“In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths.” Proverbs 3:5-6
One of the great mistakes of life, if not the dominant one, is the attempt to understand ourselves and the world without God. This is the default setting of humanistic philosophy: the search for truth, self and meaning outside of the Bible. Our education system is literally built upon this premise and kids graduate every year trained up in the pursuit of a fantasy. It should be obvious that if we base our lives on what’s not true, and in defiance of the Creator of the world, we’ll certainly dash ourselves to pieces against reality.
It’s for this reason that Paul says “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘the righteous shall live by faith.’ (Romans 1:16-17). Why does he mention not being ashamed? To understand that we must understand what the gospel is. And once we understand that we understand ourselves and our feet are on the path that’s straight (Proverbs 3:5-6).
The gospel, in a nutshell, is the life and work of Jesus Christ. To believe in Jesus is to understand the purpose of His life, death and resurrection. He lived a perfect and holy life for us. This point is profound. As a created image bearer of God, you and I owe God our lives. Yes, literally. And with this life we owe Him a perfect and personal obedience that has no end. In other words, we owe God a personal, perfect and perpetual obedience and nothing short of that. The gospel is that in faith, by faith, and through faith alone, the perfection of Christ is credited to our account.
This is how the righteous requirements of the law (a life of perfect obedience) is fulfilled by us in Christ (Romans 8:4). It’s why Paul says that the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel! God will not judge on a curve. He will not alter, bend, or stretch His perfect standards. We shall have the perfect obedience of Christ by faith alone, or we will face judgment. This is the gospel and it’s how God’s justice, mercy and righteousness are all revealed. To alter this is to sever one from the other – it’s to make Him not wholly righteous, or just, for example. And God is indivisible. We cannot play one of His attributes over against others.
Jesus also died for our transgressions. His death on the cross, in faith, is the wrath we deserve and by faith alone we know there’s no condemnation for us because of this merciful exchange. To reject this is to live a life saying that God’s a liar and that He isn’t so righteous as He says He is, nor are we so bad. Many play with this by convincing themselves that their sins are “no big deal” because their heart is good and they mean well.
His resurrection is the guarantee that just as He died and rose again, so shall we, provided we have faith in Him. And this resurrection life is a life of faith – indeed, the righteous by faith alone shall live by faith. We shall live a life of loving and thankful obedience to the standard by which we’ve been saved. In this way, the Christian life isn’t either antinomian (lawless) or legalistic. It’s a life of abundant joy and trust in Christ – hearts leaping in true gratefulness to serve and know Him. Repentance of sin and the grace of God in Christ chances who we are, which causes us to hate sin. God doesn’t love us because we obey; we obey because He loves us and has poured that love into our hearts (Romans 5:3).
Okay…but let’s get organized. Our basic sin is “to be as God, knowing good and evil.” This is what happened in the Garden of Eden. “Knowing” in this way has the context of deciding for oneself, of determination. In all, our essential sin isn’t cursing too much, drunkenness, fornication, etc. Yes, those and other sins of the flesh are sins but they flow from our attempt to play God. We intend to decide right and wrong on our own terms.
What this means is that we aren’t saved to some outward conformity that’s loveless, but to loving obedience born from the heart that sees reality aright. We aren’t ashamed of the gospel because we see reality, at last and by the grace of God, not by our great intellectual powers (1 Corinthians 1:20), as it truly is. The world and everything in it is God’s. This means that every fact we know and everything we do has eternal consequences. To be ashamed of the gospel is to be that foolish man referenced throughout Proverbs and by our Lord in Matthew 24-27, building your life on the sands of humanism and self-reliance.
To set our minds on the flesh, that is, to be conformed to this world, its values and philosophy, is to find the whole business of repentance of sin silly. It’s to convince yourself that you’re a “free thinker” and/or a “free spirit” when, in fact, you’re a slave to sin. And slaves to sin seek their acceptance from the fig leafs of self-righteousness (false religions and philosophies), wealth, career success, or hedonistic pleasure. There is no neutrality in God’s created world. We will either bend the knee to Him, the true and living God, or we’ll serve idols.
The idols are the path that’s wide and whose way is easy. It’s the going along with the world and its definitions of right and wrong, not bothering to compare them to the Scriptures. Many are on that path and its end is destruction (Matthew 6:13). But when we base our premises on the Lord and keep Him preeminent in all our thinking, which is the narrow path, though it be hard, it leads to life.
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