Paul's Big But and the Life of Faith

Tamed Cynic is a reader-supported publication. If you appreciate the work, consider a paid subscriber!

From the cutting room floor…

Here’s a move in Sunday’s sermon that got cut for time. Paul’s big but in Romans 3.21 is not only rhetorically powerful and theologically crucial, it is essential to the life of faith.

When the little voice inside your head rears his forked tongue and suggests that you are not really a Christian— indeed that you have never been a Christian— because of what is still in your heart, or because of what you are still doing, or because of something you once did, or because of the doubts you yet harbor in your mind— when the devil comes and thus accuses you, what do you say in response?

Do you agree with what your conscience’s attacks?

Or do you cling to this little word and reply, “Yes, that may be true, but now…”

Do you hold up these words against him? Or when, perhaps, you feel condemned as you read the scriptures, especially God’s first word— the law, and as you feel that you are undone, do you remain lying on the ground in hopelessness, or do you lift up your head and say, “But now?”

This is the essence of the life of faith.

This is how faith answers the accusations of the law, the accusations of the conscience, the accusations of the Enemy, and everything else that would condemn and depress us.

“But now!”

Faith is a kind of protest.

All things seems to be against us. Very well, are you a person of faith or not? That is the vital question and your answer to it proclaims what you are. Having listened to all that can be said against you, and in the most grievous circumstances, do you then say, “But now?” That is part of the fight of faith. Do not imagine that as a Christian you are going to be immune to the assaults of Satan to attacks of doubt. They will certainly come. But the whole secret of faith is the ability to stand up with these words against it all.

Faith means perpetual unbelief kept quiet, like the snake beneath Michael’s foot.

The snake wriggles and tries to get at the angel to bite him; but as long as Michael keeps his pressure firm upon the neck of the snake it cannot harm him. On top of all the wriggling of doubt and unbelief and denial, and all these accusations, faith keeps its foot firmly down and say, “But now!”

“But now, without the law’s involvement, God’s righteousness has been made plain, although it is confirmed by the law and the prophets, that is, God’s righteousness through Jesus Christ-faith for all who believe (for there is no distinction, since all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God, yet all are rectified freely through God’s grace through the liberation from slavery that comes about in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as the very cover of the ark of the covenant.

God did this through God’s own faithfulness, by means of Jesus’ bloody death, as a demonstration of God’s righteousness because of the incapacity resulting from previous sins and through God’s forbearance, as a demonstration of God’s righteousness at the present time so that God might be right and might make right the one who is part of this Jesus-faith.”

*paraphrase of Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app