Entering into Christ’s victory
Entering into Christ’s victory
For Christians as for Christ, life spells conflict. For Christians as for Christ it should also spell victory. We are to be victorious like the victorious Christ. Did not John write to the ‘young men’ of the churches he supervised because they had ‘overcome the evil one’? Did not Jesus deliberately draw a parallel between himself and us in this respect, promising to him who overcomes the right to share his throne, just as he had overcome and shared his Father’s throne?35
Yet the parallel is only partial. It would be utterly impossible for us by ourselves to fight and defeat the devil: we lack both the skill and the strength to do so. It would also be unnecessary to make the attempt, because Christ has already done it. The victory of Christians, therefore, consists of entering into the victory of Christ and of enjoying its benefits. We can thank God that ‘he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ’. We know that Jesus, having been raised from the dead, is now seated at the Father’s right hand in the heavenly realms. But God has ‘made us alive with Christ..., and raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms’. In other words, by God’s gracious power we who have shared in Christ’s resurrection share also in his throne. If God has placed all things under Christ’s feet, they must be under ours too, if we are in him. To borrow Jesus’ own metaphor, now that the strong man has been disarmed and bound, the time is ripe for us to raid his palace and plunder his goods.36
It is not quite so simple as that, however. For though the devil has been defeated, he has not yet conceded defeat. Although he has been overthrown, he has not yet been eliminated. In fact he continues to wield great power. This is the reason for the tension we feel in both our theology and our experience. On the one hand we are alive, seated and reigning with Christ, as we have just seen, with even the principalities and powers of evil placed by God under his (and therefore our) feet; on the other we are warned (also in Ephesians) that these same spiritual forces have set themselves in opposition to us, so that we have no hope of standing against them unless we are strong in the Lord’s strength and clad in his armour.37 Or here is the same paradox in different language. On the one hand, we are assured that, having been born of God, Christ keeps us safe ‘and the evil one does not touch’ us; on the other we are warned to watch out because the same evil one ‘prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour’.38
Many Christians choose one or other of these positions, or oscillate unsteadily between them. Some are triumphalists, who see only the decisive victory of Jesus Christ and overlook the apostolic warnings against the powers of darkness. Others are defeatists, who see only the fearsome malice of the devil and overlook the victory over him which Christ has already won. The tension is part of the Christian dilemma between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’. Already the kingdom of God has been inaugurated and is advancing; not yet has it been consummated. Already the new age (the age to come) has come, so that we have ‘tasted...the powers of the coming age’; not yet has the old age completely passed away. Already we are God’s sons and daughters, and no longer slaves; not yet have we entered ‘the glorious freedom of the children of God’.39 An overemphasis on the ‘already’ leads to triumphalism, the claim to perfection – either moral (sinlessness) or physical (complete health) – which belongs only to the consummated kingdom, the ‘not yet’. An overemphasis on the ‘not yet’ leads to defeatism, an acquiescence in continuing evil which is incompatible with the ‘already’ of Christ’s victory.
Another way of approaching this tension is to consider the implications of the verb katargeō, which, though often translated in our English versions as ‘destroy’, really falls short of that. It means rather to ‘make ineffective or inactive’, and is used of unproductive land and unfruitful trees. They are still there. They have not been destroyed. But they are barren. When this verb is applied to the devil, to our fallen nature and to death,40 therefore, we know that they have not been completely ‘destroyed’. For the devil is still very active, our fallen nature continues to assert itself, and death will go on claiming us until Christ comes. It is not, then, that they have ceased to exist, but that their power has been broken. They have not been abolished, but they have been overthrown.
John makes the important assertion that ‘the reason why the Son of God appeared was that he might “undo” or “do away with” the works of the devil’ (1 John 3:8, literally). He came to confront and defeat the devil, and so undo the damage he had done. What are these ‘works of the devil’, the effects of his nefarious activity? Luther loved, for example, in his classic commentary on Galatians, to give a string of them. In one place he wrote of ‘law, sin, death, the devil and hell’ as constituting ‘all the evils and miseries of mankind’ (p.162), and in another of ‘sin, death and the curse’ as ‘those invincible and mighty tyrants’ from which only Christ can set us free (p.275). Anders Nygren in his famous commentary on Romans suggests that chapters 5 to 8 describe the life of the person who has been justified by faith: ‘Chapter 5 says it means to be free from wrath. Chapter 6 says it is to be free from sin. Chapter 7 says free from the law. And Chapter 8 says we are free from death’ (p.188). My concern is that these lists omit any reference to ‘the flesh’ (our fallen human nature) and to ‘the world’ (godless society), which are familiar at least to church people in the trio ‘the world, the flesh and the devil’. So the four ‘works of the devil’ from which Christ frees us, on which the New Testament writers seem to me to concentrate, are the law, the flesh, the world and death.
First, through Christ we are no longer under the tyranny of the law. It comes to many people as a surprise that the law, God’s good gift to his people, in itself ‘holy, righteous and good’, could ever have become a tyrant which enslaves us. But that is exactly Paul’s teaching. ‘Before this faith came, we were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed.’ The reason is that the law condemns our disobedience and so brings us under its ‘curse’ or judgment. But Christ has redeemed us from the law’s curse by becoming a curse for us. It is in this sense that ‘Christ is the end of the law’ and we are no longer ‘under’ it.41 It emphatically does not mean that there are now no moral absolutes except love, as the advocates of ‘the new morality’ taught in the 1960s, or that we now have no obligation to obey God’s law, as other antinomians teach. No, since the tyranny of the law is its curse, it is from this that we are liberated by Christ, so that we are not ‘under’ it any more. The law no longer enslaves us by its condemnation. The cheirographon we were thinking about earlier has been expunged. The first four verses of Romans 8 bring these strands together. They say that for those who are in Christ there is ‘no condemnation’ (v. 1), for God has already condemned our sins in Jesus Christ (v. 3), and he did it in order that ‘the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us’ (v. 4). So the same cross of Christ, which frees us from the law’s condemnation, commits us to the law’s obedience.
Secondly, through Christ we are no longer under the tyranny of the flesh. What Paul means by the ‘flesh’ (sarx) is our fallen nature or unredeemed humanity, everything that we are by birth, inheritance and upbringing before Christ renewed us. Because our ‘flesh’ is our ‘self’ in Adam, its characteristic is self-centredness. Paul supplies a catalogue of some of its worst and ugliest outworkings, including sexual immorality, idolatry and occult practices (misdirected worship), hatred, jealousy and anger, selfish ambition and dissensions, and drunkenness. Living this kind of life, we were ‘enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures’. As Jesus himself said, ‘everyone who sins is a slave to sin’. But he immediately added: ‘if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.’ And freedom from our fallen nature and its selfishness comes through the cross: ‘For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.’42 Christ by his cross has won the victory over the flesh as well as over the law.
Thirdly, through Christ we are no longer under the tyranny of the world. If the flesh is the foothold the devil has within us, the world is the means through which he exerts pressure upon us from without. For the ‘world’ in this context means godless human society, whose hostility to the church is expressed now by open ridicule and persecution, now by subtle subversion, the infiltration of its values and standards. John declares outspokenly that love for the world and love for the Father are mutually incompatible. For by worldliness he means ‘the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does’. In the first expression ‘sinful man’ translates sarx. ‘Flesh’ and ‘world’ are inevitably linked, since ‘world’ is the community of unredeemed people, whose outlook is dictated by their unredeemed nature. Putting the three expressions together, it seems that the characteristics of the world which John emphasizes are its selfish desires, its superficial judgments (the eyes seeing only the surface appearance of things) and its arrogant materialism. Jesus made the claim, however, ‘I have overcome the world’. He totally rejected its distorted values and maintained his own godly perspective unsullied. John then adds that through Christ we can be overcomers too:
for everyone born of God has overcome the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.43
It is when we believe in Jesus Christ that our values change. We no longer conform to the world’s values, but find instead that we are being transformed by our renewed mind which grasps and approves the will of God. And nothing weans us from worldliness more than the cross of Christ. It is through the cross that the world has been crucified to us and we to the world,44 so that we are freed from its tyranny.
Fourthly, through Christ we are no longer under the tyranny of death. It is sometimes said that, whereas our Victorian forebears had a morbid fascination with death, but never spoke of sex, the contemporary generation is obsessed with sex, while death is the great unmentionable. The fear of death is practically universal. The Duke of Wellington is reported as having said that ‘that man must be a coward or a liar who could boast of never having felt a fear of death’. And Dr Samuel Johnson added that ‘no rational man can die without uneasy apprehension’.45 But Jesus Christ is able to set free even those who all their lives have been ‘held in slavery by their fear of death’. This is because by his own death he has ‘destroyed’ (deprived of power) ‘him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil’ (Heb. 2:14).
Jesus Christ has not only dethroned the devil but dealt with sin. In fact, it is by dealing with sin that he has dealt with death. For sin is the ‘sting’ of death, the main reason why death is painful and poisonous. It is sin which causes death, and which after death will bring the judgment. Hence our fear of it. But Christ has died for our sins and taken them away. With great disdain, therefore, Paul likens death to a scorpion whose sting has been drawn, and to a military conqueror whose power has been broken. Now that we are forgiven, death can harm us no longer. So the apostle shouts defiantly: ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ There is of course no reply. So he shouts again, this time in triumph, not disdain: ‘Thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor. 15:55–57).
What, then, should be the Christian’s attitude to death? It is still an enemy, unnatural, unpleasant and undignified – in fact ‘the last enemy to be destroyed’. Yet, it is a defeated enemy. Because Christ has taken away our sins, death has lost its power to harm and therefore to terrify. Jesus summed it up in one of his greatest affirmations: ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.’46 That is, Jesus is the resurrection of believers who die, and the life of believers who live. His promise to the former is ‘you will live’, meaning not just that you will survive, but that you will be resurrected. His promise to the latter is ‘you will never die’, meaning not that you will escape death, but that death will prove to be a trivial episode, a transition to fullness of life.
The Christian conviction that Christ ‘has destroyed death’ (2 Tim. 1:10) has led some believers to deduce that he has also destroyed disease, and that from the cross we should claim healing as well as forgiveness. A popular exposition of this topic is Bodily Healing and the Atonement (1930) by the Canadian author T. J. McCrossan, which has been re-edited and re-published by Kenneth E. Hagin of the pentecostal Rhema Church. McCrossan states his case in these terms: ‘All Christians should expect God to heal their bodies today, because Christ died to atone for our sicknesses as well as for our sins’ (p.10). He bases his argument on Isaiah 53:4, which he translates ‘surely he hath borne our sicknesses and carried our pains’. He particularly emphasizes that the first Hebrew verb (nasa’) means to bear in the sense of ‘suffering the punishment for something’. Since it is also used in Isaiah 53:12 (‘he bore the sin of many’), ‘the clear teaching...is that Christ bore our sicknesses in the very same way that he bore our sins’ (p.120).
There are three difficulties in the way of accepting this interpretation, however. First, nasa’ is used in a variety of Old Testament contexts, including the carrying of the ark and other tabernacle furniture, the carrying of armour, weapons and children. It occurs in Isaiah 52:11 with reference to those who ‘carry the vessels of the LORD’. So the verb in itself does not mean to ‘bear the punishment of’. We are obliged to translate it thus only when sin is its object. That Christ ‘bore’ our sicknesses may (in fact, does) mean something quite different.
Secondly, the concept McCrossan puts forward does not make sense. ‘Bearing the penalty of sin’ is readily intelligible, since sin’s penalty is death and Christ died our death in our place. But what is the penalty of sickness? It has none. Sickness may itself be a penalty for sin, but it is not itself a misdemeanour which attracts a penalty. So to speak of Christ ‘atoning for’ our sicknesses is to mix categories; it is not an intelligible notion.
Thirdly, Matthew (who is the evangelist most preoccupied with the fulfilment of Old Testament Scripture) applies Isaiah 53:4 not to the atoning death but to the healing ministry of Jesus. It was in order to fulfil what was spoken through Isaiah, he writes, that Jesus ‘healed all the sick’. So we have no liberty to reapply the text to the cross. It is true that Peter quotes the following verse ‘by his wounds we are healed’, but the contexts in both Isaiah and Peter make it clear that the ‘healing’ they have in mind is salvation from sin.47
We should not, therefore, affirm that Christ died for our sicknesses as well as for our sins, that ‘there is healing in the atonement’, or that health is just as readily available to everybody as forgiveness.
That does not mean, however, that our bodies are unaffected by the death and resurrection of Jesus. We should certainly take seriously these statements of Paul about the body:
We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body (2 Cor. 4:10–11).
The apostle is referring to the infirmity and mortality of our human bodies, specially (in his case) in relation to physical persecution. It is, he says, like experiencing in our bodies the dying (or putting to death) of Jesus, and the purpose of this is that the life of Jesus may be revealed in our bodies. He does not seem to be referring to the resurrection of his body, for he comes to that later. Nor are his words exhausted in his survival of physical assaults, in which he was ‘struck down, but not destroyed’ (v. 9). No, he seems to be saying that now in our mortal bodies (which are doomed to die) there is being ‘revealed’ (twice repeated) the very ‘life’ of Jesus (also twice repeated). Even when we are feeling tired, sick and battered, we experience a vigour and vitality which are the life of the risen Jesus within us. Paul expresses the same thought in verse 16: ‘Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.’
That the life of Jesus should be constantly revealed in our bodies; that God has put into the human body marvellous therapeutic processes which fight disease and restore health; that all healing is divine healing; that God can and sometimes does heal miraculously (without means, instantaneously and permanently) – these things we should joyfully and confidently affirm. But to expect the sick to be healed and the dead to be raised as regularly as we expect sinners to be forgiven, is to stress the ‘already’ at the expense of the ‘not yet’, for it is to anticipate the resurrection. Not till then will our bodies be entirely rid of disease and death.
We must now return to the four tyrants over which Christ has won the victory and from which in consequence he sets us free. The four tyrannies characterize the old ‘aeon’ (age) which was inaugurated by Adam. In it the law enslaves, the flesh dominates, the world beguiles and death reigns. The new ‘aeon’, however, which was inaugurated by Christ, is characterized by grace not law, the Spirit not the flesh, the will of God not the fashions of the world, and abundant life not death. This is the victory of Christ into which he allows us to enter.