A Kingdom of Priests (4)

 

In 2 Corinthians 5:16 we read that because of Jesus Christ and His glorious work of salvation that, “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.”

 

Sadly, for the most part, we are trained to evaluate others, and indeed life, according to the flesh, according to what our natural eyes see. We are trained to see ourselves not in the Light of God’s Word and Jesus Christ, but according to naturalistic understanding, according to the world, the flesh, the devil…and O so sadly, according to much of the professing church which is mired in the gravitational pull of the earthly and not the heavenly.

 

What is it to “know Christ according to the flesh”? It is to know Him other than He is revealed in Scripture, and this “other” is myriad. We can know Him as a good man, but of course, that cannot be so; as C.S. Lewis articulated (building on those who had gone before him), Jesus is either Lord, liar, or lunatic; Jesus Christ did not give us the option to consider Him a good man.

 

We may know Christ as an American, but not just any American, but most certainly as belonging to our own political party. We may know Him as an economist, supporting our personal economic theories and agendas. We may know Him as belonging to our racial and ethnic heritage. We can know Him according to the flesh any number of ways, but the most dangerous way to know Christ according to the flesh is to know Him according to our ideas of righteousness and religion, allowing them to be the interpretive lens through which we read the Bible and think about Him, ourselves, and others.

 

As the Pharisees and scribes demonstrated, when we see and know Christ according to the flesh, according to our natural instincts and way of thinking, the assured result is that we will kill Him, we will put to death the revelation of Christ in the Bible, in our hearts, and most tragically, in the hearts of others. And here is a frightening thing, our thinking can look so good, for it can focus on good works, on self-improvement programs, on sociology; we can be like Peter on the Mount, “Let’s make three tabernacles!”

 

Think of Paul, the man who wrote 2 Corinthians 5:16; here is an example of someone who was O so righteous when seeing Christ and His Body according to flesh, persecuting the Body of Christ, being complicit in Stephen’s murder; yet Paul would come to a place when he would write, “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ” (Phil. 3:7).

 

Let’s ponder two examples of what it looks like to see others beyond the natural, the flesh, and to see them as God sees them, we’ll take an example from Paul and one from our Lord Jesus.

 

Suppose you were asked to speak to a congregation that had split into factions, was tolerating sexual promiscuity, showing up drunk for worship and fellowship, and creating chaos during corporate worship. What mental picture would you form in your mind as you prepared to speak on Sunday morning to these people? How would you “see” them? How would you begin your sermon? Paul faced a similar situation, the difference being that since he couldn’t travel to speak to the congregation, he wrote a letter. How do you suppose his letter began? How did he set the stage for dealing with the above problems? Let’s read what he wrote:

 

“Paul, called as an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes,          To the church of God which is in Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling, with all who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

“I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus, that in everything you were enriched in Him, in all speech and all knowledge, just as the testimony concerning Christ was confirmed in you, so that you are not lacking in any gift, as you eagerly await the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will also confirm you to the end, blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, through whom you were called into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” (1 Cor. 1:1 – 9).

 

Paul calls the Corinthians “sanctified” and “saints.” He thanks God for the grace they have in Christ Jesus and says that they have been enriched in Him in everything, “in all speech and knowledge” and that they are “not lacking in any gift.” Paul is confident that Christ will “confirm them to the end, blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

 

Does Paul’s approach make any sense? How can he write these things to a congregation so messed up?

 

He can do it because what he is writing is based on and in our Lord Jesus Christ, it is about the marvelous and miraculous love and grace of God in Jesus Christ, as especially manifested in the Cross. This does not mean that the Corinthians are not accountable, it does not mean that they do not need to repent of their present sin, it does not mean that they do not need to grow in their love and understanding. In fact, much of the rest of Paul’s letter is taking them to task for their immaturity and their sin, and instructing them in godly living in Jesus Christ. But first Paul sets the stage by affirming Jesus Christ in them and them in Jesus Christ – Paul does not address them as sinners but as saints.

 

Paul desires that they live in Christ as who they are in Christ, and thus the letter begins with affirmations of the work of God in the Corinthians, a reminder of who God is and of who the Corinthians are in Him. This is not the way we would normally think but it is the Way of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

There is a sense in which we can only say hard and difficult things to our brothers and sisters when our brothers and sisters are secure in their relationship with Jesus Christ. There is a sense in which God can only speak hard and difficult things to the depths of my soul, to the depths of who I am, when I am secure and assured of who He is in me and of who I am in Him. Without an assurance of God’s love for me and of the perfect and complete work of Jesus Christ on the Cross I will likely interpret God’s conviction of sin and disciplines in my life as His rejection, when in fact it is a manifestation of my Father’s love for me.

 

Paul was not viewing the Corinthians “according to the flesh” but seeing them in the Holy Spirit as who they were in Jesus Christ. Paul was not basing his ministry to the Corinthians based on appearances, but rather based on Jesus Christ and the Cross (see 1 Cor. 1:30 – 2:5).

 

I suppose I should say that for Paul to have written the first nine verses of his letter and then to have kept going in that vein without exposing and dealing with immaturity and sin would have been an example of the false teaching that we see today, a teaching that wants to seduce us by having us feel good without the Cross, without repentance, without obedience to the Word of God. Paul was not ignoring the chaos and sin in Corinth, in fact, he was writing because there was sin and chaos. 

There is also a sense in which Paul ends his letter the way he begins his letter, for in 1 Corinthians 15 we have the theme of the resurrection, of our glory in Christ and of our being taken out of Adam and into Christ – a reminder again of who we are as Paul directs our attention to our consummate destiny.

 

In the next post in this series we’ll consider an example of Jesus Christ saying things that, according the flesh, just don’t make sense.