Please explain if one has lost their faith and fallen into unbelief,how are they still declared righteous?
I addressed Who is the perfecter of faith in this post above:
http://christianchat.com/bible-disc...tance-vs-eternal-security-17.html#post1451916
Who's setting the criteria to determine whether a person has actually fallen into 'unbelief' or whether they are just discouraged in their faith because they're believing stuff about themselves in Christ that isn't true? Maybe because judgemental believers are telling them that God is holding their sinning against them . . .
Consider this . . .
Fruit in a believers life does not come out fully formed and completely ripe.
Good fruit takes time.
Don’t judge the blossom because it’s not yet a strawberry.
Let me take the example of a morbidly obese person, say, around 300 lbs. or so. You may look at the person in question and make observations, thinking unkind thoughts about their size, their ‘obvious’ eating habits, their ‘obvious’ undisciplined lifestyle, their ‘obvious’ sin of gluttony, etc.
Please do not misunderstand; I’m not saying at all that obesity is a sin. This is an illustration.
Now let’s take a look at what you
don’t see, because you CANNOT see what GOD sees, and you may be greatly misinterpreting what’s going on in someone’s life or how you perceive leadership to be handling a situation. Be careful how you interpret what you
think you see:
Perhaps that 300 lb. person
used to be 500 lbs., and with God’s help, they have dropped 200 lbs. They have good days and bad days, calorically speaking, but they are a work in progress, keeping their eye on the goal, persevering, and relying on God’s Mercy and Grace to see them to the finish line. Some in that position will reach their goal in a relatively short period of time; for others, it will take a
lifetime. For some, it may be a simple case of an over-active love for food. For others, maybe they have an underlying medical condition. For still others, it may be a comfort thing, where they are replacing the lack of care and love in their lives with food. Whatever the issues, God is faithful to progressively address and minister to those issues over time.
Now let’s apply that same concept of what you can and cannot see to all different kinds of situations and sin scenarios. I won’t detail any here; we all have people and situations familiar to us that we’re thinking of right now.
Here’s the thing: While some are radically delivered from their addictions and/or lifestyles, for many, though positionally they have been forgiven of all their
sins, it can be a life-long process for them to have victory over
sinning.
For most, behavior is a manifestation of heart issues, and those things are not dealt with by employing behavior modification techniques. Those are things that take time to heal – not that God can’t deliver immediately and completely – that can and does happen – but for many, like skittish animals that have been abused, it takes time (for some, a lifetime) for the deeply wounded to learn to trust Who God is, how completely He loves and accepts them, and who they are in Him.
That said, God does save completely:
Hebrews 7:18-26
18 The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless 19 (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.
20 And it was not without an oath! Others became priests without any oath, 21 but he became a priest with an oath when God said to him:
“The Lord has sworn
and will not change his mind:
‘You are a priest forever.’”
22 Because of this oath, Jesus has become the guarantor of a better covenant.
23 Now there have been many of those priests, since death prevented them from continuing in office; 24 but because Jesus lives forever, he has a permanent priesthood. 25 Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.
As a result, we have unlimited and uninterrupted access to the Grace of God:
Hebrews 4:14-16
14 Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. 16 Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
However the woundedness manifests in sinful behavior, it is God’s desire to see the
positional New Creation in Christ in the spirit become the New Creation in
this life:
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
16So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:
19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.
20We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.
21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
What struck me as I re-read the above portion of Scripture is that God is committing to
us, the Body, this message - that in and through the Work of Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting people’s sins against them. I don’t often look to commentaries, but my sense in reading, “that this is the message of the Gospel that God is committing to
us“ means that it is something that God is
entrusting believers with, that we would communicate this
Gospel of Grace, this Good News, to others, indicated by the ‘ambassadors’ language following. I found this, from
Barnes’ Notes:
Tyndale renders this: “and hath committed unto us the preaching of the atonement.” The meaning is, that the office of making known the nature of this plan, and the conditions on which God was willing to be reconciled to man, had been committed to the ministers of the gospel.
The Scripture goes on to say that “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors,
as though God were making His appeal through us.” What kind of ambassadors of the message of reconciliation are we being?
How can we be proper ambassadors to the world if we, as the Body of Christ, are holding sins against people that God no longer holds against them?
I’m not speaking of
Universalism, here, at all. What I am saying is that all sin was dealt with at the Cross; the sins of the entire world were
propitiated for by the Work of Christ:
1 John 2:2
2He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.
That being the case, all do need to
respond by faith to
believe in the Work of Christ and
receive that forgiveness and the free gift of righteousness
(Romans 3:21-26, Romans 5:12-21, Romans 10:9-15).
By grace, through faith (
Ephesians 2:8-9), we are then positionally declared justified and righteous not because of anything we have done or ever will do beyond receiving God’s free gift of righteousness, but because of Who Jesus is, His actions as the Last Adam – His Perfect Righteousness - which is imputed to us.
Note that imputed righteousness is preceded by imputed sin. It doesn’t seem fair: “
. . . as by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin . . . therefore as by the offense of one, judgement came upon all . . .” Neither is imputed righteousness ‘fair’: “ . . . For the judgment which came from one offense resulted in condemnation, but the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification. 17 For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.” (From Romans 5)
We are condemned by the sin of the First Adam (though the Scriptures cover the sin issue from two angles: sin was imputed to you, but by the Law we were all found guilty; no one is righteous). We who receive the gift of righteousness are declared righteous by the actions of the Last Adam (Christ Jesus). Not only that, but the result is this:
Romans 5:20-21
20 The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
It’s very convenient for a religious spirit to ‘deal with’ believers sinning by applying the nice, neat, template of Law (
an improper use of the Law, as the Law was made for the unrighteous, not believers, who in Christ, are declared righteous). One can just throw the Law out there and hope that the ‘target’ will ‘get it’ and turn from their evil ways (reduction in sinning) under the threat of ‘or else’.
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That's excerpted from an article I wrote,
Grace or Law? How Then, Shall We Live? Click the link to read the entire piece.
-JGIG
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