Victory over the Christless law of sin; victory over the beast and his image that institutionalizes the law of sin

Victory over the Christless law of sin; victory over the beast and his image that institutionalized the law of sin

For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband. (Rom. 7:2)

In another context: The children of Israel gave their hearts to the world thereby they became bound by the law to Egypt so long as Egypt was in power. But when Jesus ended Egypt’s power over the children of Israel, then the Israelites were loosed from the law of Egypt. “Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity captive.” (Psa. 68:18). As long as the children of Israel remained captive to Jesus they would remain free from Egypt. But if they would ever free themselves from Jesus and His laws, statutes, judgments, and prohibitions, the law of Egypt would come back with a vengeance.

Protestant America and Protestant Europe made the same heart to heart covenant with Jesus as did the children of Israel. But now the children of the Reformation have given their hearts back to the world. “Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves…. Your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it.” (Isa. 28:15,18).

For the past century and a half, especially the past half century they have been under a moral attack by Protestantism’s fifth trumpet army of voracious locusts from the bottomless pit, the insidious enemy from the Dark Ages, by which now we are bound by the enemies’ law of modernism, naturalism, atheism, technology, and the stresses of being enslaved by an empire that they have lost to the same heathen, Dark Ages enemy. Always and forever, God holds His people accountable for their new covenant with hell, as He did with Adam and Eve. So sooner or later the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, all turn to floor sweepings in our once happy, arrogant mouths. And when they do, then the children of the Reformation will seek to be loosed from the law of this world’s empire, but God will not be able to take them back without a deep repentance for their covenant with His arrogant adversary, a deep repentance that they can’t produce.

And so it is. They have all the latest amenities, they are receiving all the goodies as privileged children of the kingdom of God; yet they aren’t free. There is no peace and they are dying of cancer. Many Reformation descendants have become disillusioned and desperate for their forefathers’ peace. But God’s peace and help haven’t been forthcoming. Fallen from our five hundred year old revival of Christ in the Great Reformation, our Spiritless condition has left the devastating questions in Protestant multitudes: Is atheism true and my unbelief correct? Was faith wrong? Have we been deceived by Protestantism’s Solas? Have we been deceived by the Protestant Received Text Bible? Was the Reformation a big mistake? Has God been only an ancient and obsolete myth? Is He dead?

The answers to these doubts are a resounding, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, and NO!! Protestants are becoming disillusioned with the world and tormented by the world’s unbelief, yet we are really still tied to all that we have imbibed from it. Many are turning off the fifth trumpet locusts’ TV; many have turned off the fifth trumpet locusts’ movies and DVD player; but the images and sentiments, and powers of the angels of darkness and their locust henchmen, are still in us. Those weapons were only their overt attack. The real attack has come in the covert attack on the full gospel of Romans 7 — the true gospel that only comes first through the Law before it involves the cross! What can break the locust and black smoke spells that “shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces” (Dan. 7:23)? The good news of the gospel alone doesn’t complete the task of bringing us to peace with God. The Law of God must be involved. The bad news of the Law of God must first lay our pride in the dust. This is the missing link, the missing puzzle piece, the straight gate that leads to life, but that few find because they don’t want their pride hurt! Pride is the biggest idol we own and protect at all costs! Yet it’s the humbling that puts our resistant self-will in its place. The humbling Law is the secret to the gospel’s success and victory over our tormenting voracious locusts! And the Law for these bewitching last days, which is the straight gate that leads to eternal life that so few ever find, is the straight testimony of Jesus, the Spirit of prophecy as given to us through Ellen G. White. Once the prophet’s instructions and corrections have been wrestled with and her demolishing reproofs have been processed, then, and only then can we look to the empty and immolated body of Christ who was also demolished for us.

This is the message of Romans 7 and Galatians 3:22-24. Let’s not glory in Galatians 3:25 until we have fulfilled its prereq in Galatians 2:24. Then, and only then, we can join Paul in his glorying of Jesus Christ in the cross, “by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” (Gal. 6:14). By our full subjection to the emptied Saviour through our full acquiescence to the high authority of God’s Law is our old man killed, and we are freed from our defunct will that cannot obey the spiritual, holy, just, and good Law of God. Our old motions of self-based right acting are put to death, and a new heart and mind — the spiritual mind — control our actions from a heaven-based resource. “So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.” (Rom. 7:3). Because of their new “subject[ion] to the Law of God” to “serve the Law of God” (Rom. 8:7;7:25), the Son of God will again become their Lord; and because of His cross He will again become Protestantism’s Saviour. The Law and the Cross together make a complete salvation. Theme for the most profound meditation!

Just because we want out of the relationship we’ve had with loving the world doesn’t mean God can come to our rescue. We may join a church. We may start reading our Bible. But, our hearts are still not subject to His will. Such a heart is carnal, “it is not subject to the Law of God, neither indeed can be.” (Rom. 8:7).We aren’t worthy of Christ’s gracious power until we have surrendered to God’s will, seen in His Law. God is an immaculate God and His heavenly home cannot be poisoned by Satan’s kingdom that still resides in us. Therefore God considers us adulterers because we still love another husband. We are only half divorced from Satan. The world isn’t completely, perfectly dead in our hearts. We haven’t renounced the world’s idols. There are still things we love more than God and His righteousness. We still have our lustrous golden calves and our gods from the astral planes. Onn the surface we look like we’re on the Lord’s side, but deep down our allegiance is still in the devils’ dominion. All loyalty to the kingdom of rebellion must be gone before God will reconcile us to Him and deign to blend His pure Spirit with ours, His unchangeable rest on our enervated bodies, and give us eternal life.

But, how can we rid ourselves of those most deeply rooted idols and gods? We can’t. Some idols are chemical and we have a physiological inter-relationship with them. Some idols are habits that were instilled in us on day one by our parents’ habits. Some gods we came to indulge as teenagers because their stronghold in us was our beloved peers’ music that tantalized our minds and soothed our anxieties. The required total removal of every sin creates a huge chasm between our condition and the holiness that God requires. This was the very condition of the people of the evil Roman Empire who Paul taught the gospel.

There must be something more. Ascetics divorce themselves from the world, but lead a miserable life. Theirs has been Paul’s Romans 7:15-19 experience. Paul’s self-made righteousness wouldn’t allow him to obey the Law perfectly. He eventually saw that living righteously, all by itself, was meaningless. But he first needed to be brought to total helplessness, humbling, and repentance. So must the Protestants, both the lawless Protesant unchurched atheists and the lawless Protestant churched religionists. There must be something better than atheism and hedonism, and there’s got to be something better than humanism and asceticism, even if the asceticism is called Christian. There must be another power from outside of us, someone besides ourselves, someone from above, to throw a lifeline, that will extricate us from our defiled souls, and rid us of the powers of darkness. What escape did the Roman Christians find?

“Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.” 

Yes, there is more. We need to be divorced from the world, but not be married to asceticism. We must be divorced even from asceticism. We must be divorced from the follies of the world, but also be married to Christ. God has provided the means to rescue us all from our idols and gods. There exists one faculty that God can use to disconnect us from every vestige of this world’s idols and gods. That is the love faculty. The worst Hitlers want love. The most hardened criminal needs to be loved. Even if he has been trained from infancy to disavow and ignore that need, the need still exists, and a macho dereliction of its satisfaction will destroy him. Love is the most powerful force in the mind of every creature.

The body of Christ, corpus Christi, is our only hope to awaken that love in us. By corpus Christi I don’t mean the Eucharist’s corpus Christi. I mean identifying with and being in sympathy with, I mean the natural empathizing, which came to Abel by faith, over the emptied of Spirit, demolished body of Christ.

Christ came to our world from the infinite God. From the days of Michael’s eternity He had been begotten and reared in the pure atmosphere of His most holy Father. No other intelligent life existed to interrupt His Father’s lessons on perfection. Perfect love, perfect righteousness, perfect selflessness. There were no Lucifer and Gabriel. Later the “many angels round about the throne …. the number of [whom] was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands” who, with a loud voice, would say, “Worthy is the Lamb ... Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.” (Rev. 5:11-13). But, not yet were the heavenly hosts brought into existence. All life, all joy, all wisdom, everything that could make happiness, had one Source. It came from no other than His Father.

It was a quiet communion between the Father and Michael. It was a quiet environment in which God brought up His only begotten Son. Hearts joined in an infinite bond of filial, unselfish love. No sin separated them. Sin never existed in God’s mind or actions. Nothing distracted the divine Son from His Father’s love. All the self-sacrifice of the Father fed the heart of His Son. All the principles of righteousness were inculcated into the Son; and the divine Son, the only-begotten of the Father, had the unique infinite capacity to appreciate infinite, eternal love. Self-indulgence was extinct from the mind of Michael, who was like God. Sin was nonexistent in Michael. He knew nothing of it. He had never been taught it. He had never seen it or heard, felt it or tasted it. All of His instructions had been devoid of it. Then, when He was of age, he and his father created Their angelic children, and they raised up Their angelic family in the same selfless love and righteousness.

Sin, not righteous love, is the aberration in the universe. Sin is an intruder to god’s kingdom. It cannot be accounted for. Again and again it has been proven in our sight throughout human history that selfishness causes disease, death, and the total collapse of society and organizations, families and relationships. And, as often, we have witnessed that a life of service to others is the only thing that maintains civilizations, organizations, families, and relationships.

It was the Lamb begotten to save who hung between heaven and earth, utterly divested of life, utterly emptied of soul. He was made a lightning rod for the massive discharge of infinite wrath in order to save us from the infinite charge of disobedience and to keep our habitations from being devoured by infinite heat. Gutted of His Father’s glory, devoid of His Father’s total blessedness, His Father’s Spirit without measure, His Father’s “own self” (John 17:5), the eternal Spirit of unbroken union and communion, taken back to His Father who had given it. “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” (Ecc. 12:7).

This was the body that hung from the cross. This was the corpus Christi that, once married to it, will jar us, and crucify and scourge our pride, cauterizing our sin nature. We need to be more than divorced from the world. We then, with the Father, need to be married to the Son, who was born in eternity, raised up in the perfect environment of love, undistracted by not a single outside influence, learning only the most perfection of divine selflessness, never once eating from the forbidden tree, self-centeredness never once entering his lessons. Like aged Abraham, who in perfect patience and abundance of love training Isaac, the Ancient of days trained up His youthful Child in the way He should go, so that when He had sufficient experience, training, and the infinite maturity to go forth to war He would face off with Lucifer and his devils, without once departing from the infinitely inculcated righteousness and faith of His Abba.

5  For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. 

6  But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. 

7  What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. 

8  But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead. 

9  For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. 

10  And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. 

11  For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me. 

12  Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. 

13  Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful. 

14  For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. 

15  For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. 

16  If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. 

17  Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. 

18  For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. 

19  For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. 

20  Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. 

21  I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. 

22  For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: 

23  But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. 

24  O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? 

25  I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin. 

The only way to understand verse 25 is by inserting the introductory verse on this subject, verse 4.

4  Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God. 

Rom 8:1  There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. 

2  For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. 

3  For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: 

4  That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

5  For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.