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There is no real and true knowledge of God
except in and through Jesus Christ; that is a basic and
essential principle of Christianity.
Christ Is God's Everything For You
Harold J. Chadwick
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Sometimes in this world we don't know were we are going,
but wherever we are going we can rejoice, for Christ is
going with us.
The End of All Things Is at Hand
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The world should increasingly hold less interest for
Christians, because God is continually working in us to
separate us from the world.
Amazing Works of John Newton
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Christ did not come to make us God's people, He came to take
God's people out of the world and make them fit to stand in
God's presence.
God Print: Making Your Mark for Jesus
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who have eternal life not only know God and His relationship
to them, they delight in God and their supreme desire is to
know Him better.
Encounter: Face 2 Face
With Jesus
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the life of a Christian may result in loss of conscious
fellowship with God, but never loss of salvation or Christ's
life in us.
My Anchor Holds
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all circumstances and in all places, Jesus had but one great
desire, which was to live to the glory of God. |
What is the collective sin in
Hebrews 12:1? (See Part 1 of this series.)
 Well,
what was the writer's topic in the previous chapter:
Hebrews 11? Faith. And please notice
that our text-verse begins with the word, "Therefore."
As always, whenever you find a "therefore," you should
find out what it's there for. And what it's
there for is to tie what the writer is about to say to
what he has just finished saying. He has just
finished a long dissertation on the faith heroes of Old
Testament times. Now relating back to what he has
just expounded upon, he says in conclusion, in a
wrapping up of his thoughts, in a bringing forth the
point of his dissertation: "Therefore . . . let us lay
aside . . . the sin which so easily ensnares us."
So whatever the sin is, it is directly related to faith,
for faith is what he has been discussing.
Now if we back up far enough
through the epistle to the Hebrews, we might find a
collective sin that has to do with faith, and that led
the writer to list all those faithful people of God.
And we find exactly such a thing in the third chapter,
where the writer talks about when the Israelites stood
posed on the border of the Promised Land and would not
go into it. Let's extract some verses to see if we
can find the collective sin that ensnared them.
First God is speaking, then the writer.
"Therefore I was
angry with that generation, and said,
'They always go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.' So I
swore in My wrath, 'They shall not enter
My rest.' " Beware, brethren, lest
there be in any of you an evil heart of
unbelief in departing from the living
God.(1)
For who,
having heard [God speak], rebelled?
Indeed, was it not all who came out of
Egypt, led by Moses? Now with whom was
He angry forty years? Was it not with
those who sinned, whose corpses fell in the
wilderness? And to whom did He swear
that they would not enter His rest, but to
those who did not obey? So we see that they
could not enter in because of unbelief.(2) |
Look at
the accumulation of expressions tying sin and unbelief;
i.e., no faith in God, together: "always go astray in their
hearts . . . have not known my ways . . . evil heart of
unbelief . . . those who sinned . . . those who did not obey
. . . because of unbelief." There we have it, the
collective sin that so easily ensnares us all: unbelief.
Would any of us say this is not so—collectively so? Of
course it is! So we can see clearly that unbelief, or
no faith, even negative-faith, is sin; and so the Apostle
Paul wrote, "Whatever is not from faith is sin."(3)
Now why
is it sin? The reason is easy to see. All we
need to do is end our sentence properly whenever we say, "I
guess I just don't have enough faith—in God."
Well, if we do not have enough faith in God for some
particular thing that He has told us to do or not to do,
then in who or what do we have enough faith for that thing?
Ah, therein lies the rub! For if we do not have faith
in God, then we have faith in something or someone else
other than God.
And that
is sin!
Only the Son of God was free from it.
Only He never sinned against God. He lived a totally
sinless life though He was flesh and bones like us.
The way Jesus remained free from sin was to choose always to
do the will of His Father. It was not that Jesus was
never tempted to go the way of His own will. The
Scripture says He was tempted in all ways just as we are.(4)
It was that in the temptation, He chose the will of God the
Father over His own will.(5)
Jesus
of Nazareth was perfect humanity showing how those who
returned to their created purpose as vessels of the life of
God could live in perfect harmony with God's will.
Though in the image of God, He humbled Himself and took on
the form of man, and by faith was obedient even onto
death.(6)
In so
doing, Jesus became the first-born as opposed to Lucifer who
became the first-dead.(7)
While
He was in human flesh, Jesus Christ lived by the strength
and guidance of the Spirit of the Father in Him, and by so
living was able to submit His will and every part of His
being to the will of the Father. If we would learn to
live by the strength and guidance of the Spirit of Christ in
us,(8) we too could live a life much like Jesus. Not
totally free from sin as He was, but at a tremendous
decrease in our independent self-actions.
Faith
Faith in its essential form is trust
and confidence in God. It is the casting of the entire
personality and life's circumstances and situations upon God
in absolute assurance of the manifestation of His grace in
goodness and kindness. It is believing God and Christ.
It is dependence upon God. It is choosing always His
will over ours. Faith is irrevocable belief that God
is the God of all comfort and is working all things together
to our eternal good, no matter how they may appear to us in
this temporal world. It is absolute belief that
"Father Knows Best." Faith is a dependent-choice
relationship to the sovereignty of God. Faith is that
which Lucifer turned from in eternity when he rebelled
against God, and which he is constantly tempting Christians
to turn from, also.
If we would keep in mind the
antithetical relationship of faith and sin, it would be much
easier for us to determine if we are sinning against God
when we make the daily thought, word, and deed choices of
our lives. It also would take us out from under the
legalistic sin-list bondage of others. What is sin for
one Christian is not necessarily sin for another, and what
is not-sin for one is not necessarily not-sin for
another.(9) For each Christian, their sin/faith
relationship is a personal one between them and God.
That which I can do or not do in true full
heart-assurance that it is all right for me with God is
not sin. For one who did not have such
heart-assurance, it would be sin.
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