God's Promises vs. Empty Promises

When we meet Paul's language about circumcision in his other letters and in chapter 3 of Philippians we know that we are encountering an issue that was very hot for Paul. In his letter to the church at Galatia it was almost the only thing he talked about. This is because in the teaching of those who tried to persuade the church that Gentile Christians must convert to the Mosaic law in order to be true believers Paul saw a great danger to the gospel. In Paul's world, circumcision and the keeping of Torah were not symbolic of a humble people following Yahweh in faith and repentance, awaiting an opportunity to share God's love with the Gentiles and the whole world. Instead, circumcision and Torah-keeping were outward signs which symbolized (1) the point of view that God was more interested in rule keeping and ritual than he was the condition of one's heart and (2) an attitude of spiritual pride based on ethnic superiority. This had been Paul's life until he had come to understand that Christ's revelation of God on the cross was the true circumcision of the heart that the old fleshly symbol of circumcision had only pointed to. This is why Paul can refer to himself and the Philippian Christians as "the circumcision" (3:3) and the false teachers as "dogs" (3:2). Those who belong to Christ in faith and repentance are those who have the circumcision of the heart. Those who would argue for the circumcision of Gentile Christians are referred to not as those who want to circumcise but as those who want to mutilate (3:2); and he drills home the seriousness of his position with another bit of word play, accusing these mutilators of being "dogs" (ironically, the term many of the Jews of Paul's day used disparagingly of Gentiles).

Does Paul's rhetoric here suggest that he who often admonished to love one's enemies is guilty of not practicing what he preached? I would suggest the answer to this is mainly no. First of all, we can't tell from what he says in this letter all of what he was wrestling with in his heart. If he is like most of us, and there is no reason to think that he wasn't, he probably had flashes of rage at his enemies which he then had to deal with before the Lord of grace and mercy. But we must remember that Paul had been dogged by these "Judaizing" teachers since he began his work of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles. If his words sound confrontational and angry it is because they are. But his stern frustration is directed primarily towards the position of the teachers which he sees as a contradiction to the truth about what God has done in the death of Jesus on the cross. A concern that the gospel be rightly taught and rightly believed should register deep emotional responses from all of us.

Now, let's turn to some application. It is helpful for us to remember that Paul's rationale for evaluating what opposed the gospel is as important as the conclusions he drew from it. In short, Paul understood that Jesus' death on the cross meant that to look for God other than on the cross is futile. In the Christ poem of Philippians 2, the pagan approach is shown to be futile and the exact opposite of Christ's self-giving love. The quasi-divine Caeasar was given the most honor in the Roman scheme, while slaves and those crucified on the cross were at the bottom of the heap. Similarly, to look for God in Torah-keeping was futile because that rules-based scheme did not look for God's love and acceptance at the cross. Ultimately, to deceive oneself into thinking that one has found God anywhere other than in the self-giving love of Jesus on the cross is a sure-fire way to believe in empty promises which separate one from the love of Jesus.

On the other hand, the power of the gospel enables us to see the world more and more as God sees the world. When we see the world through the self-giving love of Jesus on the cross we are given the wisdom and power to break with the empty promises made to us by self-absorbed love. Since none of us have been asked to keep Torah lately or worship the emperor, let's think of some examples more common to us of the empty promises of self-absorbed love.

1. The empty promise that I will be better off by regarding myself as better than others in order to justify my lack of love for them.
2. The empty promise that it is better to control my inner life by my habits of self-loathing even when it means that to do so is to shut myself off from God's love and the mutual love of others.
3. The empty promise of measuring your own worth and the worth of others by their material success instead of seeing each person as uniquely valuable to God.
4. The empty promise of worshiping sex rather than seeing as it as a gift to be adorned with and nurtured by mutual promises of fidelity and a love that surrounds and protects.

Each of the above examples require a lot of self-deception on our part: a great deal of confusion about where to find God and his love. But this is what life is like when we look for God's love apart from the cross of Christ - we meet ourselves as a twisted caricature, turned inward and mangled like narcissistic origami, crying from a lack of true love. The magnificent beauty of the cross of Christ is that at the cross the exploitative power that comes from self-absorbed love is defeated by the power of Christ's self-giving love. So, through the cross of Christ we are helped to see our self-deception for what it is and, in repentance, find our self-absorption, over time, transformed into Jesus' love. It is not for spiritual pride that Christ died on the cross; it is not for the exclusion of those we regard as our enemies that he died on the cross; it is not so that we may remain locked in our self-absorbed prisons that he died on the cross. He died on the cross to create a new community, a new humanity where human beings flourish based upon the consistent manifestation of self-giving love, given, received, given again, received again..... repeat.

Questions for discussion:

1. Do you resort to rule-keeping to measure how well you experience and understand God's love for you? Give an example that is suitable for the group. Why is it so tempting to reduce our relationship to God to rules. Does your rule keeping extend to your evaluation of others? If so, how so?

2. If self-deception is easier to come by than we would care to admit, how can we get free of it? What helps us focus on the gospel and take us away from self-deception? Does community play a role in this? If so, how?

3. It is through his self-giving love that God accomplishes the atonement of our sins and the redemption of this fallen world and there is a strong suggestion in the Christ-poem of chapter two in Philippians that Christ's self-giving love at work in us is the means to our transformation. If participation in Christ's self-giving is foundational to our relationship with ourselves, God, and others, how does it help us when we are in the throes of temptation to sin?