Will You Shake Your Fist or Fall on Your Face?

This morning I had a message from someone asking for some clarification on some things we had discussed earlier. I responded to the questions and asked if I could post the questions and response here. The person agreed, so here it is:

hey nick, i figured i hadn't bugged you for a while.. So i have a question for you. Last time we talked, you said something about how some people when they meet Jesus, will have their fists in the air and saying, "but I lived a good life..."" something like that.. and Jesus turns them away.. Is there scripture I can read to understand that better? I hope my question makes some sense.. Oh and can you explain the Christianity is about substitution thing again. I think i understand it, but i wanna be sure. Hopefully this all makes sense.. :)

RESPONSE:

I think what I was thinking about at that time was this:

Matt 7:21-23 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. ²² Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ ²³ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.’

Here we see that Jesus NEVER knew them. It wasn’t that He knew them and they fell away… It also means it’s pretty important for Jesus to “know” someone. It’s not just that He knows who someone is, He knows who everyone is. When God “knows” someone, it’s and intimate relationship. It sheds light on passages like Rom. 8:29-39 “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; ³⁰ and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.” He didn’t just know about people beforehand, He planned to have a close relationship before the foundation of the world!

The “shaking the fist” thing is kind of my paraphrase of the second half of Romans 1, and Revelation 16:8-11. Romans 1 talks about how people suppress the knowledge of God and do not obey Him even though they know He exists, and they have a pretty good idea of what He requires of us.

Revelation 16:8-11:

⁸ The fourth angel poured out his bowl upon the sun, and it was given to it to scorch men with fire. ⁹ Men were scorched with fierce heat; and they blasphemed the name of God who has the power over these plagues, and they did not repent so as to give Him glory.
 ¹⁰ Then the fifth angel poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast, and his kingdom became darkened; and they gnawed their tongues because of pain, ¹¹ and they blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores; and they did not repent of their deeds.

There will be so many plagues and judgements in the Tribulation period (they start in chapter 6), and even though the people know the judgement is coming from God, they will refuse to repent and acknowledge God as Lord, hence the shaking of fists.

On substitution:
2 Cor. 5:21 “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” Basically, we failed dismally to keep the law. We never had a chance. The law was to show us God’s holy standard. If we never broke the law (from birth) and we ALWAYS loved God perfectly and our neighbour as ourselves (impossible), then we would be righteous before God and He would take us to Heaven. Rom. 3:19 says that the law is to shut us up (my paraphrase) and show us we are guilty and deserve God’s judgement. We earned it like a paycheque, because the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23).

God can’t lie, or He would be unrighteous. He said He is holy and will punish sin. If He lets us off the hook He would be unrighteous, a liar, and there would be no justice. Remember, sin usually if not always hurts people, and sinners should be punished if only for the victims’ sakes. So how does anyone get pardoned for sin and become righteous before God without God compromising His holiness? Answer: substitution. Jesus lived a perfect life. He ALWAYS kept the law. He ALWAYS loved God perfectly, and He ALWAYS loved His neighbour as Himself. He was and remains perfect, yet God poured out His just wrath against OUR sin on Him. Jesus suffered more than we can imagine, and not just physically. God put our sin on Jesus, and His perfect righteousness on us.

Think about it. We can stand before a HOLY God clothed in the PERFECT righteousness of Christ! It’s not our righteousness, it’s a foreign righteousness. Even Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, says in Phil. 3:8-9 “I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish (dung – KJV) so that I may gain Christ, ⁹ and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.”

That’s substitution, and it happened at the cross. The difference between the fist shakers and those who fall on their faces before a holy God is that God in His love chose to have mercy on His people before the foundation of the world. Eph. 1:4-6 “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. ⁵In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, ⁶ to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.”

There is nothing in any of us that makes us more “open” to being saved than anyone else. If it were not for God’s grace, we too would still be shaking our fists at God. Eph. 2:3-5 says, “Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ”. Hope this helps.