Christ and His Spirit

Perhaps you have seen pairs of practices listed which are biblical, that is, the actions can be found in scripture, but only one of which is Christlike. For instance, owning slaves and freeing slaves are both biblical, but only one is Christlike. Killing your enemies and loving your enemies are biblical, but only one is Christlike. The same can be said for repaying an eye for an eye and forgiving all wrongs; for stoning evildoers and having dinner with them. On and on we could go. Taken literally, as a whole, the Bible is unclear about what is righteous and unrighteous. Murder is forbidden in the Ten Commandments, but Elijah slays the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:40). What are we to think and do?

We are not the first to recognize the scripture’s contradictory portrayals of what is godly. The early church saw the problem too. Aware of this, Paul declares that only in Christ is the veil which keeps us from understanding the scriptures removed (2 Corinthians 3:14). The letter, the literal reading, kills, but the Spirit gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6). When we confess Jesus as Lord, the one who is the image of God and in whom the divine fullness dwells (Colossians 1:15,19), we are saying that he is the lens through which to read all scripture. Christ teaches us to distinguish what is consistent with God from what is not when looking at the history of Israel’s attempts to follow God.

To know Christ and his Spirit is essential to understanding how to read the scriptures. Without Jesus showing us the true heart and love of God, we would not be able to sort our way through the contradictory statements and examples found in the Bible. Are we warmakers or peacemakers? Do we take the lives of the wicked or lay down our own lives, taking up the cross? The way we make sense of all the stories and claims is by interpreting metaphorically anything which is inconsistent with Christ, so as to make it about Christ figuratively, and interpreting literally anything which is true to Christ.

For instance, when we are told to love our neighbors as ourselves we take this literally. When we read that Jewish men in Ezra’s time were told to divorce their foreign wives (Ezra 10:10-12), or that Joshua was to slaughter all the children of the Canaanites (1 Samuel 15:3), we take those as figurative ways of telling us to address our sinfulness. When we know Christ, we cannot advocate breaking marriage vows based on racial differences any more than we can believe Jesus would say to act like Herod the Great and kill babies. Christ and his Spirit lead us.

In Acts, it is the Spirit sent by Christ that guides the early church. When the Spirit is active among the Samaritans, the church does not resist or dispute the Spirit’s presence, but rather changes its perspective to include what the Spirit is doing (Acts 8). When the Spirit comes upon Cornelius and his household, the church again accepts the Gentiles, though without the Spirit’s obvious coming it would have been unthinkable. Christ and his Spirit are leading his disciples into what is new, a radical departure from their traditional ways of understanding God and his will for them, and all is now reinterpreted through Christ himself.

Christ, through his example and Spirit, has always been leading the church out of its own worst versions of itself, shedding prior paradigms for the disruptive coming of the Kingdom of God. We read not only the history of Israel from the perspective of Christ, but also the history of the church. The pronouncements and practices of the church thought he centuries has been sometimes as morally compromised and blatantly opposed to Christ as any of the actions of ancient Israel. Racism, slavery, the mistreatment of women, the persecution of unbelievers and the murder of heretics, pursuing worldly power, the failure to care for creation, division and sectarianism, war and violence, and many other sins are indisputably part of the history of the church. Only through Christ do fresh prophetic voices discern the wheat from the tares, the way of the Spirit of Christ from our horrific failures, calling us to repent, mourn, and follow Christ.