All posts by David Sloan

“The Jews” in John and Anti-Semitism

I was at a dinner last night where the topic came up of the phrase “The Jews” in John. In particular, Sunday’s sermon had addressed John 20, and the pastor helpfully noted that we need to be careful when reading a verse like 20:19 (“…the doors were locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews…”) that we don’t let it feed into anti-Semitism. I shared some of my thoughts about this with the group, and I thought I’d share here for anyone else who would be helped by this.

“The Jews” is a terrible translation of the Greek word Ioudaioi here and elsewhere for several reasons. First of all, the disciples themselves were Jewish. They didn’t have fear of “the Jews”; they were the Jews! Jesus was a Jew, and probably most of the people that John wrote for were Jews in Asia Minor who believed in Jesus as Jews. Clearly that’s not what the word means here.

Second, the Greek word is mainly a geographic term referring to people who live in Judea. While it could be used in a religious sense to refer to people who have a Jewish belief system, the concept of “religion” really develops later in history. I would translate this with a geographic term rather than what will be read today as a religious phrase, e.g., “the doors were locked where the disciples were for fear of the Judeans.”

But even still, “the Judeans” is not really a perfect way of putting it either. Were they afraid of Judeans in general? No, they were staying in the home of a Judean! Jesus had a following in Jerusalem and throughout Judea, just as he did in Galilee. What is meant here is the people in charge in Judea … those who had urged for Jesus to be put to death. So a lot of Bibles have a footnote here suggesting that the word refers to “Jewish religious leaders” or something like that. The closest equivalent I can think of in our language today is when people use the word “Washington” to refer to the government. It isn’t a criticism of a whole city and the people of it, but specifically of the “Washington governmental leaders.”

Finally, we should think about the pragmatics of Bible translation. Even if “the Jews” was an accurate translation of Ioudaioi, the way that phrase has been used throughout history should caution us against ever using the phrase, especially in a book that people will ascribe so much authority to. I remember in the TV series Community that Shirley says to Annie, “I can’t believe that I never knew you were a Jew,” to which Annie responds, “I’d say the whole word next time.” It is a somewhat funny exchange, and certain we can use the word “Jew” (as many Jewish people would). The problem with Shirley’s quote is not what she says, but how she says it. There is almost a critical tone as she says the word “Jew.” Tone cannot be communicated in written text, so this is another reason I would avoid this phrase in Bible translations. Too many people will see the phrase and embed into it later critical use of the term.

Which brings me to my final point. I was asked yesterday if critical use of the word “the Jews” began with Hitler. Sadly, not at all. The Romans often despised the Judeans for not worshiping the Roman gods, so there was already critical use of the term at play in the first century (but that does not mean John himself used it critically!). By the second century you had so many non-Jews who embraced the Gospel of John that they already began to read the phrase critically … even though they spoke in Greek. Hitler was one person in a long line of people, including Martin Luther and already Ignatius of Antioch in the second century, who took passages like this to justify their own anti-Jewish biases. It’s not just that “the Jews” became a word of derision and so we shouldn’t use it in Bible translation. We could go so far to say as the Bible itself contributed to this use of the word. John himself uses the Ioudaioi critically. For him, it didn’t mean “the Jews,” but he was critical of a group nonetheless. And ironically his criticism was simply widened to include his own people group just decades later.

We should be careful to embody the spirit of love. As John himself (ironically?) says, “Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.” (1 John 2:9-11, ESV)

Let us be careful in how we think and speak about people who oppose us … lest our words become fodder for hate. Eventually that hate will find its way back to us!

NEW YORK, NY – JANUARY 05: People participate in a Jewish solidarity march on January 5, 2020 in New York City. The march was held in response to a recent rise in anti-Semitic crimes in the greater New York metropolitan area. (Photo by Jeenah Moon/Getty Images)

“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and the Downplaying of Political Oppression

One change between early Christianity and modern Christianity is that we spiritualize everything today. Consider the difference between how we sing a verse of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and the way it was chanted in the early centuries:

Ancient version: “O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples, before you kings will shut their mouths, to you the nations will make their prayer: come and deliver us, and delay no longer.”

Modern version: “O come, thou Rod of Jesse, free thine own from Satan’s tyranny; from depths of hell thy people save, and give them victory over the grave.”

Notice how the original “O Antiphons” addressed kings and the need for deliverance from political oppression, but the newer hymn addresses “Satan’s tyranny” and the need for deliverance from death. I have highlighted in previous posts how modern Christianity makes the latter need central, when more immediate needs are addressed in both the Gospels and Paul’s letters. Some of this is because we aren’t oppressed by kings anymore, and so the biblical language is less striking to us than our modern gospel tellings, which we find biblical verses (often taken out of context) to support. But we should also be aware of ways in which we who have wealth today (most people in developed nations) are more in the position of kings than in the position of the peoples crying out for help. If we don’t feel the oppression, we might just be in the position of the oppressor.

Richard Horsley, The Liberation of Christmas

Last Christmas I had the pleasure of reading Richard Horsley’s book The Liberation of Christmas, where he notes how much of American wealth is generated by oppressive policies that funnel wealth to America while benefiting from labor performed in oppressed countries. We Americans are more in the position of Egypt than of Israel or of Rome than of Galilee. And so it is natural for us to rewrite the Christmas story, to downplay the interest in political oppression, and to spiritualize things. Consider another verse from “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”:

Modern version: “O come, thou Key of David, come, and open wide our heavenly home. Make safe the way that leads on high, and close the path to misery. Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.”

The verse is about going to heaven rather than hell when you die. (Or is it when Emmanuel comes? Modern Christian chronology has trouble fitting the biblical evidence together.) Now consider the ancient version, which is again about political oppression:

Ancient version: “O Key of David and scepter of the House of Israel, you open and no one can shut; you shut and no one can open. Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house, those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.”

It is easy to see how the modern translator took this to be about deliverance from death, since the verse can be read as a reference to the gates of Hades, especially given the language of “the shadow of death.” But we should look at this verse more closely.

The first half of this verse quotes Revelation 3:7: “These are the words of the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens.” [All Bible quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.] In Revelation this addresses Jewish Christians who have been shut out of the synagogue, and Jesus says, “I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name” (3:8). The words are addressed to the oppressed and excluded, who are about to experience “the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth” (3:10). They will be “kept” through the trial, just as they “kept” Jesus’ word (3:8).

The last line of this verse quotes from Luke 1:79, where Zechariah says that John the Baptist “will go before the Lord to prepare his ways” (1:76) and then the messiah will come “from on high” (1:78) “to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (1:79). This verse itself picks up the language of Psalm 107:10-16 (“Some sat in darkness and in the shadow of death, prisoners in affliction and in irons…. Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death and burst their bonds apart.”) The older version of “O Antiphons” recognizes that Luke 1:79 is language of being released from prison, and so the verse goes, “Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house, those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.”

Release of prisoners is a central idea in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus’ first sermon is about release of captives (Luke 4:16-30). He chooses Isaiah 61 as his base text: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” that is the Jubilee year when all who are poor and oppressed have their fortunes restored. Jesus also bases the Beatitudes and Woes (Luke 6:20-26) on Isaiah 61 and makes his fulfillment of Isaiah 61 the central evidence that he is the Coming One (Luke 7:22), that is, the rightful king (Luke 19:38), who delivers the needy (Psalm 72:1-4) .

The Christmas story in Luke 1-2 highlights ways in which Israel has been oppressed and is in need of deliverance. Luke 1:16-17 quotes Malachi in this regard. Luke 1:32-33, 35 speaks of Israel having a king again from David’s line with a never-ending kingdom. Mary’s Magnificat speaks of rulers being brought down from their thrones and the poor and hungry being cared for (1:46-56). Zechariah’s Benedictus speaks of a savior who would save Israel from its enemies (1:68-79). Luke 2:1-5 sets the birth of Jesus in the context of Roman oppression, referencing a census that had led to political revolt. Luke 2:25 speaks of “the consolation of Israel,” a reference to the political liberation prophesied in Isaiah 40:1. Luke 2:32 speaks of the return of glory to Israel in the midst of the nations. Luke 2:34 speaks of “the falling and the rising of many in Israel.” Luke 2:38 notes that people “were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.”

In other words, the early Christians were concerned about Roman oppression of Israel and the redemption of Israel. Prisoners would be set free. Kings would be toppled. The hungry would be fed. The Christmas story is about deliverance from political oppressors. As Jesus announces at the beginning of his Sermon on the Plain, “Blessed are you who are poor, … blessed are you who are hungry now, … blessed are you who weep now” (Luke 6:20-21). The Gospel is about the exalted being humbled and the humble being exalted (Luke 14:11; 18:14). In early Christianity, the rich gave up their positions of power (Luke 19:1-10; Acts 2:45; 4:32-37), and the poor were cared for (Acts 4:34-35). The God of Israel became the God of the nations (Rev 11:15), so that people all over the world worshiped Yahweh.

These are the themes Luke associated with the Christmas story. The old “O Antiphons,” on which the hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is based, captured some of these themes. As the hymn developed, we gradually abandoned the political ramifications of Christmas and made the whole message about what happens when you die.

This Christmas let’s remember the reason for the season: that “the hungry [might be] filled with good things” (Luke 1:53), that oppressed peoples “would be saved from [their] enemies” (1:71, 73), that we would “give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death” (1:79).

There have been times when we have remembered this. We see it in the 19th century hymn “O Holy Night,” where an abolitionist translator wrote: “Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother, and in His name all oppression shall cease.” Or even more recently, in the 1984 Christmas song, “Do They Know Its Christmas,” with its clear message:

Spare a thought this yuletide for the deprived.
If the table was turned would you survive?
Here’s to them underneath that burning sun.
You ain’t gotta feel guilt, just selfless,
Give a little help to the helpless.
Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?
Feed the world.
Feed the world.
Feed the world.
Feed the world.
Feed the world.
Let them know it’s Christmastime again.

The true way to put Christ back in Christmas is to feed the hungry, to set the oppressed free, to meet the needs of others. Let us make that our focus. Merry Christmas!

Want to keep Christ in Christmas?

“Romans Road” Evangelism and the Misuse of Scripture

I became an evangelical Christian while in college in the nineties. Most of what I knew about Christianity came from what I learned at the megachurch I attended, from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at OSU, from my first read of the Bible from start to end, and from Christian radio. I did not realize how modern of a phenomenon evangelical Christianity was. In my view, evangelicals were recovering the “biblical” Christianity that had been lost through the legalism or liberalism of past generations of Christianity.

Evangelicalism was also simple. We were told what to believe about debated theological issues, difficult ethical questions, or hot political topics. It’s not that preachers commanded us to believe these things. It was the culture of evangelicalism. We all thought the same, voted the same, and saw the same issues as central to the gospel.

It wasn’t until after I earned my doctorate in theological studies at an evangelical seminary that I started to realize how different the biblical world was from the modern evangelical world and how different we think today about theological, political, and ethical issues than Jesus or Paul did. This has caused me in recent years to revisit the foundation that my faith was laid upon in the nineties.

One fundamental issue that I have rethought heavily over the years is our understanding of the basic gospel message. I wrote about this in my article “The Biblical Gospel vs. the Evangelical Gospel,” where I noted that the Gospels don’t present what we think of as “the gospel,” and I demonstrated that “the gospel” according to the biblical authors was centered on God’s kingdom coming to earth, not on how to go to heaven when you die, a topic that is rarely addressed in the Bible.

In this post I want to do something similar, but instead of focusing on the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, I want to look at the book of Romans and particularly the idea that Romans gives us a roadmap to salvation, commonly referred to as “the Romans Road,” a series of verses isolated from their context by the Baptist preacher Jack Hyles in 1948. I want to demonstrate that Romans is addressing an entirely different question and that the popular use of Romans to teach someone how they can go to heaven when they die is a misuse of Scripture that makes the Bible serve our theology rather than uses the Bible to teach us theology.

The “Romans Road”

One of the ways I was taught in the nineties to explain my faith was to walk people through Paul’s teachings in Romans. According to this teaching, there were four basic ideas in Romans that needed to be highlighted:

  1. We are all sinners, who have displeased God: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23, ESV; cf. Romans 3:10)
  2. We deserve the judgment of death and hell: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23, ESV)
  3. God has freely offered heaven instead of hell: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, ESV)
  4. In order to experience this, we must make a confession of faith: “because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.… For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Romans 10:9-10, 13, ESV)

This is such a simple and memorable way to present the gospel that it has been used extensively and has become our very definition of what “the gospel” means: we sinners can escape hell and go to heaven by believing in Jesus. The problem is that this is not at all how Paul defines the gospel in Romans and that each of the passages here is taken out of context to get this interpretation of the gospel.

“The Gospel” According to Paul

Paul defines “the gospel” right at the beginning of Romans. Not surprisingly, his definition is close to Jesus’s definition. I noted in “The Biblical Gospel vs. the Evangelical Gospel” that Jesus repeatedly defines the gospel as being about God’s reign being established on earth, not about what happens to an individual when they die. From Jesus’s first words, he preached, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:14-15). The good news is that God’s reign is beginning. This is also what he taught the disciples to preach: “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 10:7). Repeatedly Jesus’s teaching is summarized as being “the gospel of the kingdom” (Matt 4:23; 9:35; 24:14; Luke 4:43; 8:1; 16:16; cf. John 3:3, 5). The gospel, or “good news,” is not what happens when you die, but that in Jesus God is dethroning Satan and taking over the rule of earth.

This is also what Paul says at the beginning of Romans:

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God—the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. [Romans 1:1-4, NIV]

Paul is introducing himself here as someone who was “set apart for the gospel of God.” This gives him an opportunity to explain what that gospel is: it is a gospel “regarding his Son.” What does it say about the Son? He has earthly royal pedigree (“a descendant of David”), but he has also been appointed as the agent of God’s rule in heavenly places by being raised from the dead. “Son of God” is a royal title. Kings from Egypt to Rome claimed divine authority to reign on earth by being the son of God.

(Interestingly, translators have had trouble with the word “appointed” in Romans 1:4. Other versions use the word “declared” for fear of giving the impression that Jesus was not Son of God until the resurrection, but the Greek word here does not mean “declared” and is regularly translated “appointed” elsewhere. The KJV used the word “declared” and modern translations have generally followed suit. The 2011 revision of the NIV bucked this trend and went with the more accurate translation, “appointed.”)

So in Romans 1:3-4, Paul takes two verses to summarize the gospel, and he summarizes it as being about Jesus’s enthronement as Son of God in power. There is nothing here about what happens when you die or about making a decision of faith. The good news is that Jesus has now been appointed the true ruler of the earth. Caesar’s actions from Rome are not what decides things throughout the world, but Jesus’s actions from heaven do. This is the good news: it is the gospel of the kingdom. God has taken the throne in Jesus.

It is true that the next two verses in Romans (Romans 1:5-6) call people to belong to Jesus, and Romans 1:16 specifically addresses the salvation that comes through the gospel. But salvation is what happens because the gospel is true: because Jesus has taken the throne, those who trust in him will experience the blessings of the kingdom. Our salvation is not the good news itself; it is one of the side effects of the good news that God is taking charge of the earth.

Salvation in Romans

The fact that Romans 1:16 mentions “salvation” indicates that Paul does have something to say in Romans about “being saved,” but it is not what modern interpreters think. Hell is never mentioned or even hinted at in Romans. Salvation in Romans 1:16 is from the wrath of God that is being revealed “on earth” in Romans 1:18. Repeatedly Paul mentions the judgment of God that people experience:

  • “they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:21),
  • “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves” (Romans 1:24),
  • “God gave them up to dishonorable passions” (Romans 1:26),
  • “God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done” (Romans 1:28).

All these things lead to death (Romans 1:32), but because Jesus overcame death and is enthroned over death and all hostile forces, we can experience life everlasting. And not only that, but it is a different life than the one described in the bullet points above. We can “be transformed by the renewal of [our] mind” and offer our bodies “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Romans 12:1-2). This is what salvation is: no longer living according to the flesh, but living according to the Spirit (Romans 6-7).

By making Romans about how to go to heaven when you die or about how to escape hell, we read the word “salvation” and hear something very different than what Paul intended. Not once does Romans describe heaven as a place where you go when you die. Not once does Romans describe the wrath of God as going to hell when you die. Not once does Romans describe the goal of salvation as being going to heaven. These are later theological concepts that are not on Paul’s mind. If we want to hear what Romans says, we need to stop coming to it with our questions and start going to it with an open mind, ready to hear what God might have been saying through Paul.

The Message of Romans

So what is the purpose of Romans? It is to show that God is just or righteous in saving Gentiles from the judgment described above. I used to read the words, “the righteousness of God is revealed” (Romans 1:17; 3:21), as speaking of an imputed righteousness, as if it was saying, “now we can see where we get righteousness from – God.” It wasn’t until I taught a seminary course on Romans that I noticed that Paul spells out what he means in Romans 3:5: “if our unrighteousness serves to reveal the righteousness of God, what shall we say, that God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us?” The context there is a quotation of Psalm 51:4, which says that God is “justified” in judging David. This is not about how David can be righteous, but a question of how God can be righteous in punishing or rewarding David as he sees fit. As Paul says later in Romans, God “has mercy on whomever he wills and hardens whomever he wills” (Romans 9:18). Romans is dealing with a question of theodicy: is God good? If many of the people God made promises to (Israel) are rejecting God’s reign, and many who have never worshiped God (the Gentiles) are receiving it, is that fair? How should people understand the differing responses to Jesus among Jews and Gentiles? This is the question Romans addresses from beginning to end. In the process, Paul says some things about salvation being by God’s grace, but he is not talking about how to get saved; he is talking about how to think about God’s actions among Jews and Gentiles. Paul is justifying God’s activity of saving many Gentiles and judging many Jews in his day.

Of course, even if Romans was written to address a different question than the one we are asking, the book still has things to say about our questions, but there are a few things we should keep in mind:

  1. It is important to read Romans not on our terms, but on Paul’s terms. We can’t just listen to the book for what we want to hear and not let it challenge us about questions we weren’t even thinking about.
  2. We need to remember that Paul uses terms very differently than we use them. Just as “salvation” meant something different to Paul than it means to us, so do other key words: “faith,” “believe,” “works,” “glory,” “death,” “eternal life.” We need to be careful not to assume that Paul is using those words the way we’ve used them.
  3. We need to pay attention to the context of the verses we quote. By quoting Romans 3:23; 6:23; 5:8; 10:9-10 and others apart from the larger argument they are part of, we start hearing different things in those verses than what Paul is teaching.

The Verses in “the Romans Road”

Let us consider the four points of Romans Road evangelism and note how differently we are reading these verses than Paul intended them.

Are We All Sinners? (Romans 3:23)

“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23, ESV).

We make two errors when we quote Romans 3:10 or Romans 3:23 in the context of “the Romans Road.” First, we read Paul more individualistically than he intends. Paul’s point is that all – Jews as well as Gentiles – have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That’s why the fuller quote is “For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. … Then what becomes of our [Jews’] boasting? It is excluded. … Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since God is one—who will justify the circumcised [Jews] by faith and the uncircumcised [Gentiles] through faith” (Romans 3:22-30). We hear the word “all” as “every person,” whereas what Paul is saying is “Jew and Gentile alike.” The point being made here is not an individualistic salvation point, but a national pride point.

Second, we read “fall short of the glory of God” as if it means that God is judging us for not being as glorious as he is, something that we were never intended to be. It might be better to think here in terms of the image of God. Like the nations [Gentiles], Jews have fallen short of being representatives of God’s glory. Their justification comes not from how well they have represented God, but “by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24). It is in Jesus that Jews (and Gentiles!) are finally able to bear the image and glory of God (Romans 5:2; 8:18-30).

The message of Romans 3:23 is that the playing field between Jew and Gentile is level (cf. Romans 3:9). What the Romans Road tries to make Romans 3:23 say is that we are all sinners. Now Paul knew as well as we do that nobody is perfect, but Paul never expected anyone to be perfect and neither did the Old Testament Law, which included rituals to deal with our imperfections. Romans Road evangelism gives people an improper view of what God expects and leads to unhealthy levels of guilt.

I have a friend who when asked how he is doing will always answer, “Better than I deserve.” He has taken Romans Road theology to its logical conclusion: we deserve the wrath of God rather than the love of God. Not only is this not what Romans 3:23 is saying, but it opposes what Paul is arguing in Romans. Paul argues that God “will repay each person according to his works: to those who [persist] in doing good … he will give eternal life, but for those who are self-seeking, … there will be wrath and anger” (Romans 2:6-8). By misreading Romans 3:23, we have made Paul’s argument out to be that we all deserve hell, when Paul’s point is more that God is just in treating Jews and Gentiles the same as each other. In Paul’s view, many Gentiles deserve God’s commendation rather than his judgment (Romans 2:13-16, 26-29).

Do We All Deserve Hell? (Romans 6:23)

“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23, ESV).

As a young Christian, I often used Romans 6:23 to explain the gospel. I didn’t need the full Romans Road; all the aspects of the Romans Road gospel could be found in this verse: sin, wages, death; God, gift, eternal life in Jesus, Messiah and Lord. I would explain that we have all sinned and that death is what sinners have earned just as wages are what an employee has earned. I would explain that eternal life is not what we deserve but is a “free gift,” and that it can only be obtained by making Jesus Lord, thereby surrendering to him.

The first thing that made me realize that this interpretation of Romans 6:23 is problematic is when I started studying the Old Testament Law. There were sins that lead to death and sins that do not lead to death. I was surprised to discover that sacrifices could be made only for sins that do not deserve death; there was no sacrifice for sins punishable by death (Exodus 21:12-14; Leviticus 4-5; Numbers 15:30; etc.). This severely challenged my view that sacrifices were substitutes. I had always thought that the wages of sin is death, but God allows an animal’s death to be a substitute for the person’s death. That idea is foreign to Scripture. Sacrifices were offerings to restore one’s relationship to God, not substitutes for one’s own blood.

So why does Paul say the wages of sin is death? In context he is discussing the difference between Adam’s sin and Jesus’s free gift. That is how this section of Romans begins. Paul says in Romans 5:12-21 that death came into the world through Adam’s sin. “Therefore, as one trespass [Adam’s sin in the Garden] led to condemnation for all men [mortality/death], so one act of righteousness [Jesus’s sacrifice] leads to justification and life for all men [Jew and Gentile].” (Romans 5:18, ESV). Paul expounds this idea through the next three chapters of Romans. In Romans 6, Paul is calling people to no longer live in Adam’s sin, but to “present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life” (Romans 6:13). Romans 6:23 sums up the argument so far: the wages of [Adam’s] sin is death [mortality], but the free gift of God is eternal life [by living in] Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Romans 6:23 says nothing about us deserving hell or judgment. It is a call to live in Christ rather than in Adam, to live in the Spirit rather than in the flesh. That’s why Romans 7–8  contrasts the flesh and the Spirit. “For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6). To make Romans 6:23 out as if it were bad news about what someone who commits a single sin deserves is to miss Paul’s argument. It is not as if because we fail to be perfect, we deserve a spiritual and eternal death. The Torah made it clear that most failures do not result in death. The point is that we are mortal because sin entered the world through Adam, but immortality is now available through Jesus.

Romans Road evangelism has the danger of making salvation out to be an intellectual transaction: you really deserve hell, but God is so gracious he’ll give you heaven instead if you pray this prayer. Romans 6:23 instead teaches that there are two paths: one, the way of Adam, leads to death, and the other, the way of Christ, leads to life. Watch that you walk the path of righteousness rather than the path of sin.

Has God Freely Offered Heaven Instead of Hell? (Romans 5:8)

“But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, ESV)

The third part of the Romans Road is stronger than the first two. The only dangers here come in (1) missing the Father’s love here and (2) making this about escaping hell and going to heaven. Some evangelistic proclamations make it out as if God the Father is the angry judge waiting to punish sinners, and Jesus is appeasing his wrath. I have addressed this in my post “Did Jesus Experience the Father’s Wrath?” In short, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. Or in the words of this passage, “God shows his love for us.” This is why it doesn’t work to say we are “just sinners saved by grace.” Biblically we are God’s children, predestined to bear his image and glory (Romans 8:29-30). We are instruments of God’s love through and through. Presentations of the Romans Road that emphasize the Father’s love here are good. The similar Four Spiritual Laws also has this strength in that it begins with God’s love.

But there is also the danger of making this about heaven and hell, which it is not. Romans 5–8 is looking forward to “the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19), which will transform creation. Romans has a very this-world focus, and Christ’s death for us is not so we can go to heaven when we die but so we can live a new life and redeem the whole earth (Romans 8:19-23). We look forward to the return of Jesus and the final defeat of all evil on earth (Romans 11:26). A better reading of Romans is one that looks to the transformation of earth rather than one that looks forward to a disembodied state after death.

Is It Really About a Confession of Faith? (Romans 10:9-10)

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” (Romans 10:9-10, ESV)

In the twentieth century, evangelism became more and more about bringing people to a moment of decision, the moment when they would be “born again” (a misunderstanding of John 3:3, 5, and the same misunderstanding that Nicodemus himself makes), the moment when they would be “saved” (though Paul speaks of salvation largely as a future act, Romans 5:10, etc.). And what better passage to emphasize making a decision in your heart and confessing it with your lips than Romans 10:9-10? The irony is that Paul is doing something very different in Romans 10, and biblically, confessions don’t mean as much as we make them out to (cf. Matthew 7:21-27).

Romans 10 is difficult to understand, and I have only recently begun to feel like I see where Paul is going here. Paul uses a series of passages in Romans 9 (Genesis 21:12; 18:10, 14; 25:23; Malachi 1:2-3; Exodus 33:19; 9:16; Isaiah 29:16; 45:9; Hosea 2:23; 1:10; Isaiah 10:22-23; 1:9; 28:16) to explain why Israel is largely failing to obtain salvation.

Romans 10:9-10 is not a major point Paul is making, but a transition comment. Paul has just quoted Deuteronomy 30:14 (“The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”), and he is using it to make the point that Gentiles could receive this word as well. Look at the next three verses: “For the Scripture says, ‘Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing riches on all who call on him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:11-13, ESV). The argument is very similar to the one we find in Romans 3:21-31, but here the point is that what is needed is something Gentiles as well as Jews can do, as long as Jews faithfully proclaim the message to Gentiles (Romans 10:14-17). This is what Paul is doing, proclaiming to Gentiles the gospel of God’s reign being established in Jesus’s resurrection and ascension. That makes Paul’s ministry a fulfillment of Isaiah 52:7 (Romans 10:15). Romans 10:9-10 is not about what we must do to be saved, but about how you don’t need to do Jewish things to be saved. Many who do Jewish things have missed out on salvation altogether (Romans 9:31; 10:3).

Often Paul’s message about not needing to do works of the law (Jewish things) gets misinterpreted in evangelical preaching to mean that we are not rewarded for our good works, but we have already seen in Romans 2:6-11 that Paul says we are rewarded for our good works. Evangelical preaching tends to make everything about the moment of decision and praying the sinner’s prayer, but to Paul it is about keeping in step with the Spirit (Galatians 5:16-25), about walking in Christ rather than in Adam (Romans 6:1-23), and about working out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12-13). By omitting verses like these and selecting verses that can be read out of context to promote the Romans Road gospel, we preach a somewhat different gospel than the one the Bible presents.

Conclusion

Romans is not a roadmap to heaven. It is not about how to escape hell. Romans is assurance that God knows what he is doing and that we should therefore obey him. As Paul says at both the beginning and the end of the letter, he wants “to bring about the obedience of faith” among all nations (Romans 1:5; 16:26). The good news or “gospel” is the announcement that Jesus is on the throne. The result of this announcement shouldn’t be that we all grab a “Get out of hell free” card, but that we should submit to his Lordship and walk in Jesus now rather than in Adam. That is the true Romans road.

The popular Romans Road evangelism flattens this and makes Romans about teaching that we all deserve hell but can get to heaven by saying, “Lord, Lord.” The true teaching of Romans is that sin leads to death, righteousness leads to life, and by being more like Jesus we can escape enslavement to sin (Romans 6:5-14) and live that righteousness that leads to life. We choose to offer our bodies as living sacrifices not because we want to escape hell, but because we can … and because it is what we have always wanted (Romans 7:16-20).

A popular reading of select verses from Romans gives improper levels of guilt, an emphasis on our intellectual beliefs, and a desire to escape hell and obtain heaven. A good reading of Romans gives us excitement about who God is and what he is doing, an emphasis on our actions as being actions appropriate to the reign of God, and a desire to transform the earth and bring about the new creation. One approach is popular; the other is biblical.

Polygamy in the Bible: A Response to David Instone-Brewer

Recently the Logos Bible Software blog posted an excerpt from David Instone-Brewer’s book Moral Questions of the Bible: Timeless Truths in a Changing World that argued that “Jesus criticized polygamy as a warped version of the lifelong committed relationship of a one-plus-one marriage.” Instone-Brewer recognizes that up until the Roman era (about the time of Jesus), polygamy was considered a valid marriage model both in biblical thought and within Judaism in general, but he argues that “Jesus took the side of the Romans against the Jewish establishment on this occasion.”

I have been concerned for quite some time about a modern tendency to twist the Bible to say what we want it to say rather than to listen to what it actually says, and here, in my opinion, is a classic example. In this article, I want to show how Instone-Brewer has twisted the words of Jesus and Paul to oppose polygamy. In a subsequent article I will survey the biblical teaching on the subject, showing that the Bible does not condemn polygamy, and consider what the Bible’s failure to oppose polygamy means for the church today in view of the recent uptick in “ethical non-monogamy.”

The (Foreign?) “Problem of Polygamy”

The blog post begins with a section titled, “The Problem of Polygamy Today,” though its focus is on polygamy encountered on the mission field, with no mention of the fact that ethical non-monogamy is not a merely foreign issue that missionaries encounter in some distant land. Increasingly the western world is questioning the normalization of monogamy, with one recent study noting that 24% of Gen Xers and 37% of Millennials failed to “somewhat agree” or “strongly agree” with the statement that couples should be monogamous. So we don’t need to make this an issue that relates to some hypothetical “African tribal chief” out there as Instone-Brewer does. This is an issue that is all around us. I know of people who don’t go to church anymore because they are afraid that their relationship will not be accepted by churchgoers.

The Instone-Brewer quote in this section on “The Problem of Polygamy Today” is particularly troubling:

When an African tribal chief converts to Christianity, what happens to all his wives? Should he divorce them and send them back to their parents’ home in shame and penury, or should he live away from them in a separate house, but continue to provide for them financially? This is a classic problem for missionaries in countries that practice polygamy, and one to which there is no easy answer—just the fervent hope that the next generation will marry only one wife! It must seem very strange for those polygamous families when their normal, socially acceptable lifestyle is suddenly regarded as immoral.

No, Dr. Instone-Brewer, there is an easy answer: stop imposing Western values on the peoples we do missionary work amongst! Stop opposing the words of the prophets about divorce (Malachi 2:16) or the words of Jesus that what God has joined together, let no one separate (Mark 10:9)! If, as you admit, the Old Testament and other Palestinian Jews of Jesus’ day saw polygamy as acceptable, who are we to regard the polygamy of your hypothetical African tribal chief as “immoral”? When sending people away in shame is considered a better option than fidelity to marriage, you know that Western values have trumped biblical values, especially if, as we will note in the next post, the Bible never opposes polygamy.

Did Jesus Side with the Romans against the Old Testament?

But Instone-Brewer has what he considers a biblical reason for thinking divorce or separation is better than polygamy. He argues that while “[p]olygamy had been considered perfectly normal and proper [in Judaism] until the Romans took over, … Jesus took the side of the Romans against the Jewish establishment.” With these words Instone-Brewer commits a common and troubling rhetorical move, referring to “the Jewish establishment.” Christians have long struggled with anti-Semitism (yes, even us evangelicals today!), and we have trouble hearing the words “the Jewish establishment” and not automatically thinking, “That must be right, because we know that opposing the Jewish establishment was what Jesus was all about.” Jesus the Jew had a much larger problem with Roman beliefs and ethics than he did with his own religion and especially with a practice that was rooted in the Old Testament and practiced by the most faithful Jews throughout history. (On the Old Testament view of polygamy, see my other post, “The Bible, Polygamy, and the Church Today.”)

But another problem should be immediately evident to us: Jesus never addresses the topic! Instone-Brewer has to take Jesus’ teaching about divorce in Mark 10:1-12 and make an inference from it about what Jesus thinks about polygamy. His logic, however, is so convoluted that we have to admit it is an effort to twist Jesus’ words to make the Bible say what Instone-Brewer wishes it would say. Here is the logic:

First, Dr. Instone-Brewer notes that there were some Jews in Palestine (specifically the Qumran community) and many outside Palestine (in the greater Roman world) who agreed with the Romans that polygamy is immoral. He then notes that the Qumran community read Genesis 1:27 (“God created them male and female”) alongside Genesis 7:9 (“two and two, male and female, they went into the ark”) to imply that only two people could marry. His point is not that these passages make this point or that the logic of the Qumran community is a good interpretation of these texts. (“We may not be convinced by their logic, but as far as they were concerned it was case proven.”) He just wants to make the point that Genesis 1:27 is important to the Qumran community for this reason.

Then Instone-Brewer notes that Jews in the diaspora (i.e., those outside Palestine) had another way of seeing polygamy as against Scripture. He gets this idea simply from the fact that when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, the translators “added a word to Genesis 2:24.” Whereas the Hebrew text could be translated, “Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife, and they will be one flesh”; the Greek translation says, “For this reason a man will leave behind his father and his mother and cling to his wife, and the two will be one flesh.” Instone-Brewer argues that the words “the two” were added to “to show that polygamy was wrong.”

But the Septuagint (Greek) translation of the Hebrew Bible regularly uses dynamic equivalent translations, and Instone-Brewer is probably reading too much into why the translators used the words “the two” here. Since the passage was speaking of two people here, Adam and Eve, the words “the two” would have been a natural choice. Furthermore, even polygamists saw marriage as a union between two people; they simply thought that the man could become one flesh with one woman and then one flesh with another. Even the apostle Paul could apply Genesis 2:24 to the case of a married man having relations with a prostitute: now he, who is one flesh with Christ and with his wife, is also one flesh with a prostitute (1 Corinthians 6:16). It is not at all clear how saying that “two” become one in marriage tells us anything about whether that two-to-one transformation can happen with another person after the initial marriage union. When Abraham took Sarah as his wife, the two became one flesh even though Abraham also had concubines (Genesis 25:6) and, after Sarah’s death, took another wife, Keturah (Genesis 25:1), who presumably also was made “one flesh” with him. It says in 2 Samuel 12:8 that God “gave” King David multiple wives, but this does not mean that there was no point at which “the two” became one flesh. Polygamy in the ancient world was a repeated experience of two becoming one flesh. Why David Instone-Brewer reads the Greek translation of Genesis 2:24 as an attempt “to show that polygamy was wrong” is unclear.

But the argument gets even more convoluted. Instone-Brewer writes:

When the Pharisees were questioning Jesus about divorce, he took the opportunity to set them straight about polygamy, too. Jesus used both sets of arguments used by other Jews. He quoted the key verse used by Qumran Jews (Gen 1:27) and even said this was what happened “at the beginning of creation” (Mark 10:6, which presumably reminded his listeners that Qumran Jews called this “the foundation of creation”). Then he quoted the verse preferred by Jews outside Palestine—Genesis 2:24—including the additional word “two” (Mark 10:8; Matt 19:5). By deliberately using both arguments, Jesus emphasized that he agreed with those Jews who taught monogamy, contrary to the Pharisees.

This argument is loaded with problems. First, Jesus did not take “the opportunity to set them straight about polygamy, too.” There is no indication in Mark 10 that the issue of polygamy has even entered Jesus’ mind. The passage is about divorce, and Jesus argues that Scripture is on the side of those who do not permit it. This is where Jesus keeps his focus throughout the passage, and it is twisting the words of Jesus to imply that he is addressing a different issue than the one the passage is about. It is possible when we speak to one topic that what we say may have implications for another topic, but to claim that Jesus was trying to “set them straight about polygamy, too” is to twist Scripture.

Of course, Instone-Brewer claims that this is what Jesus is doing because he thinks that the word “the two” here in the Gospel of Mark means Jesus took the side of those who thought marriage was limited to two people, but this is problematic as well. First of all, the Gospel of Mark is written in Greek, not Hebrew, and Mark regularly quotes the Greek version of the Old Testament though Jesus would have quoted the Hebrew text that did not contain the words “the two.” This is the way the Gospels generally work. If I quote Jesus, I generally quote an English translation. This doesn’t mean I think Jesus used the exact words in this translation; it’s just a way of quoting the text as my audience is familiar with it. By using the words “the two,” Mark simply quotes the text as his Greek audience knows it, without making any claim that Jesus used those words over the Hebrew version of Genesis 2:24 or that Mark prefers the use of the words “the two” over a version that lacks those words. Instone-Brewer is reading too much into the form of Mark’s quotation here.

There is another problem with Instone-Brewer’s argument. He implies that Jesus’ reason for quoting both Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24 is because Jesus wants to show his agreement with both anti-polygamist groups (neither of which he is a part) over against the mainstream view of Palestinian Jews (the group he is in!). Not only is this a wild guess at why Jesus quoted these two passages, but it is unlikely. Remember that Jesus is addressing the issue of divorce, not polygamy. Would it not be natural – even if polygamy is not on your mind – to turn to the two creation texts that address marriage when discussing the legality of divorce? Why suggest that Jesus turns to these two texts because he happens to know that some scroll stored at Qumran uses the one text against polygamy and that someone might (mis)read the Greek translation of the other text as opposing polygamy? Jesus’ audience is an Aramaic-speaking audience in Palestine, not the community gathered in Qumran or diaspora Jews who would have been most familiar with the Greek form of the text. Instone-Brewer’s argument is so forced that we must conclude it is nothing other than eisegesis, an effort to make Scripture say what we want it to say, which should strike us as quite troubling!

There are other problems here, including how Instone-Brewer subtly identifies the pro-polygamy stance with “the Pharisees” though I am not aware of any evidence that suggests it was a particularly Pharisaic belief, and how he suggests that Jesus is reminding his listeners of Qumran views when it is not clear that others wouldn’t have called this “the beginning of creation” or that Jesus’ audience was that familiar with Qumranic theology. But to keep this brief I want to focus instead on Instone-Brewer’s claim that Jesus “deliberately us[ed] both arguments” to “emphasize[] that he agreed with those Jews who taught monogamy, contrary to the Pharisees.” This is a twisting of Jesus’ argument plain and simple. Jesus is not speaking about the issue of polygamy; he did not use arguments against polygamy here but simply quoted Scripture having to do with marriage and divorce; he never contrasted himself to the Pharisees with regard to polygamy; and he does not here express any agreement or disagreement with anyone on the issue of polygamy. Instone-Brewer is wrong on every point.

This is not to say that Jesus didn’t have a stance on polygamy. Jesus seems to have been pro-celibacy in general (Matthew 19:10-12). One can imagine that if someone asked him, “Should I take a second wife?” he would have answered, “Better is he that takes no wives at all!” But would he have seen those with multiple wives as having engaged in an “immoral” activity by marrying them? There is nothing in the Bible that suggests this.

Did “Jesus and Paul Change God’s Commands”?

Instone-Brewer follows his discussion of Mark 10:1-12 with an argument that Paul “took the teaching against polygamy further by reversing the command that a man had to marry his dead brother’s wife.” In short, the Old Testament commands that if a man dies, having given his wife no children, his next of kin is obligated to marry her (even if that man already has a wife) and to give her a son who could carry on his brother’s family line. Instone-Brewer takes Paul’s command that a widow is “free to marry whomever she wishes” (1 Corinthians 7:39) as a reversal of this Old Testament law. But there are two major problems with his argument.

First, the levirate marriage law is specific to widows who have no sons and would not have applied to widows in general. Second, the law was not taken in Paul’s day (or even in Ruth’s day a millennium earlier!) as requiring the woman to marry the next of kin if there was another potential suitor for her. This law was already understood within Judaism to give the widow the freedom “to marry whomever she wishes.” To see Paul’s words here as reversing an Old Testament command is to twist Paul’s words out of a desire to make the New Testament anti-polygamy.

Instone-Brewer then asks, “Why did Jesus and Paul change God’s commands?” His answer: God’s commands are temporary and it’s God’s purposes that should always be the focus. He explains this as follows:

God’s purpose for marriage was to help individuals find mutual support in families. When there were too few men due to warfare, this purpose was accomplished by allowing polygamy to ensure male heirs. In more stable times, polygamy resulted in many men remaining single because wealthy men could have many wives. In order to maintain God’s purposes at times like these, the rule about polygamy had to change. God’s purposes are eternal, but his commands change in order to carry out those purposes in different situations. We might summarize God’s purpose in the words of Psalm 68:6: “God sets the lonely in families.”

In other words, Instone-Brewer suggests that polygamy was intended for times where there is a great disparity between the number of men and the number of women in a culture. If there is no such disparity, polygamy is immoral because it opposes God’s ideal of setting the lonely in families. (One could note that polyandry, the marriage of multiple men to one woman, could reverse any disparity created by polygyny, the marriage of multiple women to one man, but this is besides the point here.) Here again, Instone-Brewer is twisting Scripture. Psalm 68:6 is not giving the purpose of marriage. It is a verse about how God provides a home for the fatherless and the widow. The NRSV gives a more literal translation than the NIV here: “God gives the desolate a home to live in.” This is not about “loneliness” so that it should be applied to the poor man who is single because the rich men have taken all the available wives; it is about a person who does not have family – no brothers or cousins or anyone to take them in. Mephibosheth is a classic example (2 Samuel 9). He didn’t need a wife; he needed a king to take him into his home. Marriage may be one way that God gives the desolate a home to live in, but we show our lack of awareness of ancient Near Eastern hospitality when we think that Psalm 68:6 means everyone should be able to marry someone. That is not at all what David was talking about in this psalm.

Conclusion

David Instone-Brewer concludes that “Jesus criticized polygamy as a warped version of the lifelong committed relationship of a one-plus-one marriage.” When we examine his arguments, we find that he has built one forced argument on another to make Jesus say something that Jesus does not say. This should trouble anyone with a commitment to Scripture, regardless of what we think of the ethics of polygamy.

God forbid that any of us should let our traditions trump Scripture. God forbid that we should use our intellectual prowess and our research (two things Dr. Instone-Brewer has in abundance!) to twist the words of Jesus! We may think marriage should be a lifelong union between one man and one woman, but let us not make out the Bible to say this just because we believe it.

If we are going to be faithful to Scripture, we need to be more open-minded when reading it. We need to listen to what the Bible actually says rather than what we want it to say. In my next post, I will attempt to do this, surveying the Biblical teachings on polygamy and then considering why monogamy might be desirable even if it is not mandatory. But we should always start with Scripture and move to interpretation. If we start with the interpretation we want and then seek words like “the two” and “whomever she wishes” as phrases that we can hang new meanings on, then Scripture is no longer our guide; instead we have decided that we will guide Scripture according to our values. And that is a troubling abuse of Scripture.

The Bible, Polygamy, and the Church Today

It is often said that the Bible defines marriage as “a lifelong commitment between one man and one woman,” meaning that polygamy is unbiblical.[1] But the Bible offers no such definition and has a very different take on polygamy. Lamech, Jacob, Esau, Gideon, Elkanah (the father of Samuel), David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijah, Ahab, Jehoram, Joash, and Jehoiachin were all polygamists. In addition, Nahor, Abraham, Jacob, Eliphaz, Manasseh, Caleb, Gideon, Saul, David, Solomon, and Rehoboam all had concubines. We do not know how many others in Scripture had multiple wives; these are just the ones whose wives come into the story. Moses may have been a polygamist, too, but it is not clear if his Midianite wife Zipporah was still alive when he took his Cushite wife in Numbers 12, less than a year after Zipporah comes to him in Exodus 18.

Polygamy in the Law of Moses

It is not that these men disregarded the law of God. The law itself allowed for and even called for polygamy in certain situations. There were certain restrictions put in place, such as Leviticus 18:18, which says you should not marry both a woman and her sister (as Jacob did). And there were instructions about how to do polygamy well: “If a man takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife” (Exodus 21:10). Or consider Deuteronomy 21:15-17:

If a man has two wives, one of them loved and the other disliked, and if both the loved and the disliked have borne him sons, the firstborn being the son of the one who is disliked, then on the day when he wills his possessions to his sons, he is not permitted to treat the son of the loved as the firstborn in preference to the son of the disliked, who is the firstborn. He must acknowledge as firstborn the son of the one who is disliked, giving him a double portion of all that he has; since he is the first issue of his virility, the right of the firstborn is his.

In other words, the Torah does not view polygamy as a bad thing itself; it simply commands husbands to love their wives well, regardless of how many wives they may have.

Another law states that if a man dies, leaving a widow with no sons, his next of kin should marry her, which would often lead to the next of kin having multiple wives (Deuteronomy 25:5-10). But polygamy was necessary in a patriarchal, war-torn society. When woman are largely dependent on men for their sustenance and survival and men are dying in war, multiple women needed to be attached to one man (cf. Isaiah 4:1). And so the law of Moses was written to allow for and even encourage polygamy.

Polygamy: A Blessing or a Curse?

Of course, most men could not afford multiple wives, but the wealthy could, which is why those listed above tend to be kings and prosperous patriarchs. But for those who could have multiple wives, it was not only an acceptable arrangement, but was viewed as a sign of God’s blessing. It was because Jacob had two wives and two concubines that he was able to have twelve sons and become the father of the twelve tribes of Israel. The prophet Nathan tells David that it was God who gave him Saul’s wives when Saul died, and God would have given him more (2 Samuel 12:8)! His multiple marriages were God’s gift to him. In other words, the Old Testament portrays multiple wives as a good and desirable thing. If “he who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains pleasure from the LORD” (Proverbs 18:22), how much more the one who finds two wives? This is why the heroes of the Bible are the men with more wives and concubines. These were a sign that these men were blessed by God. And in turn, having multiple wives allowed these men to have a “quiverful” of sons (cf. Psalm 127).

At the same time, the Bible highlights challenges that come with multiple marriages. Because Jacob favored Rachel over Leah, the two struggled for his attention. Something similar happened with Peninnah and Hannah, the wives of Elkanah. Even Sarah and Hagar had tension that did not end well for Hagar. This is why the Torah has the laws that it does about not marrying a woman and her sister or about not neglecting the first wife when taking a second: polygamy presents challenges not known to a monogamous family. It can become easy for one wife to be neglected when a “better” one comes along, and this neglect is a sin.

The story of Solomon is even more striking. Solomon is criticized for having taken many wives, but the problem is not that he was polygamous (this was expected of a king), but that he married foreign wives who led him to introduce the worship of other gods in Judah. It is here that sin comes into the picture, according to the biblical worldview. Polygamy is not a sin, but it has the potential of tempting one toward sin.

Marriage and Biblical Wisdom

So does the Bible define marriage in monogamous terms? No. The Bible allows for multiple marriages but disallows the mistreatment of a spouse. The Bible also urges wisdom. The king is told that he “must not acquire many wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away; also silver and gold he must not acquire in great quantity for himself” (Deuteronomy 17:17, NRSV). How many wives is “many” and how much silver and gold is a “great quantity” is not specified. Wisdom calls for temperance. Just because someone can have more than one spouse doesn’t mean they should. Greed is one of the seven deadly sins because it turns us in upon ourselves. Jesus points to a better way: “If anyone wants to follow me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34). In all things – love, relationships, marriage, life – our goal is not to amass more but to love more.

Many who followed Jesus decided to forego marriage altogether. Paul warned: “The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman and the virgin are anxious about the affairs of the Lord, so that they may be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please her husband. I say this for your own benefit, not to put any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and unhindered devotion to the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 7:32-35). He clearly says in this same chapter that “if you marry, you do not sin, … yet those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that” (1 Corinthians 7:28). Perhaps the same can be said of polygamy: it is not a sin issue, but it is a wisdom issue. Is polygamy wise?

The Normalization of Monogamy

It was the Romans who introduced the idea that polygamy is immoral. While there is no biblical warrant for this assessment, there is wisdom to the Roman way. Sociologists have noted how polygamy is often rooted in economic disparity and can further that disparity, giving the wealthy man a larger family which can perpetuate its own power and wealth.[2] In times when a society is not war-torn, polygyny (multiple wives for one husband) can lead to poorer men being unable to find wives and have families. In some cases polygyny can lead to abuse, as is highlighted in the Netflix series “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey.” Not to mention that tensions are more likely to arise when there are multiple people desiring the attention of one, as we noted above.

This may be why Paul lists being “a one-woman man” as one of the qualifications for being an overseer or a deacon (1 Timothy 3:2, 12; Titus 1:6). This is the only place in the Bible where monogamy is held out as preferable to polygamy, and still here, polygamy is not seen as a sin. Was it because a polygamist would be too occupied with a larger family to be able to oversee the church well? Was it because a polygamist would be viewed less favorably in the wider Roman world? It is hard to know, but Paul does see wisdom in urging Timothy and Titus to appoint monogamist overseers and deacons.

We also see both in the New Testament and in the wider world around the New Testament an increasing status of women. So far we have considered only the concept of polygyny (one man, multiple wives), not the concept of polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands), an arrangement that is unknown in the biblical world. Polygyny is often rooted in a patriarchal society, but the New Testament is pushing toward a society where “there is neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28), where not only does a husband have authority over a wife but the wife has authority over the husband (1 Corinthians 7:4). This shift from a mentality where men own their wives to a more egalitarian model was perhaps not made fully enough to lead to polyandry in the first century but was made fully enough to make monogamy seem more natural than polygyny.

So the move to normalize monogamy happened naturally as Christianity gained influence in the Roman world and as Christians wrestled with what it meant for a wife to have authority over her husband’s body as well as vice versa. But this does not mean that polygamy is inherently sinful or forbidden. Nowhere is this thought expressed in the Bible. There are different family models, and there were good reasons for monogamy to become normalized, but it is not the only biblical family model.

What This Means for the Church Today

Polygamy is currently illegal in much of the western world, but it is likely only a matter of time before this changes, and already polyamory and other forms of consensual non-monogamy are becoming increasingly common.[3] The Church is not really ready for this. I have friends who are effectively in a polygamous marriage who wouldn’t dare walk into a church for fear of judgment. As the Casting Crowns song says, “The weight of their judgmental glances tells him that his chances are better out on the road.” People trying to manage multiple relationships are in need of biblical wisdom and the grace of God, and sadly they feel unwelcome in the Church. If we want to be the body of Christ, his “hands and feet,” we have to become like Jesus and be friends of those who live unconventional lifestyles. The purpose is not to convert them to conventional lifestyles but to help them fulfill the royal law of Scripture: to love selflessly.

Jesus said that the Torah and the Prophets all hang on two commandments: loving God and loving neighbor (Matthew 22:34-40). Elsewhere he said that the Law and the Prophets are summed up in doing to others “whatever you wish that people would do to you” (Matthew 7:12). Paul taught that “love is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:10). James said that “the royal law of Scripture” is to “love your neighbor as yourself” (James 2:8). Scripture repeatedly emphasizes that our calling is to love others. And when Jesus tells the disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them … and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you,” what he means is not that we should teach them all to be monogamists (something Jesus never taught), but that we should teach them what he said it all boils down to: loving God and loving neighbor.

This is what the world around us needs. How will marriages survive, especially marriages that involve multiple relationships? Through biblical, Christlike, self-sacrificial, unconditional love. The Church needs to model this in the way we love the world. We need to help the world see what it means to deny the self and to love others as we love ourselves.

The Bible gives a lot more freedom in defining marriage than we tend to admit, and the Bible is far more concerned with empowering people to love one another than with defining societal models. There is a reason for this: cultures change, and what it means to love our neighbor changes with the culture. This is why many of the Old Testament laws were no longer applicable in the New Testament. The enduring feature of biblical law is love of neighbor (Matthew 7:12; 22:34-40; cf. Romans 13:8-10). All else is commentary about how the Israelites could best do this in their own cultural setting.

The same can be said of Paul’s letters: He is giving instructions for how to live out the royal law within a particular cultural setting, but we must determine what that looks like in our own cultural context. This is why we read 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 and don’t require women to wear head coverings today. We recognize that Paul’s teaching about head coverings is instruction about how to love one’s neighbor in a different context than our own and that we must discover what it means for us to best love our neighbor in our own cultural context.

All biblical interpretation involves a process of determining the deeper principles that lie behind the context-based instruction, and determining how to best apply those principles in our own setting. Again, cultures change and what it means to love our neighbor changes with the culture. For centuries the Church has attempted to apply biblical wisdom to the traditional marriage, but as society moves away from traditional marriages, the Church should be there to help society see how biblical wisdom can help it navigate these changes.

Sinlessness, Holiness, and Wisdom

The Bible uses different models for thinking about right and wrong actions. The model most people are familiar with today is sin, which involves transgressing against a commandment of God. Having multiple partners is not a sin, but there are other categories to consider.

The Bible also speaks in terms of holiness, which biblically refers to being consecrated or set apart for a specific purpose. Biblically, a person could avoid all sins and yet not be holy. Meanwhile a person could be set apart for a special purpose and yet sin against one of God’s laws. When we speak of “holiness” in the biblical sense, we are not speaking of sin issues but of consecration. A priest or a Levite, for example, was set apart for God in a special way that the common Israelite was not. Israel itself was a “holy nation” (Exodus 19:6), set apart from the nations of the world. This meant that they didn’t just avoid sins, but they lived in a way to set them apart from the other nations. The concept of holiness was continued in the Catholic priesthood, where priests would avoid marriage altogether, not because marriage was sinful, but because the priest was “holy,” set apart for a special purpose.

A third category the Bible uses is wisdom. A person is to avoid laziness not because laziness is sinful (in the biblical sense of the term), but because it is foolish since it leads to poverty (Proverbs 6:6-11). As Christians we should ask not just if polygamy is sinful (it is not), but if it is wise and if it is a proper way to consecrate ourselves to God’s purposes for our lives.

For me it is the category of holiness that inspires me to be “a one-woman man.” A person devoted to one spouse has undivided loyalties. When I consider my call to love my wife “just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25), I see myself as best able to fulfill this calling if I am consecrating myself for my wife alone. My being “a one-woman man” is how I practice holiness both to my wife and to God. Others will be struck more by the wisdom of monogamy, as polygamy is a more challenging marriage structure. Others still will find that for them, polygamy may be both holy and wise, and still others will find that for them singleness is the best path. People do life differently, and the Bible provides model polygamists, model monogamists, and model lifelong singles. Each person must find the best way to honor God with their own lives (Romans 12:1-3; 1 Corinthians 6:18-20).

Conclusion

Most who are reading this will choose the path of monogamy, and that is a good thing. I have found a 20+ year focus on loving one person to be a great blessing. But let us make that choice because it is the holy and wise choice for us, not because we think that polygamy is a sin against God. This will help us to love others for whom it might be holy and wise to love multiple partners. And let us train each other that marriage should be rooted in the command to love others as ourselves. If we cannot learn selfless love, we are not ready to take on one marriage, let alone two. The role of the Church is not to condemn people who do things differently but to love them and to help them learn biblical wisdom and reliance on the Holy Spirit. Only if we admit that the Bible is not so condemning toward people with other marriage models will we be able to love them unconditionally and set for them an example that will help them in their own relationships.


[1] For the quote, see for example, https://www.desiringgod.org/topics/marriage. For a typical argument that the Bible teaches that polygamy is immoral, see Lexham Press, “Polygamy in the Bible (and What Jesus Said about it),” Logos Bible Software Blog, and my response to it, “Polygamy in the Bible: A Response to David Instone-Brewer.”

[2] Walter Scheidel, “Monogamy and Polygyny,” Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, 5-6.

[3] Jessica Klein, “Ethical non-monogamy: the rise of multi-partner relationships,” BBC, March 25, 2021.

Teacher, You Insult Us Too! A Sermon on Jesus’ Woes against the Pharisees and Lawyers (Luke 11:39-52)

Today I preached a sermon on Jesus’ Woes against the Pharisees and Lawyers (Luke 11:39–52). This is not an easy text to preach from,. We don’t often know what to do with passages like this in the Gospels. We like the positive stories that focus on God’s love or mercy or grace. We like to think of ourselves as receiving that same love or mercy or grace. But when there are negative stories, filled with rebuke, we read through them quickly and think, “Those people must have been really bad.”

In fact through much of Christian history, we have assumed that the Pharisees were legalistic, hypocritical, self-centered people with a holier-than-thou attitude … nothing like us. But if you actually study the Pharisees, you’ll find that this couldn’t be farther from the truth. We know of several first-century Pharisees like the great Rabbi Hillel who taught God’s people that the Torah could be summed up in the instruction to not do to others what you hate. Or like Rabbi Gamaliel that we read about in Acts who convinces the Sandhedrin not to persecute Christians. Or the Apostle Paul who still identifies himself as a Pharisee at the end of his life (Acts 23:6; 26:5; cf. Philippians 3:5). No one in the early church would have heard the word “Pharisee” and thought it meant legalistic, hypocritical, self-centered people with a holier-than-thou attitude. People would have assumed Jesus was talking about a group of Jews who loved God, loved neighbor, and were committed to the Bible and to living a righteous life.

This is why we have stories like the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9–14). The whole point is that even the worst of the worst, a traitorous tax collector, could be justified by God if he sincerely repents, and even the best of the best, a righteous Pharisee, could miss out on God’s justification if he looks down on others. If you come in with the assumption that Pharisees are legalistic people, very different from us, you just hear this passage as saying legalistic people won’t be justified but we will. We tend to associate ourselves with the good guys in stories and associate people we don’t like with the people we don’t like in stories. And it makes us bad readers of the Bible. But Jesus told this story knowing that his original audience would have viewed the Pharisees more positively and would have taken this as a warning.

And the same is true of the Woes against the Pharisees. If we have in mind these awful people, different from us, then we won’t get much of this passage. On the contrary, if the Pharisees of Jesus’ day were those who were committed to the Bible, to honoring God, to loving others, and to living a righteous life, then might this passage have something to say to those of us today who are committed to the Bible, to honoring God, to loving others, and to living a righteous life? If Jesus had warnings for the leaders of God’s people in his day, might he have warnings for those of us who lead God’s people in our day? If the Pharisees and lawyers needed to repent in the time of Jesus, might we need to repent today?

In this post I want to walk through the passage verse-by-verse and think about how God might want to challenge us.

The Setting: Jesus and Purity (11:37–41)

While he was speaking, a Pharisee invited him to dine with him; so he went in and took his place at the table. The Pharisee was amazed to see that he did not first wash before dinner. (Luke 11:37–38, NRSV)

Our story picks up after Jesus has been teaching in public. A Pharisee hears Jesus teaching about the kingdom being present and about our need to be filled with light rather than darkness, and the Pharisee does what any good person would do – he invites Jesus to dinner. The first thing the Pharisee notices is that Jesus doesn’t do what other people who are passionate about God do. Leviticus had given laws about how to be pure, and most the laws were not about morality but about what you’ve touched and about what you eat. His immediate question is going to be, “Wait, does Jesus really care about purity? Why isn’t he doing what we all do to honor God.” He doesn’t ask the question. He just thinks it, and Jesus addresses him.

Then the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? So give for alms those things that are within; and see, everything will be clean for you.” (11:39–41)

Jesus’ point is that often the things we do to honor God are external things, but God is after something deeper. We might go to church. We might raise our hands in worship. We might pray prayers or sing songs or talk to other Christians or even share the gospel, but these are actions that can be cleaned up easily. What’s on the inside? Is there greed? Is there wickedness? Is there lust for power or for control? Is there anger or envy or deception? Jesus says give all these things away, and then you will be truly pure from the inside out (cf. Mark 7:18–23).

Specifically Jesus is concerned that we might have greed on the inside – you know, the very basis of the American Dream; the very attitude we cultivate in American culture. This is what Jesus warns is on the inside of those who look good on the outside. If Jesus had some things to say about this to the Pharisees, he has a lot more to say to us today. He calls for a true almsgiving – one that includes not only money for the poor but giving all of ourselves to the poor. If we struggle in this area, he has some woes to speak to us.

The First Three Woes (11:42–44)

“But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God; it is these you ought to have practiced, without neglecting the others.” (11:42)

God doesn’t care as much about whether we tithe as about what we do for the poor. Are we agents of justice in the world? Are we agents of God’s love? Often in the church today we are so focused on external things like tithes and building projects and programs, and God wants us to go deeper. The things that Jesus is passionate about in the gospels are often not the things we are passionate about in the church today. Jesus continues:

“Woe to you Pharisees! For you love to have the seat of honor in the synagogues and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces” (11:43).

How many of you feel good about your involvement in church? That is what Jesus is criticizing here. This isn’t criticism of these super elitists out there somewhere. This is a criticism of us who love to do things in the church, who love the praise we get from others for our church involvement. Jesus is hitting where it hurts! If most of what we do for the church is done inside these walls and is done to get us recognition, then woe to us!

“Woe to you! For you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without realizing it.” (11:44)

The passage started with the Pharisee thinking Jesus might not be concerned enough about purity. Now Jesus reveals that there is a deeper purity that the Pharisee hasn’t even thought about. Unmarked graves were a problem because the Bible teaches that you become impure if you have touched something that is dead, but it is hard to be sure you are honoring God if you don’t even know where the things are that dishonor God. But Jesus makes the point that if you have greed and wickedness inside you rather than love and justice, you are the thing that causes uncleanness.

People see what it looks like when you follow God, and they think the life you are living is OK, so they do the same and think they are OK. But honoring God goes much deeper than your church involvement and your worship. It must be rooted in an inner disposition to love your enemies and to care for those in need.

The Woes Insult Us Too! (11:45)

At this point a lawyer speaks up, and notice his words:

One of the lawyers answered him,  “Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us too.” (11:45)

Notice how introspective this lawyer is. He doesn’t say, “Thank God I’m not a Pharisee.” He doesn’t say, “Yeah, I guess Simon here is kind of hypocritical.” He says, “Wait, doesn’t this apply to me too?”

Lately I have been thinking about how bad of Bible readers we are. We always compare ourselves with the people who are commended in the story and never with the people who are being criticized. We read this passage and think, “Man, those Pharisees were pretty awful people.” Maybe we even think about people we don’t like and conclude they are the Pharisees of today. Our response is far more arrogant and less humble than the response the lawyer offers.

A friend recently told me that he went to a Bible study on the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. In the parable, the Pharisee thanks God for not making him like the wicked tax collector, and the tax collector simply asks for mercy. Jesus say the tax collector goes home justified rather than the Pharisee. My friend said after the study, the leader prayed and basically thanked God that we’re not like the Pharisees. He missed the message of the passage.

If we read the woes against the Pharisees and feel better about ourselves afterwards, we are misreading them! We should respond to the Woes against the Pharisees as the lawyer does: “Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us too.”

Insulting us is exactly what Jesus wants to do. Sometimes we need to be shaken into deeper levels of obedience. So Jesus continues!

Heavy Burdens Hard to Bear (11:46)

And he said, “Woe also to you lawyers! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them.” (11:46)

What is Jesus talking about here? The lawyers were the Bible teachers. They were the ones who would tell the people (who were illiterate), “Here is how the Bible says you should live.” And this process involves a whole lot of interpretation.

The Bible says to wash yourselves or items that have been touched by a bodily discharge or a dead animal, but what if we don’t know what all has touched a person or an item? The lawyers wanted to keep the people safe and so they instructed them to wash in all situations.

The Bible says not to do work on the Sabbath, but what is God going to consider work? The lawyers interpreted that for the people.
And sometimes the Bible says what to do in a specific situation that the lawyers had to determine whether and how to apply in a different situation. They did their best to interpret those things.

The same is true of us. We read the 613 laws of the Old Testament and have to determine what applies in the new covenant and how. What should Christians today do with laws about the Sabbath, about not bearing false witness against your neighbor, about ceremonial washings or Jewish holidays, about sexual purity, about theft or coveting. Some of these we say are to be applied strictly in any situation. Others we say are not.

This is what the lawyers did in Jesus’ day. The rabbis referred to this as binding and loosing. Those who were designated lawyers had the authority to make a decision regarding whether a certain act was permitted or not permitted, whether a person was bound by the law in a certain case or not bound by the law, and the belief was that as lawyers made these declarations on earth, the heavenly council would back up their decisions and make them so. This is what Jesus promises that the disciples will be able to do when he says, “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 18:18, NRSV). Jesus is giving the disciples the authority of lawyers. This passage is about how we determine that the law applies in a modern context.

This doesn’t mean we can go against what the Bible says. It means that the church has a responsibility to determine how the Bible rightly applies in a new context. And we do this all the time. Most Christians today think that we are not bound today by Paul’s instruction that women should not pray or prophesy without a head covering or by his statement that it would be better not to marry. We also tend to be pretty lenient about Jesus’ instructions about wealth or the Old Testament teachings on gluttony. But then we are pretty strict about other issues related to sex and gender, foul language, drinking, political beliefs, work ethic, physical appearances and other things depending on what church we belong to.
In all of this, we as the church are binding and loosing. How are we doing? Would Jesus say to us today, “Woe also to you Christians! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them”?

I think there are a few ways we can tell if this is the case. First, are we sending the message that Jesus’ burden is heavy or light? People are leaving the church in droves right now and even speaking of how they have been hurt by the church. That is a bad sign. Second, are our interpretations loosing the bonds of injustice? Jesus could see a disparity between the rich and the poor that he repeatedly challenges in the Gospel of Luke, including in our passage where he notes that the problem with many of the Bible teachers is that they are filled with greed and wickedness. Is this true of our teachers today? Third, do many of the things we are strict about have to do more with external appearances than with justice and the love of God? Fourth, do our interpretations place ourselves in the seat of honor? Are we stricter on issues we ourselves don’t struggle with and more lenient on the issues we do?

I have a confession to make. Twenty years ago the church where I was now preaching had a female pastor and I told her that I don’t think what she was doing was biblical. I followed the strictest interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:12, where Paul tells Timothy that he does not permit a woman to teach, and I ignored Galatians 3:28, where Paul says there is no male or female in Christ Jesus, or Romans 16:1 where Paul commends a deaconess to the Romans who will be ministering to them on his behalf, or Romans 16:7, where Paul refers to a female apostle. I remember the dinner I had with her and her husband where I loaded them down with a burden hard to bear and did not lift a finger to ease it.

I have another confession to make. A few years later I was the associate pastor of a church in Columbus, and I was asked to come up with a membership curriculum for the church. I decided that if people want to be members of this church, they had to commit to a few things: reading the Bible devotionally every day, attending services every week when possible, and giving 10% of their income to the church. I also added a statement about living a holy life, but I never spelled out what that was, and I did not consider that some of the people in my church lived paycheck to paycheck and could not possibly give 10% of their income to the church. The 10% standard was given to a different people in a different time – a people who weren’t paying taxes in addition to tithes and who lived off the land rather than in a modern monetary system. Some of us today are wealthy enough that we can afford to give far more than 10% and some of us would struggle to put food on the table if we gave 10% of our income. These situations call for us in leadership to lift our finger to reduce the burden on the poor, but I did not do that.

I have a third confession to make. A few years ago I was an associate pastor at another church and someone asked if she could be a member in the church. Someone in leadership raised a concern: this woman lived with a man she was not married to. This person felt that the woman was not committed to holiness and therefore could not become a member of the church. I pointed out that (1) the man was not a Christian himself and did not care what rules we put on her, (2) he was absolutely opposed to getting married, and (3) he was the father of this woman’s child. We had a heated discussion about this situation and eventually it was decided that she could not become a member of the church. We as a church would rather break up the father and mother of a young child or tell the mother she cannot become a member of our church than lift a finger to ease this woman’s burdens. This woman now no longer attends church.

Have I loaded people with burdens hard to bear and not lifted a finger to ease them? Have I “lock[ed] people out of the kingdom of heaven” (to use Matthew’s wording of the final woe that we’ll talk about in a minute)? This passage is not about some hypocritical group of people who lived in a different time and place. This passage is about you and me, and we need to repent!

Building the Tombs of the Prophets (11:47–51)

“Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your ancestors killed. So you are witnesses and approve of the deeds of your ancestors; for they killed them, and you build their tombs.” (11:47–48)

Matthew gives us a little more of what Jesus said here than Luke does. Matthew 23:30–31 (NRSV) says, “You say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets.”

In other words, there have always been two groups within God’s people: those who speak prophetically … and those who oppose that speech. The claim that the lawyers make – that they would not have shed the blood of the prophets like their fathers did – shows that they are sons not of the prophets, but of those who killed the prophets. But Jesus isn’t just being cute with his words here. There is a subtext to this: those who are building the tombs of the prophets are about to kill the greatest prophet of all, showing whose sons they truly are. So Jesus says:

“Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,’ so that this generation may be charged with the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be charged against this generation.” (Luke 11:49–51, NRSV)

But these acts of shedding the blood of prophets have continued throughout history. In the 15th century, great Christian thinkers like Jan Hus and Joan of Arc were executed for heresy. In the 16th century, around a thousand people were killed by church leaders for challenging the corrupt church of their day. In the 17th century many Quakers in America were put to death, and in Europe Galileo was put on house arrest until he got sick and died. Even in the 20th century some of the greatest modern prophets like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Martin Luther King were killed by people who didn’t like their message. We might not be burning people at the stake anymore, but how many people have committed suicide because of pressure to conform that was placed on them by the church, and many Christians have become convinced that they are fighting in holy war against people who have a different message about God than they do.

If we are going to repent, we have to lay down our desire to control others. If we are going to speak against people, it needs to be against ourselves and against those who are in power, not against outsiders. We have a tendency as Christians today to judge those that we think we are holier than. Paul calls out the tendency to judge others in Romans 2: “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.” (Romans 2:1–2, NRSV)

Or Jesus calls this out in Matthew 7: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:1–3 , NRSV)

Jesus calls out even our anger as consisting of murderous thoughts: “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” (Matthew 5:21–22, NRSV)

Do you think when Jesus calls out those who would murder the prophets in his day that he doesn’t insult us also? We have to be careful to do what Peter says: “Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.” (1 Peter 2:1, NRSV)

The Key of Knowledge (11:52)

And then we come to the final verse:

“Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.” (11:52)

When we abuse our power as messengers of the gospel, we take away the key of knowledge, and we hinder people from entering.

I am struck by another woe that Matthew records that is not in Luke: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves” (Matthew 23:15, NRSV). God forbid that this could be said about us.

The only way we enter the kingdom of God is if we love like God loves. As Jesus said, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:14–15, NRSV).

If we ignore Jesus’s teachings about anger and judgment, then woe to us. If we read passages like the Woes against the Pharisees and Lawyers and don’t take the message to heart or if we think it’s about someone else, then woe to us.

The Good News

But there is good news in all this. First John says, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8–9, NRSV). In other words, we have two choices before us: we can be like the Pharisee in Luke 18 who voids all his righteousness by looking down on the tax collector, or we can be like the tax collector who beats his breasts and cries, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13, NRSV).

I bring this passage to our attention to call us to beg God for mercy and to change our ways. If we have been focused on externals, let’s ask God to change what’s inside our hearts (Luke 11:39–41). If we have given to the church but not stood up for justice, let’s ask God to help us fight for justice and the love of God (Luke 11:42). If we have focused on the recognition we get in church, let’s ask God to help us do things without recognition (Luke 11:43). If we have caused people to turn away from the kingdom, let’s repentant and ask God to teach us to love like Jesus loves (Luke 11:44, 46–52). This is a lifelong battle. I am still trying to figure out what this looks like. I don’t think I focus on the condition of my heart enough or stand up for justice enough. But God is faithful. If we repent and ask him to do these things in our heart, he will!

Who Are “the Lost” according to the Bible?

Christians have developed our own language, and we tend not to realize how we may even use biblical terms in different ways than the Bible uses them. Today I have been thinking about the word “lost.” This word is often used in evangelical churches to refer to those who have never accepted the gospel. The idea is reinforced by songs we sing (“I once was lost but now am found”), prayers we pray, labels we use for those who do not have “a personal relationship with Jesus,” and the way we read the New Testament. The term “lost” is a biblical term, but might the Bible mean something different by the term than “those who do not know Jesus”?

There are four passages where the word occurs in the Gospels, and ironically it is never used of those who do not know God. In Matthew 10:5-6, Jesus sends out the Twelve with instructions not to go to those who don’t know God: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In context, “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” refers back both to Matthew 9:36, where Jesus encountered his own people who were “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd,” and to Ezekiel 34, which Matthew 9:36 draws the image from. In Ezekiel 34, “lost” does not mean not knowing God or not being among God’s people. It is a reference to God’s people who have been mistreated by their leaders (the shepherds) and who therefore have become vulnerable to hostile nations (Ezek 34:5-6) or even to the shepherds themselves, who are devouring the lost sheep (Ezek 34:7-10). Being “lost” means not having access to the pasture that is needed. Sure, this could be equated with non-churchgoers, but in its original context it is a reference to those involved in the believing community who are simply “harassed and helpless.”

The second use of the word “lost” is in Matthew 15:24. Jesus has been feeding the hungry (Matt 14:19-21) and healing the sick (Matt 14:34-36), and in Matthew 15:22 an outsider, “a Canaanite woman,” comes to Jesus looking for healing for her daughter, and he says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Again, “lost” does not refer to people who don’t know God; it refers to people who do, the insiders, “the children” of God (Matt 15:21)! This use is similar to the first instance. Jesus is coming not to tell the lost how they can escape hell; he is coming to help them overcome oppression, whether by the corrupt leadership of Israel or by demonic strongholds. The lost are insiders who are down on their luck.

The final two passages are slightly different in their usage, but they too do not use the term as if it is often used today. The word is used several times in Luke 15, in reference to the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. In each case the emphasis is not on those who have never known God or who lack a personal relationship with God, but on those who have gone astray. Twice Jesus identifies the lost with the “sinner who repents” (Luke 15:7, 10), and in the third example he refers to someone who had been close to the father but had left to “squander his property in reckless living” (Luke 15:13). Nowhere here is “lost” equated with the modern idea of a person who doesn’t know the gospel. It is a person who has walked away from the Father to live for his own pleasure.

The final use of the word “lost” in the New Testament is in Luke 19:10 in reference to Zacchaeus, who had gotten rich by betraying his brothers and sisters and taking their property as tax to the Romans. As the man repents, Jesus pronounces salvation upon him (Luke 19:9) and then concludes with the maxim: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). This usage is similar to the other one in Luke: the lost are those who know God but have become consumed with themselves.

So there are four New Testament passages that describe “the lost.” In each case the lost person is someone who knows God. In two of these the person has been abused by the religious leaders; in two the person has gotten caught up in sin.

One thing that concerns me about the modern usage of the term is that it creates an insider-outsider mentality. We who have come to an evangelical faith are “the found” and those who have not are “the lost.” This mentality is reinforced in evangelical tradition with the songs we sing (even our children’s songs: “I’m on the inside, on which side are you?”) and with the way we read these passages. We read the story of the prodigal son and think of “non-believers,” and never question whether we are squandering our inheritance. We read the story of Zacchaeus and don’t ask ourselves, “How about me? In what ways do I need to repent?” We think of ourselves as being “the found” simply because we have a correct doctrine of God. The prodigal son had a correct “doctrine” of the father, but he was lost as ever when he was wasting the inheritance he received from his father. Zacchaeus had a correct doctrine of God, but he was lost as ever when his focus was on wealth rather than on caring for the poor. Insiders – churchgoers – are often lost and Jesus is calling out to us in these passages, but we cannot hear him because we think these passages are about someone other than ourselves. We need to hear the references to “the lost” in these passages and be aware of the fact that biblically “the lost” are people who know the Way but who are not properly walking in it. Perhaps we once were found, but it could well be that in the current moment we are lost and are truly the ones in need of the gospel!

sheep

Did Jesus Experience the Father’s Wrath?

One of my favorite songs is “In Christ Alone” by Stuart Townend and Keith Getty. When I was a worship leader this is one of the songs I chose most frequently, because it draws the worshiper into the depths of God’s love and the power of his salvation in a way that few other songs can. I have been singing this song for twenty years, and it still brings me to tears. The song is very rich in theology, but there is one line that I always change because it expresses a popular idea that is unbiblical. In the second verse we find the words, “Till on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” The idea here is that for God to be holy, he must express wrath against sin, but because God is merciful he delayed that wrath until Jesus took all these sins upon himself and then God poured out his wrath on his Son, and so “the wrath of God was satisfied.” This is a very popular way of understanding why Jesus had to die, but is it biblical?

The Wrath of God in Scripture

To be sure, there are plenty of verses that speak of God’s wrath, including 1 Thessalonians 1:10, where Paul says Jesus “delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thess 1:10), but neither this verse nor any other says that this deliverance happened because God placed his wrath on Jesus instead. In fact, in 1 Thessalonians 1:10 God’s wrath is not satisfied; it is still coming! Paul is speaking here of the second coming of Jesus, when “sudden destruction will come upon [the disobedient] as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape” (1 Thess 5:3). Jesus delivers us from this wrath not by taking it upon himself but by transforming us into “children of light, children of day. … For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him” (1 Thess 5:5, 9-10). It is only popular theology that causes us to think that God transferred that wrath from us to his Son. What Paul says here is that by becoming “awake” or by becoming “children of day” we are delivered from the coming wrath. Elsewhere Paul speaks of Christians as objects of mercy rather than objects of wrath (Romans 9:22-23). We receive “eternal life,” whereas those who reject the truth receive “wrath and fury” (Romans 2:7-8). According to John the Baptist, those who get baptized “flee from the wrath to come” (Matthew 3:7//Luke 3:7). In none of these passages is that wrath transferred to the Son. The wrath simply is not experienced because we have changed from being self-seeking to being righteous.

This is explained most clearly in Ephesians 2:1-7 :

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Nowhere does this say that the way God did this is by turning his wrath toward his Son. This is something we simply assume. But if we look at the text more closely, we see something quite different: though we were “by nature children of wrath” (2:3), this is not what God felt toward us. Verses 4-5 say, “Because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses.” God did not feel wrath toward us, but “great love”! Our nature may have been “children of wrath,” but God viewed us differently, even while we “dead in our trespasses,” that is, before Jesus died on the cross. There was no transfer of wrath onto his Son. There was love for us and love for his Son, and so God delivered us from our spiritual death just as he delivered his Son from his physical death.

The Father’s Role in the Crucifixion

In fact, not only is the idea that God transfers his wrath to his Son never taught in Scripture, but it goes against the way Scripture repeatedly speaks of the Father’s role in the cross. Not once is the cross described as a place where God punishes his Son. In fact, crucifixion was not a divine punishment; it was a Roman punishment for those rebelling against the empire. The Romans, or rather “the rulers of this age,” crucified Jesus, not understanding what God planned to do with this (1 Cor 2:6-10). God allowed Jesus to die so that Jesus could defeat Death (see my post on Death as mythical creature in the Bible), not so that God could punish Jesus. Whenever we read about the Father’s role in the crucifixion, it is one of handing Jesus over rather than punishing:

  • “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
  • “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” (Rom 3:23-25)
  • God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom 5:8)
  • “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom 8:31-32)
  • “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 Jn 4:10)

In every passage, God’s role was to give up his Son, not to punish him. Likewise, Jesus describes his own death not as an opportunity for God to take out his wrath, but as a “ransom” (Matt 20:28//Mark 10:45), that is, a payment by God to redeem us from the enemy. We do not see God’s wrath in any of the passages that speak about the cross; instead we repeatedly see God’s love for us and for his Son.

Sometimes people will read wrath into the term “propitiation” in Romans 3:25; 1 John 2:2; 4:10, but the word simply refers to the removal of any barriers to the relationship, not to how they are removed. These passages allude to the sacrificial system, so Jesus should clearly be understood as a sacrifice, but here again our misunderstanding of the Jewish sacrificial system causes us to wrongly import the idea of wrath here. Sacrifices in the Jewish world were not substitutes. If you were guilty of a sin for which the punishment in the Torah is death (murder, adultery, rape, bestiality, striking your parents, witchcraft, etc.), you could not say, “I’m sorry. Here is a lamb to die in my place.” That’s not how sacrifices worked. There was no substitute for a human being who deserved death. The idea that sacrifices were substitutes emerged only recently from those who wanted to read their unbiblical understanding of Jesus’ death back into the Old Testament sacrificial system. Biblically, sacrifices were an offering of something valuable in order to restore one’s relationship with God, and they were offered only for the sins where the punishment was not death.

“The Wages of Sin Is Death”

But doesn’t Paul say, “The wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23), meaning that death should be the punishment for every sin? Paul is speaking here of human mortality as a product of sin, a discussion he began in the previous chapter:

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.

Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. [Rom 5:12-19]

It’s not that Jesus was being punished by God for our sins. We read Paul too individualistically here. He is speaking of a corporate issue. Humanity (as a whole) had sinned, and so humanity was experiencing its just desserts – mortality. Romans 5 emphasizes not the fact that Jesus had died, but the fact that Jesus had committed an “act of righteousness” or “obedience” that was more powerful than Adam’s act of disobedience. “For the wages of sin is death” (i.e., human mortality is the result of our sinfulness), “but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nowhere here does Paul express the idea that Jesus had to pay those wages for us. Instead, chapter 6 lays out a different path:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his deathWe were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. [Rom 6:1-4]

It is not that Jesus paid the wages for us, but that we died to sin and can now experience the gift of life. “Our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing” (Rom 6:6). “For one who has died has been set free from sin” (Rom 6:7). In light of Paul’s larger discussion, Romans 6:23 is not about Jesus paying our wages, but about us having put sin to death:

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. [Rom 6:20-23]

This well-known verse reads very differently when we see it as the conclusion of the preceding verses. Death is the wages you previously received as sinners, “but now that you have been set free from sin,” life is what you receive thanks to the work of Jesus.

Without the Shedding of Blood, There Is No Forgiveness of Sins

Other verses are sometimes also mistaken to imply that God punished Jesus. For example, Hebrews 9:22 says, “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins,” but the fuller context reveals that the author of Hebrews is not connecting this shedding of blood with punishment:

For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. … And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. [Heb 9:13-14, 17-22]

The shedding of blood is not about punishing the animal, but about providing blood, which has the power to “purify.” Jesus’ death was absolutely critical for our salvation, but it was not because God needed to punish someone. It was because Jesus’ blood was the offering God made to restore our relationship to him.

Conclusion

Over the course of Christian history our ideas have changed. The earliest Christians understood Jesus’ death as a ransom. This view prevailed for the first thousand years of the church. In the eleventh century, Anselm introduced the (very medieval) idea that humanity owed God a debt of honor and that Jesus “satisfied” this debt by becoming a man and honoring God in the greatest way possible. In the sixteenth century, John Calvin modified the idea to suggest that a righteous God would have wrath toward sinful humanity and so Jesus satisfied God’s wrath. From this came many of our songs and teachings that emphasized the cross as satisfaction of God’s wrath. But the idea is not in the Bible, unless we start importing unbiblical ideas into the verses mentioned above.

N.T. Wright notes that our theology of the atonement tends to twist John 3:16 as if to make it say, “God so hated the world, that he killed his only Son.” John 3:16 and Romans 5:8 and 8:31-32 and Ephesians 2:1-7 and 1 John 4:10 and many other verses make it clear: God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. He did not hate the world or have a wrath toward us that needed to be satisfied, and he did not punish his Son. He offered his Son to gain the world, and then he redeemed his Son from death. And on that cross, as Jesus died, the love of God was magnified!

Sometimes we need to course-correct our theology and our songs to bring them back in line with the Bible. Sometimes we need to read the Bible more carefully to see where we are importing ideas that aren’t actually expressed in the text and that go against what the text is saying. This is one of those places.

jesus_on_the_cross_for_us

The Biblical Gospel vs. the Evangelical Gospel

Many years ago a friend asked me why the Gospels don’t teach the basic gospel message, and at the time I didn’t know how to respond. After studying the Bible more and more, I’ve realized that the problem is in us, not in the Bible. If you ask Christians today, “What is the gospel,” they will likely say something about heaven and hell and what happens when you die.[1] For most of us, the “good news” is primarily about salvation and specifically salvation from hell. But if you look in the Bible, the gospel is much bigger than this. Sometimes the gospel is tied with salvation, but more often the gospel is tied with the message of the kingdom.

Look at how the Gospel of Mark summarizes Jesus’ preaching: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news’” (Mark 1:14-15, NRSV). The gospel, or “good news,” is about God’s kingdom coming to earth and about us repenting and exercising faith in it to change the world. Did you know that the Gospel of Mark never once talks about what happens when you die? There is one passage that talks about hell (Mark 9:43-48), but it is not in an appeal to believe in Jesus. It is in a warning not to cause someone to stumble. The Gospel of Mark also never talks about going to heaven when you die. There is one passage that talks about having treasure in heaven and about having eternal life in the age to come (Mark 10:17-31), but the age to come is when Jesus sets up his reign on earth and we live in resurrected bodies on the new earth. Those treasures are stored in heaven, but are brought out for us here![2] And Mark 12:18-27 speaks about the resurrection, but again, this is about what happens on earth after Jesus returns. No passage in the Gospel of Mark speaks of going to heaven when you die. For Mark, that is not the gospel. The gospel is the message that Jesus is now taking the throne to bring God’s reign on earth. The very first verse of Mark says this much: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus the Christ, the Son of God.” Both the terms “Christ” and “Son of God” are royal terms. The emperors of Rome claimed to be able to rule as the son of God, but Mark says, no, Jesus is the one with authority to rule as the Son of God. “Christ” (or “Messiah”) is not Jesus’ last name; it is the Greek word for “anointed one,” meaning the one who has been anointed as the Jewish king. That’s why when Jesus is on the cross at the end of the Gospel of Mark, the charge against him is that he is “the king of the Jews.” The gospel, for Mark, is ultimately the gospel of the kingdom.

But it is not just Mark who views the gospel differently than we do today. After the birth narrative, the Gospel of Matthew starts with these words: “In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’” (Matt 3:1-2, NRSV). John the Baptist’s preaching is centered not on personal salvation, but on the invasion of God’s kingdom. One chapter later Matthew introduces Jesus’ preaching with these words: “From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’” (Matt 4:17, NRSV). And in chapter 10, when Jesus sends the twelve apostles out, he says, “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near’” (Matt 10:7, NRSV). In three other passages Matthew refers to the gospel as “the gospel of the kingdom” (Matt 4:23; 9:35; 24:14). That’s what the gospel is: it is more about God reigning through Jesus than about what happens when you die. Matthew devotes an entire chapter at the center of his gospel to telling seven parables about the kingdom (Matt 13).

Now it might be tempting to think that because Matthew talks about “the kingdom of heaven” what he means is the place you go when you die, but a look more closely reveals that this is not what he is thinking about. In fact, Matthew uses “kingdom of heaven” in the same places where Mark says “kingdom of God.” “Kingdom of heaven” is just another way of referring to God’s rule from heaven. That’s why Jesus can say, “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” God’s reign is coming to earth. That’s why we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The kingdom of heaven is about heaven having its way with the earth. That’s why Jesus says when he casts out demons that Satan’s kingdom cannot stand and that “the kingdom of God has come to you” (Matt 12:25-28). That’s why Jesus could say to those around him that some of them “will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matt 16:28). That’s why Jesus can say to the Pharisees that “the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Matt 21:31). Or “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom” (Matt 21:43). The kingdom of heaven is something that Jesus and his disciples are bringing to earth!

We find the same thing in the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus again uses the phrase “gospel of the kingdom” three times (Luke 4:43; 8:1; 16:16) and associates the good news with the message that the poor, hungry, mournful and persecuted are blessed (Luke 6:20-26). And we find the same thing in the Gospel of John, where Jesus tells Nicodemus that unless he is born from above he will not see the kingdom of God (John 3:3, 5).

There are a handful of references to hell in the Gospels (Matt 5:22, 29, 30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43, 45, 47; Luke 12:5), but none of them talks about Jesus saving us from hell. And there are many more references to heaven in the Gospels, but only once in the four gospels do we find the idea that you can go to heaven when you die (Luke 23:43, assuming Paradise is in heaven, which is debated). Paul also talks a couple times about going to heaven upon death (Php 1:23; 2 Cor 8), but both Paul and Jesus are far more concerned with the breaking in of the kingdom of God than they are with where you will go when you die. Where you go when you die is important, but far more important is the fact that in Jesus God has begun changing the world! This is what “the gospel of the kingdom” is about. In order to understand this better, we should look at the Old Testament background of the concept of the kingdom of God.

In the Old Testament, Israel was established as a theocracy, which means it was a nation directly ruled by God. God shows himself to be king over all the gods of Egypt in the exodus. God acts as king to give the people their laws. God leads the Israelites through the wilderness as their king. God anoints judges to deliver the tribes of Israel under his kingship. But in 1 Samuel 8 we read the following:

Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, “You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.” But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to govern us.” Samuel prayed to the LORD, and the LORD said to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so also they are doing to you. Now then, listen to their voice; only—you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.” [1 Sam 8:4-9, NRSV]

Samuel goes on to warn them that the king will only look out for himself and will oppress the people and start wars and tax them heavily. Sure enough, the king they choose does this very thing. Eventually God gives them David, who is a man after God’s own heart, but his reign does not last, and the later kings oppress the people and lead them astray. This is why Ezekiel prophesies against the shepherds of Israel:

Thus says the Lord GOD: Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd. [Ezek 34:2-5, NRSV]

Ezekiel continues:

For thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out.… I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land. I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; … I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice. [Ezek 34:11-16, NRSV]

This promise, that God would shepherd his own sheep, is the promise of the kingdom. Isaiah prophesied:

Get you up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good news;
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good news,
lift it up, do not fear;
say to the cities of Judah,
“Here is your God!”
See, the Lord GOD comes with might,
and his arm rules for him;
his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.
He will feed his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms,
and carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead the mother sheep. [Isa 40:9-11]

This chapter of Isaiah is important for the New Testament. It announces the change in Israel’s fortune, and John the Baptist gets identified as the voice crying out in the wilderness from earlier in this chapter. The word “good news” (twice in verse 9) is the same word that gets translated as “gospel” in the New Testament. And notice what the good news is: “Here is your God,” “his arm rules for him,” “he will feed his flock [and] gather the lambs.” It is a gospel of the kingdom. Later Isaiah uses the word “gospel” or “good news” again, and again it is in terms of God’s kingship:

How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,
who brings good news,
who announces salvation,
who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” [Isa 52:7, NRSV]

Here we have a message of salvation, but that salvation comes in the form of God reigning, that is, in the kingship or kingdom of God.

The Old Testament prophets knew that God intended to rule the world as its king and that his people had rejected his rule. And they announced that God eventually would rule as king, and what would this look like? Feeding the flock, gathering the lambs in his arms, carrying them in his bosom, and gently leading the mother sheep (Isa 40:11). Or in the words of Ezekiel: seeking the lost, bringing back the strayed, binding up the injured, strengthening the weak, and feeding them all with justice (Ezek 34:16). And so when Jesus came, what did he do? Matthew summarizes it this way:

Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. [Matt 9:35-36, NRSV]

When Jesus preaches the gospel of the kingdom, he heals the sick. As he says later in a summary of his activity: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Matt 11:5, NRSV]. The gospel sets people free right here, right now. Jesus sees the sheep. He knows they are harassed and helpless. And he gently leads and cares for them. This is the kingdom of God.

But that is not all. Look at the next verse in Matthew:

Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” [Matt 9:37-38, NRSV]

If the gospel is the good news that God is taking charge of the world and making it right, then discipleship is being the hands and feet of Jesus in carrying that out. The gospel is not about you. It’s not a purchase of fire insurance. It’s seeking God’s kingdom on earth, seeking God’s righteousness being realized on earth. It’s making God’s name hallowed, God’s will done. It is making sure people have their daily bread. It is forgiving those who trespass against us. It is helping people escape temptation.

Do you see the crowds? Can you tell that they are harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd? Do you have compassion on them? Will you work with Jesus to feed the flock? In the very next verse it says, “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness” (Matt 10:1, NRSV). And before they go, Jesus tells them, “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons” (Matt 10:7-8, NRSV). Many of us don’t have the faith to cure the sick, to raise the dead, to cleanse lepers, and to cast out demons, but start small. Do you see someone who is lonely and needs a friend? Be that friend! Do you see someone struggling financially? Give them whatever help you can offer. Do you see someone struggling with their health? Pray for a breakthrough. Do you see a troubled teen in need of an adult who cares? Take them under your wing. Do you see someone who doesn’t know if God cares about their situation? Show them that God cares through your actions. Let your actions prove Jesus’ words true: The kingdom of heaven has come near!


[1] A Google search for “What is the gospel” returned the following as the top three results: “the gospel is the good news concerning Christ and the way of salvation” (gotquestions.org); “Good news! Here is how you can be saved from my judgment!” (Crossway.org); and “sometimes the term gospel refers broadly to Jesus’ work of justification and sanctification for and in His people, and sometimes it refers narrowly to Jesus’ work of justification” (Ligonier.org).

[2] Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2007), 164, notes that the language of treasure being stored suggests that the treasure will later be brought out of that storehouse. He says, “If I say to a friend ‘I’ve kept some beer in the fridge for you’, that doesn’t mean that he has to get into the fridge in order to drink the beer. God’s future inheritance, the incorruptible new world and the new bodies that are to inhabit that world, are already kept safe, waiting for us, not so that we can go to heaven and put them on there, but so that they can be brought to birth in this world, or rather in the new heavens and new earth, the renewed world.

Wouldn’t Any Shepherd Leave the Ninety-Nine?

As modern (or postmodern) Westerners, we often misread passages of the Bible. This is not surprising; it is hard to read a text written in a vastly different language from a different time and a different culture and make sense of it. God knows this and is patient with us. He also calls us to study and to get better at reading this ancient, inspired text. The benefits of doing so are tremendous and sometimes the cost of not doing so is great. This is true with regard to the parable of the lost sheep.

The Parable of the Lost Sheep

Jesus tells three parables in a row: the lost sheep (Luke 15:3-7), the lost coin (Luke 15:8-10), and the lost son (Luke 15:11-32). The reason for telling these parables is given in verses 1-2:

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” [Luke 15:1-2, NIV]

The Pharisees and the scribes had a problem with Jesus’s acceptance of sinners. This should give us a hint off-the-bat that these parables are about the way we view sinners. And yet we tend to view them as a commentary on God’s love. Consider the song “Reckless Love” by Cory Asbury:

Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God;
Oh, it chases me down, fights ’til I’m found, leaves the 99;
And I couldn’t earn it,
I don’t deserve it, still You give yourself away;
Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God.

We often sing about how undeserving the sinner is of God’s love, but the problem is that in doing so, we make Luke 15 say the opposite of what it says! It was the Pharisees that saw sinners as unworthy of God’s love. Jesus was opposing that view! Consider Jesus’ opening question:

Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? [Luke 15:4, NIV]

Modern readers who have never cared for sheep might not know what a shepherd would do if one sheep disappears. Would he stay with the 99 so as not to lose another or would he leave the 99 in the open country and go after the one. Jesus expected his hearers to know: any shepherd is going to go find that sheep!

We know this not just because shepherds will attest to it, but also because of the way Jesus asks the question. We see rhetorical questions formatted in exactly the same way throughout the Gospel of Luke:

  1. Which of you if a friend comes at midnight would say, “Don’t bother me. I cannot get up and give you anything” (Luke 11:5-8). In a world where hospitality is highly valued, everyone knows the answer: none of us would do that. In the same way, God’s not going to do that regarding our prayers.
  2. What father among you if his son asks for a fish or an egg would give him a serpent or a scorpion (Luke 11:11-12)? Even today we know the answer: none of us would do that. In the same way the Father is going to give us what we need (Luke 11:13).
  3. Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his life (Luke 12:25)? None of us. Then don’t be anxious (Luke 12:26).
  4. Which of you has a son or an ox fall in a well on the Sabbath and says, “I can’t do anything about it; it’s the Sabbath” (Luke 14:5). No one would do that. In the same way, it is right for Jesus to free a man from bondage on the Sabbath.
  5. Which of you would start building a tower without first determining if he has the ability to complete it (Luke 14:28-30), or what king would go to war without first determining if he has the power to win the battle (Luke 14:31-32)? No one would. In the same way, don’t approach discipleship without counting the cost.
  6. Which of you who has a servant plowing or taking care of the sheep then serves the servant dinner (Luke 17:7-10)? No one. In the same way we as God’s servants shouldn’t think that God is suddenly indebted to us.

In each of these examples, the answer is clear (or at least it would have been to the original audience): none of us would do that, and the implication is that we shouldn’t expect God to be like that. These rhetorical questions work because everyone knows that Jesus is giving absurd scenarios. It is the same with the parable of the sheep:

Which of you having 100 sheep would choose not to go after one that is lost? None of us, Jesus. None of us would let even one slip away.

The point is that every shepherd values the lost sheep. In fact, we could say that the one sheep is suddenly of more value to the shepherd than the ninety-nine that have no need of being found. This is made clear in the next two verses:

And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’ [Luke 15:5-6, NIV]

This is not surprising at all. It is not about God’s love in particular. It is about what every shepherd would do. Every shepherd is relieved and overjoyed to find a lost sheep. So is God:

I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent. [Luke 15:7, NIV]

The message is clear. Don’t you value what you have lost? So sinners are of great value to God!

The parable of the lost coin makes the same point:

Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ [Luke 15:8-10, NIV]

These are not surprising activities. No one says, “Well that coin doesn’t deserve to be found!” Deserving or earning is not the question. The question is one of value. A sheep and a coin (valued at a day’s wages) have value! And in the same way, a lost soul has value to God. This is the point of these parables. These parables do not imply that the sheep and the coin are undeserving, nor do they imply that God’s love for sinners is surprising.

The third parable makes the point again, and this time introduces another character, the older brother, representing the Pharisees and scribes who cannot see the occasion as worth celebrating. The father who has lost a son knows that the son’s return is worth celebrating, because the son has value. If the older brother cannot see that, the older brother is not thinking rightly about the situation, much as the Pharisees are not thinking rightly about the value of sinners.

To recap: God’s love for sinners should not be surprising to us. It surprised the Pharisees, but only because they undervalued human beings. Jesus told three parables to help everyone realize that God feels about lost human beings the way we feel about important things we have lost. To make the parable of the lost sheep about the recklessness of God’s love is to misunderstand not only the parable, but the value of human beings.

Popular Theology Today

So why do we gravitate toward the Pharisaic view? Probably for the same reason the Pharisees did. It starts with two seemingly noble desires: (1) to magnify God’s love and (2) to humble ourselves. These desires, wrongly applied, lead us to a bad theology and a bad anthropology, and in the end we feel like we have glorified God, when in reality we have misrepresented him and denigrated his creation.

The Bible is clear that humanity was created in the image of God and therefore has inherent value. This image has been marred by sin, but it is still there, and so is the value that comes with it. It is simply not true to say that there was nothing of value within us before we were saved. We had the image of God. It is simply not true to say, “I am just a sinner saved by grace.” We were never just sinners; we have always also been image-bearers and the object of God’s affection. What does Jesus say about the way God feels about sinners? “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16, NIV).

Why? Why did God love the world? Because it is his creation! Why does any of us love our rebellious sons and daughters? It comes naturally. Even when we have been hurt by those we love, there is still a warm place in our hearts for them. Again, just as the shepherd values the lost sheep and the woman values the lost coin and the father values the lost son, so God really, truly values humanity!

But what is the harm in having an overly humble view of our past selves? Simply this: we will extend that view to others who are where we were. But it is the view of the Pharisees, not the view of Jesus.

Sure, we can combat it with a theology of a God who loves sinners despite their worthlessness, but does that help us to love our neighbors as ourselves? It might help us share a message about Jesus with them or even to treat them as we would want to be treated, but does it help us to truly love and appreciate them the way Jesus loved and appreciated sinners?

Look at the way Jesus loves the sinful woman who wets his feet with her tears and dries them with her hair and kisses them (Luke 7:36-50). Everyone else thinks the worst of her actions. Jesus sees her actions in a positive light because he values her! Look at how Jesus is “a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 7:34). It is easy to be a witness to sinners; much harder to be a friend. Look at how Jesus is able to be entertained by a tax collector (Luke 19:1-10). Or how he sees a crippled woman as a “daughter of Abraham” long overdue for healing (Luke 13:10-17). The examples go on and on. Jesus didn’t just selflessly love people; he valued them.

So What?

So what does this mean for us? I think we need to make some adjustments. I come from a Calvinist background, and many years ago I would have spoken of the “total depravity” of humans apart from Jesus. Reading Scripture helped me to shed this worldview. But even Christians who do not identify as Calvinist are taught that there was nothing in us deserving God’s love. We need to replace that narrative with one in which no one is totally depraved, no one is “just a sinner,” everyone has value as an image-bearer, and the lost among us have a special value to God. That value is not just a kinetic energy that gets activated only when God changes the person. That value is already there. God looks at the sinner and loves who that sinner is apart from whether or not that sinner will get saved. We should do the same.

Changing our view of humanity in this way will produce two results:

  1. People will no longer be projects. When we think of people as unworthy of God’s love, we have trouble valuing them, and they can easily become projects. I am trying to lead so-and-so to Jesus, and that is the only value I see in them. If instead we see value in sinners, we will love them and appreciate them for who they are, just as Jesus loved and appreciated the sinners he encountered. Our ministry to them will become a two-way street as we learn from them and receive blessings from them while sharing what we have to offer.
  2. We will no longer be crippled by low self-esteem. Many Christians have a healthy self-esteem, but those who don’t are hindered all the more by their theology. They see their true self as the one that walked in sin, and they long to be freed from themselves, which is something God will never do. They struggle to see the image of God in themselves, even though it was there long before they came to know Jesus. They hate themselves and don’t believe that God really loved who they were even while they were in rebellion against God. Singing, “I couldn’t earn it; I don’t deserve it,” is not helping them. Singing about a “wretch like me” is not helping them. If we replace our Pharisaic view of humanity with Jesus’ view of humanity, we will love who God made us to be when he knitted us in the womb, and we will love who God made others to be even while they are lost.

If you feel like you are merely a saved sinner, a wretch, or a person having no value, know that this is not what God thinks! This is the Pharisees’ view. Jesus has always felt differently, and so he naturally left the ninety-nine behind to find you. He swept the house and searched carefully until he found you. He ran to greet you while you were still at a distance. Even for the God who can create whatever he needs, something was lacking as long as you were lost. God genuinely longed for you, and when you were found there was much rejoicing in heaven (Luke 15:7, 10)! This is the message of the parable. It’s not that you don’t deserve this; it is that you were worth seeking after and celebrating!

lost sheep