*How Jesus Reacts to Sin

The episode in John 8 of the women caught in adultery offers a stark contrast between the scribes and Pharisees and Jesus Christ in terms of their reactions to sin. The gospels contain several examples of Jesus having to deal with a sinner—a harlot, a tax collector, even whole crowds who only wanted to get something for themselves from Him. Jesus, however, almost always treats such sinners the same way, unlike the scribes and Pharisees. We know the story:

Now early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people came to Him; and He sat down and taught them. Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, they said to Him, "Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say?" (John 8:2-5)

We can imagine that, despite the early hour, quite a crowd had already gathered there in the Temple precincts, and this is precisely what the Pharisees wanted, an audience to witness what was about to take place. The Pharisees had probably been watching the woman for quite some time, planning to use her to discredit Jesus before the multitudes. When she stole away to her tryst with the unmentioned man, they were ready. Barging into the room, the Pharisee's drag her out—leaving the man—and haul her to the Temple to display before Jesus.

Then they ask a leading question, testing Him, as verse 6 plainly states, to frame Him when He spoke against God's law. It was a "gotcha" situation. They knew that He "consorted" with sinners, and having questioned Him or criticized Him about it at other times (Mark 2:16; Luke 7:34, 37-39; 15:1-2; etc.), they expected to use His compassion for them against Him.

Jesus, though, does not react as they planned: "But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear" (John 8:6). He ignores them and their question, treating the latter with the disdain it deserves. What He wrote on the ground matters little. His action says that their silly attempt to entrap Him is hardly worth His notice, that He is not going to jump at their bidding, that He would not be baited into error. They were, in effect, playing "the accuser of our brethren," one of Satan's roles (Revelation 12:10), and we can imagine that this is often Christ's reaction to him when he accuses one of the saints.

The Pharisees, not liking or accustomed to being ignored and disdained, nag him for an answer. After letting them stew for a while, He answers in a way that totally disarms them of their "righteous" indignation: "He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first" (John 8:7). Their consciences' pricked, the Pharisees from oldest to youngest, slip away, melting into the crowd, overcome once again by the Teacher from Galilee.

Yet, Jesus' reaction to the situation is not finished. What He does next is even more astounding:

When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, "Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?" She said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said to her, "Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more."

Consider that she is an obviously sinful woman; she had a reputation as a loose woman. The Pharisees had caught her in the act of adultery, and that was probably only one of many sins. We would likely not be wrong in calling her a wicked woman.

In every way opposite to her is Jesus Christ, sinless and perfect. The Pharisees, themselves sinful, attempted to force Him, a Man of unimpeachable character, to condemn a sinner—to them, a foregone conclusion. However, Jesus' approach to the situation is poles apart; His reaction and attitude throughout this vignette is completely contrary to that of the Pharisees.

To them, reading the Old Testament law concerning the punishment for adultery (Leviticus 20:10-11; Deuteronomy 22:22), this was an open-and-shut case: The woman had been caught in the act, they had two or three witnesses, the law was clear, so there should be a stoning! This appears to be unequivocal. The law does indeed proscribe the death sentence by stoning. What more proof does Jesus need?

Despite everything weighing against the woman, Jesus approaches the matter differently. He clearly understands that the woman had sinned. He realizes there were witnesses to that effect. He knows the law and the penalty, but He does not leap to a verdict of condemnation.

Recall that, for some time, He does nothing but write on the ground. He lets the matter simmer. While the carnal Pharisees agitate for answers and demand action, Jesus patiently waits. God works with us in the same way. We can become infuriated when God fails to answer us immediately after we say, "Amen," but giving us time for things to work out is a consistent pattern with Him. We can be certain that He does this when we are accused before Him, even when we are guilty as charged, as the remainder of the passage in John 8 shows.

Because we are so familiar with the character of Jesus, we do appreciate how shocking His statement in John 8:11 is: "Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more." One would expect a righteous God to say, "This is the law. This is your infraction, so this is your punishment." But we understand that God is love and that He is gracious and merciful, so when He does not say, "I condemn you to be stoned," we tend to pass over it without thinking.

However, first-century Jews would have been astounded to hear such a thing! They may have been the most judgmental people who have ever lived on the face of the earth. One little infraction of the law was enough to condemn a person. Excommunication was so common a practice that people stood in great fear of the Pharisees (see John 9:22). What Jesus says was a radical concept, one that contradicted everything they had been taught.

Moreover, Jesus had every right—as God in the flesh, to whom the Father had committed all judgment (John 5:22)—to condemn her to death, but He shows mercy. He does not react in anger to reinforce how bad her sin was. He does not even preach at her. He simply commands her not to sin like this anymore, and He lets her go to work it out for herself.

However, He does not pass up an opportunity to teach the crowd: "Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, "I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life" (John 8:12). He teaches that He, being that Light, has given us an example to follow in situations like this. A sinner condemned to die produces nothing. Only with further life and light will he or she have the chance to repent and grow in character.

That is how God works with us, and are we not happy that He reacts to our sins with patience and mercy? So we should forbear with our brethren (Colossians 3:12-13).

Forty Days and Forty Nights

I heartily recommend The King's English blog as an excellent commentary on the various phrases from the King James Bible (also known as the Authorized Version) that have become part of our cultural vocabulary over the last 400 years (although I do not agree with some of the theology). I found this one on the phrase "forty days and forty nights" especially intriguing due to the author's highlighting of the outcomes of these periods of testing and trial. Here is the main point from the blog entry:

There are seven prominent periods of 40 days in the Bible.
The first “40 days” was the time of the flood-waters that fell in judgement on the earth. (Genesis 7:4)
Moses fasted 40 days on the mountaintop before entering God’s presence.
Israel sent 12 men to spy out the land of Canaan. They spent 40 days doing reconnaissance of the promised land.
Goliath taunted Israel for 40 days before David stepped forward to bring victory.
Jonah came to Nineveh with a message – in 40 days the city would be destroyed. But, because they repented, God visited not with judgement but with salvation.
For 40 days Jesus entered the desert (a place of trials and temptations) and emerged victorious.
Finally, there were 40 days between Jesus’ resurrection and the time of His ascension to heaven. It was a time when He proved Himself to His followers, showing them tokens of the resurrection life He promises to all.
40 days seems to be a time of testing and transition. For those who pass the test there is a new world to enjoy:

A world washed clean.

Face to face with the LORD.

A land of milk and honey.

Victory over the enemy.

Salvation.

The defeat of the devil.

The new creation.

This just shows that we should not despair if we find ourselves in a long spate of trouble, particularly if we come to realize that it is from God (and not necessarily something we have brought on ourselves by stupidity or rebellion). There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and the world we will see when we finally come out into the sunshine again will be one of great reward. So do not despair! A trial is not forever, and if we pass it in good order, we will really enjoy the result!

Evil Is Real (Part Five)

Luke 4 contains Satan's temptation of Christ, and it is instructive to see what Jesus did in the face of evil:

Then Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan [where He had just been baptized] and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being tempted for forty days by the devil. And in those days He ate nothing, and afterward, when they had ended, He was hungry. And the devil said to Him, "If You are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread." (Luke 4:1-3)

Just prior to this, Jesus had been highly complimented by the Father: "You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased" (Luke 3:22). Jesus, then, must have been feeling confident, for the voice booming such praise out of heaven was a massive pat on the back. Then, Luke 4:1 relates that He was filled with the Holy Spirit; the power, the strength, of God was pumping through Him. It was at just this point—before He commenced His ministry—that Satan pounced.

We should not think that Satan tempted our Savior with merely three or four temptations, as recorded in this chapter, as well as in Matthew 4. The text says that He was "tempted for forty days"—meaning that He was under constant attack for the full forty days, every day! This was an intense, prolonged test and more personal and powerful than we have ever experienced. The terrible evil that He faced in the wilderness would likely have crushed us.

The passage implies that Satan left the worst temptation to the very end, when Jesus was seemingly at His weakest point. He had not eaten food or drunk water for forty days. But was He passive all that time? Did our Savior just sit or lie on the sand for those nearly six weeks, allowing the Devil's temptations to batter Him like one sandstorm after the next? Luke does not present Him like that. Jesus did not fast because He had nothing to eat in a barren land. Remember, He is the One who inspired the instructions about fasting in Isaiah 58, so He clearly knew the spiritual strength that fasting provides. At the end of the forty days, He may have been weak as a kitten physically, but spiritually, He was the powerful Son of God.

Perhaps the temptations were not just storm after storm, but were like an ever-strengthening tempest that culminated in a hurricane. What did Jesus do? Each successive onslaught was harder to resist. How did He face it? Jesus bent all His will and strength on overcoming each temptation as it broke on Him. He pulled out every spiritual weapon to defeat each one.

Luke does not say that He pulled out His scroll of Deuteronomy and began instructing Satan on the finer points of God's way of life. Jesus already had them deeply embedded in His mind. He was prepared—by long years of study and deep meditation on what He learned—to face Satan's attacks. We also know that, not only was He fasting when out in the wilderness, but as His everyday practice, He prayed regularly, almost constantly.

Here are four tools that we also must use to rid evil from our lives: 1) Bible study, 2) meditation, 3) fasting, and 4) prayer. When Satan hit Him with temptation, Jesus did not need to do some emergency Bible study. Not only was He the Word of God in the flesh, but He also knew Scripture by heart. When Satan sent a temptation, Jesus quoted an opposing scripture verbatim. The right words—words that He had inspired as God of the Old Testament—came immediately to mind, and He hurled them at Satan like a razor-sharp weapon (Ephesians 6:17).

Christ never treated evil as if it did not exist. In addition, He knew the weakness of His own flesh. He is the only person who has ever totally resisted the pulls of the flesh, though He suffered them just as we do (Hebrews 2:14, 18; 4:15). However, He was strong in the Spirit of God and able to resist them. We see in this vignette from His life that, even so, it was no easy task for Him. We know that it is certainly not easy for us, but if we want to be like Him, we have to approach it just as He did.

The apostle Peter, who witnessed the life of Christ firsthand, had a certain approach to life in which events like this made a great impression on him. Thus his epistles, both I and II Peter, are full of advice on how to be diligent to overcome and grow. In the three middle chapters of I Peter, he tells us how we are to resist evil, how we are to do good, how we are not to be as the rest of the world is. Perhaps these things were tough for him to do too, which is why they made such an impression on him and thus is why he passed these instructions along. It is a good thing that he did! God inspired it to be included in His Word because we need the admonition.

Notice I Peter 2:19-24, where Peter is speaking about submitting to masters:

For this is commendable, if because of conscience toward God one endures grief, suffering wrongfully. For what credit is it if, when you are beaten for your faults, you take it patiently? But when you do good and suffer, if you take it patiently, this is commendable before God. For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps: "Who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in His mouth," who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously; who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed.

What does he say that we are called to? Suffering! One could say we are called to be hit over the head for doing good. In reality, God's way is so antithetical to the way of Satan and of this world, that it is only natural that doers of good will suffer rather than be rewarded for their good works. Of this, Jesus Christ was the most extreme example—and not just on the last day of His life! He suffered every day He drew breath. Satan never stopped tempting Him for long, and His flesh never stopped trying to pull Him towards evil.

Peter says that Jesus overcame these things by committing Himself to the One who really knows what is in our characters, what our hearts are really like. In that commitment was great faith that the Father, knowing Him intimately, would guard Him and help Him to the very end—that considering Him as the apple of His eye, God would be with Him even through the grave.

Note, too, Christ's reaction to the evil that was done to Him: He did nothing like it in return. He did not return evil for evil; out of Him came no defiling sin. What did He do? He did self-sacrificial acts of goodness toward His revilers and persecutors—and not only for them, but as Peter goes on to say, He also did it for us, His brethren. Throughout His life, He consciously performed self-sacrificial acts of goodness for others. As Peter says in Acts 10:38, Jesus "went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil."

There is our pattern to follow! He did not allow evil to get Him down or to change His course—He just kept on doing good. That is how He fought it: He faced it down with the Word of God, committed Himself to His Father's will, and repaid evil with good. His method will work for us too.

A Bridge Too Frail

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In the murky waters of the Mississippi River, as it flows through Minneapolis, Minnesota, divers are still searching through the rubble for the bodies of the missing and presumed dead as a result of the I-35W bridge collapse on Wednesday evening. The forty-year-old bridge, part of an eight-lane interstate freeway running through the heart of the city, carried 141,000 vehicles a day. When the central section collapsed during rush hour, the whole concrete and steel structure—plus dozens of idling vehicles—plunged about sixty feet into the river. Adjacent bridge sections immediately crumpled onto both riverbanks.

As might be expected, early reports cast far afield to ascertain the cause of the collapse. The federal Homeland Security Department ruled out terrorism almost immediately, focusing attention on the bridge itself, which had been under repair for resurfacing when disaster struck. Soon, it was reported that the bridge was unusual for one of its length in that it had no supports under its central span, it having been determined by early planners that piers would obstruct river traffic. While the design worked successfully for four decades, it was ultimately flawed.

In the nearly two days since, heavy attention has been given to the fact that the National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that the bridge, Minnesota's busiest, had been given the "structurally deficient" rating in 1990. While this does not suggest that it was on the verge of immediate collapse, it does mean that serious, potential safety issues needed to be analyzed and addressed. When cracks and corrosion in the steel understructure were found in the years following, inspections were moved up in 1993 to be done on a yearly basis rather than every two years, and since that time, inspectors have suggested various repairs and reinforcement strategies. Yet, rather than add steel plates to buttress the cracked areas, the state chose only to make a thorough inspection. The bridge was not a candidate for replacement until 2020.

In a Friday, August 3, 2007, article, "First Alarm About Bridge Raised in 1990," the Associated Press reports, "More than 70,000 bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient like the I-35W bridge, and engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion." As in the case of the I-35W bridge, the deteriorating condition of the nation's bridges has been an open secret for a few decades, but few states are eager to tackle the problem because of the huge cost of rebuilding. While most of these bridges still have some life expectancy, how many of them are just a major vibration or a slightly increased traffic load away from collapse? Such a thing is impossible to know. State inspectors all across this country are scrambling to inspect every "structurally deficient" bridge in their jurisdictions—just in case.

This tragedy—which, by all accounts, could have been far more deadly—points out just how important the underlying structure is to an edifice. We usually see only the façade of a building, an arena, a tunnel, or a bridge, and rarely do we even think about things like footings, pilings, rebar, beams, girders, ties, welds, bolts, rivets, and such. Yet, a crack or two, corrosion, inferior materials, shoddy construction, slippage, settling, or erosion, and despite how massive a thing might seem, it can all fall down in the blink of an eye.

God, through the apostle Paul, calls on Christians, not only to inspect their spiritual condition on a regular basis, but also to run tests on how well they are performing: "Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves" (II Corinthians 13:5). Among other things, his point is that we should go farther in our self-inspection than merely looking at ourselves. We can, and should, do this frequently, of course, but we can do it in a slapdash or self-justifying way—and we come out of it smelling like the proverbial rose every time! Paul wants us to go deeper than examining the façade; he commands us to determine if we actually function according to what we profess to believe.

In a practical sense, this means that our self-evaluation is not a snapshot of our spirituality at a given moment, but to continue the metaphor, a reel or two of our activity over a given period. It is as if we were watching a movie, "This Is Your Life!" and it is our job to rate how well we applied the teachings of Jesus Christ and the apostles and prophets as our daily walk was documented on film. Alternatively, think of it as a spiritual reality show. Would the Judge boot us from "Who Is a Real Christian?" or would we survive to the next episode? Do we have what it takes to win the fabulous prize in the finale?

Obviously, if we fail the self-evaluation, God gives us time to make repairs and return to service. But it is certain that no true Christian ever wants to be found "structurally deficient." The apostle Peter gives us a formula to avoid such an evaluation:

But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For he who lacks these things is shortsighted, even to blindness, and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins. Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure, for if you do these things you will never stumble; for so an entrance will be supplied to you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (II Peter 1:5-11)

A regular schedule of inspection, maintenance, testing, and repair is just what we need to avoid spiritual collapse.