Status Quo Sentries and Troublesome Trailblazers

Put yourself in their moccasins for a mile or two and you can see how either side constructs a rationale. Protecting the traditions of the past, and blazing the trail for bold new possibilities are both challenges you have probably taken on, depending on the situation. To move forward, we sometimes recognize how things have to change. Still, we often fear the treasure of what has been maintained could be tossed if we side with the new path. A new member in the Church of England spoke to one of the old guards, who explained he had been warden of the church for forty-one years. The newcomer said, “Oh my, I bet you have seen a lot of changes in those forty-one years.” To that, the warden said, “Yes, and I resisted every one of them.”

When we get a sense of the evolution of the faith of ancient Israel, we see how the Holy Covenant with Yahweh took on adjustments of emphasis as the epochs rolled on. The earliest Abrahamic covenant was about faithfulness to God and the promise of a huge family of nations: more offspring than the stars in the sky and sand on the shore. In the renewal of the covenant with Moses we see the strong promise of land. His successor Joshua was to lead them into the promised land, and they were to be faithful to the law given by Yahweh. They were not to swerve from it to the right or the left. They were to circumcise all the males, keep the feasts, fasts, dietary ordinances, the Ten Commandments, the purity rituals, and washings. The promise was security in the Promised Land and the obligation was to stay true to the whole law.

By the time of Saul of Tarsus, contemporary of the Apostles of Jesus, all of these laws were still the key emphasis of the Temple system in Jerusalem. The chief priest, scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees had constructed elaborate written traditions of interpretation through the centuries in their examination of the codes and laws. The teaching of Jesus just did not square with the traditions of those in religious power.

Saul, himself a Pharisee of a kind was persecuting the followers of Jesus until his vision-encounter with the resurrected Lord Jesus turned him around. After that, he was no longer seen by the Temple power elite as a sentry of the status quo but rather as a troublesome trailblazer. He is, by then going by the Greek name, “Paul”. He was going all over the Mediterranean regions of the Roman Empire, promoting, not Zionism, not adherence to the Law of Moses for righteousness but the connection to God through the Spirit. By believing in Jesus, all people, slave or free, Jew or Gentile, man or woman, are seen as part of spiritual circumcision, and righteous before God, by Christ’s saving work upon the cross.

Paul was not sure when he would get to visit Rome to check on the developing Christian bodies in the center of the empire, so he writes to them what is tantamount to a complete didactic essay on belief in the Lord Jesus Christ. In the section which the later church numbered as the fourth chapter, Paul is reiterating a crucial element of his teaching, that righteousness comes through faith, complete trusting reliance on Christ. He asserts it does not come by the Law, no matter how strictly one adheres to it. He was not appealing to the epoch of four hundred years earlier: a covenant emphasis that rose out of the post-exilic rise of Judaism in the reforms of Nehemiah the Judean governor and Ezra the priest. He was not pointing to the classic Mosaic emphasis on the Law 1,400 years before Christ. Paul leans on an element from the more ancient source. He looks to the patriarch Abraham from the second millennium before Christ, noting that Abraham was deemed righteous because of his trusting belief in God:

For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith…For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”)… Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.  —Romans 4:13, 16-17, 22-25

In this way, Paul teaches us to put faith in Christ and ties it to the ancient archetype of faith, Abraham. Even, before he was circumcised. Abraham realized righteousness before God simply by believing and trusting divine guidance. Paul teaches a new Christ-centered covenantal connection to God, by showing how Abraham modeled such a thing. He asserts a new, truly saving, covenant through Christ, and reinforces it with the father of their ancient faith tradition.

I suppose Paul was surely seen as a trouble-maker, both by the religious rulers and by Rome. He was not guarding the Jewish emphases of his day, nor upholding Roman traditions. He was executed in Rome, perhaps in the year 65 AD. His mission came to an end, but his proclamation of the power of Christ is still read in worship today. He was no sentry for the status quo, but everywhere he went he introduced the message that is ever new, and the One whom the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews called, Jesus Christ—the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Hebrews 13:8). Your faith is ever new, as you give yourself to God daily. Your righteousness comes by trust in God through Christ. It is a covenant of faith leaning wholly on the grace of God who is Love itself.