Why include such a petty detail here at the apex of the story? Some argue it adds a layer of forthrightness to the scriptures that make it more believable. In other words, while religious texts often seek to paint their followers in a positive light, this one doesn’t hide from seeing people as people. 

Undoubtedly this type of honesty strengthens the trustworthiness of the text, but it still doesn’t answer the question of why it’s here – at such a pivotal moment in the story. There is an abundance of sights and sounds from the first Easter Sunday to choose from so why land on this offhanded, gloaty comparison?  

One possible answer can be stated in the form of a question: instead of reading these words as John bragging, what if we consider him to be confessing?  

John has a front-row seat to the most exciting moment in history and yet he’s still stuck thinking about himself. Imagine sitting courtside to watch Caitlin Clark break the NCAA all-time scoring record, but you don’t clap because you’re trapped in your own head considering the ways you’ve made better life choices than your sister…or how that dumb friend from high school’s salary is double your own…or how the emotional intelligence of your supervisor could possibly be that low… or on and on we go. The scores we keep may be petty, but their grip on our thought life is undeniable. 

And maybe that’s the point. John’s confession is one of many invitations from God heading into Good Friday and Easter. Our intuitions during Holy Week often include doing spiritual things to feel closer to God. John’s approach here is to show how the doorway to things above, that is, holy (literally set apart) activity is never what we expect because it’s upside down. God is not saying to step up or speed up, to moral high ground, but instead to step down from the ladder of our ideal versions of ourselves and back into reality – to look at who we actually are in the dark recesses of our own hearts. Holy Week is all about acknowledging the things we actually think about because here is where we find our great need for rescue.    

Jesus died on Good Friday to deliver us from our daily scorekeeping and petty comparisons. He passed us up in our race to self-deification and showed us the end of those things is only death, but he rose again to bring us into a new reality, never again to be marked by our place in relation to others. Freedom looks a lot like self-forgetfulness, and the surest way to forget about yourself is counterintuitive: confess the scores you keep and watch them lessen their grip because the last will be first. Jesus wasn’t in the tomb awarding John with a first-place ribbon. Our races don’t flatter him, he’s never at the finish lines we expect, because he’s already out there working to find us apart from our best efforts. 

The post That Weird Easter Footrace appeared first on Red Tree.

Now, on this side of having kids, my mornings are a bit more…charged. The second my husband and I open the door to our girl’s room, the rigamarole begins. Before we put our hands on the doorknob, we sometimes exchange “the look.” Maybe you know the one. It’s the look of “Are you ready?” or maybe “Are you sure we can’t wait five more minutes?”  

As we head in, our eldest daughter pops her head up from her bed and doesn’t miss a beat: “Mama, Dada. Hungry, Addy. Pancake, banana.” As I squat down to give her a morning squeeze, she passes right on by me and makes a beeline for the kitchen. She is consumed with the thought, “Food cannot come fast enough, I need it now,” and her requests for food play on repeat until her blush pink plate touches the table.

Early last week, I was in a meeting and someone read Luke 12:22-34 from The Message paraphrase by Eugene Peterson. It contains one of Jesus’s more famous teachings about anxiety and worry, how the birds and flowers don’t worry, so neither should we because we are of even more value to God. 

The Message uses the word “fuss” instead of worry. And this is what felt heavy, but revealing to me about it: who fusses?! Everyone! (Despite how much we may pretend the contrary.) We fuss about the weather (Minnesota winters, anyone?). We fuss over our current lot in life, whether that be jobs, relationships, or overcommitted schedules. We can even fuss about preferences toward the everyday like food and clothing, as Luke 12 suggests. But the reason we do so is a little more complicated. The underlying reason we fuss is that we believe in just a tiny bit of karma, so when something doesn’t go our way, even though we’re doing all this good, fussing flows from the injustice that we feel has been committed. It’s a tiny, albeit fruitless attempt to right all wrongs…in our favor.

Jesus adds, “What I’m trying to do here is get you to relax, and not be so preoccupied with getting so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works.”

Bringing this back to the daily routine of my insatiably hungry daughter: her perpetual morning fussing is a picture of how it’s built into all of us, from birth — this desire to self-justify. The angst-ridden cry of “How dare things not go right for me!”, at its core, is sourced by the belief that we deserve the good thing.

It reminded me of how Old Testament Israel — just days after the Lord freed them from slavery in Egypt — grumbles and complains about the menu, their leaders, the inhabitants of the promised land … the list goes on. In fact, it’s one way to summarize the entire story of Israel: through the lens of the fussing people of God, which, again, is fertilized by the belief that they were good people who deserved good things. Even after the law came in to help pump the brakes on their propensity to trust in themselves, they used it to throw gasoline onto the fire of their arrogance and misguided sense of self.

Yet, in the midst of all of this, the Lord, shockingly, unfairly, yet persistently meets their needs. He was preparing his people for a great unveiling. As they continued to fuss about their circumstances and miss (or forget) his small provisions, the Lord readied his people for his greatest provision, his Son, Jesus Christ. Like the loving Father He is, He gave us the very kingdom itself through the life, death, and resurrection of His Son. Our greatest worry, eternal separation from God, was satiated on the cross. 

Maybe most important here is to see that the cross wasn’t a pedestal or a lectern for Jesus to simply tell us to try harder at not fussing. Instead, it was there that he bore our worst — our most strenuous complaints, our resistance to his offer of grace, and his insistence that salvation was a gift, not a trophy. On that dark day, when Israel grumbled about the True Manna of Jesus’s body itself, we all cried out with them, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” But it was through our acts of evil, that God worked for good and fed us with his grace.

Addy’s morning rituals, Israel’s wilderness wanderings, the Jews’ crucifying of Jesus — they’re all my story. And yours. The good news is that he feeds us anyway. But his plate isn’t blush pink like Addy’s, it’s blood red, full of unconditional love — the only power in the universe that can help turn our fussing into humble trust.

The post Why We Fuss appeared first on Red Tree.

This is likely one among many reasons the Joker is widely argued to be the best villain of all time. He has a timeless appeal as the master of chaos. It’s his unpredictability that makes him so terrifying, perhaps seen clearest in Heath Ledger’s Joker asking his victims the rhetorical question: “Do you wanna know how I got these scars?” before proceeding to tell a traumatic story usually resulting in the death of the hearer. 

Those scenes were living rent-free in my mind this week while reading the first chapter of 2 Corinthians as the apostle Paul lets us into the backstory of his own scars. Most of his scars can’t be seen with the naked eye, for they don’t live on his body but on his soul. 

Referred to as “afflictions,” “troubles,” and “pressing pressures,” Paul’s scars are the direct result of the physical and emotional suffering he experiences in his efforts to share news of comfort to all people, couched in misery and distress. 

Our miseries and troubles are wide and varying. We wake up at three in the morning thinking about that thing we shouldn’t have said to our coworker the day before. Our brother’s cancer cells aren’t responding to chemo, despite everything else in his body dying. We get blue in the face retelling the stories of ways we’ve been wronged. Or maybe we join the growing number of individuals who are saying to their financial advisor for the first time, “I don’t feel confident in my ability to make ends meet this month.” 

It’s to weary people, like us, who are well acquainted with a sense of insecurity, that Paul is writing about his own experiences in the pressure cooker of life itself: 

We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death.  

If you think about it, it’s a bit of a strange thing to zero in on, isn’t it? Making others aware of your own uphill struggles. You can quickly get dismissed as a Debbie Downer when you drone on about your hardships, so why is Paul doing so here? 

Fortunately for us, he give us his why in the next sentence: these hard things happened so that we would learn to not rely on ourselves but on the God who raises the dead. Contrary to the 21st-century obsession with escaping suffering at any cost, we’re told suffering becomes a doorway to coming to the end of ourselves. Or to say it differently, the door to God’s office is found at the end of our rope. 

Learning to rely on the God who raises the dead is a worthwhile teaching to be taken to heart and directly applied to all current pressing pressures we’re experiencing. But the Scriptures are always taking us a step further by showing us the why and how behind the what. In other words, we’re never just given an imperative or an example in a vacuum, it’s always connected to a greater story that’s meant to draw us into Jesus and his cross. See, for example, Ephesians 4:32 where we’re told to forgive others precisely because God in Christ forgave us. 

And here in 2 Corinthians Paul himself becomes a picture of Jesus whose scars and troubles are for our comfort. He says “If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation.” Before he becomes an example to us about coming to the end of our rope, he preaches a picture of salvation for us through his own suffering. 

The clearest message we have from God is his public death on a cross that in one sentence is the very voice of God saying to you “Here is my distress for your comfort and salvation.” This is the story of the Bible. It’s a story that labels all humanity as equal parts victim and villain. All are afflicted, and all are in bed with the evil of sin which leads to every form of heartbreak, pressure, and affliction. 

The resurrected Jesus has been and continues to hunt down sin-sick antagonists like us to tell us how he got his scars. When you hear of it, the death of self-reliance occurs – be it for the first time or the millionth time. His distress is for our comfort, teaching us to no longer rely on ourselves. By his wounds we are healed. 

The post How I Got These Scars appeared first on Red Tree.

One of the best parts of watching one of these movies is that if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. I’m telling the truth here, there are even bingo cards because the plot points are that predictable. 

Even if you haven’t yet seen one, you know the story: 

• A busy businessperson visits a small town with the intent to destroy it.
• They, then, serendipitously meet the person they are supposed to be with.
• But they’ve also lost sight of the meaning of Christmas due to a dead relative, typically the mother.
• But they find old letters from the mother that remind them of the spirit of Christmas and together with their newfound love interest they save Christmas for the small town, just in time.

Why do I nestle into my couch to watch these movies annually – especially if they’re this predictable? Maybe it’s because they offer an expected escape. For two hours, I can step away from the unpredictability of my life and the perpetual moral incongruence that comes with being alive. I can forget all the ways I don’t live up to the ideal self I’ve concocted in my mind. I find respite in these movies where everything slows down, moral lessons are simple, and consequences for wrongdoing are easily mitigated. I want my life to be neat and tidy, like I’m living in a snow globe, where even when things get stirred up it is always beautiful and I remain completely put together. Like the perfect kiss as the snow falls at the end of a Hallmark movie, I want things to be pristine and simple.

My longing for simplicity often shows up when I think about what it means to have a relationship with God. Specifically, the mechanics of sanctification or what it looks like to be growing in grace. I want my growth in Christlikeness to come to me in an easier, more controlled, and morally clear way. I don’t want to keep taking two steps forward and three steps back. I want my life to play out like a Hallmark movie. I want easy “snow globe” sanctification, where I control the severity of my problems and the outcome is effortless and expected. I don’t want to be pushed over limits I didn’t know I have with surprise car maintenance or a sick baby screaming at 2am with an overloaded work day waiting on the other side of this sleepless night.

In my pursuit of simplicity, I stack up unbiblical performance metrics like IHOP pancakes and continually assess myself against a growth chart that the New Testament doesn’t prescribe. Where Jesus and the apostles talk about sanctification in the slow terms of agriculture like mustard trees (Mark 4:31-32), and bearing fruit (Gal 5:22-23), I insert mental charts and self-imposed data analytics into my walk with Jesus to quantify things and to make sense of myself.

Life in Christ and growth in grace is not simple, linear, or congruous. Snow globes are at rest but not fully beautiful until they get shaken up. It is precisely when things get messy that they can become beautiful. When I stop measuring my life and let grace shake me up, I realize that God isn’t interested in my performance and my own efforts to make myself holy. 

It’s also worth noting that easy life lessons never actually change people. What we need is a rescuer, not a teacher. The cross of Christ looms large here because his death for sinners like me means that God is not pacing the throne room of heaven, worrying about the messes we make or waiting for us to figure out how to better ourselves. The only one who was ever morally congruent put on our incongruence and mess. He became bloodied, bruised, and was ultimately killed — you could say he was the true snow globe who was shaken up and disturbed — because he understands the transformation process for people requires new life, not moral ladder climbing. 

Instead of focusing on how to make my life more predictable, I’m reminded that God has invested his Spirit to move like the wind (John 3:8) in my life, and to make me like his son Jesus (Rom 8:29), and he will complete his work (Phil 1:6). In the meantime, I get to continue allowing grace to shake me up. As I behold the overwhelming beauty of Jesus again and again (2 Cor 3:18), I find the simplicity and rest I long for and begin to experience God at work in transforming me.

The post Living In a Snow Globe appeared first on Red Tree.

A year and a half ago all of that changed when our first child, Addy, was born. While my husband and I were thrilled to settle in as a family of three, bringing a child into the world dismantled any sense of routine I had previously set. That early alarm sound that used to be an invitation into a warm, slow start to the day had suddenly evolved into a siren signaling my own demise. Now, the joys of parenting are many and nearly impossible to put into words, but the inconvenience paired with the sleeplessness is not. In fact, I think most of the words on that list are four letters. 

Routine interruption brought with it a sense that I was somehow letting God down because I didn’t know what it looked like to spend time with him now that a newborn was in the picture. Due to the exhaustion that came with the transition, when Addy napped I felt like I had to spend time with the Lord when all I really wanted to do was rest or sleep. I wasn’t being gracious or kind to myself, and I felt like the pressure was on me to maintain my relationship with God, because after all, relationships require time, right? Oddly enough, this narrative (and my false understanding), appeared to come from the Bible itself.

Philippians 2:12 says, “Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” What does it mean to work out our salvation? What is it that I need to do in order to maintain my salvation or secure God’s love for me? It’s a daunting thought because what if I don’t “work it out” right? What if God isn’t pleased with the way I pursue and love him? 

Then add 1 Peter 1:14-16 to the mix: “As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy.”’ Be holy in all we do? Oof! But, again, I have a kid now, and I’m just so…tired.

Left to my own devices, these passages can work together to shape an unhealthy narrative in my mind. They make me feel that it’s on me to please God and if I take a wrong turn, my relationship with him is on thin ice. For me to be holy I need to spend 30 minutes a day in Scripture and journal afterward. Or in order to work out my salvation, I need to serve in three areas at my church and make sure to always be there when a friend is in need, no matter the cost. 

But here’s the thing: while none of these things are bad pursuits, they put me at the center of my spirituality, and not Jesus.

Earlier portions of Philippians 2 frame the context of what it means to “work out our salvation.” It reads, “[Jesus,] who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!”

Working out our salvation involves accepting a gift we did not earn. This is easier said than done. It comes with accepting all that Christ has done for us and trusting that the work that he completed on the cross is sufficient, since Christ is the one who has, ultimately, worked out our salvation (Phil 2:13).

A friend recently reminded me that good works aren’t even meant to be thought of. They’re something that come from a place of love, out of our belief in the gospel and our orientation toward his sacrificial work for us. Good works belong in the “left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing” category. That’s been a balm for me, now just days out from meeting our second daughter, and having renewed fear over what my relationship with God might look like during those first few months. But, his love for me will not change. Afraid or not. Anxious or not. Tired or not. Routine-centered or not. His side of the relationship does not ebb and flow based on my participation. I have no category for this! 

Even during the times it doesn’t feel like God is at work, or we don’t feel like we’re “working out our salvation”, the Lord is working in us. His grace is new in the middle of the night when I wake up to feed and care for this new baby. He’s at work when he reveals to me my lack of patience towards our daughter or my husband due to the sleepless nights. When friends and family come to help or bring a meal, he reminds us through their gracious acts that he loves and is caring for me through his people. And when fatigue gets the best of me, he’ll be the one to quiet my heart and remind me that he is for me (and for you), always. 

The post Too Tired to Work Out My Salvation appeared first on Red Tree.

But there’s a dark side to it. Resisting help often leads to arrogance because to need help is to admit weakness. Did we cultivate that garden, do that kitchen remodel, come up with that idea, or write that article by ourselves? Or did we need someone’s help? Who do we want others to think is the hero when we retell the story? It’s even in little things, like carrying the groceries inside. I find an inordinate amount of satisfaction in carrying all the bags in by myself, in one try, without any help. My wife is never impressed.

The same message also pokes at us from the outside. You could say it’s one of the premier cultural mantras of our day, the simple phrase “You got this.” Is there any type of motivational jargon that’s spoon-fed to us more often? It builds an impenetrable shell around us, most resistant to the fact that we need help in more ways than we don’t.

This tension is basic to human experience, and it brings me back to how basic it is to Christian theology. Not in the sense that we need God’s help (though we do, more on that later) but that there’s something at the core of what it means to be human that seeks to resist God’s help. It’s as involuntary as breathing. But God doesn’t waste our resistance. He uses it to underscore how one-way love operates in the world around us and in our very lives.

Take the story of Jonah as exhibit A. When God sends the storm upon the ship, he has something more in mind than turning Jonah around. He’s not mad. Nor is it punishment per se for Jonah’s disobedience. It’s a chance to let some of the B-level characters in the story have their moment — in this case, the rowers. 

After Jonah realizes the storm is his fault, he offers a surprising, albeit disturbing solution: “Throw me in the sea and the storm will quiet down for you.” The rowers respond how we’d all respond to inexperienced, outlandish advice on how to do our job: they ignore him and try to row out of the storm themselves. But the storm grows worse until they are left with no solution but to take Jonah at his word and throw him overboard, right into the belly of a huge fish, which makes the storm instantly stop. 

At that point, it’s hard to know whether to cheer or gasp in horror. But therein lies the theology, because this isn’t the only time in the Bible those two emotions go hand-in-hand. In the New Testament Jesus likens himself to Jonah by saying, “As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt 12:40).

These stories have an echo to them. A common rhythm. And the point isn’t just that Jesus saves us from the storm by being thrown into it himself. It’s that he saves us from our futile efforts at rowing ourselves out of our problems. Like Jonah’s death doesn’t cooperate with the rowers’ muscles, so does Jesus’s blood not mix with our works.

This lopsided grace can be difficult to accept, even for Christians. Just look at Peter. Whether resisting a foot washing from Jesus, or trying to prevent Jesus’s arrest, or even promising to die for him (!), it was all another expression of what plagued the rowers: seeking to replace the substitutionary death of a prophet with the self. 

People have been trying to minimize the cross and even manufacture an outright cross-less Christianity since the day Jesus died. But mixing in a little human achievement here and there doesn’t add. It subtracts. Fortunately, no matter how much we try to row against it, the current of God’s grace is too strong.

What matters, in the end, is not the muscles in our arms, the oars in our hands, the good intentions in our minds, or the pious deeds in our hearts. Salvation isn’t doled out in response to us “doing our best” (Jonah 1:13). Doing our best is never, ever enough. In fact, it only makes the storm worse. We need help — not mere assistance but wholesale rescue — through the Jonah-like self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the one who loved us to the belly of the beast and back again, and whose grace alone contains the power to break through the hard shells of our stubborn self-reliance.

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This post originally appeared on mbird.com

The post Rowing Against the Grace of God appeared first on Red Tree.

One of the early relational obstacles they experience, though, is Hermione’s incessant judgmentalism. She is the smartest of the three, by far. Her work ethic and her attention to the rules help her ascend in her classes above the rest. But it doesn’t come without a little snobbery and a lot of self-righteousness along the way. She is born of muggle (non-magical) parents, which may have led to a desire to prove herself, but her rule-following, intelligence, and pride all coalesce, like they tend to do in all of us, and it drives a wedge between herself and the people she cares about most. Even Harry and Ron keep their distance.

But there’s a moment in the first book when all of this changes. It doesn’t come from a class textbook or a spell on how to acquire humility or conjure likeability. Rather, it comes from love — a love manifested in an act of deliverance on the day a mountain troll is set loose inside the school. That day, Hermione is doing what she always does: showing off in class and making her classmates look bad. Hearing Ron ridicule her to others — “She’s a nightmare; it’s no wonder she doesn’t have any friends!” — Hermione runs away to the bathroom in tears. But when news breaks of a troll roaming the halls, Ron and Harry immediately dash to her rescue.

After some genuine luck, the troll is defeated and Hermione is forever changed. Rowling summarizes the outcome in a seemingly passing sentence: “Hermione had become a bit more relaxed about breaking the rules since Harry and Ron had saved her from the mountain troll, and she was much nicer for it” (Sorcerer’s Stone, 181).

I remember reading this for the first time years ago and marveling at how well it epitomized the New Testament. When our focus is taken off of the rules and put onto something else outside of us — especially an act of love — our hearts begin to soften, and we stop needing to win all of the contests life throws our way.

In the Bible we read, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor 8:1), and elsewhere how it’s not through wisdom that we know God (1 Cor 1:21). I also think of the woman who loved much because she was forgiven much (Lk 7:47). For her, like Hermione, a loving disposition came from first being saved and forgiven, not from being told to be more loving. This is precisely the lesson Jesus is trying to teach. His interaction with her doesn’t happen in a vacuum but is witnessed by pious religious leaders who sneer at the woman’s actions and at Jesus’s kindness and who fail to understand that a mountain troll is standing right behind them as well.

The rules actually preclude true heart change because they point us back to the desert of “self” where no life-giving water flows. They addict us to playing comparison games and to the never-ending task of one-upmanship. But Jesus invites us to himself for the water (Jn 7:37-38) and not the law. The law can’t breed love; there’s no magic in it. Only love breeds love. And not just any love, but a Love that set out to forgive and reconcile his enemies to himself by being pinned to a cross by the troll of our sin.

Christianity’s approach to life transformation is utterly unique. It happens, as J. Gresham Machen says, “not by appealing to the human will, but by telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the narration of an event.” Hermione’s story is a small window into this greater truth. Transformation is not really our work at all. It needs to happen to us, from outside of us. It needs to surprise us, apart from the rules, through a felt sense of how we can’t save ourselves, but how someone else graciously has. It’s only then — in the shadow of the loving work of someone else’s hands — that we find that maybe we’re a little nicer than we used to be.

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This post originally appeared on mbird.com

The post How Do We Become Nicer People? appeared first on Red Tree.

Fashion trends come and go like the wind, and if you’re concerned with trying to keep up, you find yourself needing to buy new clothes much more often. It reminded me of this little thing called planned obsolescence, and how it might be partly to blame for the unwelcome cycle of replacing things at high rates of frequency.

Planned obsolescence is “a policy of producing consumer goods that rapidly become obsolete and so require replacing, achieved by frequent changes in design and the use of nondurable materials.” We see it in things like the lifespan of lightbulbs, irreplaceable batteries in tech products, short-lasting printer ink cartridges (ugh!), and even major appliances. My wife and I have replaced our dishwasher 3 times in the 16 years we’ve owned our home. That’s…not awesome.

The idea is that if things fail quicker, then people will be forced to replace them or buy the updated versions at a faster pace. Is it legal? Depends on who you ask. But from a business standpoint, it makes sense how companies would benefit from designing products that don’t last forever. Why not create a felt sense of need between you and your customer base that pads your pockets? 

So, planned obsolescence is a bad thing for consumers. What’s interesting, though, is that the Bible spins this idea in a positive light. Not with lightbulbs or iPhones, but with covenants.

Hebrews 8:13 says, “By calling this covenant ‘new,’ he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.” The author of Hebrews is referencing Jeremiah, an Old Testament prophet, and essentially saying that even 700 years before Christ, the old system — epitomized by “Do this and then you will live” (Lev 18:5) — was, itself, growing old. It was starting to fade. So God promised a new one that dawned with Christ’s first advent, culminated in his death and resurrection, and has been opening up like a flower under the sun ever since.

God wasn’t surprised by any of this. Jesus wasn’t his plan B. He designed the first covenant to fail. He planned its obsolescence. The laws and ordinances that stood between God and Israel, wrapped up with their conditions, “if-thens,” and associated judgments, were always meant to give way to a new and better design. They served a purpose for a time, exposing humanity’s faults like a mirror, pointing ahead to greener pastures. But now those pastures are here, pastures that would be defined by grace, one-way love, and divine self-sacrifice.

That’s good news. See, it’s not just the old system proper that’s disappearing, but what the system precluded. God, through Jesus Christ, has “outdated” our attempts at proving ourselves, since his atoning death has purchased our forgiveness. He has made obsolete the need to wash up before we enter into his presence since we are cleansed not by our actions but by his. He has shown our acts of piety to be “nondurable” since his Son’s blood has spoken a much sturdier word, the word of his own suffering.

And so we’re left with only one product to buy — the new product — but we don’t have to spend anything for it. It’s free. More than that, it will never go out of style. It’s built to last forever because it’s built on God himself and his “better promises” (Heb 8:6), not on us. Maybe that’ll take the edge off the frustration the next time we need to hop on Amazon to buy printer ink (yet again). All things are like grass, meant to wither, even the old works-centered covenant itself so that we might get outside ourselves and long for that which truly lasts.

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This post originally appeared on mbird.com

The post The Planned Obsolescence of the Law appeared first on Red Tree.