Christian Philosophy: Everyone Has a Philosophy. It's The Lens Through Which They View The World and Make Decisions. (14 page)

Jesus had been preaching and teaching the mercy of God, and He wanted to set people free from the bondage of religious tradition. Jesus ate meals with sinners (Matthew 9:11; Mark 2:16; Luke 15:2), and associated with outcasts. One of His disciples was a hated tax collector (Matthew 10:3), and a formerly demon-possessed woman cooked for Him (Luke 8:2). His life and teaching were in complete contrast to the harsh, judgmental God that the religious leaders of the day were portraying.

By bringing this woman to Jesus for judgment, the Pharisees were trying to make Him choose between obeying the Law and demonstrating the mercy He had been preaching. Either way, they thought Jesus was trapped. If He demonstrated mercy and let the woman go, then He himself would be subject to stoning for failing to enforce the Law of Moses. Yet if Jesus followed the Law and condemned the woman to death, then He would be going against the message of mercy He had been teaching, and the people would think He was a hypocrite. The Pharisees thought it was a win-win situation.

Of course, the Pharisees’ trap wasn’t as good as they thought. Jesus immediately recognized what they were up to, so when the Pharisees threw the woman down before Jesus and demanded His judgment, Jesus simply bent down and wrote in the dirt with His finger. When the Pharisees continued to press Him for an answer, Jesus stood up and said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (John 8:7). Then Jesus bent over again and continued writing on the ground. We don’t know what He was writing, but whatever it was, it appears to have convicted the accusers of their own sins. One by one, they walked away until only the woman was left standing before Jesus. When Jesus looked up and saw only the woman, He said,

Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

John 8:10-11

Jesus didn’t tell the woman that it was okay to commit adultery. He didn’t lower the standard of righteousness. Some people today are trying to reconcile God’s love and holiness by saying everything is okay—drunkenness, adultery, homosexuality, drugs, and other harmful lifestyle choices—but that isn’t how Jesus responded. He didn’t deny the woman’s act was wrong or imply that it would be okay for her to continue committing adultery. No, He said, “go and sin no more.” Jesus admitted that she had sinned, but He didn’t condemn her—He showed mercy.

Adultery was punishable by death under the Old Covenant, but Jesus didn’t enforce the punishment. If someone was caught in adultery under the Law of Moses, they were stoned to death; it wasn’t negotiable. As a matter of fact, the very first person who was punished for breaking the Old Testament Law was a man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32-36). After he was caught gathering sticks, the Israelites turned him over to Moses and Aaron because no one knew what the punishment should be. The Lord told Moses that the man should be brought outside the camp and stoned to death. He was killed for gathering sticks to make a fire!

Some people hear these stories and they wonder, “Why the change?” In a nutshell, God held people accountable for sin under the Old Covenant, so He punished them for it. But under the New Covenant, our sins have all been paid for by Jesus, and God isn’t holding sin against us anymore. God has changed the way He deals with us because the price for sin has been paid—and that single change makes everything brand new. After putting our faith in Jesus, we become new creatures (2 Corinthians 5:17), and God can deal with us differently than He could deal with people under the Old Covenant (Hebrews 8:12-13).

Jesus changed everything, and nothing has been the same since. A helpful illustration is to consider how we change the way we relate to our own children as they mature. Young children often have to be physically restrained from doing wrong. I know many people today reject spanking children as being harmful, but leaving children to themselves is what’s harmful. The scripture says,

The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.

Proverbs 29:15

So, it’s a godly thing to use corporal punishment to train young children. A two year old doesn’t understand that the devil is inspiring our selfish actions. If you try and tell them that it’s the devil who leads them to take their sibling’s toy, they will just look at you with a blank stare. They don’t get it.

But when the devil gives them those selfish thoughts of taking their sibling’s toy, you can tell them, “If you do that again, I’m going to give you a spanking.” They may not know about resisting the devil (James 4:7), but I guarantee you when that thought comes again, they will resist it because they don’t want the punishment. Sometimes kids need to be spanked—not to hurt them, but to deter them from doing what is wrong.

Even so, spanking is not a long-term solution. You only use physical restraint for a short period of time until children grow up and you can teach them by instruction. We don’t spank our 20-, 30-, or 40-year-old children! Likewise, the Old Testament revealed God’s wrath against sin, and He put punishments in place to deter the Israelites from sinning until His plan of redemption could unfold. When the time was right, Jesus came and paid for our sin. Until Jesus made a new way for us, the Israelites were kept under the Law, waiting for saving faith in Christ to appear (Galatians 3:23).The apostle Paul said it this way:

Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.

Galatians 3:24-25

The Law was just a training tool God used to guide His children until we could be saved by faith. You could say that the human race was in its infancy until Jesus came and revealed the true nature of God. Before Jesus came, God dealt with sin harshly in order to keep the Israelites out of trouble. But now, God no longer deals with His children in the same way. We aren’t under the Law the Israelites were under (Romans 6:14). We have a different covenant, a New Covenant of salvation by grace, through faith in Jesus (Ephesians 2:8). We are a different kind of people from the Old Covenant believers—new creatures entirely—and God deals with us differently.

It’s true that God inflicted people with leprosy and destroyed entire cities under the Old Covenant, but those actions have to be understood within the context of how God was able to deal with humanity. Jesus changed all that. He made it possible for us to be spiritually reborn. In much the same way that you can’t reason with an infant, God couldn’t reason with humanity prior to Jesus. In the Old Testament, God released His wrath on people, but in the New Testament, Jesus changed how God relates to us.

Scripture says Jesus is the exact representation of God the Father (Hebrews 1:3). The Old Testament prophets revealed some truths about God, but Jesus gave us a complete view of the Father. The writer of Hebrews said “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him” (Hebrews 2:3). Jesus revealed God in a way that superseded all previous revelation. In Jesus, we see a kind and compassionate God who gave Himself over to a cruel death, in order to give us the hope of new life.

Jesus’ disciples tried to re-enact a story from the Old Testament once, and His response to them dramatically illustrates the difference between the Old and the New Covenants. The story revolves around the ungodly king Ahaziah—the son of Ahab and Jezebel. Ahaziah fell seriously ill, but instead of seeking the Lord for healing, he sent messengers to inquire about his recovery from the false god Baalzebub, the god of the neighboring people of Ekron. God told the prophet Elijah what king Ahaziah was doing and sent him to intercept the messengers. Elijah said to them, “Is it not because there is not a God in Israel, that ye go to enquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron? Now therefore thus saith the LORD, Thou shalt not come down from that bed on which thou art gone up, but shalt surely die” (2 Kings 1:3-4).

When the messengers heard this, they returned to Ahaziah and reported what Elijah had said. Although Elijah didn’t identify himself to the messengers, he had a long history with Ahaziah’s family, and the king knew right away who it was that had spoken to them. After hearing Elijah’s warning, the king sent out a captain with fifty soldiers to capture him. The captain found Elijah on top of a hill and commanded him to come down. Elijah replied, “If I be a man of God, then let fire come down from heaven, and consume thee and thy fifty” (2 Kings 1:10). After saying this, fire came down from heaven and consumed the captain and his fifty soldiers.

Not deterred, the king sent out another captain with fifty soldiers. Elijah called down fire from heaven again, and the second captain and his men were also killed. So the king sent out a third captain with fifty soldiers, but this time the captain fell down on his knees before Elijah and begged for his life. At that, the angel of the Lord spoke to Elijah, told him not to be afraid, and to go with the soldiers to see king Ahaziah. Elijah went with the men, delivered a message to the king, and that was the end of the matter.

This story comes up again in the New Testament while Jesus and His disciples were passing through Samaria. The Jews looked down upon the Samaritans because they had stayed behind in the land of Israel and intermarried with Gentiles during the time the Jews were taken into captivity. As a result of the intermarrying, the Samaritans adopted pagan beliefs and mixed them with their Jewish religious tradition. Because of the Samaritan’s mixed religion, the Jews forbade them from worshipping in Jerusalem—even though they were worshipping the God of Israel. The mutual hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans was both religious and racial, and we need to keep the extreme prejudice between them in mind as we read the New Testament story.

And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, And sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem.

Luke 9:51-53

We know Jesus had already taught in Samaria because the Gospel of John tells the story of Jesus ministering to the woman at the well (John 4). After Jesus ministered to the woman, she went and got the entire village to go hear Him, and they all accepted Him as the Messiah. On this occasion, Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem, but instead of going around Samaria the way the strict Jews did, He went right through Samaria. Before arriving, Jesus sent some men ahead to find Him lodging, but once the Samaritans knew Jesus was on His way to a celebrate a feast in Jerusalem, they rejected Him and wouldn’t even give Him a place to stay. They hated the Jews so much that it offended them Jesus was planning to go worship in Jerusalem.

These were people who already acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah! They were willing to accept Jesus as God’s anointed Savior, but they were unable to overcome their religious prejudice against the Jewish worship, so when Jesus identified Himself with the Jews in Jerusalem, they rejected Him. They didn’t snub Jesus due to ignorance—they knew He was sent by God—they rejected Him because He was associating with a group of people they didn’t like. They intentionally rejected God’s anointed Savior because they couldn’t get over their racial and religious hatred.

The Samaritans’ rejection of Jesus was much worse than anything the army captains did to Elijah in the Old Testament story. The army captains were just obeying orders by trying to bring Elijah to King Ahaziah, but the Samaritans were rejecting the Messiah. When the disciples saw how the Samaritans were acting, they asked Jesus,

“…Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as [Elijah] did?”

Luke 9:54

The disciples wanted to imitate Elijah by calling down fire to kill the Samaritans, and you could argue that what the Samaritans had done was more deserving of judgment than anything the soldiers did. Yet Jesus reproached the disciples.

But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them. And they went to another village.

Luke 9:55-56

Someone who looks at this casually might think God was being inconsistent, but the difference here is actually the difference between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Prior to the Law being given through Moses, which was approximately two thousand years
after
the fall of Adam and Eve, God wasn’t holding people responsible for their sin (Romans 5:13). He was dealing with people in mercy and grace, but people began to take God’s lack of punishment as an indication that He didn’t care whether they lived a holy life or not. They didn’t understand that even though God wasn’t punishing sin, Satan was taking advantage of sinful actions and corrupting the whole human race. So God had to restrain sin. He had to get people to turn away from sin and the damage it was causing.

Before the Law, God wasn’t punishing sin. For example, He actually protected the first murderer (Genesis 4). After Cain killed Abel, God set a mark on Cain to protect him from any vigilante-style attempts to exact justice by taking his life. God didn’t approve of the murder Cain committed; it was wrong, and it had consequences, but God didn’t punish Cain for his sinful action. God’s grace toward Cain stands in sharp contrast to the punishment exacted upon the first person to violate the Law—a man who was picking up sticks on the Sabbath to make a fire (Numbers 15:32-36). The difference in God’s reaction to these sins was that prior to the giving of the Law, God wasn’t holding people accountable for their sin (Romans 5:13); He was dealing with people in grace.