The sentiment that Jesus has unconditional love for all of us has become standard fare in many evangelical churches. The speaker assures the congregation that Jesus loves them to such an extent that he died for them. He assures the audience that Jesus is just waiting for them to turn to him and to reciprocate the love he already has for them. Some people go even further in their claims to unbelievers. I remember once reading an article by Rick Warren printed in Ladies Home Journal. In this article, titled "Learn to Love Yourself!," Warren wrote the following: "God accepts us unconditionally, and in His view we are all precious and priceless." The article closes with these words: "You can believe what others say about you, or you can believe in yourself as God does, who says you are truly acceptable, lovable, valuable and capable." Nowhere does he qualify these statements. Instead they are offered as blanket statements, encompassing all of humanity.

Is this how the Bible portrays God's feelings towards those who do not believe? It’s worth a glance at just a few of the many passages that speak of God's position towards the unregenerate.

Psalm 5:5 says that "The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers." The NIV translates this as "you hate all who do wrong." Psalm 11:5 tells us that "The LORD tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence." And turning to the New Testament, John 3:36 reads "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him." The Bible clearly portrays God as one whose wrath burns against both sin and sinner. His righteous anger burns against all unrighteousness, and against all who are unrighteous.

In The God Who Justifies, James White writes the following. "Theologians should be those enraptured by the beauty of the unchanging object of their study: the eternal, immutable God. But theologians are people, and they are influenced, to greater or lesser extents, by the society and era in which they live. The cultural decay of modern times has inspired many a theological denial of biblical truth, most often when that biblical truth speaks to something that is unfashionable. One such issue...is the oft-repeated biblical phrase 'the wrath of God.'" White goes on to say that while we most often associate God's wrath with the Old Testament, where he commanded the Israelites to utterly destroy the pagan nations, in reality his wrath is most clearly shown in the New Testament. Were you to ask where in the Bible we see the clearest picture of God’s wrath, I would have to point to Jesus' final hours, from the Garden of Gethsemane to his death on the cross. After all, what but the need for satisfaction of God's wrath, could compel the Father to send his Son to such a horrible, painful, death?

Earlier this morning I finished up Richard J. Evans’ The Third Reich at War, a very long, very thorough, very interesting tracing of the rise and fall of German military might from 1939 to 1945. More than just another account of the Second World War, this book looks to battles, but also to atrocities and to the German home front. It provides an overall perspective on the German experience of war, from the men on the front lines, to the Jews in concentration camps, to the men and women who lived in the cities and worked in the factories. It goes so far as to look at German art and music during the war. It is, in a word, thorough.

Whenever I read about Germany in the Second World War, I am amazed that so many normal people, people not unlike you and me, were involved in acts of astounding evil. While many Germans disagreed with the wholesale extermination of Jews and Gypsies and people with mental disabilities, few had the will or courage to voice their disagreements. Many were complicit in these crimes, many others were actively involved, even if they did not fully support the ideology behind them. We read of otherwise ordinary men who murdered hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of helpless people. We read of monsters who found joy in torture and mutilation. We read of doctors, sworn to protect human life, who instead took the opportunity to carry out barbarous experiments on young children, torturing them and killing them with no apparent attack of conscience. Surely Satan had a field day in Germany in those days.

As I read about these crimes, these atrocities, my heart cries out for justice. This is a natural cry, I think, and a good one. Yet so often it seems that these people got away with their crimes. Hitler, the mastermind of it all, died in 1945, but did so at his own hand. A bullet to the head hardly seems to satisfy the demands of justice based on the lives of 6 million Jews and countless millions of other lives destroyed in the war he began. It almost seems that he got away with it. Or Josef Mengele who carried out ruthless medical experiments at Auschwitz and, who after the war, escaped to South America where he lived in relative peace until he died of a stroke in 1979. Where is the justice in this? Did he get away with it?

When we read in the Bible that the law of God is written on our hearts, surely this is some of what we mean—that we have a sense of justice and that we want this sense of justice to be served, to be satisfied. We also know from Scripture that justice will be served. Indeed, it must be served. And we want it to be served. Justice is “the quality of being just or fair;” it is “judgment involved in the determination of rights and the assignment of rewards and punishments.” But it is more. A Christian definition of justice goes further. Justice is the due reward or punishment for an act. God must punish evil. We know this. We tremble at this thought. Or we ought to.

God must punish evil. When we come to know Jesus Christ, we are shocked at the reality that He willingly paid the penalty for the sins of all who would believe in Him, even those who have committed unimaginable sins. When I believed in Him I saw that He suffered for me. I deserve to be punished for all those things I’ve done to forsake Him. But Jesus, through His great mercy, accepted this punishment on my behalf. Justice has been served.

But those who do not turn to Him must be punished for their own sin. And it is here that we see how justice will be served. The sin of even a man as blatantly evil as Adolph Eichmann, who relentlessly hunted down Jews throughout the Reich, differs from mine only in degree. He and I are both sinners through and through. We are both sinners in thought, word and deed. But God has seen fit to extend grace to restrain me from doing all of the evil I’d otherwise so love to do. And He has accepted Jesus’ work on the cross on my behalf. Justice has already been served on my behalf. But for those who do not turn to Christ, justice is still in the future. Justice hovers just over the horizon.

We do not look forward to the punishment of another person with a sick glee. We do not rejoice in what they must suffer. But we do look forward to the fact that justice will finally be served. God will not and cannot allow sin to be unpunished. And while we are humbled by the grace that is ours through Christ, we still thank God that there will be justice. We do not have unlimited license to sin knowing that death allows us to escape just punishment. Instead we see that death is just the beginning, just the entrance, to the courtroom where justice will be served. Death is no escape.

At the very heart of the gospel, at the very heart of the Christian faith, are two great miracles, two inseparable miracles, through which a dead man is brought to life. The first miracle is justification; here a condemned sinner is made right in the eyes of a perfect judge. The second miracle is regeneration; here a hater of God and a hater of good is transformed into a lover of God and a lover of all that is good and right. Despite the importance of these two, confusion reigns, even among Christians, about what they are and what they mean. In Justification and Regeneration Charles Leiter sets forth a biblical understanding of each of these, the similarities, the differences, the misconceptions, the truth.

This morning began with John MacArthur’s second and final sermon. His topic was “Simultaneously Righteous and a Sinner” (or, to use the latin theological term, simul iustus et peccator). He turned first to the well-known story of the raising of Lazarus and on that basis titled his message (rather creatively, I might add), “We Have Been Raised but We Stink.”

He looked to the story of Lazarus and remarked on the fact that, even after Lazarus left his grave, the smell of death would have been upon him. His clothes would have been scented with death, so that though he was alive, death clung to him. MacArthur used that as a metaphor for Christians today—people who have been saved from sin but who still have death upon us. Of course eventually the metaphor breaks down. After all, once Lazarus removed his grave clothes, the smell of death would have left him. He could have bathed and all traces of death would have been gone. But our predicament is not quite so easy. We do not just have grave clothes that stink, but we have a full, dead carcass—the presence of sin that remains upon and within us. The stench of death is not just on us, but all through us.

From here he turned to Romans 6 and 7 and showed that there the Lord tells us that we are no longer slaves to sin because once a person dies he is no longer a slave. Death frees him. Through Christ’s death we have been freed from sin’s mastery—we are no longer in slavery to sin. Sin no longer rules or has dominion. We now need to consider ourselves dead to sin but alive to God. Having been freed from sins we now become slaves of righteousness. There was an entity in existence that is no longer in existence. There was a real death and this was a real transformation. We often hear that when we are converted we have a new nature added to our old nature. But this is not the language of the New Testament. It is not addition but transformation—the death of one entity and the creation of a new one. The change in you when you were converted is greater than the change will be at your death. Death is simply subtraction.

Can we become total masters over sin and achieve sinlessness? Is that our goal or objective? Those who hold to perfectionism necessarily separate the act that brings justification and an act that brings sanctification. They separate these so a person can, by an act of his free will, become entirely free from sin. To support this, they downgrade the definition of sin only to acts which are premeditated.

Even mature, theologically-informed Christians can fall into the trap and fall into wrong thinking about sanctification. Part of the cure is ensuring that we truly understand both justification and sanctification—the similarities and differences. If you know these things you can immediately dismiss all talk of perfectionism.

He outlined five similarities between justification and sanctification:

• -Both arise from the free grace of God.
• Both are part of Christ’s redemptive work of salvation.
• Both will (and must) be present in the same persons.
• Both begin simultaneously.
• Both are necessary to glorification.

And then he outlined five differences:

• In justification a person is counted righteous because Christ’s righteousness is imputed to him. In sanctification a person has to work out his salvation over time.
• The righteousness of justification is not our own, but Christ’s. The righteousness of sanctification is ours, though wrought by the Spirit.
• Our works play no part in justification but are critical to sanctification.
• Justification is instantaneous and instantly complete while sanctification is an incomplete and imperfect work.
• Justification does not increase or develop or grow while sanctification is progressive as Christians grow in their spiritual walk towards glorification.

MacArthur took us on a survey through Scripture to show that perfectionism simply cannot be supported by Scripture. The Bible supports no leaps into eradication or total consecration. Rather, the Christian life is a slow and steady climb towards increased holiness (or, as J.C. Ryle says, a slow climb up an inclined plane). While we try to do the right thing, all we do and all we are is permeated by the flesh, by that old man who cannot be entirely eradicated until we are glorified.

What do we do about it? Believers do everything they can to kill the sin that remains. They do not imagine that they have no sin, but instead endeavor by all the means of grace to mortify the sin that remains. They abstain from sin, they avoid sin, they read Scripture, meditate upon Scripture, pray constantly. It is a lifelong battle we fight daily. It’s a battle that must be fought with passion.

MacArthur closed by borrowing an Old Testament example. He turned to 1 Samuel 15 where God commands Saul to utterly destroy the Amalekites for their cowardly attack on the Israelite women and children. But Saul and the people disobeyed God, sparing Agag and the best of the plunder. Failure to obey God cost Saul his throne and cost him his kingly lineage. Finally Samuel commanded that Agag be brought before him and he hacked him to pieces, but did not wipe out all of his people. A few years later the Amalekites were stronger than ever and began to torment the Israelites with raids and with battle. David attacked but once more did not destroy them utterly. A few generations later Haman showed up (in the book of Esther) and once more sought to destroy the Jews. The analogy is this: that you need to be obedient to God, ruthlessly hacking sin to pieces or it will come back and will come back stronger than ever. Putting sin to death is a lifelong process and one that will be perfected only in the day of Jesus Christ. Until then we are and shall remain both righteous and sinful.

Chuck Colson has begun a blog tour to support his new book, The Faith (and interestingly, this blog tour is actually modeled on the one I put together with the publicity team at Crossway after the release of my book). I was asked to participate in this tour and agreed to do so because I wanted to ask a question that would really get to the heart of this book. And while I had Colson’s ear, I wanted to ask a question that I’ve often struggled with as I’ve considered Christians who pursue greater unity with the Roman Catholic Church. It’s a question I would ask Colson if he and I were standing face-to-face. Here is my question and Colson’s response.

Protestants have traditionally held that justification by grace alone through faith alone is at the heart of the Christian faith and thus a non-negotiable doctrine for anyone who considers himself a Christian. Yet this is anathema within the Roman Catholic Church. This would seem to be an unbridgeable divide when seeking communion between the two traditions. Is justification by grace alone through faith alone a doctrine fundamental to the faith? What theological distinctives are non-negotiable in determining who belongs to the Body of Jesus Christ?

It is true that Protestants have traditionally believed that justification by grace alone through faith alone through Christ alone (sola fide) is at the heart of the Christian faith, the doctrine on which the church stands or falls. It was also true that the Roman Catholic Church in Trent anathemized this position. This has been an unbridgeable divide.

In 1992, an informal group of Catholic and evangelical scholars began to meet in New York under the co-chairmanship of Richard Neuhaus and I. One of the items taken up in our consultation was justification by faith alone. And in 1997 we issued a document called “The Gift of Salvation.” You will find it referenced on page 113 of The Faith. It is a remarkable document in which both confessions agreed that we can now affirm what the Reformers meant by sola fide or faith alone.

Admittedly, this was an informal consultation; but Cardinal Cassidy from the Vatican took part in our final discussions, approved the document, and took it back to Rome where it was taught to the bishops in the synods prior to the millennium. Significantly, in the Lutheran-Catholic dialogues, similar agreements were reached, although not quite as explicitly tied to the Reformation. There is an historic shift taking place.

Simply because of its structure, the Roman Catholic Church moves much more slowly than evangelicals do. It will take a generation for these kinds of changes to be reflected in the Catholic catechism. But more and more Catholics are embracing the very doctrine that was at the heart of the Reformation.

Do not be misled here; there are many fundamental differences in how we view the church, methods of worship, baptism, the Eucharist, etc. We’re a long way from having unanimity of belief. We may never achieve it. But, the point of The Faith is that we can agree on the fundamentals laid out in the Nicene Creed, and as we work together and seek unity in a spirit of charity towards one another, it’s amazing how much genuine progress we can make, which eliminates some of the great barriers to the unity Jesus prayed for in John 17.

At some point I would like to respond to this. But not today!

Here is where this blog tour has gone and is going…

March 5 - Acton Institute PowerBlog

March 5 - The Dawn Treader

March 6 - Reasoned Audacity

March 7 - Challies.com

March 10 - Adrian Warnock

March 11 - Tall Skinny Kiwi

March 12 - Mark D. Roberts

March 13 - Rebecca Writes

March 14 - Jolly Blogger