Please turn to Philippians 3, which is page 922 in the pew Bible. Let’s read v.9: And be found in [Christ], not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that [righteousness] which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness of God that depends on faith.
So, Paul’s talking about righteousness. Which raises the question: What’s not right? What’s un-righteous?
A Bible reader answers that question in a particular way. It’s not simply that God has given us rules and we haven’t obeyed them. That’s true…and that’s important, of course.
But see the bigger picture: God created the world: the stuff and how the stuff is arranged and governed. In this creation – stuff and arrangement – God set man – humanity I mean – into a central role. I can’t overstate that point. Man is to have dominion over the creation. He is to shepherd it, to cultivate it, to extract its potential, to protect it, to combine its ingredients into meals like carbonara and inventions like weather satellites.
Humans are to rule, but not to oppress but rather to serve and protect. For example, we thin out the underbrush so lightning strikes don’t cause massive forest fires but only small ones that will renew the forest. ETC
Man performs this leadership role as the image of God. Genesis 1: 26: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”. What that mean is that humans stand between God and the rest of the creation as a reflection of God into the creation. We live in the presence of this good God in loving trust or trusting love, and then we reflect Him – His wisdom and care – in our rule over His creation.
In our central role of ruling for God, it’s especially important that we obey God’s explicit instructions, like when He tells us to not eat certain fruit on certain trees. But even above these explicit instructions we learn our leadership vocation from God by being with Him, watching Him. And then – again – all that we learn from obeying and attending to God – His wisdom and justice – we then reflect into our creation dominion. The warm, complete trust in God’s goodness is key to this whole arrangement.
Still talking about what it means to bear God’s image. It gets a little complicated here, but not much. Repeat: Humans live between the Creator and the rest of the creation. As we go about ruling and developing and serving the creation, within that creation we spot the goodness, beauty, justice, and power of God. (Some of all that has entered the creation from God through us but it’s always sourced in God.) So, we spot the goodness of God throughout the creation… and we return that goodness to Him in the form of praise.
We are conveyors of God’s rule into the creation. And we are conveyors of praise from the creation to God. We see rivers and mountains and stars and bounty, and we oversee all the possibilities for more good and provision from within the creation…and for this we acknowledge God and give him thanks. HUMANS ARE SPECIFICALLY CREATURES OF THANKSGIVING. We are priests presenting the thanksgiving offerings of the whole creation to the Creator.
Saying all this shortly: human beings are servant-kings: as man goes the creation goes. Man goes well by trusting God. Human beings are priests: Man is a natural born expert in spotting the goodness of God and thanking Him. THESE ARE NOT SIMPLY WHAT MAN DOES, THEY’RE WHO MAN IS. We gather week after week to remind ourselves of what a human being is. Image bearing rulers. Priests. The place where God and His creation come together. Where heaven and earth intersect. A kind of temple!
Adam threw a big monkey wrench in this whole creation arrangement by disobeying God’s explicit command. Notice this: As the story of that first disobedience comes to us, the emphasis is on how we – all of humanity as it then was– grew to doubt God and then positively distrust him. But trusting God – loving Him, seeing Him, worshiping Him – was key to the whole creation arrangement! But no: we chose to decide what is helpful and unhelpful away from the direction of God.
Before we were living before God! We were planted in this great waterway of Life! But by our mistrust we cut ourselves off, we dammed ourselves from the Presence.
The natural consequence of leaving behind Life is also the legal judgment: death. Death in all its presentations. Relational death on its ways to physical death and all leading to a great and eternal Second Death.
And when death comes to Man the servant ruler, what happens to the rest of the creation that he oversees? Death enters.
So, back to our question: what’s not right? The world’s unrighteous – it’s not the way it was supposed to be. And this is because man at the center of God’s creation purposes distrusted him and disobeyed. Instead of man causing the world to flourish, he releases death. Death in all its presentations enters and soon begins to dominate the planet: funerals, fires, entropy, Alzheimer’s, bad religion, divorce, sickness, crippling fear, blight, war, racism, pseudo-racism…
Not right. Unrighteous. And guess what, I could have said a lot more about this! But I said what I said because my burden is that we do not think of righteousness or unrighteousness thinly, that is, God gives some arbitrary rules that we happened to disobey so what’s the big deal. It has to do with our failing at our central calling and all the spill-out from that failure.
Paul speaks of two main ways of things being put right: v. 9: a righteousness of my own that comes from the law (Torah). This is the way that puts Paul at the center: a righteousness of my own. Come look at my well-lit, polished glass display case that contains…Torah! I’mpart of that great covenant with God. I’m a Hebrew of the Hebrews. I’m dead serious about obedience and faithfulness to Torah. I’m going to keep the commandments of Torah and thereby demonstrate that I’m part of the great plan of God making things right. Look what I’ve got. Look who I am. Look what I’ve done. With all these advantages I must be on God’s team, the side of the angels, part of what’s right – what’s been made right – with the world!
But Paul says, when I met Christ, that whole construction around Torah shattered! Because for the first time I grasped this big picture. All the so-called “gains” associated with the covenant of Israel and the Law I now see only made things worse, THEY ONLY HIGHLIGHTED THE FACT THAT I’M JUST ANOTHER HUMAN “IN ADAM“ – THE TRESPASSER, THE FAILED IMAGE BEARER, THE BRINGER OF DEATH. I’M ALL TOO HUMAN.
But, hallelujah, there’s another way of the world being put to rights: that [righteousness] which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. What does Paul mean by that? To answer that question, first I’ll point out a grammatical question regarding faith in Christ. Is Paul talking about our faith in Christ? Or is he talking about the faith or faithfulness of Christ?
I believe he’s referring to the faithfulness of Christ for a few reasons, the main one being that in the final phrase of the sentence he’ll refer to Christ as the object of our faith. It seems unlikely that he’d repeat the concept of faith in Christ twice so close together. You can ask me later for other reasons. But for now, let’s just state this: there is a true righteousness which comes through the faithfulness of Christ.
In what ways was Christ faithful and how does the faithfulness of Christ make things right?
Jesus is born within the human race… yet without a human father. Which means He’s a man… yet not connected to Adam like other men. He’s a new Man. A second Adam. He’s at the head of a new Humanity. Just as the first Adam stands for every human who followed him, and by his sin brought all his descendants under sin… so this second Adam’s righteousness belongs to those connected to Him. Which means: you could be in the Jesus line, and be righteous, simply because He did things right….faithfully. He is right.
Jesus perfectly bears the image of God. He obeys everything God says- yes! – and He lives every one of His minutes in a stance of trusting God. He says, I only do what my Father shows me.
This Man rules the rest of the Creation and things flourish – does He ever rule! In His hands loaves and fishes multiply. Under His supervision things develop: water turns into wine. Seas rage… and then grow quiet at his word. A Ruler who serves.
Also, a Priest! When He’s among the creation, He connects it all with God. Look at the sparrow… Hey, about the hairs on your head and God… Look at the grass of the field… See the rain fall on the just and the unjust…
With Jesus truly we have ourselves the complete King. Priest. A Temple where Heaven and Earth meet!
All this was contested. The Devil went after Him, trying to make this Man like other men: yet another conduit for death to stream into God’s creation. The Devil deceived, he tricked, he tempted him to doubt the Father – – but no. Then the Devil went after him indirectly, in the form of political pressure, intimidation, complex questioning, flattery, social pressure. In the form of friends telling him to not be so intense, to not travel the difficult road.
Jesus often found Himself in crowds. Doggone, it’s hard to keep your integrity in a group.
This perfect Image Bearer is tempted yet keeps entrusting His soul to God. The faithfulness of Christ! Look at him. Here is a human who is the perfect Human – not simply in that He kept the rules but that at His heart in trusting God, in ruling wisely, in serving the creation including other image bearers He perfectly fulfilled the role of a human being: an Imago Dei. An image bearer of God.
Think of all the inertial against Jesus! Through the dense jungle of millennia of human sin intertwined with human sin, systemic rebellion, habits of sloth toward God, demonic insurgency – in every second, every minute, every hour Christ was cutting open the perfect way of being human – the way out from death and separation from God and the lies of the serpent. And He did so not with big money or worldly power but simply by entrusting His soul to the Heavenly Father in every moment. Trust and obey. Trust and obey. Trust and obey.
Three brief concluding steps. Christ trusted His Heavenly Father…and obeyed…all the way to death on a cross. That’s what Paul emphasized earlier in the letter: the essential thing about Christ was not His heavenly glory, but that He trusted His Father! That’s the heart of the 2ndAdam, the Head over a New Humanity. That’s the thrust of the new creation: wherever the Father leads, no matter how painful, I’ll trust that He’s a Creator, a builder, a life-giver…that He’s doing something good. TRUST! Will you renew your trust in that good God today, Brother and Sister?
And, of course, the Father’s direction for the Son to go to the cross wasn’t because the Creator is fixated on death…but so that He could bring many sons (and daughters) to life…to God. Christ’s death was necessary to release us from death, to pay the penalty of our sin, of our failed image bearing. The perfect image bearer trusted God and served us…and thus took our failure onto His body, He “became sin.” So that in the judgment of God upon our failure being poured out on His body and the forgiveness of sin now being opened to us we might become part of God making right the world. The Great Priest offers His life as an offering for sin in behalf of humanity.
How do we enter this accomplishment of things being made right? Someone says, I hear this, but I feel like I’m standing on the outside, still essentially a part of what’s wrong with the world.
Well, let’s hear Paul again refer to that [righteousness] which comes through the faithfulness of Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. How to get into this situation where God is making things right? Faith. Believe.
Faith in what? Faith in Christ. He is the Way into being perfectly human, He is the Truth that leaves behind the lies of the serpent, He is the Life that is sourced in God and then flows into the rest of the creation. Christ is the righteousness of the world. Join Him! Believe.
And what would that look like? Hear about Jesus’ perfection offered in your behalf so that you could be freed from guilt. Hear that God raised this Second Man out of death, and, with Him, all joined to Him in faith. Be struck by His authority, by His commitment to the Heavenly Father, by His love for His own. Be publicly baptized into His death and life and make Christ officially your Lord. And then spend the rest of your life learning from this Perfect Image Bearer how to be a human being. In your LinkedIn profile call yourself an “apprentice of the Master in being human.”
An apprenticeship which will include regularly coming together with other image bearers freed from death, remembering together that your deliverance into righteousness happened through the Great Image Bearer trusting the Heavenly Father to the point of death. But not simply remembering intellectually – taking the body and blood of Christ into our own bodies, letting His life merge into ours, overwrite our Adamic existence. Joined to Christ our Righteousness.
Then instructed by this Master and empowered by His Spirit, you go out to serve the world, to spread life, all in loving trust of the Heavenly Father. Sounds pretty righteous.
AMEN
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Brothers and sisters, this is the table of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because it is His table, we extend an invitation to every baptized Christian believer who is under the accountability of a church, even if it’s not this one, to join us in this sacred remembrance of the Lord’s death for us and for our salvation. Please don’t participate if you are not a follower of Christ, if you’re not baptized, if you’re not in a warm, healthy, accountable relationship with a church.
For the sake of those who are visiting, let me give a brief word of explanation. When we pass the bread to each other, it is our custom to say, “The body of Christ broken for you.” And when we pass the tray with the cups, we say, “The blood of Christ shed for you.” By saying these words to each other, we are reminded of the priesthood of all believers.
It is also our custom to hold the bread and cup until everyone is served, so that we can eat and drink together. In this way, we are reminded that are we are one Body and we share one faith, one Lord, one baptism.
Now let us confess our faith using the words of the Apostle’s Creed printed in the back of your bulletin. Christian, What do you believe?
As you sit there, whether you’re participating or not, use this time to thank God for this great salvation. Instead of wiping out failed servant-rulers and disastrous priests, he offered up the Eternal Son to become Man in our place. Hallelujah!
Ask God for a better faith in the Perfect Image Bearer. The old prayer: “I believe; help my unbelief.”
Pray for your fellow redeemed image-bearers sitting around you.
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