5.1 The "order" of salvation (part 1)

Previous links in this series at the bottom.
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1. We come now to the final stage of our journey. We have mentioned most of the key biblical texts. We have looked at most of the theological elements. We have reminisced a little about the way holiness has been preached in its more and less reasonable forms. We have touched at least a little on the question of how Christians have claimed to experience sanctification in the past. How can we tie all these things together?

Wesley, of course, put it all together in an ordo salutis, an "order of salvation." [1] First, salvation begins with God. Although many of us have a tendency to throw the phrase "free will" around, Christians do not officially believe that humans have unassisted free will. Wesleyans do believe in a kind of free will but it is not "unassisted." It is not something we have in our own power.

This matches Paul's "natural" or "unspiritual" human in 1 Corinthians 2:14, who does not understand the ways and thinking of God. And it also includes the unfortunate person of Romans 7 who wants to do the good but does not have the spiritual power to pull it off. Calvinists have a term for this. Humans in their default state are totally depraved.

Wesley did not really disagree with John Calvin (1509-64) on our depravity, our inability to do good in our own power. For Wesley, we are not absolutely depraved, but we are thoroughly depraved. Sin has touched every aspect of human life to where we are "fallen" across the board. No one can be good enough on their own to deserve or earn God's favor.

The basis for this theology is of course found in Romans 3:10-18: "There is no righteous person, not even one" (3:10). "All have sinned" and are in need of God's mercy and forgiveness. We cannot earn our way into God's kingdom (Eph. 2:8-10).

2. However, Wesley differed from Calvin from this point on. For Calvin, our inability to choose God in our own power led him to see our salvation as entirely God's choice, the work of God's singular will ("monergism"). Either God flips the switch or he doesn't. We have no real part in the matter except that we are the puppet of his will. Even if we feel like we are making the decisions, we aren't. God is.

In Calvin's system, God's grace -- his unearned favor toward us -- is both unconditional and irresistible. If God has chosen you, you will be saved. You will persevere to the end.

About fifty years later, Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609) would suggest a slightly different process. Building on Augustine's notion of God's prevenient grace -- God's grace that reaches out to us when we are unable to reach out to him -- Arminius suggested that this grace made it possible for us to choose. So while Calvin's sense of grace was all or nothing, an on-off switch, Arminius (and later Wesley) saw this as a grace that empowered our wills so that we can cooperate with God's grace ("synergism" or working together).

This system goes beyond the biblical texts -- as did Calvin's system. Both approaches do their best to fill in the blanks, to stitch together the biblical texts. In the case of Arminius, he is trying to take seriously texts that indicate anyone can be saved (e.g., 1 Tim. 2:4) and that our will plays a real role (e.g., 2 Pet. 1:10). The "Wesleyan-Arminian" approach has far fewer problems, in my opinion. Ultimately, the Calvinist approach makes God too responsible for evil and sin.

3. So, the first step in Wesley's ordo salutis was prevenient grace. God makes the first move. God empowers our will to begin to cooperate with his grace. We may not even know the Spirit is drawing us. We may not know that God is lining up our circumstances. But the Spirit is plugging us in, and we are beginning to power up.

The next steps on the journey in the order of salvation are justification and regeneration. Justification is when we are legally pronounced "not guilty" because our sins are forgiven (Rom. 5:1). Righteousness is "imputed" to us legally. 

Then in regeneration, we are given new life. We are "born again" (John 3:7). We are empowered to walk in the Spirit. We can be victorious over Sin. Righteousness is "imparted" to us.

As we have seen, Wesleyans would rightly say that we undergo initial sanctification at this point of conversion as well. We are set apart to God by the Spirit (2 Thess. 1:13), and our sins are cleansed (Acts 15:9; Heb. 9:14). We receive the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). We are baptized in the Holy Spirit (Luke 3:16). We are filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:4). This is the true moment when we are baptized into Christ and become part of the people of God.

4. However, whether you are Calvinist or Wesleyan, this is not the end of the story. After this beginning in the faith, one experiences progressive sanctification. There will inevitably be areas in which you need to grow spiritually. Even though you may be victorious over temptation, you may find that it is still sometimes a struggle. 

Even more -- as we have seen -- some still find themselves in a carnal No Man's Land. They are stuck in the "evil I don't want to do I do" zone of Romans 7 even though it should not apply to the believer. Such individuals need another filling of the Spirit because their power connection is spotty. Their relationship with the Lord would seem to be defective.

Progressive sanctification is the practical necessity that many if not most Christians experience where they must continue to give the territory of their lives to Christ. It is a practical rather than theologically necessary category. In theory, we should give everythng to Christ that we know to give when we become a believer. From that point on, we would immediately give to Christ anything new as we become aware of it.

In practice, our surrender to Christ is often defective even after we have believed on him. We turn out to be babies in Christ in need of milk, not yet ready for the meat. Progressive sanctification is the growth in giving our lives to God that often still needs to take place after we have believed.

5. Philippians 3:12-16 is often thought to give a biblical picture of this movement forward in our Christian life. The popular reading of these verses is not quite right, but it is not far off. "Not that I have already been perfected, but I am pursuing it if indeed I might take hold of that for which I was taken hold of by Christ. Brothers and sisters, I do not reckon myself to have taken hold of it, but one thing I do. Forgetting what is behind and reaching for what is ahead, I am pursuing the goal of the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus" (3:12-14)

Then, with the goal in mind, he pictures continual progress moving foward. "Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in someway you are thinking differently, God will reveal this to you. Just keep going to the measure you have already attained" (3:15-16). 

These verses present a picture of us growing in faith. As God reveals areas of growth to us, we advance in our faith. We don't lose ground but walk in faith to the degree we have already growth.

However, one aspect of these verses is also frequently read out of context. Many Christians are all too quick to point out that Paul says he's not perfect. You may have heard the slogan, "I'm not perfect, just forgiven." The interpretation fits the narrative that Romans 7 is Paul still struggling with sin.

It's also wrong. The verses before Philippians 3:12 were about resurrection. Paul is hoping he will be faithful enough for God to consider him worthy of resurrection (3:10). [2] After all, even in 3:14, he mentions the "upward call" as that toward which he is striving. 

So when he says he has not yet been perfected, he is referring to the resurrection, not perfection in his moral walk with Christ. He starts off the verse by saying, "Not that I have already received [the resurrection]." Once again, our glasses have read into Paul something that is contrary to his theology. Paul does not in any way consider himself a moral failure at this point. Indeed, he goes on in 3:17 to consider himself a model, an example for them to follow.

These verses are a model for growth in Christ and progressive sanctification. However, they are not an excuse for sin in the life of a believer.

6. In practice, this progressive surrender of our lives often comes to a head. Sin's last stand. We have already mentioned the image of progressively giving to Christ more and more of our spiritual house. Last year, we wrestled over the closet. This year, we wrestled over the attic. Each time, I came to a point of "fish or cut bait." Each time, I came to a point of crisis in which I fully surrendered another aspect of my life.

It doesn't have to be this way, of course. Theologically, I could have given God everything I knew to give from the very moment of saving faith. This is how it ideally should be. Just, for some reason, it doesn't always seem to happen that way.

Then came the Battle for the Basement. There was that one thing I wanted to cling too. Perhaps psychologically I needed to cling to it for some reason. Preachers of sanctification used to threaten (unhealthily) the question of whether you were willing to be a missionary to some remote part of the world -- back in the days when plane flight around the world wasn't nearly as common.

But what if God wasn't calling you to be a missionary to Africa? One wonders if there were ever any individuals who ended up as missionaries in those days, not because God called them, but because of some mental struggle they had over being a missionary that some preacher put on them.

Once a person has fully surrendered themselves to Christ -- signed over the deed to the property, as it were -- it is now possible for Christ to take fully hold of them, as Philippians 3 intimated. We cannot have the fullness of the Spirit if there are parts of us we are not letting the Spirit fill. So, if our part is full surrender and "consecration" of ourselves to God, God's part is our entire sanctification. "May the God of peace himself sanctify/make you holy entirely" (1 Thess. 5:23).

Then beyond that point, Wesley believed we continued to grow in grace as long as we live on this earth. Then, when we die or when Christ returns, we are glorified.

7. I'll confess that, while the above sequence makes a good deal of sense, there is still something that makes me a little uneasy about it. I think there are a couple reasons. For one, we are pressing the Scriptures into a system they were not originally part of. To some extent, we are taking the verses out of context. 

The second reason is that the path we all take as individuals is likely messier than Wesley's tidy system. To some extent, I've already tried to complexify it a little. Once upon a time, I found it helpful when Chris Bounds suggested in conversation that it may be more of a "via" salutis than an "ordo" salutis. A "via salutis" would be a way of salvation rather than an order.

What I took him to mean is that we have here the pieces, the elements of salvation. But the order in which they are experienced or the way in which we move through them may be a little different from person to person. Indeed, we likely will need to be filled with the Spirit over and over again. New things come into our lives after we have signed over the property to Christ -- like adding a room or a patio in the back. 

Old struggles may return. Perhaps the cares of life have exhausted me. Perhaps they are threatening to choke me spiritually. Perhaps I have been neglecting my relationship with Christ. Old temptations can return...

[1] See especially his sermon, "The Scripture Way of Salvation."

[2] Notice that Paul does not consider himself "eternally secure." He sees his Christian walk as one of continual striving, "pressing on" toward the goal of the upward call in resurrection.

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Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)
3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)

4.1 What is the flesh? (part 1)
4.2 The oxymoron of a "carnal Christian" (part 2)

4.2 The oxymoron of a "carnal Christian" (part 2)

Previous links in this series at the bottom.
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7. Romans 6-8 gives the theory. We see the frequent reality in practice in 1 Corinthians 2-3. The typology built out of these verses is well-known in holiness circles. The "natural" human does not receive the things of God (1 Cor. 2:14). The "spiritual" person does (2:15). The Corinthians are somewhere in between. They are "fleshly" or "carnal" Christians (3:1).

Again, Paul is not setting up an ordo salutis here, an "order of salvation." More on that in the final chapter. But we can see hints of Wesleyan theology in Paul's rhetoric with the Corinthians. 

We all start off as the default human. We are under the power of Sin. We cannot help but sin whether we want to or not. At worst, we "do not receive the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolish" to us (1 Cor. 2:14). We "are not able to know them because they are spiritually discerned."

The adjective Paul uses here is almost untranslatable: the "natural" person. The King James used "natural." The Revised Standard used "unspiritual." But the word is psychikos, "soul-ish," which is pretty much meaningless to us in English. My sense is that Paul is thinking of the part of us that we share with animals, the living being part. I decided to go with "natural" here, our default person. Yes, it does typify a person without the Spirit.

In short, this person is not a believer. He or she is not "saved." He or she is not a Christian.

8. The Corinthians should be spiritual. After all, they are believers and thus have received the Spirit. They have been set apart by God, "sanctified." Paul actually addresses the congregation as sanctified in 1:2. They are certainly not entirely sanctified! But like all Christians, they were set apart as God's property when they believed and received the Spirit.

It's worth a quick reminder of Paul's theology of the Spirit and coming to be in Christ. The Holy Spirit is God's "seal" of ownership on us (2 Cor. 1:22). Without the Spirit, we do not belong to Christ (Rom. 8:9). The Spirit is the "earnest" of our inheritance, a guarantee of our destiny, a downpayment of glory (2 Cor. 1:22). The Corinthians were thus set apart as belonging to God, "sanctified," when they came to Christ.

Romans 6 and 8 tell us what this state should look like for a believer. Sin should not rule this person's body -- or mind, for that matter. This person is no longer a slave to Sin, thanks be to God! By the power of the Holy Spirit, this person is able to do the good that God wants them to do and that they want to do. This person is consistently victorious over temptation.

This person has a complete love. They do not merely love their friends and those who love them. They love their enemies as well. This is not a syrupy feeling. This is a will to do the loving thing when the choice presents itself. This person fulfills the righteous requirement of the Law (Rom. 8:4) because the Holy Spirit has written the law of love on their hearts (Rom. 2:15; 13:8).

If the Corinthians had been spiritual like this, they would not have fought with each other over who had led them to Christ (1 Cor. 3:4). They would not have thought themselves to superior to other believers because they had more knowledge (8:1) or had spiritual gifts that others didn't (e.g., 14:21). Rather, they would have loved each other (1 Cor. 13).

9. In short, the Corinthian church was an oxymoron. They were Christians in the flesh -- something that isn't a thing. Somehow, they were stuck in the middle. They had been initially sanctified by the Spirit and set apart to God. They had been baptized into Christ...

... and then they argued over whose baptism was more significant because of who did it! They were "stuck." They were in-between, an anomaly. They had the Spirit but they weren't spiritual. They were sealed by the Spirit but still in the flesh. "These things ought not to be!" (Jas. 3:10).

To describe this "shouldn't be" phenomenon, several New Testament authors drew on the well-known trope of a baby drinking milk rather than meat. Paul says, "I gave you milk to drink not solid food because you were not yet able" (1 Cor. 3:2). 1 Peter encourages its audience to long for the pure milk that babies drink so that they can grow up. Hebrews 5:13-14 compares its audience to children who should have switched to solid food a long time ago but are still on milk.

This is not a state that can normally continue forever. While Wesley over-systematized and raised the bar too high for "going on to perfection," the basic concept is on the money. The carnal Christian needs to move on to maturity. If they don't, they will eventually fall away from God altogether (Jude 24). You cannot be both in the flesh and in the Spirit indefinitely, for these two are at war with each other (Gal. 5:17).

10. The war of the flesh against the Spirit can involve many battles. The Spirit says to do x, but the flesh wants to do y. No battle has taken you that God can't make a way to win (1 Cor. 10:13). The promise of God is that you can win every battle. Under normal spiritual circumstances, you can make the conscious choice to do x every time by the power of the Holy Spirit.

A war can be won even if you lose a few battles. But the more battles you lose, the more in danger you are of losing the war. God has not only given us the Spirit, but the Church -- fellow soldiers to hold us accountable and fight the battles with us. We don't have to lose. We should expect to win.

What is particularly serious is when you lose the same battle over and over again with some "besetting" sin. We'll think a little about addictions and an impoverished will in the final chapter. There are times when God uses the body of Christ to come alongside you because you are extraordinarily pinned down behind enemy lines.

Yet if the problem is that you have a divided will and are a "double-minded" person (Jas. 1:7), your soul is in grave danger. The second and third soils in the Parable of the Soils tell of those who initially receive the word with joy but then either wither because they have no root or because the cares of the world choke them (Mark 4). 

The double-minded person should not expect unending forgiveness when there is no genuine repentance. "Let him or her ask in faith" (Jas. 1:6). And if a person continues to try to use Christ's sacrifice for the same sins over and over again -- not because of genuine addiction or disempowerment but because of a lack of wholehearted allegiance -- let not that person think they will receive anything from the Lord (Jas. 1:7). They have used up their sacrifice (Heb. 10:26). 

In context, James 1:2-8 is talking about a time of trial and testing. God will help you through if you genuinely want help. Ask for wisdom in the trial, and God will give it (1:5). But you must really want God's help. If you're not sure, you're double-minded. A few verses later (1:13-15), James makes it clear that God is not at fault if temptation leads you to sin -- you are.

11. We can thus affirm in an unsystematic way what Wesley was trying to get at with his doctrine of Christian perfection. It is often the case that those who have believed in Christ find themselves in a carnal No Man's Land. They still identify with the person in Romans 7 who wants to do the good but finds themselves in a horrible war with their flesh. And they sometimes lose.

Is there no hope for something more? Is it not possible that the power of the Spirit might take the journey to the next level? Are we doomed to stay on milk our whole life on earth, or might we actually by God's power and grace be able to eat some spiritual steak!

It will take complete surrender to God. It will take full allegiance to Jesus as Lord.  Only then can we be filled with the Spirit to the top of the cup, the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

Getting there will likely take some battles. The Battle-of-This-Thing-I-Don't-Want-to-Fully-Give-God. Then do you remember the Battle-of-the-Next-Thing-I-Didn't-Want-to-Fully-Give-God? Then surely there is a point where you have surrendered everything you know to surrender. As Keith Drury put it, you have given God full access to all the rooms of your house. But now will you sign over the deed to the property? [9]

Is not this moment of choice what Wesley and all those holiness preachers were preaching? God will not give us all of him if we haven't given him all of us. "There remains, therefore, a sabbath rest for the people of God" (Heb. 4:9).

Yes, these verses were taken a little out of context. [10] Yes, Wesley overly systematized it. But if we can step back just a little, there is a profound truth here.

And we'll likely have to give more to God again later. We may have to give the same things to God again. That is different. Our power over the flesh is only as sure as we are plugged into a relationship with the Spirit. If we loosen the connection, lessen the relationship, Sin lieth at the door. New things come into our lives -- we have to give them too.

There is no "I'm done now." Every day that is called "today," we enter his rest again (Heb. 3:13). We are Pilgrim until we reach the heavenly city.

In the final chapter, I hope to tie all these threads together into what I have heard Chris Bounds call a via salutis ("way of salvation") rather than an ordo salutis ("order of salvation"). I also want to address some of the concerns of our modern world like addictions. Finally, I want to mention an aspect of holiness that we Westerners are prone to overlook -- corporate holiness.

[9] Keith Drury, Holiness for Ordinary People 2nd ed. (Wesleyan Publishing House, 2004).

[10] In context, Hebrews is telling its audience to recommit their faith to God every day. The author is urging them not to fall in the desert on the journey to the Promised Land. The final Sabbath rest, it would seem, is when we finally make it to the kingdom of God.

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Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)
3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)

4.1 What is the flesh? (part 1)

4.1 What is the flesh? (part 1)

Previous links in this series at the bottom.
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1. Romans 6-8 gives the theory. Before we receive the Spirit, we are under the power of Sin. We cannot do the good even if we want to. We will inevitably sin.

However, once we have the Spirit of Christ, the situation changes. We are rescued from the power Sin has over our flesh. We are empowered to keep the righteous requirement of the Law and to love our neighbor. Where we couldn't keep the essence of the Law before, now we can by the power of the Spirit.

Paul goes further in 1 Corinthians 10:13: "No temptation has taken you except what is common to humanity. But God is faithful. He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able to resist. But with the temptation he will make also a way to escape so it is possible for you to bear it." He is telling the Corinthians that it is not inevitable that they will succumb to temptation. God will make a way of escape so that they do not sin.

It's important to note that Paul was not really setting up a system like I am in these comments. In Romans, he is trying to make it clear that his teaching does not advocate sin or the breaking of the Law's essence. Rather, his theology of the Spirit actually makes Law-keeping possible where it otherwise wasn't. It is a general framework rather than an absolute system.

In Corinthians, he is concerned that some in the church are compromising their loyalty to God by visiting the temples of other gods and partaking of meals there. We know from Romans 16:23 and an inscription that some of the believers at Corinth were actually involved in city government. [4] It is possible that they saw such participation as crucial to their participation in city life. Paul is saying God will make a way for them to get around such things.

2. The Corinthian church is a good example of how human practice often doesn't match the theory. In theory, the Corinthians should have been full of the Spirit from their earliest moments in the faith, from their baptism. Filled with the Spirit, they should have immediately found themselves living a life above temptation and filled with love for one another.

Instead, they formed divisive factions in the church. They were jealous of each other and had selfish conflicts. 1 Corinthians reveals to us a thoroughly "carnal" church -- a church that was operating out of the "flesh" rather than the Spirit. At every turn, it seemed, they were letting their "flesh" run the show rather than the Holy Spirit.

3. But what does Paul mean by "flesh"? The first version of the New International Version (1984) often used the phrase "sinful nature" to translate this Greek word sarx. In doing so, it was passing along over a thousand years of tradition going back to Augustine (354-430) and continuing in Wesley (1703-91), who used terms like "inbred sin" or the "carnal mind." "Carnal" means "fleshly" -- you can see the similarity to words like carnivore, someone who eats meat.

The fundamental meaning of sarx is "skin" and thus "flesh." There is an inevitable dualism hiding in here between the flesh and the Spirit that we often find in the New Testament texts (e.g., John 3:6). Currently, many biblical interpreters and theologians are allergic to this sort of dualism, but the biblical texts themselves don't care. Paul was no Gnostic, but he did often use a dualistic framework.

So, it is clear that Paul connected the human propensity to sin with our bodies. Romans 6:12 -- "Do not let Sin rule in your mortal bodies." "Present your bodies a living sacrifice" (12:1). "Who will rescue me from the body of this death." [5] 

It is no coincidence that the word flesh is a bodily term. Unlike the Gnostics, Paul and the New Testament authors did not consider our fleshly bodies to be inherently sinful, but they are "weak." "The spirit is willing indeed, but the flesh is weak," Jesus says in Mark 14:38. Our "flesh" is the most productive point of attack for Sin.

You'll notice that I have sometimes capitalized Sin. When I have referred to a sin act, I have left the word in lower case. However, when I have been referring to Sin as a power over us, I have capitalized it. Paul says in Romans 7:23, "I see a different law in my members warring against the law of my mind." This other law is the force of Sin over my body. Notice again, the "members" here are the members of my body.

Krister Stendahl well pointed out decades ago that Paul does not see our minds as the point of weakness. [6] The person in Romans 7 wants to keep the Law. They serve the Law of God with their minds (7:25). Unlike Augustine, who saw my "I," my will as the point of corruption, Paul sees my body, my "flesh" as the point of weakness.

See the dualism. There is my spirit. There is my mind. There is my will. These want to serve the Law of God. Then there is my body, my flesh, my "members." Sin takes hold of them and thwarts my attempt to do the good. My spirit is willing, but my flesh is weak. This is how Paul presents the conflict. [7]

4. This is different from Augustine. Indeed, Augustine has made it difficult for us to hear Paul on his own terms. Augustine did not know Greek and famously misinterpreted the Greek of Romans 5:12: "Just as Sin entered the world through one human -- and death through Sin, and thus death passed to all humans because all sinned." What Paul was saying is that Paul brought the power of Sin into the world leading all humans to sin. We all sin like Adam and, therefore, we all die like Adam.

But Augustine misread the words I have translated as "because" in the verse. He understood the last part of the verse to say "in whom all sinned." That is to say, Augustine believed that we sinned "in" Adam along with Adam.

Herein is the doctrine of original sin as Augustine understood it. For Augustine, we all share the guilt of Adam's sin because we sinned in Adam. One of the purposes of infant baptism was then to wash away the guilt of original sin.

But Paul knows none of this. Paul does not consider us guilty of Adam's sin. There is no original sin in us in Paul's thinking. Rather, we sin like Adam because Adam introduced the power of Sin into the world, a power of Sin over our bodies. All have sinned and, therefore, we all die. We do not die fundamentally because we are guilty of Adam's sin.

Paul uses the word flesh in many ways. In its most basic meaning, it simply refers to our skin or is a synecdoche for our bodies. In that use, it has no connotation of sin. Jesus Christ descended from David "according to the flesh" (Rom. 1:3). There is no sense of sinfulness here whatsoever.

However, in Romans 7-8, flesh is my skin under the power of Sin. This is the sense that Paul uses in Romans 8:8: "Those who are in the flesh cannot please God." My flesh has a propensity to give in to temptation. Therefore, Paul admonishes his churches not to be "in the flesh." "You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit since the Spirit of God dwells in you" (Rom. 8:9).

5. This clearer understanding of Paul's imagery immediately clears up many of the debates I grew up hearing about. "Does God eradicate the sin nature in entire sanctification or is it merely suppressed?" The Keswick view of sanctification was considered to be a sub-orthodox view because it saw us continuing to struggle with Sin after sanctification. [8] The orthodox Wesleyan view was that the root of Sin was removed at sanctification. Our hearts were cleansed of inbred sin.

But this entire debate is askew from the very beginning. We cannot get out of our skin or bodies. They are always with us. In that sense, Sin is always lying at the door, waiting to take control again if we do not continue to walk in the Spirit daily.

I find the image of plugging into the Holy Spirit much more fruitful. It focuses on the positive power of the Spirit rather than the negative removal or suppression of a supposed sinful nature. When we are filled with the Spirit, we are plugged into God as a power source. The inherent weakness of our flesh is overcome. We are not slaves to the power of Sin but slaves to the power of righteousness by the Spirit. We are empowered to love God and our neighbor.

But as we know about power, it has to be re-supplied. In this case, it has to be continuously supplied. I have a laptop whose internal battery is defective. It works fine as long as it is always plugged in. Unplug it, and it dies immediately.

"Walking in the Spirit" (Gal. 5:16) is about being continuously plugged into God. The power of the Spirit means that Sin has no force over our flesh. We want to do the good, and we are empowered to do the good.

But if we unplug -- or if our connection to the Spirit is "spotty" -- our flesh will quickly become susceptible to the power of Sin again. It's as simple as that. No need for arcane discussions about eradication versus suppression. 

Sin is not a thing. It is not some lump of coal that must be removed by spiritual surgery. Sin is much more the result of the absence of good than the presence of something. This is how Sin can exist without God being its creator. God created the possibility that Sin would arise in the absence of good. He did not create a thing called Sin. 

6. A final note seems in order in relation to Mildred Bangs Wynkoop's theology of love. Wynkoop's theology emphasizes the relational nature of holiness. She also moves beyond Paul's dualism to a more holistic transformation of the heart. In the final chapter, I will also try to move beyond Paul's categories to discuss the transformation of our hearts in more holistic terms.

For now, I want to affirm her emphasis on relationship. When I talk about plugging into God, the conversation can seem rather impersonal. But God is a person, and the Holy Spirit is a person. When I talk about plugging into God, I am not talking about impersonal forces. We plug into God by having a relationship with him. We plug into the Holy Spirit by having a relationship with him...

 [1] At the very beginning, Paul locates the audience among the Gentiles (1:6. 13). In 11:13, he also arguably addresses the audience as primarily Gentile (2:17 is a hypothetical). In 15:15-16, he connects his role as apostle to the Gentiles to his letter to the Romans. His ethical instruction throughout also assumes a core sense of the Law rather than a fully Jewish sense, which would involve circumcision. It is an implicitly Gentile-oriented perspective. An uncircumcised Gentile de facto could never keep the Jewish Law, yet Paul assumes this possibility (2:26). The only factor in favor of a significant number of Jews in the audience is Romans 16, which more likely was a letter of commendation for Phoebe to the Ephesian church.

[2] E. P. Sanders argued that the reason Paul chose this command in particular was because it was the one commandment that was more internally oriented. Almost all of the others can be kept perfectly in concrete terms (not murdering, not stealing, not taking oaths, not giving false testimony). In Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Fortress, 1983).

[3] I should throw in here that Wesleyan theology also expects victory over sin from the moment one receives the Spirit at conversion. A key difference at entire sanctification is that victory over temptation should cease to be a struggle.

[4] An inscription mentioning that a pavement was funded by Erastus is visible still at Corinth. It is often thought that this is the Erastus mentioned as the city's treasurer in Romans 16:23.

[5] I've heard some "preacher's stories" about someone having to carry a dead body on their backs. This is completely made up. The verse is rather straightforward. Our bodies are a weak point when it comes to the power of Sin.

[6] Krister Stendahl, "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," in Paul among Jews and Gentiles (Fortress, 1976).

[7] We might note that Paul probably was not functioning with a sense of creation ex nihilo. He simply doesn't address that question. However, given the assumptions of the time, he may have seen God more as the redemptor of our bodies -- the "re-organizer" of them as it were -- rather than the one who designed their fundamental nature and characteristics.

[8] The Keswick view originated in the "higher life" movement in England in 1875. Its key leaders included William Boardman and Hannah Whitall Smith.
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Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)
3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)

3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)

Previous links in this series are now at the bottom.
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11. I sometimes think that Paul must turn over in his grave (or perhaps do flips in heaven) when he sees how so many have misinterpreted Romans 7 to mean exactly the opposite of what he was trying to say. The conundrum he presents in 7:7-25 is a hypothetical person who wants to keep the Law but lacks the power to do so because he or she does not have the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately, the picture has resonated so strongly with the experiences of so many Christians that they can't seem to read the plot to its resolution in Romans 8.

In my opinion, Paul's position on sin in Romans 6-8 is not remotely ambiguous. After all, how does he start this section? "Should we remain in sin so that grace might abound? Absolutely not!" (Rom. 6:1). It sure sounds like he does not believe sin should typify a believer.

Let's try that again in Romans 6:15: "Should we sin because we are not under Law but under grace? Absolutely not!" Hmm. That's strange. Sounds like he's saying sin should not typify the life of a believer. 

How about Romans 6:12: "Do not let Sin be ruling in your mortal bodies." Very strange. It sounds like he is saying that my body should not participate in sinful activities. That sure sounds like sin should not typify the life of a believer.

Romans 6:13 confirms this understanding. "Do not continue to present your [body] members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness but present yourselves to God as living from the dead and your members to God as instruments of righteousness." This is not about a legal fiction where, as Luther said, we are both "sinner and saint at the same time as long as we keep repenting." [10] Paul is talking about the way we concretely live in the world -- how we use our "members," our body parts.

12. While I'm on this point, let me make a quick side trip to Galatians 5:16: "Walk in the Spirit, and you will never fulfill the desires of the flesh." It is worth noting the grammatical constructions here. The first verb is a present imperative -- an ongoing command -- "Be walking." The result is a clause known as the "subjunctive of emphatic negation." It has two words for not in it, which in Greek is an emphatic "no."

Once again, Paul seems to say in strong terms that sin should not typify the life of a believer. This is not a legal fiction, as Luther argued. In Hebrew, "walking" is the word for ethics (halakah). This is about how you live. After all, what are the fruit of the flesh? Galatians 5:19-21 tells us. The deeds of the flesh range from sexual immorality to idolatry.

As a side note, I believe part of our problem in appropriating Scriptures like these is that Western culture has become so introspective, particularly after the Romanticism of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Whereas Paul's understanding of something like envy was probably much more concrete than the "navel gazing" that we hyper-individualistic, introspective Westerners might think. Even Jesus' focus on the heart in Matthew 5 was not likely as hyper-introspective as we can be.

We remember that Paul thought he did pretty well at keeping the Jewish Law before he gave his allegiance to Jesus. In Philippians 3:6, he says that he was "blameless" when it came to the righteousness in the Law. [11] It is a reminder that, in the minds of most Jews at this time, keeping the Law to a standard acceptable by God was considered achievable. 

13. My puzzlement at the popular misinterpretation continues as we work our way through the last part of Romans 6 and into the first part of Romans 7. Paul repeatedly contrasts what we "used to be" before the Spirit and what we are "now." Take a look at these contrasts:

• "Thanks be to God because you used to be slaves of Sin... having been freed from Sin, you became slaves of righteousness" (6:18).
• "Just as you presented your members as slaves to uncleanness and lawlessness leading to lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness" (6:19).
•  "When you were slaves of Sin, you were free to righteousness. But now, having been freed from Sin and having been enslaved to God, you have your fruit to holiness" (6:20, 22).
• "When we were in the flesh, the passions of sins (aroused through the Law) were working in our members results that bore fruit to death, but now ... we serve in the newness of the Spirit" (7:5-6).
• "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. God has accomplished the impossibility of the Law that was due to the weakness of our flesh...  so that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us" (Rom. 8:2-4).

Notice how consistent Paul's repeated sense of sin, righteousness, and holiness is throughout Romans 6-8. We used to be slaves to Sin. Our "members" -- our bodies -- used to do things they shouldn't do. We were in the flesh.

But now, we are set free from the flesh. We are no longer slaves to sin. We are now slaves to righteousness. This is a result of the Spirit. Our members -- our bodies -- now produce fruit of righteousness and holiness in our lives.

14. We need to emphasize the point. Over and over throughout Romans 6-8, Paul repeatedly says that believers should no longer be slaves to the power of Sin. We should step back and point out why this was important to his overall argument in Romans. His opponents were accusing him of teaching "let us do evil that good may come" (Rom. 3:8). He had a bad reputation among Jews, as James reminds him in Acts 21:21 -- rumor was he was telling Jews not to keep the Law. They saw him teaching a sinning religion.

Accordingly, Romans 6-8 have as their primary rhetorical goal to show that his theology is not "pro-sin." Those who say that he encourages people not to keep the Law are dead wrong. "Do we nullify the Law through faith?" he poses in Romans 3:31. "Absolutely not!" he responds repeatedly. [12] 

Paul is absolutely against sin. That is his point in these chapters. In that sense, the popular interpretation of Romans 7 is diametrically opposed to Paul's fundamental purpose in this section.

15. With this overwhelming context in mind, let's finally turn to Romans 7:7-25. In these verses, most Pauline scholars believe that Paul is picturing the situation of someone who wants to keep the Law but does not have the power of the Spirit in order to do it. [13] Let's track his train of thought.

7:14 -- "The Law is spiritual, but I am fleshly (carnal), having been sold under Sin." We should immediately sense that something is up. Why? Because throughout the last part of Romans 6, he aligned being a slave to sin to the time before we came to be in Christ. 

In fact, in the verses right before this one, he has been talking about the beginnings of his spiritual awakening. "I wouldn't have known sin except for the Law" (7:7). "I was alive apart from the Law once" (7:9). He's telling his past story. [14]

So when he gets to 7:14, he is talking about our default human state starting out -- not his present condition. [15] He is not talking about the state of the person who has been baptized into Christ and has received the Spirit. He is telling the story of "everyman" in his or her spiritual pilgrimage. We all start off "in the flesh," a slave to Sin.

7:15, 19 -- "I don't know what I'm doing, for I don't do what I want to do but I do what I hate... I don't do the good I want to do, but I do the evil I don't want to do." As with 7:14, Paul is dramatizing the plight of the person who wants to do good but cannot actually do it because they are still a slave to sin. They have not yet been freed from the power of Sin and become a slave to righteousness.

A quick reminder of 6:17 is in order: "Thanks be to God because you used to be slaves of Sin but you obeyed from the heart the type of teaching to which you were committed. And having been set free from Sin, you were enslaved to righteousness." See where Paul has located himself in the storyline in the last part of Romans 7? It is before a person has come to be in Christ.

In fact, this same progression -- leading to the "Thanks be to God! -- takes place at the end of Romans 7. The struggle of the person who is a slave to Sin reaches a climax. 

7:22-25a -- "I delight in the Law of God in my inner person, but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and making me a captive to the law of sin that is in my members. O wretched man am I! Who will rescue me from the body of this death? Thanks be to God! Through Jesus Christ our Lord!"  

The drama now reaches its peak. Note again. In Romans 6 Paul has implored the Romans not to let sin reign in their "members," in the actions of their bodies. If Paul were talking about his current experience in these verses, he would be in a lesser spiritual state than he is instructing the Romans to be.

No! This is the situation of the person who is still a slave to Sin. This is a person whose "members" are still instruments of unrighteousness. He gets to the same climax alluded to in Romans 6:17 where, "Thanks be to God!" the new believer is set free from the power of Sin. How does this happen? It happens "through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Romans 8 follows directly on this victory! [16] "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus for the law of the Spirit of life has set you free from the law of Sin and death!" We have now reached the resolution of the tension Paul portrayed in the last part of Romans 7. The situation of when we "used to" be slaves to Sin is resolved. We are now at the part of the story where we have been freed from Sin and are now slaves to righteousness.

Indeed, now we can keep the Law by the power of the Spirit! "God has accomplished the impossibility of the Law that was due to the weakness of our flesh...  so that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us" (8:2-4). Sin no longer reigns in our mortal bodies. We no longer yield our members as instruments of unrighteouness. We are no longer sold under Sin. 

Indeed, we are no longer "in the flesh," for "those who are in the flesh cannot please God" (8:8). Now, we are "in the Spirit" because the Spirit of God dwells in us (8:9). Note that Paul expects this to be true of all believers. He is not describing what he thinks will take place after a second experience. In a perfect world, this situation would be true of everyone in Christ.

However, as we will see in the next chapter, the problem is that we often find Christians who are still to some degree in the flesh. In Romans 6-8, Paul gives the ideal and the way it should work. But leave it to the Corinthian church to mess things up! In the next chapter, we will see how it is often necessary for us as believers to move on to the spiritual from the carnal. Once again, we find a place to argue that most Christians can find themselves at a second moment of grace.

16. We shouldn't leave this chapter without a quick mention of Romans 12:1-2, a classic entire sanctification text. "Present your bodies as a living sacrifice -- holy, pleasing to God -- which is your appropriate worship. And stop being conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mindset so that you can verify what the will of God is -- the good and pleasing and complete will of God."

Do you see that this instruction alludes back to Romans 6? In Romans 6, Paul urged the Romans to present their "members" as instruments of righteousness leading to holiness. He told them not to let Sin reign in their mortal bodies. As he now starts the exhortation of Romans 12-15, he returns to that theme. Our bodies -- which were formerly slaves to sin -- must now be given completely to God. Our flesh is crucified (Gal. 2:20). We die to Sin and now live to God (Rom. 6:2). We are no longer conformed to this world.

Now, we walk in the Spirit and do not fulfill the desires of the flesh (Gal. 5:16). Our mindset is transformed and renewed. Note that Paul is not focusing on ideas or worldviews here. The transformed mind to which he refers is made clear in the chapters that follow. Far from ideology, he has in view a mindset of mutual submission and love of one another. Indeed, Romans 13:8 sums up what a renewed and transformed mind is -- it is a mindset of love toward others.

Now we can not only see clearly what the good, pleasing, and complete will of God is. We are now empowered to do it through the power of the Holy Spirit. God has made possible the impossible through the sin offering of Christ Jesus so that we can now fulfill the righteous requirement of the Law.

Of course, experience demonstrates that most Christians are not quite there at first. In theory -- in theology -- we all should be. But in practice, there is often a middle zone where a Christian is still fleshly or carnal. It is to this uncomfortable middle zone that we turn next.

[10] simul iustus et peccator, semper repentans.

[11] One of the most transformative articles on my interpretive journey with Paul was Krister Stendahl's "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," now in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Fortress, 1976). 

[12] The difference between Paul and some other Jewish believers is that he did not consider Israelite-specific laws to be binding on his Gentile converts. He also seemed to believe that the unity and mission of the church took precedence over keeping these Israelite-specific laws. Although he did not express it in this way, he was laying the seeds of what later Gentile Christians would think of as the "moral law."

[13] It's an ancient literary device known as prosopopoeia.

[14] I actually think he is telling the story of everyone, not his story specifically, but I don't want to distract from the main point here.

[15] I have heard individuals say something to the effect of, "He is using the present tense. Therefore, he is talking about his current state and what is happening in the present." I'll try to be kind. This statement reflects an utter lack of understanding of Greek tenses. They are not primarily about time. In fact, some argue they are not about time at all. In any case, the Greek present tense can be used in several ways (including to talk about the past). This argument doesn't even pass first-semester Greek.

[16] You might note that I have left off the final part of 7:25 for clarity's sake: "So then, I myself with my mind serve the Law of God but with my flesh the law of Sin." This sentence summarizes the pre-faith condition of the person who does not have the Spirit but wants to keep the Law. However, because this summary comes after the climax of Paul's train of thought, some mistakenly think it condemns us to never have victory over the power of Sin. Again, this interpretation completely undermines Paul's train of thought in these three chapters.
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Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)

3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)

Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)

1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)

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5. Now we get to an important practical question. To what extent can a believer live above sin? To what extent is it possible for a Christian not to sin?

The word on the street is that we cannot help but sin even after we come to Christ. Many Christians identify strongly with Romans 7:19 -- "I do not do the good I want to do, but I do the evil I don't want to do." Someone might quote 1 John 1:8 -- "If we say that we do not have sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." Seems pretty straightforward, right?

Except both of these verses are completely taken out of context. We've ripped them from the text and made them say things they weren't saying. In context, both Paul and John turn out to have exactly the opposite theology we are making it sound like they had.

6. Let's start with 1 John 1:8. If John was really saying that Christians cannot help but sin, would he also say 1 John 3:9? [5] No one who has been born of God practices sin because his seed remains in him and he is not able to sin because he has been born from God. Wow! That seems to say something quite different from what many take 1 John 1:8 to say.

If we would only read a little further in 1 John 1 to 1:10, we would get a better sense of what 1:8 is really saying. "If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us." This is the perfect tense, as also in 3:9. The perfect tense has the sense of something that happened in the past and has continued to the present. So, I have been married twenty-five years speaks both of an event that happened in the past but that has since continued.

1 John 1:10 is saying the same thing that Romans 3:23 does -- all have sinned at some point in the past. If you say you have never sinned ever, you are making God a liar. Now note the wording of 1:8. "If we say we do not have sin." The verse does not say, "If we say we do not practice sin." In other words, 1 John 1:8 is simply saying the same thing that 1:10 says. Everyone needs Christ because everyone has sin from the past -- sin that is forgiven and cleansed when we come to faith.

The perfect tense in 3:9 then gives the situation of the person after they have been born of God. If we all have sin before we come to Christ, we all have God's seed in us afterward. That seed is the seed of love we have already seen. And the seed of love makes sin incompatible with our new life.

It is difficult for us to interpret 1 John because it's historical situation isn't entirely clear from the text itself. It only gives us hints. A good hypothesis is that John's church had recently undergone a split (2:19) in which a group of early Gnostics had left. They were "Docetists" who thought that Jesus had only seemed to be human. But to them, he had not truly come in the flesh (4:2).

In keeping with the fact that they did not believe Jesus came in the flesh, they denied the atoning work of Jesus on the cross. In effect, they denied their need for atonement, as if they did not have any sin that needed to be cleansed. 

This group also seems to have had some material means but to have withheld it from those in need in the community (3:17-18). So when 1 John talks about love, it is not referring to an emotion but to the concrete help that one person can give to another. This is the nature of God, and John indicates it should also be the nature of the church. 

If this hypothesis is correct, then the words of 1 John that can seem so abstract take on a much more concrete character. And the abstract theology that we are prone to take from the words ripped out of context becomes much clearer. John is not on "team sin."

7. 1 John has a number of interesting comments in relation to sin. For example, 1 John 2:1 gives us the bottom line: "My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you might not sin. But if someone should sin, we have an Advocate with the Father -- Jesus Christ the righteous." 

From this verse it should be obvious that John is not teaching a sinless perfection. Perhaps we should go back to 3:9 and translate it, "No one who has been born of God continues to sin... He or she is not able to keep sinning." It is not an absolute statement. It is a statement of what should be normative for the Christian life. The Christian life should not be typified by sin, although it can happen, and we have a good Lawyer.

Even more intriguing are the comments John makes about sin as he closes this letter (or sermon). [6] In 1 John 5:16-17, John distinguishes between sins that are "to death" and sins that are "not to death." He says to pray for the restoration of someone who does not sin a "sin to death" But he doesn't suggest praying for someone who commits a sin to death. What could he be talking about?

A first observation is that there clearly are different levels of sin -- at least two. Another one of the common myths in the church today is that "All sin is sin." This is not the biblical view. Jesus, for example, talks about an unpardonable sin (Matt. 12:31; Mark 3:29; Luke 12:10). He clearly considered this sin to be more serious than other sins. In John 19:11, Jesus says that those who handed him over to Pilate were guilty of a greater sin than Pilate was. 

Paul certainly does not treat all sins the same. While he chastises the Corinthians for many sinful behaviors, he only tells them to expel the man sleeping with his father's wife (1 Cor. 5:1-5). Some sins -- if continued -- imply that you will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:10), but others seem more easily forgiven (1 Cor. 11:18).

8. So where did this popular myth come from when it is so obviously not a feature of Old or New Testament theology? [7] There are likely some historical forces at work here. But perhaps some naturally think this way because we know that "all have sinned" before coming to Christ, and many believe in eternal security after you come to Christ, where "eternal security" means that you will certainly be saved after you come to Christ no matter what you do.

If your actions after Christ don't affect your spiritual destiny, and your actions before you come to Christ all have the same consequence, then you could see how someone might naturally conclude that "all sin is sin." However, while it is true that all sins have the same basic consequence before you come to Christ. The view that once you are saved, you are "always saved" is not biblical.

We can simply bring out the "big guns" of Hebrews: "If we continue to sin intentionally after we have received a knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is remaining" (10:26). Similarly, "If they fall away, it is impossible for those who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit and have tasted the word of God and the powers of the coming age, to be renewed to repentance. After all, they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and holding him up to disgrace" (6:4-6).

This concept seems similar to what we are reading in 1 John 5. There is a point where sin severs a person from God, Christ, and salvation. It is a "sin to death." Where is that line? God knows. From everything we have said so far, it is a matter of our hearts leaving God, not a matter of some action in itself. It is not a matter of someone "taking us out of God's hand" (John 10:28-29). It is a matter of us walking away from God with our hearts.  

9. The holiness movement had an opposite extreme. I call it the "one sin you're out" perspective. If you said a curse word and got hit by a train before you could repent, you were hell bound. Some have jokingly called this "eternal insecurity." It is not biblical either.

The balanced perspective of the New Testament would seem to be something like the following. Before we come to Christ and receive the Holy Spirit, we cannot help but sin. The result is that all have sinned, and the wages of sin are death (Rom. 6:23).

After we come to Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit, intentional sin should not be normative for the believer. God's seed is in us, we should love one another as the norm. Sin is not falling short of absolute perfection. Mistakes are not sins in the sense of doing wrong although we can unintentionally wrong others. "Infirmities" of our mind are not sins. Sin is intentionally doing what is contrary to our allegiance to Christ or intentionally not doing what we know faith would have us do.

If we sin, we ask Christ for forgiveness, and his blood atones for our sins. However, we can walk away from God. Our hearts can abandon God. As Paul says, we can become "disqualified" because we stop running the race (1 Cor. 9:27). It's not a matter of a single sin act, although one can imagine a choice against God so definitive that it would sever the relationship at once.

This would seem to be 1 John's "sin to death" and Hebrews "falling away."

I like to think of it in relational terms. A single act rarely breaks a relationship, although some acts are so severe they might conceivably do so. If you forget your anniversary, thou hast sinned, and atonement must be made. But it probably doesn't mean divorce. Every sin damages our relationship with God, but a single sin is unlikely to sever our relationship with him.

Can you come back after you have crossed back to death? The church long ago concluded that you could. [8] The Parable of the Prodigal Son would seem to say so (Luke 15). We can certainly make a logical argument for potential return. If it is the Holy Spirit that draws us to Christ, then anyone who genuinely desires to repent can because the Holy Spirit is saying so. God can work out the details. [9] 

Those who have committed a sin to death will never truly repent.

10. We should look at James 2:10 before we move on to Romans 6-8. On the surface, someone might think it teaches that "all sin is sin." "Whoever keeps the whole Law but fails at one point has become guilty of all." Again, if we rip this verse from its context, we might think it is equating all sins.

The verse is actually saying that we can't make excuses for ourselves by saying, "I'm a pretty good person. I keep almost all the Law except for x." In the context of James 2, it probably refers to a wealthy person who keeps most of the Law but dishonors the poor (2:6). 

The bottom line is that the verse is not saying that all sins are equal. It is saying that all righteousness is important. Love must be complete, not partial. If we fail to love one group, we aren't off the hook just because we do pretty well at loving another...

[5] I will refer to the author of 1 John as "John the elder" even though 1 John is technically anonymous. The style and theology is similar to 2 and 3 John, in which the author merely refers to himself as "the elder." 

[6] 1 John does not have the typical features of a letter. It seems more to me like a homily. 

[7] In the Old Testament, we have already seen the sharp distinction between unintentional sins and intentional sins. The sacrificial system was primarily targeted at the cleansing of unintentional sins (Num. 15:27-31).

[8] In the Novatian controversy of the 200s, it was determined that Christians who had renounced Christ under persecution could be restored.

[9] I often think of Schrödinger's cat at this point. You seem to have left the faith. You never come back. You committed a sin to death. You seem to have left the faith. You come back. You apparently didn't commit a sin to death. How do we know whether you have committed a sin to death? Only when we open the box at the end of your life and see whether the Spirit has let you repent.

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)

Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)

1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)
2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

________________

1. You hear many popular notions about sin among Christians that don't hold up to good exegesis of the Scriptures. Ironically, these "myths" about sin have infected a lot of Wesleyans as well. However, some of the exegetical strengths of the Wesleyan tradition lie in its interpretations of key passages relating to sin in the New Testament.

One common myth is that sin means "to miss the mark" in the sense of falling short of absolute perfection. Suffice it to say, the Bible never says this. In older Greek, the word hamartano could mean to wander or err -- to "go wrong" as it were. So you could talk about an arrow "erring" from its target as in Judges 20:16 in the Greek Old Testament. [1]

But the New Testament use of the word almost always involves a conscious moral choice. [2] In general, it doesn't think of sin as missing a target, nor does it treat sin for a believer as an unavoidable event. As 1 Corinthians 10:13 says, "No temptation has taken you except what is common to humanity. But God is faithful. He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able to resist. But with the temptation he will make also a way to escape so it is possible for you to bear it."

2. Occasionally, someone might point to Romans 3:23 as an instance of "missing the mark." For example, the New Living Translation (NLT) renders this verse, "Everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God's glorious standard." But this translation almost certainly misses the mark in what the verse means. 

A more accurate translation is, "All have sinned and are lacking the glory of God." The glory of God is that which God created Adam and humanity to have in the creation (Ps. 8:5; Heb. 2:7). Then humanity lost this glory when Adam sinned (Rom. 3:23). But Christ makes it possible for us to regain this glory when Christ returns (Rom. 5:2, 8:18; Heb. 2:9-10). The more we understand Paul's theology of glory, the more we will see the depth of this verse's meaning.

What Romans 3:23 is saying is that, because of our sin, we have all lost the glory that God created humanity to have. But it is not formulating sin in terms of failing to keep some divine standard -- let alone an absolute one. The focus of sin in the New Testament is not the standard (legal) but the intentionality (moral).

2. There are two basic senses of sin -- in terms of sin acts -- in the New Testament: to do wrong and to wrong (someone). In the previous chapter, we argued that if love is the ultimate standard of doing what God requires, then the most basic definition of sin ultimately refers to any choice that is contrary to love.

Can we sin unintentionally? Yes, although this is not the focus of the New Testament. Unintentional wrongdoing was far more significant in the theology of the Old Testament. [3] The sin offerings of Leviticus 4 focus on unintentional "sins" as well as matters that might make a person unclean. The same is true of the guilt offerings of Leviticus 5.

Why? Because the sacrificial system wasn't designed as much for intentional wrongdoing, which more frequently led to exile or death. Numbers 15 draws a sharp distinction between atonement for unintentional sins and sins "with a high hand," for which there was far less sacrificial provision for atonement. Hebrews 9:7 echoes this fact when it says that the Levitical system atoned for "sins committed in ignorance.

It is possible to sin unintentionally because we can harm someone else without intending to do so. We can wrong someone intentionally or unintentionally. In Matthew 18:21, Peter asks Jesus how many times he should forgive someone if they "sin against" him. He seems to have intentional wrongdoing in mind here, but we can imagine that a person might wrong someone unintentionally (for example, running over someone's cat).

In terms of ethics, sins committed in ignorance tend to be "consequentialist" sins -- sins that relate to the consequences or effects of our choices.

3. However, in most instances, the New Testament has an intentional act of wrongdoing in mind when it talks about sin. All such acts of sin are rooted in our minds and in our choices -- in our intentions. Wesley defined sin "properly so called" as a "willful transgression against a known law of God." [4] In this definition, he recognized the central role of the will in the type of sin with which God is most concerned.

Matthew 5 gets at the roots of sin when Jesus contrasts those in his day who focused on external standards and rules in their understanding of sin rather than on the heart from which our actions flow. A person might not violate the rule not to murder but violate it in one's heart with hate. A person might keep the letter of the Law with regard to adultery but violate it in their heart.

In both cases, one has sinned because his or her intentions are wrong and do not reflect a heart of love. Sin is thus not focused so much on the violation of a rule. Its primary nature is not legal but a matter of intent. As Jesus says in Mark 7:21, the heart is the seat of sin not the external violation of rules.

When we think of sin primarily as missing the mark -- especially falling short of absolute perfection -- we are lowering its sense. This is a less morally mature understanding of sin and, indeed, a picture of a less mature God who is more focused on rules than intentions. Jesus and the New Testament give a deeper sense of sin that gets at the heart rather than external legalism.

4. Just to make the point even clearer, let's look at several verses in the New Testament that reinforce this picture of the nature of sin acts (we will get to the question of a sin nature soon enough). James 4:17 indicates that if a person knows the good that he or she should do but does not do it, they are sinning. This type of sin is called a sin of omission. A sin of omission is when we do not do something we know we should as opposed to a sin of commission when we do something we should not.

But notice that intentionality is involved. We know what we should do but we choose not to do it.

Romans 14:23 gives us one of the most insightful pictures of sin in the entirety of the Bible. Paul is discussing matters on which Christians disagree such as whether one should eat meat that has been sacrificed to an idol or observe the Jewish Sabbath. In the end, he indicates that it comes down to faith. 

One person acts from a heart of faith and keeps the Jewish Sabbath. Another person acts from faith and gives all days to the Lord equally without setting the Sabbath aside. Both are acting righteously and neither is sinning (Rom. 14:5-8).

There is a key truth that comes from this insight. Two people can do exactly the same thing and the one be sinning while the other is not sinning. What makes the difference is not the act itself but the person's intentionality toward the act. Romans 14:23 thus makes it particularly clear that the nature of sin is in one's intention rather than in one's action per se.

Some might think that 1 John 3:4 has a legal approach to sin: "The one who practices sin also practices lawlessness because sin is lawlessness." But what does John have in mind? The chapter goes on to describe such sinning in terms of those who do not love their Christian brothers and sisters. They sin by not meeting the needs of others when they have the resources to do so (1 John 3:11, 17). 

And so, far from some legal sense of sin and lawlessness, 1 John also has a love-focused understanding of sin. John turns out to have a very concrete sense of wrongdoing in mind -- concrete sins of omission by not helping others when one knows he or she should. Like Jesus and Peter, John sees love as the essence of Law-keeping. Indeed, it is he who tells us that God's nature is love (1 John 4:7-8) and that the one born of God cannot sin because God's seed remains in him or her (1 John 3:9). 

What then is lawlessness here? It is an attitude that is contrary to the love of our neighbor. Such an unloving attitude toward others is a lawless attitude. It is contrary to the very essence of the Law.

[1] Although even here, it is a slightly different word, diamartano.

[2] There are some exceptions. Hebrews 9:7 speaks of old covenant sins as "sins committed in ignorance. Acts 3:17, 17:30; 1 Timothy 1:13 all speak of periods of ignorance that preceded faith in Christ. Luke 12:48 mentions servants who aren't ready for the Lord's return unintentionally. 

[3] The focus of sin in the Old Testament also often had a corporate dimension that we tend to miss because of our individualist culture.

[4] We find references to "sin properly so called" in Wesley's sermon, "The Scripture Way of Salvation" as well as in a letter he wrote in 1772 to a Mrs. Elizabeth Bennis.

2.3 What is "perfect" love? (part 3)

 Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)

1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)
2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)

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7. As surprising as it is, the New Testament regularly associates holiness with love toward one another. 1 Peter 1:15-16 is a good place to start. First, it quotes Leviticus 19:2 -- "Be holy because I am holy." Remember that Leviticus puts some instruction in that category that isn't really moral -- not wearing clothing of mixed thread, for example. In the Old Testament, being holy is much more about keeping the particulars of the covenant -- some of which we would call "ceremonial" -- rather than morality as we think of it today.

But in the fuller revelation of 1 Peter, sanctification means a purified heart that results in love toward one another. "Since you have purified your souls... love one another fervently with a pure heart" (1:22). 

Now, we are finally getting to the heart of how Wesley understood entire sanctification. For Wesley, entire sanctification was about perfect love. He called this perfect love, "Christian perfection."

8. Once again, Wesley's exegesis was "pre-reflective" in many regards. As a "pre-modern" interpreter who wasn't really wired to read the biblical text inductively, he read his system into the text at times when it wasn't exactly there. 

For example, the KJV of Hebrews 6:1 says to "go on unto perfection." Reading his definitions into the words, he took this as an injunction to go on to Christian perfection in love. However, most modern translations rightly translate teleiotes here as "maturity." In context, the strong food the author wants the audience to move on to is arguably a deeper understanding of the sacrificial offering of Christ. It has little to do with moral perfection.

Similarly, take Matthew 5:48, which is sometimes translated, "You will be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." This verse is relevant to the question of entire sanctification, but it has nothing to do with Wesley's "order of salvation" (ordo salutis). The Common English Bible gives us the sense of this verse better when it renders it, "Therefore, just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete."

Matthew 5:43-48 is the culmination of a chapter in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus is teaching what it truly means to keep the Law. It is not just about keeping the Law on the surface -- I didn't actually kill someone or have an affair, so I'm good. It's about being complete (or "perfect") in our law-keeping. We don't even hate others. We don't even lust at others (or get a divorce to be with someone legally).

In the final paragraph of this chapter, Jesus sums up what it means to fulfill, to be "complete" in your keeping of the Law. It is not just loving your friends. It is loving your enemies as well. It is being like God, who gives good rain to both good farmers and bad ones. He gives the good sun to both bad farmers and good ones. He is complete or "perfect" in his love, not partial or skimpy in his love depending on whether you are loyal to him.

Matthew 5:48 was thus not about a second work of grace. It was about a love we are to give both to friend and foe. That is what Matthew means by being "perfect."

The English word perfect threw Wesley off. After all, he was a perfectionist by nature, and it led him to frequent bouts of self-doubt. In the New Testament, it almost always refers either to maturity or completeness. Perhaps only once -- in James 3:2 -- does it have any sense like we typically think of in English.

9. Nevertheless, the association between holiness and love is genuinely there in the New Testament. Holiness has a negative association with sin -- those who are sanctified should not have sin. But holiness has a positive association with love -- those who are purified will love others. In the next chapter, we will explore how this movement from sin to love works. It will be no surprise that it happens through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, as we saw in chapter 1.

This makes sense because the New Testament says that God's nature is love (1 John 4:7-8). In fact, we could actually define sin as that which is contrary to the love of God and others. Think about it, when Jesus was asked to identify the greatest commandment, he said it was to love God and neighbor. All the Law and the Prophets, he said, are derivative of these (Matt. 22:36-40). Paul says the same thing in Romans 13:8 -- the whole Law can be summed up in the love of neighbor.

If love is what all of God's commandments are about, then sin by definition must be everything that is contrary to the love of God and neighbor. Here we see the essence of what holiness is about. When God empowers us to love him and others, by definition we move away from sin and toward holiness. The more we love, the less we sin. And the more we love, the more we are in line with God's holiness.

10. Among all the passages in the Bible that I highlighted in orange, 1 Thessalonians 5:23 is one of the ones that is mostly still standing. "May the God of peace himself sanctify you all completely, and may your whole body, soul, and spirit be kept blameless at the arrival of our Lord Jesus Christ."

There are still some aspects of this verse in context that we should clarify. For example, it is directed to an entire congregation. We tend to read it in terms of me -- individualistically. But it is much more a matter of a whole congregation, plural, collectively.

Secondly, Paul was not picturing a regimented theological event. He gives the goal -- you should be completely set aside to God, completely done with sin ("every form of evil," 5:22), and completely full of love toward God and each other. (He doesn't mention that last bit but no doubt he would agree if we asked him.) That's the goal and you need to get there by God's power (5:24).

Wesley and we Wesleyans have systematized this verse. That's ok as long as we know we are going beyond what the text had in mind. In later chapters, we will suggest that there is an implied system here even if it was not in Paul's mind. 

What we will see is that, while Christians should be completely done with sin from the moment they come to Christ, they typically aren't. We often haven't given everything to Christ at conversion because we don't even know what we need to give. The result is that we often come to a moment of crisis and decision even after we have initially come to Christ and had our sins forgiven. The crisis is the decision of whether I will give everything to Christ or withhold some from God?

This moment of full surrender is logically necessary for God to give me the fullness of the Spirit. And without the full empowerment of the Spirit, I will not be able to love completely. Nor will I be fully sanctified. The logic reconstructs the Wesleyan sense of entire sanctification without overreading the key biblical texts. More on this logic of sanctification in the remaining chapters.

2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)

Preface: A Sanctification Story 
1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)

1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)
2.1 What is holiness?

________________

5. Given all this background in the Old Testament, how in the world did Wesley and the Wesleyan tradition come to associate holiness with perfect love? 

To be honest, I'm not sure I picked up this connection too much growing up in the holiness tradition either. Growing up, holiness seemed to be much more about the things you didn't do -- a negative concept -- than the things you did do. What I heard was that, when you got sanctified, you stopped doing things. 

As an aside, let me make at least something I think is an observation. As I went to seminary, I began to loosen some of the "standards" of holiness I grew up with. I started eating out on Sunday. I started going to movies. I can't remember what the subject was, but at one point my father exclaimed, "What don't you do?"

I found this a revealing question. My father was a reasonable, kind-hearted man. He was not a legalist by any means. Still, growing up in ultraconservative holiness circles, his framework of the Christian life was primarily formulated in duty and in what you didn't do. At his funeral, I noted that he was a "good and faithful servant," but I'm not sure how often he felt like a son. Steve Deneff and David Drury captured this important concept in their book Soul Shift. [1] In our spiritual development, at some point we should fully feel the fatherly love of God for us as his children. We are not merely servants of God.

I believe I have observed that those who have remained in the conservative holiness movement often retain this character. It is a culture of "don't." When I worked at Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU), I remember hearing some people puzzle that students from holiness Bible colleges seemed more inclined to do their graduate work at a school like Bob Jones rather than IWU even though we were more closely aligned with them theologically. It made sense to me, though, because it seemed to me that Bob Jones was more aligned with them culturally -- a culture of don't.

In politics, there is a tendency toward a "law and order" approach. That is to say, it seems to me that the holiness tradition tends to lean more toward stopping wrong than toward advancing good. My friend the late Keith Drury once observed that the children of the holiness movement often retained a certain rigidity in their temperament even after they had become more mainstream. It might show up in the way they dressed -- not in standards but in excessive tidiness. Some went to the opposite extreme and became rigid in their rejection of conservatism -- long hair and a complete disregard for rules. 

Often, he suggested, after having mocked their parents for their rigidity on one set of issues, they would grow up to be rigid on another set of issues. Without realizing it, they had become their parents. But instead of railing against hair length or jewelry, now they railed against something else. The issues had changed, but the spirit of "don'tness" had remained.

I will leave that aside with you to hammer out the details in your life with God.

6. The New Testament does retain the element of "don't" in its sense of holiness. It is a clear part of the equation. Being sanctified means an end to sin. "Without holiness, no one will see the Lord," Hebrews 12:14.

But there is so much more to holiness in the New Testament than endings. Holiness also involves empowerment for good. Being set aside to God means being empowered by God. It means being plugged into God. I remember a pastor talking about how, when he was sanctified, he stopped getting angry as much. Yes! That's wonderful. But there is even more, God's power can not only stop uncontrolled anger. It can positively start a loving attitude toward others.

This was quite a shift in my understanding of what holiness was. But it was a key part of John Wesley's understanding. For him, Christian perfection was a perfection in love. Entire sanctification for him was about perfect love. In the last century, the Nazarene Mildred Bangs Wynkoop (1905-97) reminded the holiness movement of this focus. [2] Like me, she grew up with a sense that holiness was about the removal of the sin nature from a person. She reminded our tradition that it was much more about a relationship with the God of love.

I feel like it's important to make another aside here. The concept of love is in danger today from more than one front. It used to be endangered because of its trivialization. Love was the shallow, dreamy, ultimately self-gratifying emotion of the late 60s. This sense of love was really selfish and not about true love. In 1982, James Dobson reminded the culture that sometimes love has to be "tough." [3] 

Whatever you think of the details of his approach, it is clear biblically that discipline is part of love. Hebrews 12 is very clear that God's discipline is an act of love. How so? To get us back on track. After all, the path that departs from God is a path of self-destruction. Discipline is not primarily about punishment -- the punitive view of "don't." It is about redirection -- the positive goals of true lovingkindness.

At the moment, love is endangered from a more insidious direction. The culture of don't can become toxic with its sense of law and order. At its worst, the culture of don't turns on love and becomes its enemy. I have recently seen Christians begin to vilify empathy, even calling it "toxic empathy." This is don't culture gone amok, and it is of the Devil.

It is one thing to correct a shallow sense of love as self-gratification. It is one thing to remind those who have difficulty disciplining because they have a compulsion to be liked. It is another thing to turn on love and treat it as the enemy. 

True empathy is nothing other than loving your neighbor as yourself. This is the command of God. No exceptions appear in Scripture. If you want a don't, "don't hate" is a bigger one than whatever one you want to see enforced. This is the whole of the Law and the Prophets, Jesus says (Matt. 22:36-40). Jesus puts it another way in Matthew 7:12: "Everything that you would want people to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets."

This is the Golden Rule, and it is another way of expressing empathy. Empathy is getting into the experiences of someone else. Empathy is being able to see a situation from the standpoint of those who are in it. If there is a danger to empathy, it is that it would prevent discipline. And as we have mentioned, discipline is part of love because you wish the good of the other.

But beware that the Devil trick you into hate in the name of law. Know thyself. Receive the Holy Spirit, and let the light of God fill you. Ironically, the holiness culture of don't can lead to spiritual darkness.

There are levels of sin, as we will see in the next chapter. Let's pose a trick question. In God's economy, which is the greater sin, to be too loving or to be too hateful? The question is wrong, of course. It is never a sin to love, and it is always a sin to hate people (Matt. 5:21-22). Love can be misguided, but it cannot sin. Other psychological dynamics can be disguised as love, but authentic loving is never wrong.

However, the quest to stop sin can blur into genuine hatred toward the sinner. Hatred can clothe itself in righteousness. This is nothing other than sin disguising itself as godliness. It is something we must guard our hearts against. Human nature is prone to self-deception and, before you know it, you can be swallowed up in darkness.

7. As surprising as it is, the New Testament regularly associates holiness with love toward one another...

[1] David Drury and Steve Deneff, Soul Shift: The Measure of a Life Transformed (Wesleyan Publishing House, 2012).

[2] Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, A Theology of Love: The Dynamic of Wesleyanism (Beacon Hill, 1972).

[3] James Dobson, Love Must Be Tough (Tyndale House, 1982).

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)

Preface: A Sanctification Story 
1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)

1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)
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1. What then do the words holiness and sanctification even mean?

We are at a little disadvantage in English because these two words look so different to us. The two English words have two different histories that make the words look different.

However, in the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, these all come from the same root. They are related. In Hebrew, to sanctify (qiddesh) is to make holy (qadosh) -- they both have the same qdsh root. Similarly, in Greek, to sanctify (hagiazo) is to make holy (hagios) -- the same root again. Sanctification is the event of being made holy. [1]

What does it mean to be holy? You may have heard that it means to be "set apart," and that is true. But it is a special kind of set-apart-ness. In particular, it means to be set apart to God. It means to belong to God.

We miss something if we do not feel the magnitude -- even the terror -- of such a statement. If I pull up to a valet at a restaurant or hotel with my car, the valet will feel no fear to park my hunk of junk. But if a movie star or mafia boss pulls up, the car is much more precious, much more special -- much more fearful. Being set apart TO GOD!!! is something like that. 

We have lost something if we translate "the fear of the LORD" merely with "respect for the LORD." If I am in a ring with an elephant, there will be a little bit of fear even if the elephant likes me. If I have a pet lion or work in an aquarium with a killer whale that is usually affectionate, I dare not lose sight of the sheer power of these animals.

Why does Uzzah die when he has touched the Ark of the Covenant (2 Sam. 6:6-7)? Because he, a common person, has touched the holy Ark of God. Why would anything that touched Mt. Sinai have to be put to death (Exod. 19:12-13)? Because the mountain was holy when God descended on it.

Holiness means that something is touching God -- or rather that God is touching it. Like a screw that is magnetized by touching a magnet, something that is set apart to God is "magnetized." It is "sanctified" or made holy by the fact that it is touching God. Like a 10,000-volt fence, you will die if you touch it. It is not personal on the fence's part. It is just too much for a mere mortal to handle.

Obviously, none of these analogies are perfect, but I hope they begin to convey the emotive dimension of holiness. It is not merely some sterile logical concept -- "set apart to God." It is Isaiah 6 territory -- fall on your face before the HOLINESS of God, for you are unworthy, "a man of unclean lips in the midst of a people of unclean lips" (Isa. 6:5).

2. When we are studying a word or concept in the Bible, sometimes we hit an instance or two that so challenges our assumptions that it leads us to a paradigm shift. For me, the fact that the word for a cult prostitute is qedeshah challenged the way I understood holiness in the Old Testament. I had always associated holiness with moral purity, and there is some basis for this. But how could a cult prostitute be holy???

It transformed the way I understand holiness. A cult prostitute is holy to the god she serves because she is set apart to that god. The root dimension of holiness is not morality then but the proximity to the god in question. There are thus levels of holiness, as we see in the structure of the tabernacle and temple. The closer you get to the Most Holy Place, the more holy the location becomes.

It is thus the nature of our God that requires certain covenant behaviors. It is not the word holiness per se in the Old Testament that implies morality. It is rather the nature of our God and his covenant with his people that does.

At its root, the holiness of God is the God-ness of God. To say God is holy is to say that God is God. He is set apart from all creation. For us to be connected to him requires us to keep his covenant with us. In the Old Testament especially, there are rules to being associated with God. If we break the rules of his holiness, his holiness breaks us. The Old Testament doesn't always connect this result with intentionality or wrath on God's part. You just can't touch a 10,000-volt fence and live.

3. What are the rules of God's holiness? In the Old Testament, many of them do not seem to be particularly moral in nature. Uzzah is not sanctified -- he is not magnetized by God. Although his intentions are good, he simply cannot touch the 10,000 volts of the holy Ark of the Covenant. It fries him.

The layers of the tabernacle are examples of holiness rules. The rules about what you should eat also relate to the covenant. These rules in Leviticus are sometimes called the "holiness codes." From our standpoint today, avoiding pork does not seem particularly to be a moral issue, but it was a matter of observing God's holiness in the Old Testament. 

Leviticus 19 is again one of those passages that wreaks havoc with our assumptions about what holiness is. 19:2 tells Israel to "be holy for I am holy." Some of the chapter fits in the way we think of morality -- don't steal, don't lie, don't endanger someone's life. But then there are other instructions in this chapter that might seem puzzling -- don't trim the edges of your beard, don't eat food from a sacrifice on the third day, don't wear clothing of mixed thread.

Again, being holy is about belonging to God. The details have to do with the covenant God made with Israel rather than morality per se. In fact, they don't even entirely have to do with God's nature.

4. In the New Testament, holiness is more closely connected with purity from sin. This is especially the case in Hebrews, where sanctification regularly refers to an initial cleansing from the sins of the past (Heb. 10:10). The word "to make holy" is used in parallel to the purification of sins (9:13-14) and our "perfection" (10:14) -- a concept we will explore in a moment. Without this basic "holiness" -- absence of sin -- we have no hope of seeing the Lord (12:14).

The New Testament thus has a more mature understanding of holiness and sanctification than the Old Testament in general. In the Old Testament, sanctification often has a more formal or positional sense. Violation of holiness often results in automatic death or consequences [2] In the New Testament, there is a closer connection to what we think of as moral purity.

Yet even in the New Testament, sanctification can retain the sense of being set apart to God. For example, when a Gentile comes to Christ, he or she is set apart as God's -- they are "sanctified" by the Holy Spirit (2 Thess. 2:13). This connection with the Spirit makes perfect sense. We are set apart and belong to Christ when we receive the Spirit when we come to Christ. As Paul said in Romans 8:9, if we do not have the Spirit of Christ, we do not belong to him.

Note again that both in Hebrews and in 2 Thessalonians, we are primarily talking about an initial experience that takes place when we come to Christ. More of my orange highlights in my KJV turn out not to be about a second work of grace but about the initial one. The one exception so far is Hebrews 12:14, which suggests we not only become pure when we come to Christ but we must remain pure. More on this concept in the next chapter...

[1] Sanctification in the New Testament is always an event in the New Testament. When Hebrews 10:14 says that Christ "has forever perfected those who are being sanctified," it is not talking about an individual progressively being sanctified, which our individualistic glasses might lead us to think. Rather, it refers to the fact that different individuals continue to be sanctified in the I still event of appropriating Christ's offering. There is one. There's another. There, another person was just perfected and sanctified/purified.

[2] Hebrews 9:13 alludes to this "formal" and "positional" -- even ritual sense of sanctification when it says that the blood of bulls and goats purified the flesh but not the spirit.