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January 8 - February 2, 2021
If the Father calls us, we will come to Christ.
Yet we are not robots. While the Father is clearly the sovereign overseer of our redemption, we are not dragged kicking and screaming into Christ against our will. Divine grace is so radical that it reaches down and turns around our very desires. Our eyes are opened. Christ becomes beautiful. We come to him.
The text literally reads, “the one coming to me I will not—not—cast out.” Sometimes, as here, Greek uses two negatives piled on top of each other for literary forcefulness. “I will most certainly never, ever cast out.”
Every human friend has a limit. If we offend enough, if a relationship gets damaged enough, if we betray enough times, we are cast out. The walls go up. With Christ, our sins and weaknesses are the very resumé items that qualify us to approach him. Nothing but coming to him is required—first at conversion and a thousand times thereafter until we are with him upon death.
Christ. As pain piles up, as numbness takes over, as the months go by, at some point the conclusion seems obvious:
we have been cast out.
But a two-year-old’s grip is not very strong. Before long it is not he holding on to me but me holding on to him. Left to his own strength he will certainly slip out of my hand. But if I have determined that he will not fall out of my grasp, he is secure. He can’t get away from me if he tried. So with Christ. We cling to him, to be sure. But our grip is that of a two-year-old amid the stormy waves of
life. His sure grasp never falters. Psalm 63:8 expresses the double-sided truth: “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.”
Christ takes part with you, and is so far from being provoked against you, as all his anger is turned upon your sin to ruin it; yes, his pity is increased the more towards you, even as the heart of a father is to a child that has some loathsome disease, or as one is to a member of his body that has leprosy, he hates not the member, for it is his flesh, but the disease, and that provokes him to pity the part affected the more.
He hates sin. But he loves you. We understand this, says Goodwin, when we consider the hatred a father has against a terrible disease afflicting his child—the father hates the disease while loving the child. Indeed, at some level the presence of the disease draws out his heart to his child all the more.
Just as we so easily live with a diminished view of the punitive judgment of God that will sweep over those out of Christ, so we easily live with a diminished view of the compassionate heart of God sweeping over those in Christ.
For many of us, our functional Jesus isn’t really doing anything now; everything we need to be saved, we tend to think, is already accomplished.
It is the most counterintuitive aspect of Christianity, that we are declared right with God not once we begin to get our act together but once we collapse into honest acknowledgment that we never will.
But what is he doing now? We don’t have to speculate. The Bible tells us. He is interceding for us.
Justification is tied to what Christ did in the past. Intercession is what he is doing in the present.
What is intercession? In general terms it means that a third party comes between two others and makes a case to one on behalf of the other.
intercession applies what the atonement accomplished.
The atonement accomplished our salvation; intercession is the moment-by-moment application of that atoning work.
This is why the New Testament weds justification and intercession, such as in Romans 8:33–34: “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.”
Intercession is the constant hitting “refresh” of our justification in the court of heaven.
John Bunyan wrote a whole book on Christ’s heavenly intercession called Christ a Complete Savior.
God “justifies us, not either by giving laws unto us, or by becoming our example, or by our following of him in any sense, but by his blood shed for us. He justifies by bestowing upon us, not by expecting from us.”1
Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.
The phrase “to the uttermost” is one Greek word (panteles). It’s a word denoting comprehensiveness, completeness, exhaustive wholeness.
We are to-the-uttermost sinners. We need a to-the-uttermost Savior.
One way to think of Christ’s intercession, then, is simply this: Jesus is praying for you right now.
“It is a consoling thought,” wrote theologian Louis Berkhof, “that Christ is praying for us, even when we are negligent in our prayer life.”
If you are in Christ, you have an intercessor, a present-day mediator, one who is happily celebrating with his Father the abundant reason for both to embrace you into their deepest heart.
he also wrote one on 1 John 2:1, the key text for Christ’s heavenly advocacy, which reads: My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
We need not only exhortation but liberation.
The difficulty is reflected in the diversity of translations, including “Helper” (ESV, NKJV, GNB, NASB), “Advocate” (NIV, NET), “Counselor” (CSB, RSV), “Comforter” (KJV), and “Companion” (CEB).
Intercession is something Christ is always doing, while advocacy is something he does as occasion calls for it.
Apparently he intercedes for us given our general sinfulness, but he advocates for us in the case of specific sins.
able to make a better defense for us than we ever could?
No blame shifting or excuses, the way our self-advocacies tend to operate, but perfectly just, pointing to his all-sufficient sacrifice and sufferings on the cross in our place?
Look again at what Edwards says: “There is no love so great and so wonderful as that which is in the heart of Christ.” Human beings are created with a built-in pull toward beauty. We are arrested by it. Edwards understood this deeply and saw that this magnetic pull toward beauty also occurs in spiritual things—in fact, Edwards would say that it is spiritual beauty of which every other
beauty is a shadow or echo.
Throughout his ministry Edwards sought to woo people with the beauty of Christ, and that is all he is doing with the kid...
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We are drawn to God by the beauty of the heart of Jesus.
when we come to Christ, we are startled by the beauty of his welcoming heart.
Perhaps beauty is not a category that comes naturally to mind when we think about Christ.
Maybe we think of God and Christ in terms of truth,
the heart of God, proven in Christ, the friend of sinners.
Dad made that heart beautiful to me.
But his humanity, once taken on, will never end.
Our emotions are diseased by the fall, of course, just as every part of fallen humanity is affected by the fall. But emotions are not themselves a result of the fall. Jesus experienced the full range of emotions that we do
Warfield did not mean what we often mean by the word emotional—imbalanced, reactionary, driven by our feelings in an unhealthy way.
What then do we see in the Gospels of the emotional life of Jesus? What does a godly emotional life look like? It is an inner life of perfect balance, proportion, and control, on the one hand; but also of extensive depth of feeling, on the other hand.
“compassion.” In point of fact, this is the emotion which is most frequently attributed to him.3
felt the inner turmoils and roiling emotions of pity toward the unfortunate. When the blind and the lame and the afflicted appealed to Jesus, “his heart responded with a profound feeling of pity for them. His compassion fulfilled itself in the outward act;
