As we saw in the
previous post in this series, the word “holy” has a double meaning, it is a
coin with two sides that complement each other. The word means “dedicated unto”
or “separated unto”; it also means “spotless and pure.” In Christ, we can’t
have one without having the other. How might we think about the idea that we
are a pure and spotless priesthood in Jesus Christ?
I’ll begin with some
questions, “Who are we going to believe when pondering this issue of being
holy? Are we going to believe what others tell us? Are we going to allow our
experience to define our thinking? Are we going to believe what we feel and
think? Are we going to believe what the enemy tells us? Or are we going to
believe what God tells us in and through His Word?”
These, taken
together, are baseline questions for life; they go to the essence of how we
live, how we think and feel, of how we navigate life. They determine how we
“see” life. How can the New Testament continually refer to Christians as
saints, as holy ones? God can do so because of Jesus Christ and His perfect and
complete work of salvation, a salvation that reaches back before time and
extends into eternity, with the Cross in time and space forming the nexus of
the unseen touching the seen, the heavens connecting with the earth, and
eternity linking with time.
And so Paul
writes that “we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which
are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which
are not seen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18). This statement not only refers to what
preceded it, a Way of suffering that brings about life; it also provides a lens
for what follows, “For we know that if the earthly tent which is our home is
torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in
the heavens…for we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:1, 7).
This “seeing of
the unseen” (note that Moses was “seeing Him who is invisible” in Hebrews 11:27,
and note the linkage with “endurance” and “reproach” with this “seeing” in
Hebrews 11:26 – 27) leads Paul and his readers to “having concluded this, that
one died for all, therefore all died” (5:14) and then:
“Therefore from
now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known
Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer.” (2
Cor. 5:16.
Here is a “therefore”
that is a lynchpin, for it connects what precedes it with what follows it, and
what follows it is: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature;
the old things are passed away, behold, new things have come…He made Him who
knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness
of God in Him.” (2 Cor. 5:17, 21).
The Holy
Priesthood of the children of God within Jesus Christ, our Great High Priest,
is called to walk by faith and not by sight. It is called to see the unseen as
a way of life and to live above the earth’s gravitational pull. This means,
among other things, that we no longer recognize, or identify, others “according
to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh.” That
is, we don’t judge or evaluate according to appearances, but rather according
to God’s Word as we live within Christ and are led and filled by the Holy Spirit.
This requires an increase in our vision of Jesus as a Way of Life, as we
are transformed into His image, meditating on His Word and allowing it to be
engrafted into our hearts and minds as we respond to His Word in sacrificial obedience.
To no longer recognize
others “according to the flesh” means that we cease from using our natural
earthly facilities and senses in Adam to see others, but rather we perceive
according to the eyes of our understanding, our renewed hearts and minds, and we
emphatically do so according to God’s Word and the Holy Spirit. After all, we
are no longer “in Adam,” we are now “in Christ” (Romans 5:12 – 21; 1 Cor. 15:42
– 49). Hence, we are the “new creatures” of 2 Cor. 5:17; we are not only new
creatures in Christ, we are living in a new creation in Christ.
This should not
surprise us when we consider that the God of Abraham is the God who “calls
things that are not, as though they are” (Romans 4:17).
Let’s recall the
above questions: Who are we going to believe when pondering this issue of being
holy? Are we going to believe what others tell us? Are we going to allow our
experience to define our thinking? Are we going to believe what we feel and
think? Are we going to believe what the enemy tells us? Or are we going to
believe what God tells us in and through His Word?
To no longer
recognize others according to the flesh means that we learn to no longer
recognize ourselves according to the flesh. If Jesus Christ is your Lord and
Savior, are you still a sinner or are you a saint, a holy one, in Him? If you
believe God’s Word then you are a saint in Christ – no matter what you have
been told, no matter how you may feel – for your identity depends on Christ
Jesus, not on yourself. In fact, in 2 Corinthians 5:21 we see that we have been
made the “righteousness of God in Him [Christ].”
Our holy
priesthood in Jesus Christ is not a fiction, it is a reality in God, whether we
perceive that reality or not, whether we are learning to live in that reality
or not – for we are called to believe God and His Word and the work of Jesus
Christ, not our own perceptions. And may I say that others need us to live as
who we are and not as who we were, for our families and friends and neighbors,
our world, need the intercessions and intercessory life of the Holy Priesthood
of the People of God in Jesus Christ. That is, if you don’t want to believe the
Word of God for yourself, please do it for the sake of others. This is not an
option, this is our calling in Christ.
In the next post
in this series, I want us to look at 1 Cor. 1:4 – 9 and John 17:6 – 8, asking
ourselves, “How could Paul have written this to the Corinthians, as messed up
as they were? How could Jesus have said these things about His disciples, since
that very evening they would desert Him and Peter would deny Him?”
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