As the Babylonians are coming against
Judah, Jeremiah gives to God’s people a counter-intuitive message: “Do not
resist the enemy, but submit to Nebuchadnezzar, then you will be blessed.
However, if you resist and try to remain here in Jerusalem, or if you flee to
Egypt, you will not be blessed.” Sometimes the ways of the Lord seem strange to
us. Of course that is because his ways our higher than our ways.
So what is the way out of punishment for
Judah, how will they ever return from exile? Jeremiah answers this in chapter
23, verses 5 and 6:
The days are surely coming, says the
Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as
king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the
name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.”
The way that Judah will truly come out
of exile, not just physically, but spiritually as well, is through the
mediation of the righteous Branch whom the Lord is going to raise up. As
Christians, we recognize that righteous Branch as Jesus. We, just like the Jews
of old, need to recognize that our righteousness is as filthy rags and that the
Lord alone is our righteousness.
I like the way C. S. Lewis explains this
in a chapter entitled “The Perfect Penitent” in Mere Christianity….
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death
has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That
is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be
believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this
are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they
do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing
itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.
The one most people have heard is the one about our being
let off because Christ volunteered to bear a punishment instead of us. Now
on the face of it that is a very silly theory. If God was prepared to let
us off, why on earth did He not do so? And what possible point could there
be in punishing an innocent person instead? None at all that I can see, if
you are thinking of punishment in the police-court sense. On the other
hand, if you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some
assets paying it on behalf of someone who has not. Or if you take “paying
the penalty,” not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense
of “footing the bill,” then, of course, it is a matter of common experience
that, when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him
out usually falls on a kind friend.
Now what was the sort of “hole” man had gotten himself
into? He had tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to
himself. In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature
who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying
down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have
been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the
ground floor—that is the only way out of a “hole.” This process of
surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call
repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much
harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the
self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for
thousands of years. It means undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it
needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person
needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you
are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who
could do it perfectly would be a perfect person—and he would not need it.
Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to
humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He
will take you back and which He could let you off of if He chose: it is simply
a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take
you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going
back. It cannot happen. Very well, then, we must go through with
it. But the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do
it. Can we do it if God helps us? Yes, but what do we mean when we
talk of God helping us? We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so
to speak. He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we
think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one
another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms
the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We
love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do
it. Now if we had not fallen, that would all be plain sailing. But
unfortunately we now need God’s help in order to do something which God, in His
own nature, never does at all—to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to
die. Nothing in God’s nature corresponds to this process at all. So
that the one road for which we now need God’s leadership most of all is a road
God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has:
this thing, in His own nature, He has not.
But supposing God became a man—suppose our human
nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one
person—then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and
suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was
God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but
God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will
succeed only if we men share in God’s dying, just as our thinking can succeed
only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot
share God’s dying unless God dies; and he cannot die except by being a
man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what
He Himself need not suffer at all.
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