This post, and the post to follow, are not posts that are meant to turn your head a little. They're not simply "double-take" posts. These are absolute all-out in-your-face posts! I might even make some enemies with these posts, and I'm willing to take that risk. But my ultimate hope is that the words in these posts will be used to set people free.
For too long the Church of Jesus Christ has been involved in an atrocious, yet all too widely accepted, form of Christianity that continues to include within it various forms of the very thing that Christ came to set us free from! Actually, this has been going on for 2,000 years. Certain early Christians, such as the people in the churches of Galatia, were so involved in this atrocity that the Apostle Paul, in a strong rebuke, called them foolish and he asked them who had bewitched them that they would turn back to such things!
"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free," Paul said (Galatians 5:1), but yet there are still many Christians living today who are in bondage to the very thing that Christ set us free from! It should not be this way! So what is this terrible, heinous form of slavery that Christians are involved in, through the preaching and teaching of it, and through the daily yoking of themselves together with it?
The LAW. God's Law. God's holy Law. I'll be specific: The Ten Commandments (and any and all other of God's 600+ laws and ordinances in the Bible). This is what Christians, to their detriment, are misguidedly teaching and preaching as the way of the Christian life. The paradox here is that God's good, holy law... is not good for us! It was against us and contrary to us (Colossians 2:14). It was bondage to us (Galatians 4:24). See, God's good and holy Law has this itsy bitsy little shortcoming when it comes to sinful man: It can make no one perfect or holy or good! (See Hebrews 7:18-19 and Romans 8:3). So what God did through Christ was not to enable us to live according to the standards of His Law, but rather He took the Law out of the way by nailing it to the cross with Christ! (See again Colossians 2:14). And so with the Law nailed to the cross and our sin taken away, we were freed from our bondage and made close to God by His grace. We now live, not by God's Law, but by the Life of Christ that has come to indwell us.
So why the obsession with the Law in Christianity??? Do we not get that it was against us and that we had to die to it in order to belong to Christ? (Galatians 2:19-20, Romans 7:4). Jesus
said He didn't come to destroy the Law. He came to fullfil it. And guess what? At the cross, all was fulfilled!!! When Jesus died, God's Last Will and Testament (the New Covenant) was executed. When all was fullfilled, and the New Covenant came to be, God made the first covenant "obsolete" (Hebrews 8:13)! We can't miss the fact that Jesus, "after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God" (Hebrews 10:12). Jesus sat down, signifying that the work was complete and sufficient and finished forever!!! What the Law could never have done, Christ did once and for all.
Thank GOD that what was against us and contrary to us (God's Law) has been wiped out and nailed to the cross and made obsolete! Because of this, we are truly FREE!
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