down on ourselves is removed, and we’re declared free, finally and authoritatively.

So this isn’t in any sense acquittal through moral performance, or a reward for good conduct. It’s not something earned by years of carefully crafted holiness. It’s a wholly “free gift,” as Paul says five times in the span of three verses. Our justification is deliverance from a condemnation which is all too justly deserved, and which we can never hope to remove from ourselves. God does what we cannot do in declaring us righteous: Between us and the dreadful reality of our sin he sets the one great reality of Jesus Christ.

And so, third, the story of Jesus Christ means not death but “justification and life for all” (5:18). How? Because we’re united to the indestructible life of Jesus Christ. In him we’re delivered from the dominion of darkness and brought into his kingdom. His kingdom is the place of resurrection. United to him, we once again stand in fellowship with the life-giver, the one who has put death to death, who has brought life and immortality to light. The force of this for the Apostle Paul himself is hard to overstate: There is in his letters a deep sense of having been reprieved from a sentence of death, of having seen human condemnation disqualified by the incalculable mercy and goodness of God. Because Jesus Christ is, because grace abounds, then life will be the last word.

Such, then, is the great contrast which Paul draws here—a compelling and stark but above all unequal contrast between the first Adam, the figure of sin, death and condemnation, and Jesus the last Adam, the giver of life.

For most of us pondering this grand gospel theme, I guess it both does and does not make a difference in how we go about the business of our lives. We may be stirred by its force, or perhaps moved to see it as something ultimately true of us. Yet rather easily it seems a long way off; it seems a description of something that sometimes we can touch—if only just—but most of the time is out of reach. We don’t feel delivered from sin and death, for they are our daily companions; we don’t feel liberated from the old Adam, because we can recognize in him some very familiar aspects of our lives now. The gospel seems something splendid and potent, but not quite real. We may stand on the threshold of it all, but can’t quite find our way inside. What are we to do?

One thing we might do is to try day by day to grasp something which is the simplest and yet the hardest thing for any of us to grasp: that the gospel is true; that growth in the Christian life is simply growth in seeing that the gospel is true; that Jesus Christ is the preeminent reality of all things. There’s no technique here, no special insight for which we must hope, no extra illumination which we might expect. It’s simply a matter of listening to the gospel often enough and hard enough until it comes to take up residence in our hearts and minds and desires. More than anything, we need to ask God to help us steady our lives around what the gospel declares to us: that we, the damned, have been delivered from hell, that we have been set free for life and liberty in the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

Tucked away in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer is a little service for Ash Wednesday called “A Commination, or denouncing of God’s anger and judgments against sinners” intended by the English Reformers as a Protestant alternative to public penance. It ends with this wonderful prayer, which we may make our own:

Turn thou us, O good Lord, and so we shall be turned; be favorable, O Lord, be favorable to thy people, who turn to thee in weeping, fasting and praying. For thou art a merciful God, full of compassion, long-suffering, and of great pity. Thou sparest us when we deserve punishment, and in thy wrath thinkest upon mercy. Spare thy people, good Lord.… Hear us, O Lord, for thy mercy is great, and after the multitude of thy mercies look upon us; through the merits and mediation of thy blessed Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Chapter 3: Believe in the Lord Jesus

Acts 16:25–34

About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them, and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s bonds were unfastened. When the jailer woke and saw that the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul cried with a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” And the jailer called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear he fell down before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them out and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” And they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. And he took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds; and he was baptized at once, he and all his family. Then he brought them up into his house and set food before them. And he rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God.

Acts 16:25–34

LUKE’S ACCOUNT OF THE ASTONISHING GROWTH of the Christian community in the Acts of the Apostles is, at heart, a story about the unfettered progress of the good news. It sets before us the great theme of Acts, the unstoppable dynamism of the gospel about Jesus. At a number of points in Luke’s story, the progress of the gospel is, quite literally “unfettered”—there are no fewer than three dramatic escapes from prison, of which our passage records the last. This particular episode comes in the course of Luke’s narrative of the ministry of Paul and Silas in Philippi, which culminates in their deliverance and the conversion of the jailer. As in the other stories, so here: The apostles are imprisoned in a willful and wicked attempt to suppress the preaching of the gospel; they’re liberated by spectacular divine intervention; those who witness the liberation are brought to faith, and the word of the good news once again triumphs.

Each of the stories gives a condensed version of how Luke understands the ministry of the apostles—as the progress of God’s word of salvation through the world, overwhelming all opposition in the power of the Holy Spirit. And each of the stories offers us a little vignette of how Luke understands the gospel. Above all, each story gives us in dramatic form the essence of Luke’s understanding of the gospel as concerned with salvation, with that passage from death and damnation to life and liberty which is God’s accomplishment in Jesus Christ. Salvation, indeed, has been one of Luke’s most basic themes in his two-part work, from the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, in which the coming of the savior is heralded as the coming of God’s deliverance; through the ministry of Jesus, his dying and rising to new life; and on in the Acts of the Apostles, as the living Jesus makes his saving power known through his chosen witnesses. And so here in Philippi, once again, we have the enactment of the same theme.

What Word of God do we hear in this story, and especially in the story of the conversion of the jailer?

Notice, first, how this story of salvation has at its heart a question: “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (16:30). Questions come in all shapes and sizes. What kind of question is this? It’s an absolute question. It’s not one of those questions which already contains within itself the germ of an answer. It’s not a question that knows what to ask and expects a certain kind of reply. Nor is it a question that knows what it’s after but needs some help in discovering where to find what it’s looking for. On the contrary, it is a question which gives voice to absolute need: It expresses absolute emptiness. It’s a question asked by someone with no resources, no clues, no hopes. Above all, it’s a question in which, we might say, the one who is asking the question is himself absolutely called into question. In fact, we might say, it’s not so much a question as a desperate cry for help. In effect, as Luke presents the story, it’s the question of a ruined man. The jailer who throws himself on his knees and begs the apostles for an answer to his question is a ruined man, not only because he fears that he’s lost his prisoners, his job and his life, but for an even deeper reason. He has witnessed the ruination of all human opposition to God. He has seen with his eyes the shaking of the foundations which comes about when the Word of the apostles’ testimony to Jesus runs free in the world. He has found himself face to face with the extraordinary liberty of the Word of God which breaks apart all barriers. And so, he is ruined—called into question, judged, caught up in the conflict between God and sin, between the acceptance and the rejection of the message of salvation in Jesus. Hence, Luke tells us, he trembles with fear (16:29) and asks, What must I do to be saved? It’s to that question—born of perplexity, born of the most profound sense of being dismembered by the events in which he is trapped, and not knowing where to turn—that the apostles’ answer comes: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (16:31).

What is it that the jailer is told to do in answer to his question? Where does escape from ruin lie? It lies in a “name,” and the name is the name of Jesus. Salvation—escape from ruination and destruction, and restoration to life and flourishing—is identical with the name of Jesus, with this one, the man from Nazareth, once crucified but now uncontrollably alive. Salvation, that is, is not some general idea, some generic religious reality. It’s not something which comes in all sorts of shapes and forms, including a specifically Christian form. Nor is the name of Jesus a sort of label which Christians paste onto salvation, to give it a bit of Christian coloring. Salvation for Luke and for the New Testament as a whole is Jesus. He constitutes and embodies God’s salvation.

Why? Because, the apostles tell the jailer, this Jesus in whom salvation is to be found is “Lord.” He’s the one in whom and as whom all God’s purposes are brought about. He’s the one in whom and as whom God rules all things. He is therefore the reality of God’s saving rule. He’s not some partial or incidental figure, some character on the margins of history, some territorial divinity. He is comprehensively Lord, Lord of all things. This Jesus—the one who has been glorified at his resurrection and ascension and now rules over all things at the right hand of the Father—this Jesus is the great factor. He is the reality of all human life; he alone is the reality of salvation. And so when the jailer turns to the apostles in the deepest distress and cries for help, what’s offered to him is nothing other than a repetition of his name, a naming of this one, Jesus, as the one place where God’s salvation is to be found. Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.

Face to face with this Jesus, the jailer is called to “believe.” What is this belief to which he’s summoned? Believing can mean something a good deal less than certainty. I believe the bus will come in five minutes, but I can’t be sure. Or sometimes it can mean the kind of knowledge which is acquired after scrupulous review of evidence to build up a cumulative case for some conviction. But believing here is not half-certainty, nor the fruit of mental effort. It’s belief in the deep, strong sense of giving allegiance to something which overwhelms us. To believe in the Lord Jesus in Luke’s sense is to do far more than simply give him a passing nod with the mind or even to honor him with our religious devotion. It’s the astonished business of being so overthrown by his reality, so mastered by his sheer presence, so judged by him, that we can do nothing other than acknowledge that he is supremely real, supremely true. To believe in him is to confess him—to affirm with mind and will and heart that he fills all things, that our only hope lies in his name.

Belief in this sense concerns the entire shape of a personal life. It embraces the whole of us. It’s not one department of our life, something in which we engage alongside all the other things we do—working, loving, hoping, creating, worrying, and so on. Believing is about the way in which we dispose the whole of our existence. We believe when we’re totally shaped by something outside of us, acknowledging that it has put a decisive stamp on all that we are and all that we do. This is why belief in this deep, strong sense defines us completely: We’re “believers,” doing all that we do out of the inescapable conviction that the Lord Jesus is the persistent factor in the whole of our life. Believing in him, confessing him, involves no less than everything.

And the issue of this confession of Jesus is salvation. “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (16:31