The Naked Gospel: Truth You May Never Hear in Church (6 page)

S
O WE’RE FREE FROM THE LAW, BUT WHAT ABOUT THINGS SUCH AS
Sabbath observance and tithing? We can’t leave these issues unaddressed, as they will rob believers of their freedom just as any other part of the law does.

Yes, weekly Sabbath observance and tithing are rooted in the law. If we impose these on believers today, we must likewise observe the remainder of the law. The law is an all-or-nothing system. Adopting portions of it is not an option.

For the Jews, the Sabbath was essentially a reminder of the seventh day of creation, in which God rested after his work. Accordingly, God mandated that Israel
remember
the Sabbath day and reserve it for rest.

Today, we too look back on the finished work of creation. We exclaim along with King David how creative and beautiful the universe is (Psalms 8; 19). But a greater feat than creation has been accomplished—the redemptive work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Just as God declared his creation “good” and then rested, Jesus announced from Calvary, “It is finished!” and then sat down at God’s right hand.
The author of Hebrews invites us to rest along with God. We rest by ceasing from the dead works we thought would gain us favor with God. Rather than performing religious acrobatics to rid ourselves of sins, we can sit down with Jesus. We can simply agree, “Yes, it’s finished.” This is entering God’s rest. This is celebrating today’s Sabbath:

There remains, then,
a Sabbath-rest for the people of God
; for those who enter God’s rest also
rest from their own work,
as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest.

H
EBREWS
4:9-11, italics added

It is possible to calculate the height of a tree by measuring its shadow on the ground. If you look at the shadow, it also gives you a sense of the basic shape of the tree. In a shadow, you have a means to make estimations about the reality. In the Sabbath, the Jews had only a shadow of the reality. The reality is Christ, and a genuine Sabbath-rest is found in him. It’s mind-boggling to think about the thousands of years that Jews honored the shadow, the Sabbath. And on this side of the cross we can experience the reality of rest in Christ!

Many who realize their freedom from a weekly Sabbath observance still claim that God requires no less than 10 percent of your income. If you don’t give at least that much to the church, they say you’re “robbing God.” But where does the idea of tithing come from?

Joseph’s brother Levi was the forefather of a unique tribe called the Levites. When the Israelites escaped from Egypt and
conquered the land God promised, they divided the new territory by tribe. But the Levites didn’t receive land to cultivate and grow food. Instead, they were instructed to serve as priests in the tabernacle.

Under the law, priests weren’t permitted to own homes, property, or possessions. So how did this tribe of priests survive? By means of the support received from the other tribes. So tithing, or giving 10 percent, to these priests was mandated by the law. In this way, God’s tribe of priests could maintain an acceptable standard of living while serving him full-time.

Christian teaching today about giving is often inconsistent. If a pastor or church leader uses the term
tithing
and mandates 10 percent as the standard for giving, he is teaching law. If we were to examine this same leader’s life, we might see a glaring inconsistency. He owns a home, property, and possessions! He may also be earning additional income from presiding at weddings, writing books, or serving as a seminary professor. The same law that mandates a 10 percent tithe doesn’t allow him to do what he’s doing.

Besides one historical reference to Abraham’s respect for a foreign priest, Melchizedek, and paying him a tithe from his spoils of war (Hebrews 7:6), there’s no other mention of the term
tithe
in the biblical epistles. So what should giving look like under the New? God wants believers to give

• according to the need (2 Corinthians 8:14)
  
• according to what they have (2 Corinthians 8:11-12)
  
• not out of guilt or compulsion (2 Corinthians 9:7)
  
• cheerfully from the heart (2 Corinthians 9:7)
  

I believe that we church leaders should present liberation from the 10 percent tithe alongside the teaching of freewill giving. Believers are free to give 1 percent, 10 percent, or 100 percent. Clarity concerning grace giving is necessary for a healthy church.

For us to teach anything else is bondage.

Now that we’ve discussed our freedom from a Sabbath day and a 10 percent tithe, an obvious question arises: Well, then, what use is the Old Testament? To begin to address this important question, we should keep in mind the following:

All Scripture
is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that all God’s people may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

2 T
IMOTHY
3:16-17, italics added

I have made the argument that the law has no bearing on the life of the believer. But the Old Testament is a treasure that shouldn’t be disregarded. In the Old Testament, we find out how the universe came into existence. We read of the fall of the human race. We learn why there’s so much evil in the world. We experience the history of God’s interactions with his people. We see his faithfulness despite their faithlessness. We see God’s prophets at work and God’s mercy on display. We learn about what God calls wisdom and how it differs from humans’ sense of the same. We discover early indications of the coming Messiah, and we understand more fully how Jesus fulfilled prophecy.

The Old Testament offers us something we can’t get from the New. It provides a thorough background in how God initiated a relationship with humankind and how we did whatever we could to ruin this relationship. The work of Christ has far greater impact
against the backdrop of how despicably the human race has acted toward God. How gracious our God has been over the course of human history!

We also can’t forget that the promise of the New has its root in the Old. God told Abraham that through his seed (Jesus), Abraham would be the father of many nations. The promise that salvation would come to many nations was given in the Old Testament long before the law.

To disregard the Old Testament is like covering up a huge portion of a portrait God has been painting for thousands of years. But it’s important to read and teach from the Old Testament while keeping it in context.

In the Old Testament, we see God punishing the Israelites for their sins. In the New Testament, we see that God punished Jesus for our sins. In the Old Testament, we see God withdrawing his presence from his people. In the New Testament, we see that he’ll never leave us or forsake us. Even a man after God’s own heart, David, pleaded with God not to withdraw his Holy Spirit. David begged, “Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me” (Psalm 51:11). We don’t find such pleas from the apostles under the New.

Life is radically different on this side of the cross—a truth we must recognize as we study the Old Testament. We read of dietary restrictions, yet we don’t need to live by them. We read of ceremonial regulations, and we needn’t abide by them. We read of requirements such as Sabbath observance and tithing, yet we’re not bound by them. However, these restrictions, regulations, requirements, and commandments give us a fuller appreciation for what Jesus accomplished on our behalf.

T
HE STORY BEGAN IN A GARDEN WHEN A WOMAN TOOK A BITE FROM
a piece of fruit offered by a serpent (Genesis 3:6). How obviously evil her goal was, right? Well, not really. The mistake we make is thinking that Eve was motivated by the desire to do evil. Nothing could be further from the truth. What she really wanted was to
avoid evil
and
do good.
In short, she wanted to do what God does—choose on her own, having the ability to detect evil and maintain goodness.

Adam and Eve didn’t eat from a “tree of evil.” They ate from the tree of the
knowledge
of
good
and evil. Herein we see an important distinction. They weren’t pursuing sin as we normally think of it. They were pursuing a form of godliness. They made an attempt to be like God. The serpent successfully lured them, and the bait was godlikeness. Even today, this is seen as a worthy goal.

But God never intended for humanity to take upon itself the burden of developing and following a code of ethics. The fall in the garden was due to Satan’s cunning as he tempted the first humans to abandon God and choose human effort. Adam and Eve reconsidered their confidence in God’s way and opted for
morality instead. And desiring to fabricate their own system of right and wrong was their fatal mistake.

When we envision their taking a bite of the fruit, we’d like to ask Eve and Adam, “How could you do it? I mean, there was
only one thing
you weren’t supposed to do, and you ruined it for all of us!” But what was their motive really? Although they were openly disobedient, we might say it was for a “right” reason. They wanted to be “right” and do “right.” They wanted to know right from wrong so they could choose right and avoid wrong.

How do we know they weren’t interested in evil? The serpent’s alluring statement was, “When you eat…your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5), and with that they were sunk. They admired God’s goodness and desired to generate and exude that same quality. They had no interest in overtly evil pursuits. Had they ever even seen sinful behavior before?

The original sin was not Adam and Eve’s thumbing their noses at the goodness of God. Instead, it was their wanting to author their own system of right and wrong so they could make
sure
they did right and avoided wrong. Today, we can be deceived by the same offer. We may find ourselves pursuing the knowledge of good instead of listening to our heartfelt yearning for an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.

Through the Eden story, we see our need for real life, not merely a set of instructions on how to live. But our need for life is not communicated through Genesis alone. It’s amazing how certain words in the Scriptures begin to stick out once we’re made aware
of their meaning. Words like
life
and
death
leap off the page as we begin to see that Christianity isn’t intended to meet humanity’s ill-perceived need for religion. The real thing meets our deepest need in restoring to us genuine spiritual life.

While some view Christianity as a behavior improvement program, the Eden story reveals that a desire for behavior improvement was the cause of spiritual death. Lack of moral laws isn’t our problem. A plethora of socially and morally acceptable behavior improvement programs abound across world religions and even in many nonreligious movements. We could benefit from many of them if our primary need was merely a code of ethics to guide life choices.

Radically, the Bible teaches that humanity’s main problem is not what we’re doing. Instead, it’s our
lack of life
as we do it. Paul describes our main problem in these ways:

Just as sin entered the world through one man, and
death through sin,
and in this way
death came to all people,
because all sinned—

R
OMANS
5:12, italics added

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins.

E
PHESIANS
2:1

Imagine encountering a man’s body lying by the side of the road. You decide to pull over to check the man’s condition. As your car comes to a stop, you jump out and run toward him. Reaching down to check his pulse, you realize he has none. He’s dead and
gone, perhaps due to a heart attack. What can you do? Based on his appearance, you deduce that the man may have suffered heart failure due to a lifetime of poor eating habits. Instantly, you leap to your feet, rush to the car, pull out a diet book, and begin screaming important information from its pages as you head back toward him: “Chapter 1: Eating for Health and Heart!”

Stop to examine the absurdity of this situation. No amount of information on eating habits is going to resurrect this man. He’s already dead. The only real solution would be for him to somehow obtain a new lease on life. In the same way, no amount of education will change the heart of a spiritually dead person. Life is the only solution to death:

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature [flesh],
God made you alive
with Christ.

C
OLOSSIANS
2:13, italics added

Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy,
made us alive
with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.

E
PHESIANS
2:4-5, italics added

God knew our real need. And through Christ he met that need by offering us life.
^*
The law or any other system of morality could never offer us this life. Although some may think the law solves their problem, realistically it only brings more awareness of death. As we saw previously, the law isn’t an encourager. Instead, it’s a stern criticizer. The law makes one aware that there’s
a serious problem at our core. Even after our concerted efforts to constrain behavior, the law is always present to condemn in one way or another.

The apostle Paul himself admits that he thought the law was the ultimate in spiritual experience. He was sorely disappointed to end up empty inside: “I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death” (Romans 7:10).

Why did Jesus seem to go out of his way to antagonize the Pharisees and other religious leaders? Why did he anger them throughout his ministry? He healed on the Sabbath, and they hated him for it. He turned over their money tables, and they despised him for it. He called them snakes, when doing so certainly didn’t help the relationship. But he did these things to show the difference between real life and the counterfeit technique of self-focused behavior modification.

What had centuries of life under law produced in Jewish society by the time Jesus arrived on the scene? A Pharisee-led agenda that was worlds apart from Jesus’ goal. While the Pharisees paraded through city streets condemning prostitutes and drunkards for their overtly sinful behavior, Jesus was befriending these same individuals. Jesus was gentle, merciful, and kind to sinners, while the Pharisees were harsh, judgmental, and rude to them.

It appears that the only people who angered Jesus were the religious rulers of his day. Why? Because the law teachers were not being honest with themselves or others.

First, after watering down the potency of the law so as to
concoct a palatable mixture, they painted the illusion of spiritual success under law. Second, they added in their own regulations and beat their chests as they touted themselves as the spiritually elite. Jesus hated hypocrisy, and the law only breeds two things: defeat if you’re honest and hypocrisy if you’re not.

Through his resurrection, Jesus would eventually offer his Jewish contemporaries genuine life. The religious zealots of his day were working against him as they pretended to already possess life.

The source of life himself saw right through their charades.