Way|Truth|Life

One of the most pernicious false gospels that goes around in Christian circles today is the erroneous understanding about what it means to die to oneself. It is certainly true that our Lord said one who is to be saved must lose his life and deny himself:

Summoning the crowd along with His disciples, He said to them, "If anyone wants to be My follower, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of Me and the gospel will save it."
--Mark 8:34-35, HCSB

But the problem with the way "dying to self" is described in modern Christianity is that it has nothing to do with the cross, and everything to do with oneself. It is not the true Gospel of repenting of one's self-righteousness and trusting completely in the completed work of Jesus Christ on Calvary. It is a false gospel of focusing more and more on one's own determination, abilities, and will-power to overcome sin and thus render oneself acceptable to God. In fact, it is the opposite of the Biblical understanding of denying onself, as we shall see.

First, the above passage came in the context of Jesus' death and resurrection. He had just described to His disciples exactly what would happen to Him in Jerusalem:

Then He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejectedby the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, be killed, and rise after three days. He was openly talking about this. So Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him.

But turning around and looking at His disciples, He rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind Me, Satan, because you're not thinking about God's concerns, but man's!"
--Mark 8:31-33

Peter rebuked Jesus for prophesying His own death, and that is why Jesus then "[summoned] the crowd along with His disciples." Peter was not denying himself. He would hear nothing of Jesus' death, and instead wanted to substitute his own version of redemptive history, based on his own authority and power. Peter wanted a gospel without the Cross, a human gospel and not the great Divine redemptive Gospel. For this, Jesus rebuked him and went on to explain what was to happen.

But what do we mean by this? Right before He died, Jesus similarly said:

"The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I assure you: Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains by itself. But if it dies, it produces a large crop. The one who loves his life will lose it, and the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me. Where I am, there My servant also will be. If anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him.

"Now My soul is troubled. What should I say—Father, save Me from this hour? But that is why I came to this hour."
--John 12:23-27

The middle of this passage--"The one who loves his life will lose it, and the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life"--is the text often cited, completely out of context, by those who preach a false human-centered view of death to self. When we look at the wider context, we see that it is centered on Jesus' own death on the Cross on our behalf. He speaks of His own death on the Cross, and then says the one who serves Him must follow Him, indicating that we lose our life in His death on Calvary, not by our religious works or efforts at moral self-improvement. Similarly, in Mark He foretells His death, and then says we must take up our Cross and follow Him, presumably to Calvary.

This is a truth of which most Christians today are disasterously ignorant. When the New Testament presents the Cross of Jesus Christ, it presents it as something the believer was miraculously brought into, utterly changing the believer forever by putting to death the believer's fallen trust of self and replacing it with a trust in God. This is literally true EVERY SINGLE TIME Paul goes into an in-depth discussion of what the Atonement means for us. I cannot stress that enough: EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Too often today, Christians are taught that the Cross was God's means of some Divine Catharsis, purging His own anger at us by beating the snot out of Godself, so that He could then feel good enough about us to love and forgive us. The Cross is presented, too often, as nothing other than a Divine temper tantrum, what some theologians have called "cosmic child abuse." Even the reformers, when they taught their Penal view of the atonement, never dared to cast it in the pagan terms it is cast today, as if God is the pagan deity Zeus who is prone to fits of rage and must find someone to throw lightning bolts at in order to feel better about humanity. As G.E. Ladd once wrote, “Even in the Old Testament, the idea of atonement as the propitiating of an angry deity and transmuting his anger into benevolence is not to be found.”

Rather, in the Bible the Cross becomes the means of a believer's conversion, resulting in justification before God by faith alone, reconciliation to God, and eventually to sanctification by the transforming power of the indwelling of Christ, as He cleanses us by His blood. Consider the following text:

For Christ's love compels us [in context, Paul and his apostolic assistants], since we have reached this conclusion: if One died for all, then all died. And He died for all so that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for the One who died for them and was raised.

From now on, then, we do not know anyone in a purely human way. Even if we have known Christ in a purely human way, yet now we no longer know Him like that. Therefore if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; old things have passed away, and look, new things have come. Now everything is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed the message of reconciliation to us. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ; certain that God is appealing through us, we plead on Christ's behalf, "Be reconciled to God." He made the One who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
--2 Cor 5:14-21

First, a perusal of the immediate context in 2 Cor 3-5 indicates that Paul is discussing his ministry as an apostle. And he then says this one truth--"If One died for all, then all died"--is the foundation of his apostolic ministry. He does not present the Cross simply as "transmuting [God's] anger into benevolence", but rather as a miraculous death that the believer participates in, which utterly and completely reconciles the believer to God. Moreover, he does not say that the cross reconciles an angry God to a broken world, but rather it reconciles a dead world to a loving God: Please do read the above text again: Not God being reconciled to us, as the Cross is often taught, but us being reconciled to God.

Simply put, if God is reconciled to us, rather than the other way around, then humanity becomes the point of all things, and it is God who is wayward. The under-girding foundation of an incorrect view of the atonement is the false idea that it fixes something in God, rather than restoring us to Him.

Further, when we read all of Paul's in-depth discussions of the mechanics of the atonement on Calvary, we find that he always echoes the sentiments of 2 Cor. 5. Consider, for instance, the following texts:

For we know that our old self was crucified with Him in order that sin's dominion over the body may be abolished, so that we may no longer be enslaved to sin, since a person who has died is freed from sin's claims. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him, because we know that Christ, having been raised from the dead, no longer dies. Death no longer rules over Him. For in that He died, He died to sin once for all; but in that He lives, He lives to God. So, you too consider yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
--Rom. 6:6-11

Therefore, my brothers, you also were put to death in relation to the law through the crucified body of the Messiah, so that you may belong to another—to Him who was raised from the dead—that we may bear fruit for God. For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions operated through the law in every part of us and bore fruit for death. But now we have been released from the law, since we have died to what held us, so that we may serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old letter of the law.
--Rom. 7:4-6

And you were once alienated and hostile in mind because of your evil actions. But now He has reconciled you by His physical body through His death, to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before Him.
--Col. 1:21-22

If you died with Christ to the elemental forces of this world, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world? Why do you submit to regulations: ‘Don't handle, don't taste, don't touch’? … So if you have been raised with the Messiah, seek what is above, where the Messiah is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on what is above, not on what is on the earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with the Messiah in God.
--Col. 2:22-3:3

This saying is trustworthy: ‘For if we have died with Him, we will also live with Him.’
--2 Tim. 2:11

He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, so that, having died to sins, we might live for righteousness; by His wounding you have been healed. For you were like sheep going astray, but you have now returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.
--1 Peter. 2:24-25

For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring you to God, after being put to death in the fleshly realm but made alive in the spiritual realm.
--1 Peter 3:18

When both Paul and Peter present the Cross, they present it as a miraculous act that the believer is brought into in a very real way, whereby the old self that was "hostile in mind" to God is put to death, and the believer is raised with a new spirit in Christ's resurrection, a spirit that trusts in God and is thus "holy, faultless, and blameless before Him." Paul does not merely present this as a metaphor, as it is often described today, but as the foundation of his ministry, as a solid fact that he explicitly tells Timothy is "trustworthy."

Further, in Rom. 6:3-5, Col. 2:20-21, and 1 Pet. 3:21-22, Paul and Peter both teach that baptism is meant to signify this act of sharing in Jesus' death and resurrection, by which we have been born again and reconciled completely and forever to God. In the Cross, Jesus took the believer's old self within Him and exposed it to the purifying power of Divine wrath, imputing all sin to that old hostile spirit and destroying it on Calvary. In His resurrection, He also raised us with His life, giving us a new, regenerate spirit. (For a more thorough discussion of this understanding of the Cross, consider reading my book The Chains of the Prodigal Brother).

So what does all of this have to do with the original discussion about dying to self? As I said, dying to self is often presented as something the believer must work at to become acceptable to God. The Biblical view of the Cross, on the other hand, shows us that it is something we receive because of Jesus' perfect and completed act on Calvary for us. Calvary shows us that we die to self by ending our trust in our own abilities and performance and human righteousness. We instead trust entirely in God's grace through the work of Jesus on the Cross and in the resurrection.

Consider, for instance, two different translations of Gal. 5:24, one St. Jerome's Roman Catholic translation, and the other a scholarly one (yes, that is a back-handed insult):

"You cannot belong to Christ Jesus unless you crucify all self-indulgent passions and desires."
--Gal. 5:24, Jerome

Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
--Gal. 5:24, HCSB

Note the stark difference: The Catholic version (Jerome) presents crucifying our passions and desires--dying to self--as something we must do going forward in order to try to belong to Christ Jesus. This is the way death to self is often taught even in allegedly Protestant and evangelical circles. In contrast, the actual text itself says that those who belong to Christ Jesus have already done so. The Greek text undeniably says the latter, not the former.

What can Paul mean by this? In the same letter we find the famous text, "I have been crucified with Christ; and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me" (Gal. 2:19-20). And similarly, "But as for me, I will never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Gal 6:14-15).

As Paul says, because of what Jesus already did for us on Calvary, we who believe in Him and have been born again have already crucified the flesh with its passions and desires, because Jesus Christ has done it for us on the Cross. Thus, death to self is entirely and completely of grace, not at all of human effort or ability. Further, the actual Greek in Gal. 2:20 doesn't read, "faith in the Son of God," but rather, "faith of the Son of God," as it is translated in Young's and the KJV. Christ, as Paul said, now lives in Him, and Paul lives by Jesus' own trust in the Father. Thus, even faith itself is entirely a gift of God's grace, and not a religious work on our part.

Where our part in all of this comes in is given by Paul immediately after Gal. 5:24: "If we live by the Spirit, we must also follow the Spirit" (Gal. 5:25). We accept that our old self, through the Spirit, has died in Jesus' death, and a new spirit has been, through the Spirit, given to us. Therefore we live only by the Spirit. Thus, our daily life is centered on walking in a reality that has already been made complete for us in Jesus' finished work. We can either live out the reality that was won for us on the Cross, or substitute our own efforts and performances and desires and what-have-you.

So death to self is not something we give to God. Death to self is something God has given to us. The message of the Cross is for all of us to repent of our self-trust and self-righteousness and human efforts, and instead to accept the call to rest only in the grace of Jesus Christ. T. Austin-Sparks describes it brilliantly:

We have not to die; we are dead. What we have to do is to accept our death... [In] baptism... we simply step in there and say, 'That position which God has settled with reference to me is the one which I now accept, and I testify here in this way to the fact that I have accepted God's position for me, namely, that in the Cross I have been brought to an end.'

Hebrews 10:24- 25 is a passage that is often rent horribly from its context. It is often mistaken as chiefly concerned with church attendance. Someone once said, "Take a text out of context, and you create a pre-text." Though the New Testament certainly supports the idea of Christians fellowshipping together for mutual edification, and expects this to be the norm, when we take Hebrews 10:24-25 text out of its context, we make it a pre-text for ignoring and even denying the author's central point about the Cross of Jesus Christ.

The passage says, "And let us be concerned about one another in order to promote love and good works, not staying away from our meetings, as some habitually do, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day drawing near."

Note that all the other stuff about promoting love and good works--i.e. meeting to encourage each other--is usually ignored by the proof-texter in favor of simply the bolded part. This is chiefly because mutual encouragement--one-anothering--often doesn't go on in those churches where congregational life is limited to singing a 7-11 song (7 words repeated 11 times), having an offering call, "listening" to a sermon everyone sleeps through, and then driving home without speaking to another single individual. In other words, the Hebrews 10 meeting, in context, is about true fellowship, not pew-sitting. Thus, those who use this text as a proof-text don't like the first part, and often ignore it.

Note also that the "day drawing near" that the author refers to is certainly not the day of meeting. He is not preposterously saying that we should meet together in order to encourage ourselves to meet together. Rather, as the next verse, Heb. 10:26 shows, he is referring to the final day of judgment.

To understand this passage, we must understand its context: In the book of Hebrews, the audience were former Jews who had left the Old Covenant Law community of Judaism to join the New Covenant community of grace in Jesus Christ. But Christianity was a collegium illicitum --an unauthorized gathering--in the Roman empire. For a time, the Christians got by because Roman officials mistakenly took them for another sect of Judaism--a faith that was authorized. By the latter part of the first century, it was becoming clear that Christianity was not another Jewish sect, but its own separate faith. Therefore, its meetings were illegal and the Christians began to be persecuted by Rome.

Faced with persecution, some of the former Jews were returning to Judaism and the legal synagogue assemblies where the Old Covenant of Law was taught, forsaking the congregation where the New Covenant of grace was taught. The entirety of the epistle is aimed at convincing such people not to leave the Christian faith and return to the Old Covenant of Judaism, because:

• The Gospel given directly by God the Son is greater than the Law that was mediated by angels (Heb. 1).
  
• The salvation that comes in Jesus is greater than the punishment that comes in the Old Covenant Law (Heb. 2).
  
• Jesus is greater than Moses and His church is greater than the Old Covenant Temple/Tabernacle (Heb. 3).
  
• Jesus is the true rest of which the Old Covenant Sabbath rest was a symbol (Heb. 4).
  
• Jesus is greater than the Levites (Heb. 5 - 7).
  
• The New Covenant is greater than the Old (Heb. 8).
  
• Jesus death on the Cross is greater than the Day of Atonement and other Old Covenant sacrifices (Heb 9-10).

That is why the author tells them to not forsake our meetings. They were forsaking our meetings in favor of the meetings with Jews who did not believe Jesus is the Son of God and Promised Messiah.

The problem is, in many parts of our country you will be hard-pressed to find a congregation that teaches and believes in the Gospel of Grace, and instead they teach the Old Covenant idea of righteousness by Law. This is particularly true in the midwest where I live. Consequently, if no congregation can be found in one's area where the Gospel is taught, then attending a church where human performance and moralism are taught as the way to approach God, is to actually disobey Heb. 10:24-25: One would actually be abandoning our meetings (a gathering of those who believe in the New Covenant gospel of grace) for meetings with people who follow after human performance and works-righteousness. Thus, the only way one could obey the admonishment in Hebrews 10:24-25, in such a case, is to stay home on Sunday or try to organize one's own fellowship or simply wait on God to put one together with true Gospel believers.

Heb. 10:24-25 is not a requirement that a believer go to a building every weekend and hear a sermon and write a check. In fact, as passages like 1 Cor. 14 show, the "our meetings" spoken of in Heb. 10:25 would be completely foreign to most modern Christians. Rather, Heb. 10:24-25 is part of the wider admonishment of the entire epistle to not forsake the New Covenant of Calvary for the Old Covenant of Sinai.

He is not saying, "You had better get your butt in that pew every single week or else God will strike you down!" He is saying, "There is no salvation outside of Jesus Christ, and if we neglect the salvation by grace that comes from Him, there is no other." (See Heb. 2:1-4). That is why, directly after Heb. 10:25, the author states, "For if we deliberately sin after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment, and the fury of a fire about to consume the adversaries" (Heb 10:26-27). In context, "deliberately sin" does not mean that, if we might sin after becoming Christians, Christ's righteousness no longer covers us and we are lost. In the context of the entire epistle, "deliberately sin" means rejecting the New Covenant Gospel of Jesus Christ in favor of the Old Covenant of righteousness by the works of the Law. If one does so, then there is no sacrifice to cover one's sins specifically because the Old Covenant sacrifices do not actually remit sin. They merely foreshadowed the true remittance of sin on Calvary, as the author had just shown in the immediately preceeding passages (Heb. 9:1-10:18). To use Hebrews 10:24-25 merely as a proof-text for church attendance is empty the Cross of its power because it denies the author's actual central point in the local context: The Cross is the final, complete and perfect atoning sacrifice for all sins and for all time.

In summary, gathering with other believers is expected to be the norm for Christian life, because it is important for mutual edification. But only if the Gospel is believed and proclaimed in such gatherings. Otherwise, such meetings are spiritual poison. The believer is not commanded in Heb. 10:24-25 to attend a congregation regardless of whether or not the Gospel is taught. Heb. 10:24-25 does not create some sort of religious work. It does not imply that engaging in a Sunday morning ritual of sermon listening is a law we must keep in order to be right with God. Rather, it means that those who believe in the Gospel of grace in Jesus Christ should stick together and not abandon each other when persecution hits. It is , in total, an admonishment for all believers to cling to the righteousness of Jesus Christ rather than substitute the righteousness that comes by the Law.