The Author(ity) of Christ.

Robert Jacobs

And when he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came up to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” – Matthew 21:23 (ESV)

Throughout the gospels, the Pharisees seem to be asking questions that—not through their own planning—reveal deep truths about the Kingdom of God.  In fact, I wrote a devotional titled “Questioning Questions” back in July that examined the very nature of questioning Jesus (You can check that devotional out here - http://livehopedevos.blogspot.com/2017/07/questioning-questions.html). However, due to the way that the above verse has been translated into English over the past six-hundred years, I felt that this particular question deserved more scrutiny.

In the English tradition of scriptural interpretation, the above passage has almost always been translated so that the Pharisees question the “authority” of Christ. Of all the translations I checked during my research—a set of texts published between 1382 AD to 2017 AD—all but two translated Matthew 21:23 in this way. For instance, the 1526 William Tyndale New Testament translates the verse, “And when he was come into the teple the chefe prestes and the elders of the people came vnto him as he was teachinge and sayde: by what auctorite doest thou these thinges? and who gave the this power?”

But why does it matter that the Pharisees question Jesus’ “authority?”

The English word authority has a fascinating and complex history. As the Oxford English Dictionary shows, the word “authority” that we use today comes from the root concept of “author.” While we use the term author to primarily speak about someone who writes a written text, this has not always been the case for English speakers. Up until recently, the word author and author(ity)—I insert the parentheses so you can more clearly see the root—carried with it a meaning more closely related to maker. Thus, the one who had author(ity) is “he who authorizes or instigates,” “a creator or father.”[1]

When past English translators of the scriptures chose to render this passage as the Pharisees questioning the author(ity) of Jesus—a translation practice still active today—they also reinforced a strong truth about Jesus, namely that He has author(ity) over our lives. In John 1, the Son is named “the word;” “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” Jesus is the great author of the universe and everything in it. He is the conduit through which everything came into existence from nothing (ex nihilo). But past this gigantic truth, Christ is also the author who recreates our hearts anew. As Paul passionately emphasizes to the church in Corinth, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (1 Corinthians 5:17).

Despite the fact that Christians have highlighted the author(ity) of Christ for years, we must ask ourselves if we actually believe this core truth of the gospel.  Do we believe that Jesus can re-author our lives, that he can truly create us into something new, or are we content to wallow in our brokenness like a pig in filth? I think many times we are content with believing that Christ only has the power to redeem a portion of our brokenness. But we must recognize this falsehood for what it is: a lie from the pit of hell. The author of Hebrews exhorts us with the knowledge that “[Christ] is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for [us]” (7:25).

Believe today that you can be changed. Believe that Christ has total author(ity) over your life. Believe that you have an advocate who can “save [you] to the uttermost.” Believe and be made new.

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[1] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “authority.”

Biblical Connections

by Robert Jacobs

I know this is going to sound super cheesy, but the Bible really is an amazing book. Aside from the fact that it is the inspired word of God, the text as a whole possesses an amazing literary unity. Passages written thousands of years apart share an inexplicable harmony in message and imagery, imparting a textual integrity unattainable in any other way.

While biblical scholars throughout the ages have noted these inter-textual connections, every once in a while I will stumble upon one that I have never seen discussed before. Just such an event happened to me this week. I was sipping on my coffee one morning when I was struck by the last verse of Psalm 17: “As for me, I will be vindicated and will see your face; when I awake, I will be satisfied with seeing your likeness.”

Satisfaction. It’s something that almost everyone who comes to Living Hope says that they seek. They long to be satisfied, to be fulfilled, to have their deepest needs met.  As I looked at those nine letters, I began to wonder what David meant when he said that he would be satisfied in seeing God. At first, I took the intellectual high road, seeing David’s satisfaction as some kind of spiritual fulfillment. Simple enough. But something kept my eyes locked on those words.

I decided to dig deeper. Hebrew is a complex language—actually that’s a bit of an understatement—and there are a plethora of words that David could have used in his poem to indicate satisfaction. As I searched through my Hebrew Old Testament tools, I was shocked by what I discovered. David chose the word sâbêa, a “state of physical contentment, due to having physical needs met in abundance or excess.”[1]

This posed a problem for my original interpretation of the passage. While the psalm could be referring to some kind of spiritual fulfillment, David clearly deploys a word that brings up an image of the physical rather than the purely spiritual. It was in this moment that I discovered my inter-textual connection.

Back on June 28, I wrote a devotional titled “Look but Don’t Touch” (You can find it here). In that devotional, I discuss Christ’s teaching that “everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). The word used for lust indicates more than sexual desire, reflecting a deeper longing to use or consume the object of view for one’s own satisfaction.

Though Psalm 17 and Matthew chapter 5 were penned a little over a thousand years apart, Christ and David use strikingly similar imagery to explain the truth of God. In Matthew, Christ declares that trying to fill the physical and spiritual longing for connectedness through lust as sin, while David states that only true satisfaction and fulfillment comes from keeping our gaze on the Father. Both use words that, while also referring to the spiritual, highlight the physical nature of these concepts.

As I mulled over this inter-textual connection, I began to think about how we talk about singleness in our culture. (I know this sounds like a stretch, but follow me.) Within the Church, we often track people’s “progress” by watching as they move through pre-set life goals. Kids grow up, graduate from high school, possibly go to college, get married, have kids themselves, retire from their chosen career, and then invest in their grandchildren. For those who are single, this pre-determined life path can apply an inordinate amount of pressure. Even past the walls of the Church, US culture mocks those who are single, particularly if they have decided to abstain from sex outside of marriage. Consequently, voices both inside and outside the Church seem to be screaming that you are missing out if you are not in a relationship, that you will never be fulfilled or fully satisfied.

But what do Christ and David say? Jesus tells us that seeking to consume others for our own sexual gratification is sin, and we know that sin leads to death. David, through his poetry, reminds us that we will find total satisfaction through being in relationship with God rather than man, not limiting this idea to some kind of “ethereal” or “spiritual” satisfaction through his diction.

The question for us, then, is do we believe Jesus and David? Do we believe that consuming others with our eyes is sin and that sin gives birth to death? Do we believe that being in right fellowship with God will meet ALL our needs, fully satisfying us to the core? Or, do we believe that we can find the satisfaction we so desperately long for by using others to fulfill our desires, that God can only give us some kind of theoretical spiritual fulfillment that we are supposed to make due with rather than having true satisfaction?

Turn your gaze upon God. Be ever in awe of His love. As both David and Christ testify together, only He, not this world, will satisfy. And those “needs [will be] met in abundance or excess.”

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[1] J. Swanson, Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains : Hebrew (Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc 1997).

Our Love/Hate Relationship with Forgiveness

by Robert Jacobs

Forgiveness. I cannot think of another biblical topic that people both love and hate so much. On the one hand, we love to talk about how we have been forgiven by God. Just tune into any Christian radio station and you will be inundated with songs declaring the fact that our sin guilt has been removed, we have been washed white, and—to quote a modernization of a classic hymn—“our chains are gone.” Yet, on the other hand, we detest the thought of forgiving others, particularly when they have wounded us in a deep way.

Being fully human Himself, Jesus understood our proclivity to revel in forgiveness when it is lavished upon us, but to recoil when we are prompted by a situation to extend it. In fact, Matthew records Jesus teaching on this precise topic. Through the medium of parable, Jesus tells the story of a man who owed his master ten-thousand talents of gold.  For perspective, a talent in the Greek world weighed about 33 kilograms, making this man’s debt in contemporary terms approximately $12.3 billion USD. This would have been—and is today—an impossible sum for any one person to pay back. The master, however, “canceled the debt and let him go” (Matthew 18: 27).

I can only imagine the excitement, relief, and gratitude that must have washed over the man as he walked out of his master’s house…but Jesus doesn’t end the story there. As the man walked away, he bumped into another man who owed him one-hundred denarii. Again, for perspective, a denarius was made of silver and weighed about 3.24 grams, making this man’s debt in contemporary terms approximately $362 USD.

In comparison to the debt that had just been forgiven, the one-hundred denarii would have been insignificant, an amount that could have been easily paid back if given enough time. However, the servant who had been forgiven the large debt refused to show any mercy, having the man with the small debt “thrown into prison until he could pay the debt” (Matthew 18:30). It is important to note that, while in jail, it would have been impossible for the man to work, making his manageable debt impossible to resolve.

If you are like me, this complete lack of grace, this utter distain for decency, this total lack of gratitude for his own debt dissolution makes my blood boil. And, according to Jesus, this was the precise reaction of the master when he found out what his servant had done, with the master throwing the wicked servant into jail until he could pay back his insurmountable debt (Matthew 18:34).

But, in His typical fashion, Jesus turns the tables on our “righteous anger.” Just as His audience reached the pitch of indignant rage with the man who ostensibly forgot about the grace shown to him, Jesus ends the parable by saying, “this is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart” (Matthew 18:35).

Wow. In one sentence Jesus moves us from white hot rage to guilt. When we refuse to forgive, we are the wicked servant. We are the ones who have forgotten that our impossible debt was completely payed. We attempt to take the benefit of God’s forgiveness, but prevent it from having any impact on the way we live our lives. May it never be!

The reality is that the gospel—the truth that we have been both completely forgiven of our sin guilt and adopted into the family of God—should impact every interaction in our life. The knowledge of our forgiveness should never be far from our minds, an ever-present factor as we calculate our actions within the confines of God’s economy of mercy, justice, and holiness.

For many of us struggling with sexual and relational brokenness, there are deep wounds that have lead us to where we are today. Many of us have been sexually violated, physically abused, emotionally assaulted, or some combination of the three, typically by someone close to us. While Jesus is absolutely not saying that we are to be a doormat for people, He is saying that we need to forgive those who have harmed us.

Although this is one of the most difficult aspects of the healing process, it is (in my personal experience) the most life changing. When we refuse to forgive people who have wounded us, it is as if there are little strings that run from our wound to the other person, creating a tension that constantly keeps the wound open and unhealed. Even after years, these soul lacerations refuse to close, allowing for more and more infection to infiltrate. This infection, in time, spreads to other parts of our lives. And, before we realize it, the infection transforms us into a completely different person.

As you reflect back on your own life, ask yourself the following questions:

• Are there instances in my past where I have not forgiven?   
• If there are, am I willing to—in light of the forgiveness I have received from Christ—forgive them?
• How can I pray for the person who hurt me? How can I attempt to understand the wounds of the other person, the brokenness that lead them to harm me?

And this last question will be the hardest, but it was for me the one that changed my heart the most 

• How have you, in anger, sinned against them? How have you payed back evil for evil?

Though forgiving others is much harder than rejoicing in our own forgiveness, it both demonstrates that you understand the gift you have received from Christ, as well as helps to heal wounds that have been allowed to fester for years. If you would like help processing these ideas on forgiveness, join us on the Living Hope Online Support Forums. We would love for you to walk with us as we seek sexual and relational wholeness through pursuing a more intimate relationship with Jesus.