The Healing Health of the Gospel of Christ Jesus
By Jay Wegter
Chapter four of John’s first epistle is a remarkably rich section on how the gospel of Jesus Christ speaks comprehensively to the human condition. In the following verse we see in bold relief the tension between love and fear. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love” (1 Jn 4:18). How fascinating that John the apostle so effectively and efficiently captures the anthropology of the universal human dilemma—namely that fear is a symptom of expected punishment. And that when controlled by this fear, a person is not open to the reception of God’s love. Fear is symptomatic of the fear of judgment, this is true of even milder forms of fear such as stress and anxiety. For the troubled conscience sets up court, hears the evidence for prosecution, accepts the verdict, and then expects to hear the sentence.
This is the ongoing experience of every person on the planet who is not enjoying the cleansing benefits of Christ’s blood. But that does not mean that every individual is mourning over his sin or feels weighed down by it. No, sinners are quite enthusiastic about the false gods and idols they serve. And about useless solutions to a troubled conscience. Nonetheless, sin separates the unbeliever from God, and sin sours the sinner’s expectation that a holy God could love him. In short, we could truthfully say that a bad conscience is not only reluctant to receive love from a holy God, but also that possessing a defiled conscience heightens a sense of ineligibility for the reception of God’s love.
Because of being cut off from the experience of God’s love, the sinner brings his yearnings to created things. His heart is an idol factory, ceaselessly shoveling the finite things of this world into the God-shaped vacuum—treating those created things as if they were the true source of meaning, purpose, identity, security, and significance. Thus, as a result of the fall in Eden, this is the human condition, namely that slavery surely follows the service of sin (Jn 8:34-35). People commit sin in an attempt to get their deepest needs met. But all sin is lawlessness (1 Jn 3:4), and all sin is against God (Ps 51:4), and all sin ultimately brings disintegration and alienation from God rather than the wholeness we crave.
We were created for a love relationship with our Creator who has revealed Himself as a covenant-keeping God of mercy and compassion. But our love of sin, our evil conscience and resultant fear pull us toward self and the world and away from God’s command to come to Him that we might have life and salvation. Wonder of wonders, the gospel proclaims to us that God really desires our fellowship. And that He has provided what is needed for a relationship with us, and it is grounded upon what He has decisively done with our sin through the work of Christ.
The marvel of the promises of the new covenant is that everything is in place now for cleansing, pardon and favor so that the believing sinner may experience unbroken fellowship with the Lord (see 1 Jn 1:1-9-2:2; Heb 8:6-13). Therefore, it is the blessed duty of the believing sinner to daily preach the gospel to himself –namely that sonship, pardon, favor, and fellowship, are all his irrevocable possession by virtue of his union with Christ.
As believers walk in fellowship with the Lord, receiving His love, they are progressively perfected in love. They grow ever more fully into unobstructed conduits of the Lord’s love to God and the brethren. “By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world” (1 Jn 4:17). The genuine believer is sensitive to any interruptions to fellowship by acts of personal sin. He is frequently smitten by his unworthiness for God’s love and favor. But as the Spirit points him to the blood of Christ again and again, he enjoys cleansing, and he takes fresh courage that Christ is his eligibility and qualification for God’s eternal love and favor.
Humanity has a telos, an irradicable design—it is a telos of glory. We exist to be in covenant relationship with God so that the following formula characterizes our walk and the purpose of our existence, “I will be your God and you will be My people.” Walking in that blessed arrangement is how we glorify Him and fulfill our telos. That formula of the Lord being our God and we His people was first given in the book of Leviticus. And it reaches its fulfillment and apex in the eternal state described in Revelation chapter 21.
For God to be our God means first and foremost that He is our ‘Source Person’. In other words, we find our created purpose, deepest needs, and heart longings met in Him. He is the source of our supply and daily needs. This is closely tied to worship. For we will give our time, talent, affection, devotion, and energy to that which we perceive meets our needs. Thus, true worship cherishes God as the source of life and of all we need. It could be expressed in this manner; our physical needs are promised to us as we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness (Mt 6:33-34). But we know what mankind’s problem is, people love the world instead of God (1 Jn 2:15-17).
Because of human depravity, heart needs planted in the soul by our Creator are taken to created things. “Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever” (1 Jn 2:15-17).
For the unbeliever, the world has what is necessary to satisfy his greatest longings. But because we are created for fellowship with an infinite God, all finite points of fulfillment are false integration points. God has put eternity in our hearts, we cannot rest until we are in relationship with our infinite Creator (Augustine quote on restless heart). The world is not a fitting source of integration for a creature made in God’s image and likeness. Beauty, bucks, and brains, power, possessions, and pleasure are the counterfeit gods of our age. The not so subtle ‘pride of life’ has the world’s inhabitants jockeying for status. But the apostle Paul describes this hunger for a higher rung on the ladder as foolish. “For we are not bold to class or compare ourselves with some of those who commend themselves; but when they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are without understanding” (2 Cor 10:12).
Since we were created for a love relationship with our Maker, our deepest yearnings are going to perfectly match the fruit of that love relationship. What is meant by that statement is that through Christ, the believer receives love and adoption. The glorious benefit of that to the soul is: security and significance. The true Christian is secure in God’s unchanging love. And the believer has significance, he is not a zero, why? Because he has belonging, immutable membership in God’s forever family. This is how Christ makes people whole. For, idols mangle our human unity of soul—they disintegrate rather than integrate the dimensions of our soul. Only in Christ are mind, affections, will, and conscience brought together in one unifying, healing, God-glorifying life direction.
Due to our fallenness and alienation from God, the natural man will look for security and significance somewhere other than in communion with his Creator. How devious and cruel that the perfect security and significance that comes from love and belonging in Christ is perverted into the counterfeit, namely sensuality and power. Yes, Hollywood is the worldwide distributor of counterfeit sources of love and belonging. God created us for love and belonging in Him, but the devil, the world, and the flesh have corrupted that desire into the soul-corrupting substitutes of sex and violence.
The most convincing false source today of the integration God’s love and belonging are designed to bring is porn. A false source of integration has been man’s problem from the beginning. He takes his spiritual needs to fleshly sources, to false integration points. Porn is a bunker-buster smart bomb which enters deep within the masculine soul, and wreaks havoc there. Thus, porn is the spirit of Jezebel, a castration device uniquely designed to cancel the exercise of true masculinity. Men are neutered by porn. By their use of porn, they blunt their moral authority and bring their consciences into bondage. Porn use drags the conscience into a cycle of accepting defilement as ‘normal’. It sets up a corrupt objectifying worldview about the human body. And when habitually used by a society produces the ‘pornification’ of a culture.
A tragic consequence of pornified culture is that women are indirectly in competition with the raunchy idealized sex goddesses of porn. We see it in the immodest trends in fashion and in the gross sensuality of the female icons in our culture. This truly is an evil generation and age of darkness. A defiled conscience is a more serious matter than men imagine. For an evil conscience cannot see any beauty in God’s holiness, therefore it is repelled by who God is, and consequently becomes ever more resolute in its enslavement to idolatry. How horrifying this is, sin sickness unto death and damnation is the human condition.
Only the power of the gospel can penetrate this culture-wide fortress raised up against the knowledge of God. For this walled bastion of lies is set up in the institutions of our society and it is set up in the hearts of men. The walls have written on the outside, ‘God stay away, for sin is freedom and fulfillment’. Like a tagger with his can of spray paint, porn use graffiti’s this slogan on the walls of the fortress and on the walls of the heart.
The raw sewage of porn incarcerates its users like captives behind steel bars, and those confining iron bars are formed in the foundry of a defiled conscience. The solution to this soul-damning condition is found only in Christ. The Great Physician entered time and space by His incarnation to seek and to save that which was lost—to seek those who did not have a normal relationship with God—the very relationship for which they were created. But in order for the Son of God to become the Great Physician, He had a great work to do.
This work involved earning the equipment that would enable Him to save to the uttermost. He was born of woman and born under the law. He had to keep the law perfectly and lay His life down as ransom for many. He shed His blood to give life to the spiritually dead. No priest but Christ ever offered His own flesh and blood as the sacrifice. Our Great Physician took His perfect righteousness, His suffering, His shed blood, and His torn flesh and made these into healing medicine for helpless sinners.
His glory is not only found in His beauty as the God-man, but in the equipment He earned to save even the worst sinner.
What does it take for a polluted sinner to be put on the path of being perfected in love? Of walking in love so that he will have confidence in the day of judgment? So full and comprehensive is this substitution that Christ, as the Head of His people answers in His own Person for their sin, and clothes them with His own righteousness. There can be confidence before God without cognizance of these blessings.
The concept of the new man, alive in Christ must be taught to our sheep, to every growing Christian. What is sanctification but the new man asserting himself?
Teach what is meant by radical identification with Christ. Radically identified with Him was how the Father saved us. Radically identified with Him is how our sanctification moves forward.