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March 14 - March 23, 2023
The righteousness of God is 1. something that the people of God (“we”) become in the Messiah; 2. nearly always associated with pistis—whether with the Messiah’s allegiance to God or our allegiance to Jesus as the Messiah, or both;
3. tightly linked with atonement and exchange; 4. associated with God’s judgment—both his wrathful judgment of sin and his saving judgment unto new resurrection life; 5. frequently connected with union or participation with the Messiah; 6. attested in the Old Testament but cannot be obtained through performing the commandments of Moses either on the individual or corporate level; 7. revealed in the gospel but was not available prior to the Christ event.
we might think of declared allegiance and initial receipt of the Holy Spirit as the first moment of grafting into Jesus the king (creating the union), and enacted loyalty as ensuring the continual flow of benefits (that which maintains the union).
In-the-Messiah or incorporated righteousness can be defined as the saving perfect righteousness of Jesus the Christ that is counted entirely ours when we join the Spirit-filled body that is already united to the righteous one, Christ the kingly head.
If you can affirm the truthfulness of the eight stages that comprise the gospel, then you can heft the shield, and the first component of saving allegiance is in place.
It is this edge that holds the entire shield together, and fittingly so, for the confession of loyalty is the formal gateway to salvation—but it is inseparable from the whole shield of allegiance.1
The metallic front of your shield is decorated with a marvelous engraving. It is a picture of your own image—wait!—it is a picture of Jesus the Christ. Stunningly, somehow the front of the shield is liquid metal, a moving picture—a picture of your own image in the process of being transformed into the superimposed image of Jesus the resurrected king. It a picture of your own current life story in process. You, through embodied fidelity to Jesus, are increasingly taking on his character qualities and participating in his proper stewardship over creation. You are becoming conformed to his image.
Each surface of the shield is necessary for a saving allegiance—mental affirmation of the truthfulness of the gospel, declaration of fealty to Jesus as the sovereign ruler, and embodied loyalty to Jesus as the king.
Jesus is seated at the right hand of God as Lord.
this element shows that saving pistis is not primarily faith in forgiveness of sins or trust in God’s promise to make us righteous (although it involves those things too), but is above all allegiance to Jesus as the Christ, the one who shares in God’s very throne.
We must stop asking others to invite Jesus into their hearts and start asking them to swear allegiance to Jesus the king.
all the other elements that make up the gospel refer to past or future events in Jesus’s career, whereas the kingdom of God has been launched and Jesus is presently ruling the entire cosmos.
The present-tense moment of choice in a gospel invitation should always be understood to be a response to the present-tense reality of Jesus’s kingly rule.
the true gospel is not reducible to Christian activities.
the full gospel keeps the focus squarely on Jesus rather than on the self, compelling the self to be swept up into the saving story of Jesus, rather than allowing the self to remain at the center.
a better gospel presentation will emphasize that allegiance (pistis), once rendered, must persevere through God’s assistance for it to result in final salvation.
Since at the final judgment we will be assessed for eternal life at least in part on the basis of our works, a better gospel invitation will not polemicize in an unqualified fashion about “faith, not works,” but will leave room for good works (not good works produced on our own through rule-keeping, but good works embodied in allegiant union with Jesus) in our final justification. For such good works are indicative of enacted and maintained pistis.
better gospel invitation will not allow the definitive decision to give allegiance to Jesus as king to remain a private matter.
The saving purview of the gospel is wider than mere “sin management.” Salvation involves total transformation into Christlikeness through an obedient discipleship.
when we discover that saving “faith” means above all allegiance to Jesus the king, the intimacy between discipleship and salvation is easy to recognize.
a person is first saved when she or he becomes a disciple by declaring allegiance to Jesus the king—that is, when a person agrees to submit obediently to Jesus’s wise and sovereign rule so as to take up his way of life.
to be allegiant to Jesus means “becoming the gospel” for the sake of others, to live out the pattern established by the Christ’s career and so to be joined fully to his life.
Evangelism programs are only accurate and compelling when they are not merely an invitation to forgiveness but an invitation to full-orbed discipleship. Programs for discipleship are only accurate and compelling when discipleship is understood to be absolutely required for the allegiant outworking of salvation.
The Apostles’ Creed needs to be mobilized so that it functions like a flag pledge—to become the Christian pledge of allegiance for the universal church.
The Apostles’ Creed is not merely a convenient summary of Christian beliefs. It is a concise presentation of the allegiance-demanding gospel.
