In part 1 we
considered whether it is biblical for Christians to speak of a persisting sin
as though it is their identity. A
Christian with a history of substance abuse (e.g., alcoholism or drug
addiction) may continue to struggle with those habits and sins but do those
sins define their identity? Is that fundamentally who they are? Scripture says
no. A believer, i.e., one who has been given new life and true faith by the
Holy Spirit, who has been united to the risen Christ by the Spirit, through
true faith, is fundamentally a “new creation” (2 Cor 5:17) because he has “died to sin” (Rom 6:2, 10). This does not mean that Christians will not
continue to struggle with sin. When Paul says that “sin shall no longer have
dominion over you” (Rom 6:14) he was not
teaching that there is a so-called “second blessing” nor was he teaching that
Christians reach what some traditions call “entire perfection” in this life.
Rather, he was explaining that, by virtue of Christ’s death and our union with
him in that death, there has been a fundamental break with sin in the life of
the Christian. When we were outside of Christ and under the law for our standing
with God, we were under the dominion of sin. Now, however, we who are in
Christ, i.e., united to him by grace alone (sola gratia),
through faith alone (sola fide), are no longer under the
law for our standing with God. We are under grace. Because that is so, sin no
longer controls us. We struggle with it. We continue to sin but we also now
resist in a way that we did not before.
About sexual sin (e.g., same-sex attraction
and/or behavior), Paul writes: “Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a
person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins
against his own body” (1 Cor 6:18; ESV). In
Christ we are able to flee. We are able to mortify sin, i.e., to put it to
death. The Spirit is at work in us putting them to death and making us alive in
Christ (vivification). We are being conformed to the image of Christ. The work
of Christ for us, i.e., his active, suffering
obedience for us, even to the cross (Phil 2:8) leads to the gracious, gradual sanctifying
work of the Holy Spirit in us.
This leads us to the second
part of the question: is it proper for Christians to speak of offering their
former, sinful identity (e.g., their substance abuse or their homosexuality) to
God as a sort of offering? This is one of those things that well-intentioned
Christians say in order to encourage other believers to love and good works but
it is quite misguided and ill-founded. Scripture never speaks of believers
offering their sins or even their old-man or their former lives as an offering.
To be sure, under the Old Testament, offerings did sometimes involve death and
bloodshed but when we distinguish offerings from sins the picture becomes much clearer. Biblically,
we mortify (put to death) sins and we offer those things of which God has approved. To
confuse those two categories will only lead to grief.
The first thing to know about offerings, in Scripture, is that we
may offer to God only what he has commanded. We do not get to decide
what God wants or with what he is pleased. In a world where we have been told,
perhaps by parents and teachers, that we are “God’s gift” or the like, where
our every effort has been praised as wonderful, this might be a difficult
truth to accept but accept it we must. With the holy God of Scripture there are
no participation trophies. Consider the very first offering about which we read
in Scripture:
In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of
the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock
and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering,
but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his
face fell (Gen 4:3-5; ESV).
Cain brought an offering with
which he thought God must be pleased
but God was not. Cain reacted with fury. “How dare Elohim not receive my
offering?” He became enraged with jealousy when the Lord received his brother’s
offering favorably and so much so that he murdered his brother. This is a fixed
principle in God’s worship. Under Moses, he explicitly forbade “unauthorized”
offerings (Ex 30:9). In Leviticus 10 we read that when Nadab and Abihu
made an “unauthorized” offering to the Lord they paid for it with their lives.
Nothing, in that regard, has changed in the New Testament. God is still
displeased with unauthorized worship. Paul explicitly warned the Colossians
congregation about this very thing: “These things have indeed an appearance of
wisdom in promoting will-worship and asceticism and severity to the body, but
they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh” (Col 2:23). Under the New Testament God put Ananias and
Sapphira to death for lying to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5).
The Colossian Christians were being tempted to make up their own
religion, to decide what they
thoughtGod must want, to make up their own religion, to invent
their own offerings to God. In their case, they were sure that God must approve
of a mash-up of a bunch of different religious practices and philosophies that
were popular in the area. They thought that God must be pleased with harsh
treatment of the body and bringing back some of the Jewish religious laws about
washings and foods, which had been fulfilled by Christ and had expired. They
were wrong. The word that I have translated “will-worship” (ἐθελοθρησκίᾳ) the ESV translates equally well
with “self-made religion.” They were quite literally making up things according
to their imagination and offering them to God. He is not pleased with such
worship. He has not commanded it. He does not accept it. What we like, or what
we value, or what we think is beautiful does not determine what God will
accept. He determines what he will accept and he nowhere commands us to offer
our old man, which Paul calls “the flesh” (Rom 7:5, 14) i.e., our sinful nature, our former way of life. In
biblical worship, if it is not commanded it is forbidden.
Indeed, according to Scripture,
only that which God has deemed holy is acceptable to him. The entire book of
Leviticus is nothing if not an illustration of this truth. It begins with
detailed prescriptions about what may be offered to the Lord and how and only
those things authorized by the Lord for his worship, for offerings, are said to
be “a pleasing aroma to the Lord” (Lev 1:9). Of course, the Levitical offerings were meant
to point them (and us) to the perfect Lamb of God, Jesus. They also illustrated
what God really wants from us in response to Jesus’ perfect sin offering:
The sacrifices of God are
a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise (Ps 51:17; ESV).
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise (Ps 51:17; ESV).
Our offerings, our worship, our Christian life are always and
only our response to Christ’s offering of himself to God for us. Paul writes
that we should “…walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a
fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph 5:2). He wrote to the Philippians that he was “being
poured out as a drink offering upon
the sacrificial offering of your faith” (Phil 2:17). Of course these are figures of speech but we must not miss how dependent they are upon the Old Testament images.
the sacrificial offering of your faith” (Phil 2:17). Of course these are figures of speech but we must not miss how dependent they are upon the Old Testament images.
There is only one God (Deut 6:4). There are not two gods, a wrathful Old
Testament God and a benevolent New Testament God, who is pleased to accept
whatever we will offer him (even our sins). This way of speaking about God is
one of the oldest heresies (the Marcionite heresy) to afflict Christianity but
it is widely held by American evangelicals of various sorts. This heretical way
of thinking lies just under the surface of the teaching that we should
sacrifice our old way of lives to God as a sort of (figurative) offering. It
ignores his holiness, his justice, his explicit commands and the implicit
teaching of Scripture about how we should think about our sins, about our old
lives, and about what pleases God. It is a form of idolatry, i.e., making up
things about God or making a god in our own image. Paul did not describe
his former way of life (e.g., persecuting and murdering Christians) as an
“offering” but as feces (σκύβαλα; Phil 3:8)
Christ obeyed and died in
place of his people to set them free from idolatry not to reinforce it. The
Apostle John summarizes the Christian response to idolatry with admirable
brevity: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21). The good news is that Christ has come.
All who believe are freely clothed in his righteousness. We have been saved by
his unconditional favor alone, through faith alone. We are being freely
sanctified by his Spirit and that sanctification consists of two things: the
dying of the old man and the making alive of the new (Heidelberg Catechism 88). Our old, dying self, is
nothing to offer to God. It is something to crucify, to mortify (Rom 8:13; Col 3:5). In Christ we are now being renewed in the
image of Christ, in Calvin’s words, we offer ourselves, “promptly and
sincerely” to Christ.
—R. Scott Clark, Escondido
