GOD HAS SPOKEN BY HIS SON
HAVING complained with sadness at the slowness to learn of the Jewish Christians to whom he was writing, Paul now urges them to go forward in their learning and understanding. It is very important to lay a good and firm foundation for our faith but we must not rest here. We must go on to build the walls and rooms of our faith, and put on the roof. Our aim must be to build the whole house of faith, and not just remain at the foundations. The Christians to whom the apostle was writing seemed to have been seeking to lay the foundation of their faith again and again. They were like the builder or architect who looks at the foundations laid, and is always seeing some flaw or imperfection, and because of this breaking down all the work that had been done, and re-laying the foundations again.
It is very important to lay a good foundation for our faith. If the foundations are wrong the whole house of our faith will be insecure and ready to fall down. However, when we have laid the foundation we must not stumble by a lack of faith, and then go over the foundation ground all over again, raising questions and difficulties, or be reluctant to lay aside and leave go those religious and cultural practices which our new foundation tells us are unnecessary, unhelpful, or even downright in error. We must hold fast by faith to our new found faith, and build upon it in the maturity which is our heritage and privilege in Christ.
Unless we go forward in our faith, and enter by knowledge and faith into a deeper understanding of Christ our Saviour, and all he has done for us, we shall become stunted in our Christian life, and there is a real danger of falling away. If we do not go forward it suggests that there is something wrong with our faith. If we do not go forward in faith, we find we can’t stand still, and the only way is going backwards, which surely is terrible to contemplate. We are pilgrims on our way to heaven in the service of God. We can’t stand still in the Christian life. There is only one way and that is to go forward to deeper faith and commitment, together with deeper service for Jesus.
But what is the foundation we have to lay, on which the future building of our faith depends. As Paul lays down six principles as the foundation of the Christian life, we may well feel that we are confused because the points Paul lays down may seem different to what we have learnt as the foundation. We have remember that Paul was writing to Christians who were Jews, and had been nurtured in the Jewish faith laid down in the first five books of the Old Testament. I believe this is why Paul’s six points seem to us to be a trifle obscure. What we have to keep in our minds is that Paul is speaking to people brought up in the Jewish religion, also that what he is speaking about is the foundation or first principles of Christianity, which define what is essential to becoming a Christian, and is speaking of these from the starting point of people in the Jewish culture.
The first foundation is repentance from dead works, or works that are useless and damaging. The NIV translate ‘dead work’ as ‘works that lead to death’, and although this is part of the truth, I feel it is not the whole of the truth expressed by Paul here. Repentance is turning around, leaving the old way of living and thinking, and taking up a new and right way. For a Jew this means two things. Firstly, it means a turning away from the world and the sin in the world, repenting of wrong actions, thoughts and desires, and seeking to live in the ways of God. Sins and the ways of the world are dead works because they lead to death, and eventually produce death. Secondly, the Jews had to turn away from their trust in the Jewish religion as handed down to them, with all its trust in keeping the law for acceptance with God, and see in Jesus alone the realisation of salvation and eternal life. All the Jewish religious life was dead works. It never could and never did accomplish the end for which it was used. The sacrifices offered, even though ordained of God through Moses, never could and never did take away sin, or achieve forgiveness and acceptance with God. This was seen in that the sacrifices had to be repeated time and time again. What the Jew had to realise was that all this religious practice and faith passed away with the coming of Christ, and that Christ fulfilled perfectly all that the Jewish religion aspired to and pointed to. These religious works and practices were dead works because they never achieved the desired end of forgiveness and the declaration of God that sin was purged away, and the worshipper was accounted just in God’s site.
For us who have not been nurtured in the Jewish culture, this principle of repentance from dead works is also applicable. We need to turn away from the ways of the world and from sin, and turn towards God and his ways; and we must also repent of depending on our own works and merits for acceptance with God, for these are dead works. We can’t do anything that is perfect enough to be acceptable to God, and even our best actions are simply glorified sins, and fall short of the glory of God. Even if we could do a pure action, or have a pure thought, these could only stand as a one action, and would have no value for the atonement for sins of the past. The foundation of repentance from dead works is to turn from sin and from all dependence on our own works and merits for acceptance with God. There is a tremendous danger of returning to the Jewish way and thought in raising a system of priests and religious practice which is said must be added to faith in Christ, if we are to be saved. This is to return to the way of human merit for salvation, and ceasing our trust only in Christ’s merits
This repentance from dead works is of tremendous importance. One of the things we are most prone to as religious beings is to turn back to good works, and religious duties as a means of gaining the approval of God. The Christian knows that he or she is forgiven by grace, and serves God out of gratitude and love, and has no thought that our good actions and service are worthy of merit from God, but the remnants of natural religion in us all tend to cause us, when we feel our failures and feel we have fallen short of God’s ways, to seeking to gain acceptance and forgiveness through our own merit. We need to repent of these dead works, and let repentance turn us always and only to faith in Christ for forgiveness and acceptance with God.
We must leave our study of these first principles here, and go on with this study next time.