In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. God had a plan for a world not only symmetrically and economically perfect, but also filled with meaningful relationships.
“It is not good that man should be alone.” God observed this, not man. The very idea of creating woman came from realizing man’s need for a helpmeet. Adam would drown himself without Eve.
Furthermore, throughout the rest of Scripture, God constantly compares His relationship with His creation to that of a man with his wife. Marriage. Meaningful relationship. God designed. He designed all things and He designed them very good.
But you can’t have meaningful relationships with robots. Think of it, you and I are made in the image of God, right? We don’t like when people do things for us because they feel they have to, do we? Of course not! It always feels more authentic when they do it of their own accord.
In the same way, God longs for our affection and our love of our own accord.
Unfortunately, He can’t get our voluntary love without also allowing us the capability of walking away.
It’s almost as if this life needs a villain if there’s going to be true meaning to it. In other words, without the possibility of choosing something over God, and even more so, without the reality of someone else competing for our affections, our choice to love God is worthless. Much like a robot programmed to respond certain ways.
And so, as all good stories go, this villain, the enemy of God, slithered up to His creation casting doubt on what He had told them and offering alternative ways of experiencing life. The woman listened. The man stood cowardly by doing nothing but letting creation fall into chaos.
Until that day, until mankind’s decision to believe their Creator’s enemy, they enjoyed creation to the fullest. Their desire for relationship was met in their marriage and with their Maker. Their nakedness did not shame them even though it no doubt aroused passion and desire within them. You see, their natures weren’t fallen, as we’re used to today. They functioned as God designed. Their passion for each other led them to relate in a way that honored God and protected and nurtured one another.
Because of their choice to listen to the enemy instead of trusting God, however, because of their agreement that maybe God was holding out on them and that the fruit of knowledge of good and evil provided access to a life they would rather have, the perfectly created nature of man crumbled into moral depravity.
No more did Adam look to God as the fulfiller of his desires. Instead, he began writing a history of trying to do life without God. A history of corruption. Brokenness. Rebellion.
For a moment, it appeared the villain had one. Man indeed had walked away. Because of His holiness, God was forced to expel His broken creation from the Garden. He gave them up to their “dishonorable passions,” their doing life without Him. They would have to live in a world filled with pain and turmoil. They no longer enjoyed the transparent and free relationship with God they had come to take for granted.
It wasn’t long before hatred and murder entered the scene as their son killed his righteous brother. That was just the beginning of a generation of people doing life outside of God’s perfect design.
He called forth Abraham to raise up a people who would show the rest of the world by the way they lived their lives how God intended life to be. Completely convinced that God was able to do what He promised, Abraham went forth and led his wife Sarah and their offspring in following God’s call. His faith was counted to him for righteousness.
But even Abraham was no Adam.
His fickle faith wavered as he approached Egypt. Twice he lied about his wife, using his own cleverness to protect himself as he followed God. Yes, even the Father of Faith dealt with an inward tendency do to life apart from God.
Though called and set apart by God to be a people of righteousness, Abraham’s posterity could not fulfill it. So God stepped in and delivered a detailed directive of how His people should live if they are going to function as He designed.
The Old Testament law. “Here is how you can be right before Me,” he explains.
From that point on, leaders such as Moses, Joshua, and each of Israel’s Judges sought to teach their people to follow God’s law. “Obey Him. Live out His way of life. He’s made it clear to us. If we only function within His design, we stand righteous before Him.”
But the law couldn’t change man’s heart, his fallen nature.
In fact, the law became something people used to puff up their religious egos. Kings and Princes led God’s people away from a life of worshipping Him in functioning as He designed, as He laid out in His law, by either using their observance of the law as reason to feel superior to others or by completely ignoring it altogether. So God sent prophets to the people of Israel and Judah, calling them to return to their Maker.
Isaiah plead with them, saying “You worship God with your mouths, but your hearts are far from Him and you teach a fear of him that is nothing more than a commandment of man.” Isaiah spoke of the judgement God was bringing on His people.
God was getting ready to do a new thing. He was going to make a way for man’s hearts to be truly redeemed. So that all of mankind could desire what God desires. So that all of mankind could think as God thinks. So that they would see God and His perfect creation as the ultimate way of life.
But first, there would need to be a judgement. A death. A sacrifice more perfect then that of a lamb.
You see, no matter how hard man tried, he could not make himself right before God. Yes, He could satisfy the wrath of God through blood sacrifices, acknowledging his eternal need of a Rescuer, but he still tended to do life without God.
Man’s nature as it was known needed to be remade.
The nation of Israel soon fell into destruction and exile. God used pagan kings as His instruments to judge His people—then He judged those kings because they should have known simply by the creation around them that He was Yahweh. Yet, they too, were so used to doing life without God they worshipped His creation completely ignorant of the Creator.
Yes, as it stood, the villain had won.
Then one day a little boy was born. Much like any other boy around him, only his Mom had never known sexual intimacy. He just was. He always was, really. His birth was much more than a newborn baby. Something divine and holy that mankind never knew before was existing within Mary.
As he burst into the light in the middle of all the raucous of taking census in Bethlehem, although he appeared like all the other little babies (purple, crying, grasping for his first breath) his features spoke of something miraculous. The cries of the prophet Isaiah, the appeals of the Judges, of Joshua and Moses, the call of God on Abraham’s life—the very voice that called forth the earth—was no longer just words heard or read; it was flesh and blood living in this world.
A man, just like Adam, only existing within him was the very presence of God.
Yahweh had come to earth. God was now with us.
Jesus grew and learned as any child does. He apprenticed at his craft and became a master. Then, at the age of thirty, he took a walk one day and pulled aside twelve men to be his disciples. To apprentice with him. Only, this apprenticeship was much more than learning a craft. He was teaching them how to live as God designed.
He taught them a new code of conduct, a new way of thinking about life. He showed them how to love those who hated them, and how to help those who had wasted their lives away in sin.
Most radically of all, though, he showed these twelve men what their Almighty Creator was really like. He spoke of his Father, and how his Father was exactly as he was. He told them he came to reconcile them with God.
And he did just that when he died on the cross.
Mankind now had their perfect sacrifice. Man had died. And this one man carried the weight of all the men throughout history as he lived a sinless life and then gave it up in death.
That’s what God needed in order to be able to access man’s hearts and redeem them back to His original design.
As the twelve disciples saw their Master hanging on the cross, dripping with blood, flesh flapping in the breeze, they felt a sadness deep within them, like their souls were sobbing. I imagine they dropped to their knees in despair, confusion.
They had argued, just days before, about who was more important. About which one he liked the best. They didn’t realize he was going to die. They should have known—he spoke of it. But it didn’t really make sense. It didn’t fit the philosophical framework in which they had read the writings of Moses and Joshua, and the Prophets of old.
“Why? Why did he die? He did nothing wrong!” And with that, the overwhelming reality of their own brokenness and sinfulness engulfed them in an emotion they couldn’t handle, sending each one running as hard as he could to his house. Weeping, dripping with snot, their cloaks trailing in the wind.
What cowards they were. Their world had crumbled.
The villain rejoiced. This victory had been easier than the last. This fool, wimp of man, had laid. down. his. life.
Whoooh. . . The breath wafted into his nostrils. He opened his eyes. Inhaled. And unraveled his bounds.
Another breath. Another blink. He stood up, stepped forward, and within a moment the darkness of the damp cave fled as bright, radiant light shone into the tomb.
He walked out. The guards were sleeping, so he kept walking.
The morning was quiet and peaceful, but strange things were happening. Just a few days earlier, the temple veil had torn in two in the middle of an earthquake. And now, people who had died long ago were alive and walking around. This breath, this new life spoke of something drastically different.
As he walked, he approached two men traveling. They were puzzled and talking about all the strange events taking place. He asked about them and they told him of Jesus who had died and now appears to have risen for some women they knew had gone to the tomb and had seen an angel who told them he is alive.
“Was it not necessary that Christ should suffer these things and enter into His glory?” he asked. And then, with great subtlety, but all the authority as always, he interpreted to them the scriptures concerning himself.
This had to happen. His death had to be. For in his one act of obedience God was now able to pour out his love for His creation through the Holy Spirit given to them. Because of Jesus Christ, his life, death, and resurrection, all of mankind was now reconciled back to God.
The villain has been defeated! Man can now live free from his impinging grip.
Man can live as he was designed to live all along.
Through Jesus Christ because of his death and resurrection, God has justified all of us and freely given us the abundance of grace. We have peace with God! Not since before Adam and Eve sinned has man lived at peace with God. And just as death through Adam’s act of disobedience spread to all men, even more so life is now given because of the perfect, obedient sacrifice of Christ.
All our works are as filthy rags. We cannot earn redemption. We simply are redeemed in Christ and when we believe that in our hearts, when we are fully convinced, as Abraham was, that God actually has done what He said He would do, we receive eternal life: relationship with God the Father.
Because of grace, we are free.
But does that mean we can do as we want? That life is simply about believing? That’s it’s a matter of the heart and not of a lifestyle?
“By no means!” Paul says. “Do you not know that when you were baptized into Christ you were baptized into His death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead, you too might walk in newness of life?”
If we continue sinning, doing life apart from God and living as anybody else of this world lives, we simply prove we still don’t believe that Christ actually died on the Cross and justified us of our sins.
Yes, we are released from the law, but that simply means we no longer need the law to live as God designed. When we consider ourselves dead to sin and doing life without God, and instead alive to the Spirit and life as God designed, we are able to live righteously. As Adam and Eve were supposed to live in the Garden of Eden.
The problem is, we don’t feel dead to sin. Fleshly things feel more attractive than spiritual things. Yes, we want to love God. We want to do what’s right. But we keep doing the things we hate.
Paul talked about that in Romans seven. He said there are two energies waring within him. “Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of death!”
There is now no condemnation in Christ.
God is not disappointed in our struggle against flesh and doing life without Him. He isn’t standing back waiting for us to get our act together, for us to separate ourselves from the world, before He considers us righteous. He understands our nature is broken, that we are fallen from His design. Which is why He took the initiative in reconciling us to Himself by sending His own son to break the bond of sinful habits and the curse of death.
That is grace: God taking personal responsibility to fulfill in us His righteousness, then empowering us to live righteously from here forward.
Because of grace, there are no excuses for sinful living. Only, God is for us. Not against us. Too often we live the Christian life expecting ourselves to be more perfect then even God expects us to be. As if holiness is something we are to accomplish before we have peace with Him. But that matter was taken care of by Christ on the Cross. We have peace, period. We can now live in relationship with God, and it is from that relationship we find the ability to live as He designed, to obey Him from the heart instead of obligation as they did under the Old Testament Law.
We still live in a fallen world, though, bound by a fallen nature. Living as He designed goes contrary to our being. We have been grafted in—we’re not a part of the trunk that gave us root. It feels more natural to live without Him.
It is within this context that Paul is writing in Roman’s twelve.
Because people of this fallen world are bent to live life without God, as we once did, we are not to be conformed to them, but transformed by the renewing of our minds. This is not an exercise of memorization, but a new way of thinking. Seeing life as God designed.
Paul explained in his letter to the Corinthians that because of Jesus Christ we now behold the glory of God with unveiled faces. Both Gentile and Jew can now come before the throne of grace and behold our Savior. Our Maker. And as we do, we are transformed into the image of Christ from one degree of glory to another.
The glory of God is seen in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in God’s redemption of a fallen world.
If we are to be transformed into the image of Christ and not be conformed to this world, we must remember the Gospel. We must regularly meditate on the work of Christ on the Cross. When we find ourselves broken by our own sinfulness, as the apostles were when they saw Christ hanging on the Cross, when we are at our poorest state morally, unashamedly confessing our need of Christ, then and only then can God begin to work in us the life and fruit of righteousness.
Nonconformity is not a biblical term. Yes, we are to die to our flesh, to not be conformed to this world, to be set apart; but unless we remember the higher life Christ enables us to live we are no holier just because we don’t dance, or wear shorts, or do things the world does.
We die to the flesh because we are alive to Christ.
We are not conformed to this world because we are being transformed into the image of Christ.
We are set apart because Christ has made us holy.
But if we take our eyes off the glory of God and put the cart before the ox, pushing the results of holiness before beholding the glory of the God, we end up cultivating a people who do life without Him.
So does nonconformity matter?
It matters to the degree that the more transformed we are, the less we do life outside of God’s design. The more transformed we are, the less sin abounds.
Applications will vary, but righteousness will reign.
What matters most is that we have a meaningful relationship with God.
It is in knowing our Father that our lives are changed. It is through the Gospel that our hearts are transformed and we begin bearing fruit of righteousness and not of legalism or of running away from legalism.
Theology is important in that having a relationship with God means discovering more of Him. Bible reading, memorization, prayer, ministry all matter to the degree that they lead us and others into a deeper walk with Jesus.
When we experience Jesus, as John talked about in the eighth chapter of his gospel, He completely sets us free from fulfilling our desires in ways God never intended them to be fulfilled. We begin to live new, vibrant lives of love for God and His ways.
That is what the Gospel of grace is really all about.
Question: Why do we so quickly get focused on spiritual disciplines or practices as if they make us holy? Why is it we’re so afraid to be transformed in such a way that makes us different than the world? Share in the comments.
[Previously] Nonconformity: a dangerous alternative
[Previously] Nonconformity: where we get it wrong
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