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What line did Jesus draw? He drew the dividing line between God’s
Kingdom of Light and Satan’s dominion of darkness. He didn’t draw
this line philosophically—leaving it open to discussion or to the
shifting definitions of human opinion and religious ideology. Because
Jesus was the Messiah King, His arrival on the scene of human history
created the real, spiritually tangible existence of that dividing
line. His incarnational coming inaugurated the earthly debut of the
Kingdom of God, and that Kingdom’s ongoing spiritual presence calls
for human wills to respond. Putting off or making excuses to avoid a
decisive response was then and is now to make a negative choice.
John the
Baptist—sent by God as a prophetic voice to prepare people
for receiving the coming King—preached, “Repent, for the
Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” Jesus preached exactly the same
message with another intent. He was now calling people to participate
in that Kingdom by putting their trust in Him. True repentance
or metanoia [“change of mind”] is not an emotional sorrow
over personal sins or an intellectual adaptation to a new concept.
It’s the full human person—body, soul, and spirit—fully
surrendering to Jesus Christ as the Savior King. The choice of
repentant faith in response to the Good News of God’s
Kingdom initiates in the believer’s heart the actual Reign of
Almighty God, “the Father of lights, with whom there is no
variation or shadow due to change.” (James 1:17).
Forgiveness of sins and a renewed mind are the results of that
surrender, for both are found only in the King.
Satan is at work
24/7 to prevent sinners from crossing over that dividing line by
their surrender to Jesus. For all human history, he’s avidly
studied our fallen nature, learning how to play every field in order
to cater successfully to each human inclination. “Satan
disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14), not pure and holy light, but creational forms of
light and enlightenment tinted to individual human taste with various
degrees of darkness. He offers as many shades of gray as there are
human personalities to be duped by them. He still uses his old
forbidden-fruit promise that “your eyes will be opened,
and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5), and it still yields the deadly blindness of multiple
moralities, all independent from God. Long before humans fell into
it, the devil chose this path to moral independence from God. By
leading us into it too, he became “the god of this world”
who not only “blinded the minds of the unbelievers”
in Eden,
but continues to blind all
the unbelieving, “to keep them from seeing the light of
the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”
(2 Cor 4:4).
Scripture reveals
that by God’s Son “all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.”
(Col 1:16). Jesus drew a line
symbolically in the beginning when He “divided the light from
the darkness,” (Gen 1:4). But in
the human birthright of moral conscience, from the beginning until
now, He has faithfully been “the true Light which gives light to
every man coming into the world.” (John 1:9).
All creation, including those made in His image to be servant-leaders
and caretakers of creation, were described by God as “very good”
(Gen 1:31). All creation, including
us, would have remained “very good,” if human leadership had remained
living in the truth, walking in the light of the Lord.
But we listened instead to the liar Satan and were deceived into the
spiritual death and damning darkness of his lies.
Jesus described the
deceiver: “… He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding
to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks
his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies,”
(John 8:44); and He contrasted the
deceiver’s works to His own: “The thief does not come except
to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have
life, and that they may have it more abundantly,” (John 10:10). Satan extends his own rebellion against God through
us by luring us to sin against the God of light, thereby capturing us
as prisoners in his dominion of darkness. Jesus unmasked the
devil’s goal in tempting us to sin—“Very truly I tell you,
everyone who sins is a slave to sin,” (John 8:34)—and
the Apostle John told the end result: “He who does what is
sinful is of the devil.” John continues by telling why no
human can enter the territory of self-will and autonomy from God without falling
under Satan’s influential power, and sometimes, his full control: “because the devil has been sinning from the beginning.” Because he got there first and is the mastermind of
rebellion against God, he rules over the domain of sin. But these explanations
from 1 John 3:8 conclude with the divine intervention that is humanity’s only hope: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.”
Why does God’s
work of salvation boil down to this one thing: destroying Satan’s
work? It’s because sin means “missing the mark,”
and the divine mark, God’s true target for humans, is to walk in truth by living and thriving in the God of truth. Through lies, Satan tempts people to use their God-given desires in
God-forbidden ways. He uses creation itself, or his manipulations of
created things, to lure those “good” human desires into “missing
the mark.” And the result? “Then, after desire has
conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown,
gives birth to death,” (James 1:15). The incredible
but inconceivably gracious response of our loving God to our sins and spiritual death was the Cross
and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. By personally paying for our sins
on the Cross, Jesus drew a line in human history between sin’s damnation and sin’s forgiveness. By His Resurrection,
which completed His work on the Cross, Jesus drew a line between the
spiritually dead and the divinely alive, between slavery in Satan’s
dominion of darkness and the abundant life in God’s Kingdom of light.
The vicarious
Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross went beyond taking away sins. It
also put the sinner to death. A crucial dimension of
destroying “the devil’s work” was for Jesus vicariously
to take into His own death the false humanity that Satan had
fashioned with lies: “For we know that our old self was
crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with,
that we should no longer be slaves to sin,” (Rom 6:6). But, while the forgiveness of sins is God’s
instantaneous act, the emancipation from slavery to sin is
chronological, progressing in earthly time as rapidly as believers in
Christ let the truth of Christ set them free. In promising believers
this liberation, Jesus inferred this progressive pattern: “If
you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know
the truth, and the truth will set you free,” (John 8:31-32).
Many have knelt at
the Cross of Christ for forgiveness without completely surrendering
to the abundant life He brought to them by His Resurrection.
Death to the “old self”—the false self created by
Satan’s lies—is not a one time event. In Galatians 2:20,
the Apostle Paul made an amazing claim based on Christ’s work on
the Cross: “I have been
crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who
loved me and gave himself for me.”
In
this
statement, he
was describing
his victorious
walk
“by faith in the
Son of God”—his
experiential
journey
in
daily
manifesting his new
life in Christ.
In
our union
with Christ,
we can live life
“more
abundantly,”
but
not automatically. Day
by day, even moment
by moment, we
must choose to
follow
Him, choose to obey
Him. In the same way, while
we have been “crucified
with Christ”
we do not automatically die to the individual lies that shaped the
false self.
We
must,
by
a choice of our new will in Christ, reject
any
lingering lies. This
is why the
Apostle Paul exhorts
us, “Put
to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual
immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is
idolatry,”
(Col 3:5).
Placing
our faith
in Jesus
brings us across the line from death to life, because “if
anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed
away; behold, all things have become new,”
(2 Cor 5:17).
But Satan
doesn’t easily give up on
repentant
sinners
who were
once his slaves. If he
can’t
keep
us in
his realm of darkness with the old
lies he once used to
enslave us,
he invents
a million others—appealing
half-truths, innocent-looking gray areas—to lure us back across the
line into
his territory.
This is why Jesus said, “Do
not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not
come to bring peace, but a sword,”
(Mat 10:34).
He
came
to draw a
line that meant spiritual
warfare
for the rest of this fallen world’s history. Believers
are to be warriors commissioned to help others find their true
selves
in Christ. In
order to do that, without themselves
becoming
spiritual
casualties in the battle, they
must
keep
their minds and hearts
fed on the
truth God has revealed in
His Word.
They must become skilled
in resisting satanic lies with “the
sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,”
(Eph 6:17).
This
dividing line is absolutely precise.
There
is no middle ground, no room
for a mixture
of the brightest light of truth with
the
faintest tint of shading. Divine truth has no tolerance of a compromise
between
the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the most appealing precepts of ancient
or modern wisdom. Therefore, it can never ever be Jesus
plus
something else, for the
very
person
and presence of
Christ the King defines
the Kingdom of God.
He
alone is
the King of
Kings,
Who
said, “
I
am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father
except through Me.”
(John 14:6).
From
that exclusive stance,
Jesus drew a
line, and
everyone’s eternal destiny depends on what side of the line they
choose
to be on.
[If you found this helpful, you might also want to read, Finding and Becoming Our True Selves, “Question Autonomy!” and Identity Amnesia.]