ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 25 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> What does Paul mean when he says that Jesus is our wisdom, righteousness, sanification and redemption? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: This is a passage taken from Colossians. And in certain -- in a sense, certain -- maybe this is not the best possible translation of the word righteousness. I would rather say that Jesus is our wisdom, our justification, our sanification and redemption. I may have mentioned before, Eric, that as soon as we begin to divide the kind of material that we study in preparing to be pastors in the Lutheran Church, as soon as we divide the thing into topics, it seems inevitable that we're going to run into any kind of -- we're going to run into some kind of difficulties if these topics can be separate. One of the real problems that you get into is when you understand sanification as being a separate topic. That's another word you'll come to hear more often and you'll become acquainted with. Sanification can mean the entire work of the Holy Spirit in the church and on Christians. Everything that the Holy Spirit does is -- belongs to sanification. Sanification comes from the word ***sanctos in Latin and the word ***fakio, which means to make holy. Everything that happens -- as soon as you walk into the church service, that's sanification. As soon as you pick up the scriptures and you begin reading, that's sanification. The Holy Spirit is working to make his church holy. What happens when you begin to separate these topics from the person of Jesus? You can begin to get a number of false impressions, as if the Holy Spirit wouldn't make us holy apart from the person of Jesus. It just isn't that way at all. Our sanification, our being made holy, is because we are in Jesus. Holiness is not something which is in addition to the person of Jesus. But which belongs us to the person of Jesus himself. Let's go back to that first word, wisdom. That's an unusual word. Jesus used in a word in the Gospel of Matthew of himself. He said wisdom is justified by her children. That's an amazingly difficult passage. What does that mean? It probably means this: That we can see who the true Christians are because they act like Jesus. Wisdom is justified by our children. I'm musical. Of course I'm not musical. There's my son. My musical ability can be seen in the fact that my son also isn't musical. So we're also like Jesus in that sense. Wisdom does not refer to all knowledge. Wisdom here is a code term for the Gospel. Gospel in a very specific sense. And that is -- that's what Jesus is. He is God's wisdom. Before we said Jesus is the word of God. What we know about God comes from Jesus. The activity and the action of this word in our lives is God's wisdom. So that we do the things that Jesus did and follow his example. Now, we get to the other phrase, righteousness. I think it would be much better to use the old church phrase justification. Justification in the Lutheran Church is a very familiar term. We say a man is justified by grace through faith. We understand in this sense that we know ourselves to be free of sin because we believe in Jesus Christ as our redeemer. We know that. The just shall live by his faith. That was at the very heart of Luther's Reformation. It's a very existential thing. But this is what concerns me. Am I going to be condemned for my sins? Is there any hope for me? Is there any salvation? And the answer is that we're justified by grace through faith. So it's something that's very internalized. It's personal. It's something which belongs to me. But there's another dimension to it. Justification is not something that merely happens to me. It is something which happens in Christ. Christ was accused of blasphemy. He was accused of being a sinner. And he was put to death. And he was put to death illegally because he had not committed the crimes which the people said he did. His trial was false. Have you been accused falsely? God had no other choice but to raise Jesus from the dead. And by raising Jesus from the dead, he justified Jesus. We have all had the feeling. This happens to everybody, that we have been accused of things which we know are not true and of which we are innocent. That's the way our court system is based. I know our court system says that we are innocent until proven guilty. And the French system is you're guilty when you're accused until you prove your innocence. Even though we say we're innocent before we're proven guilty, I think the French system is really much closer to the way things really are. We have to prove that we are innocent. Jesus was accused. He was accused of being in league with Satan. He was accused of overthrowing the government. He was falsely accused. And God justified him. By raising him from the dead, God declared that this man, Jesus, was holy, pure and innocent. By being raised from the dead, God justified him. We are also justified in Jesus. Because we are in him. Now, the technical term for this in Lutheran theology is objectivities justification. When I believe in Christ, that's subjective justification, the personal internal feeling that I know that my sins are forgiven. I think Lutherans put most of their concentration on that. But we should pay attention to what St. Paul says here. That Jesus Christ is our righteousness, our justification. It is totally complete in him. And when Jesus justified us, he didn't justify us individually. He was the new Adam. He was the one man out of whom God was creating an entirely new humanity for himself. And when he -- God raised Jesus from the dead, he justified him, he declared him righteous. And by that act, he justified all human beings. So God is not snarling at the world. He's quite content with the world. Because in Christ, all people are present. This is also a universal redemption. Paul says that Jesus is our wisdom, our righteousness, our sanification and our redemption. This becomes very important over against the strict Reformed Calvinistic way of thinking. We have mentioned before that classical Reform Calvinistic belief holds in a double predestination. God predestines some to heaven. He predestines some to eternal damn nation. Now, they are going to fudge on that just a little bit. But they will say that God deliberately passes over some people. That's what they say. They deliberately pass over. Part of this particular doctrine is that Christ only redeems those who are elect. Christ does not die for those who are not elect. There is no universal atonement. There is no universal redemption. Redemption means basically in English to buy back. Some people say that some words which are used in the -ology are so antiquated that they have absolutely no meaning at all for the modern man. Well, maybe you would remember -- I don't think you will because you're too young. But back in the 1960s the A and P stores gave out stamps with the food. And you took the stamps to get a prize. And it was called a redemption center. Redemption means to buy back. God has bought us back. But he hasn't just bought us back as individuals. We are all together in the human race and he has bought all of us. Think of what St. Paul says here, "Christ is our wisdom. All knowledge is in him. He is our righteousness. God is content with the world because of what God has done." And this righteousness happened in the resurrection. He is our sanctification. In our own experience, our sanification will never be complete. I guess we're completely holy and completely sinful at the same time. And of course that's the dilemma that we're in. That as soon as we experience complete holiness, we're faced with the reality of who we are. But in Christ, that holiness already belongs to us. And he is our complete redemption. That means all sins have been forgiven for all people. And of course there's -- a kind of tragedy has attached to the preaching of the Gospel. Because in the preaching of the Gospel, the people are offered something which already belongs to them. It's not something which they have to earn. It already belongs to them. And the tragedy of preaching the Gospel is that though some people will believe, other people will reject what really belongs to them because it is in Christ. And that's the burden that we have to bear as preachers. It's a sadness. It's something which we wish we could run away from. We would like to believe otherwise. But that's not the way it is. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***