Bible Difficulties (15 page)

Weren't the Israelites under the old covenant saved through obedience to God
rather than because they looked forward in faith to a coming Savior? What
passages indicate that such faith was necessary for their salvation?

From Genesis to Revelation the Bible makes it clear that no one was ever saved by his own good works but only by faith in the promises of God. Only in Eden was salvation put on the basis of obedience, with the accompanying warning of death for transgression of God's command: "But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die" (Gen. 2:17, NASB). In Genesis 3

this one command was broken by both Eve and Adam in response to Satan's temptation and deceit; and God confirmed their sentence of death by saying, "For you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (Gen. 3:19). From that time on, no human being has ever been saved by obedience--except the race of the redeemed, who are saved by faith in the atonement of Christ, whose deed of obedience paid the price of their salvation.

It is true that in both Testaments great emphasis is laid on obedience. In Exodus 19:5

(NASB) God promised Israel, "Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples." But this by no means suggest an alternative way to heaven apart from faith; on the contrary, this 61

promise was given to a company of believers who had already repented of sin and surrendered their hearts to the Lord in faith. Obedience was to be a necessary evidence or fruit of faith. It is not the apple that makes its parent tree an apple tree; it is the apple tree that makes its fruit an apple. Jesus said, "By their fruit you shall know them" (Matt.

7:16); in other words, grapes come only from vines, not thorn bushes, and figs only from fig trees, not thistles. Obedience is a necessary and natural consequence of faith, but it is never described as a substitute for faith anywhere in Scripture.

It should be noted that from the very beginning Adam and Eve taught their sons the necessity of sacrifice to the Lord for the sins they may have committed; thus Abel presented the acceptable blood sacrifice on his altar--as an act of faith that typically presented in advance the Atonement later to be offered on Calvary. Hebrews 11:4 makes this clear, "By
faith
Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain.... And through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks." Genesis 15:6 records that when Abraham believed God, God reckoned it to him for righteousness. Romans 4:13 tells us that "the promise to Abraham and his descendants that he would be heir of the world was not through the law, but through the righteousness of faith."

As for the generation of Moses, to whom the promise of Exodus 19:5 was given, there could have been no misunderstanding whatever concerning the principle of salvation through faith alone. From the same chapter that contains the Ten Commandments comes the first of several references to sacrificial worship: "You shall make an altar of earth for Me, and you shall sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your oxen" (Exod. 20:24, NASB). The underlying principle of each sacrifice was that the life of the innocent animal victim was substituted for the guilty, forfeited life of the believer. He received the forgiveness of God only through repentance and faith, not through obedience.

Hebrews 10:4, referring to the Old Testament dispensation, declares, "For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins" (NASB). Earlier, in Heb 9:11-12, the Scripture states: "But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands,...and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption" (NASB).

How, then, is the benefit of this blood-bought atonement brought to sinners? It comes only through faith, not through deeds of obedience as works of merit--whether before the Cross or after. Scripture declares, "By grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God" (Eph. 2:8, NASB). But what kind of faith? The counterfeit faith that betrays itself by disobedience to the revealed will of God and by bondage to self and to sin? Certainly not! Salvation comes only through a true and living faith that takes seriously the absolute lordship of Christ and produces the fruit of a godly life--a life of true obedience, based on a genuine surrender of heart, mind, and body (Rom. 12:1).

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It is from this perspective that we are to understand the earnest calls to obedience from the Old Testament prophets: "If you consent and obey, you will eat the best from the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you will be devoured with the sword: (Isa. 1:19-20).

Similar is the requirement laid down by Jesus Himself: "And why do you call Me, `Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I say?" (Luke 6:46, NASB). The apostles concur: "Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts....But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness" (Rom. 6:11-12, 17-18, NASB).

Did Adam really die when he ate of the forbidden fruit?

In Genesis 2:17 God warned Adam, "But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die" (NASB).

Later, in Genesis 3:4, Satan's serpent assured Eve, "Surely you will not die!" When Adam and Eve yielded to temptation and partook of the forbidden fruit, they certainly did not drop dead on that fateful day; but they lived on to face the rebuke of God (3:8-19). Was Satan right? Did God fail to carry out His promise? Certainly not! But the death that overtook the guilty pair that day was spiritual only; physical death did not come until centuries later (Gen. 5:5).

Scripture distinguished three types of death. First, there is
physical
death, which involves separation of the soul form the body. The separated body undergoes chemical dissolution and reverts to the "dust of the ground" (i.e., the elements of which it was composed). The soul (
nepes
) of subhuman creatures apparently ceases to exist (cf. Eccl.

3:21: "Who knows that the breath [
ruah
, used here in the sense of the breath of life metonymic of the nonmaterial personality of the human or subhuman animal] of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth?"). On the day Adam was disobedient, the sentence of physical death was imposed; but by God's grace the execution of that sentence was delayed.

The Old Testament people of God were fully aware that physical death did not entail the annihilation of the person who indwelt the body. Genesis 25:8 states that Abraham after his decease "was gathered to his people"--which implies a continuing consciousness of personal relationship with those who had preceded him in death. Job 19:25-26 quotes the suffering patriarch as saying: "As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will take His stand on the earth. Even after my skin is flayed [lit., `stripped off'], yet in (lit., from) my flesh I shall see God" (cf. 2 Sam. 12:23; Pss. 49:15; 73:24; 84:7; Isa.

25:8; 26:19; Hos. 13:14). Already in Daniel 12:2 we find a reference of the bodily nature of deceased persons as "sleeping" in the dust of the earth, from whence they shall be raised up.

In the New Testament this same resurrection of both the evil and the good is taken up by Christ Himself in John 5:28-29: "Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; those who did the 63

good deeds, to a resurrection of life, those who committed evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment" (NASB). The implication is that all humans after death remain in a state of sleep or suspended animation so far as their bodily nature is concerned. In the New Testament specific references to this state of sleep pertain to believers, at least so far as Paul's Epistles are concerned (1 Cor. 11:30; 15:51; 1 Thess. 4:14; 5:10). But their soul and spirit, which prior to the resurrection of Christ waited in that portion of hades referred to by Christ as "Abraham's bosom" (Luke 16:22), go to be with Christ immediately upon death (Phil. 1:23).

The second type of death taught in Scripture is
spiritual
death. It is this aspect of death that overtook our first parents immediately upon their act of sin. Alienation toward God was shown by their vain attempt to hide from Him when He came to have fellowship with them in the cool of the evening (Gen. 3:8). It was apparent from their attitude of guilty fear toward Him (3:10), in the curse of expulsion from the Garden of Eden (where they had enjoyed intimate and cordial fellowship with Him), in the curse of toil and pain both in the eking out of a living from the soil and in the process of childbirth, and in the eventual death of the body and its reversion to the soil from which it was made (3:16-19, 23-24). From that moment on, Adam and Eve fell into a state of spiritual death, separated from the living God through their violation of His covenant. As Ephesians 2:1-3

expresses it, they became "dead in trespasses and sins," walking according to the course of Satan and this present evil world, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and the mind. as children of disobedience and wrath.

Not only did Adam and Eve become guilty before God and thereby fall into a state of unrighteousness, but they also incurred that defilement and pollution that characterize the unholy life of the fallen
sarx
("fleshly nature") that is basically alienated toward God and in a state of enmity toward Him (Rom. 8:5-8). Hence the mind-set (
phronema
) of the
sarx
is death (v.6 and those who abide in this state are incapable of pleasing God (v.8 Hence they are alienated from the life of God, being completely helpless to save themselves or to earn any merit or favor in the eyes of God. They are utterly lost from the time they first begin their earthly life (Ps. 51:5), for they are born as "children of wrath" (Eph. 2:3).

Such was the condition of Adam and Eve as soon as they committed their first transgression. They were plunged immediately into a state of spiritual death, from which they had no prospect of recovery, despite the most strenuous efforts to lead a better life.

Yet the biblical account goes on to tell of God's forgiveness and remedial grace. To that guilty pair He gave the promise (Gen. 3:15) that one of Eve's descendants would someday crush the head of the satanic serpent, at the cost of personal suffering (suggestive of His death on the Cross).

Instead of immediately inflicting the penalty of physical death on them, God gave Adam and Eve a set of guidelines for their life subsequent to their expulsion from Eden--which surely implied that their execution was to be delayed for some gracious purpose, even though they had forfeited the communion they had formerly enjoyed with God. God also provided them with animal pelts to cover up their nakedness and to protect them from the cold and the rigors of the outside world. But to furnish them with such pelts, it was 64

necessary to take the lives of the animals whose fur they were to wear. It may have been in this connection that God taught Adam and Eve about blood sacrifice on the altar, as a means of their laying hold in advance of the atoning merit of the Cross--that vicarious, substitutionary death that the messianic "seed of the woman" was someday to offer up on the hill of Golgotha. As they responded in repentance and faith (bestowed on them by the Holy Spirit), they were rescued from their state of death and brought into a state of grace.

This faith is deduced from the sacrificial practice of their son Abel, who presented the firstlings of his flock as a blood sacrifice on his altar in his worship of God. Blood sacrifice presupposes a concept of substitution, whereby the innocent dies in place of the guilty.

The third type of death referred to in Scripture is
eternal
death, that final, complete, and irremediable state of eternal separation from God, who is the only true source of life and joy. This death is referred to in Revelation 20:14 as the "second death." This is characterized by unending and unrelieved pangs of conscience and anguish of soul, corresponding to the ever-ascending smoke of the torment of the damned (Rev. 14:11).

This is said to be the final state of Satan, the Beast (or the self-deifying world dictator of the last days), and his religious collaborator, the False Prophet (Rev. 20:10). All three are to be cast into the "lake of fire and brimstone," there to be tormented "day and night forever and ever." Revelation 21:8 reveals that every type of unrepentant, unforgiven sinner (the cowardly, the unbelieving or untrustworthy, the murderers, the sexually immoral, the sorcerers and idolaters, and all liars) will likewise be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, which is the second death. This, then, is the ultimate destiny of those who willfully abide in a state of spiritual death until they experience their physical death.

"He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God" (John 3:18, NASB). "He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey [or believe] the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him" (John 3:36).

In the Garden of Eden, the serpent told Eve that if she and Adam ate of the
forbidden fruit, they would be "as gods" (Gen. 3:5 KJV). Then in Genesis 3:22 God
says, "Behold, the man has become like one of us" (NASB). Does "gods" and "us"

imply the existence of more than one God?

Not at all. The usual Hebrew term for "God" is
'elohim
, which is the plural of
'eloah
. It is occasionally used as a true plural, referring to the imaginary gods of the heathen. But usually it refers to the one true God, and the plural ending is known to Hebrew grammarians as the "plural of majesty." Like
'adonim
("lords" or "Lord") and
beàlim
(plural of
baàl
, "lord," "master," "owner," "husband"),
'elohim
also may be used to give a heightened impressiveness of majesty to God. As such, this plural is modified by adjectives in the singular and takes a singular verb.