GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
1 CORINTHIANS 1:8
8 He will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The law rings out with this command: “You must be blameless before the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 18:13). Moses uses the word tom there, “innocent,” which we often express with the negative “without blame” or “without guilt,” since to be innocent is to be so utterly wholesome, such a person of integrity, that no accusation of any sort can be made. That word is used many times in the law, especially when the Lord describes any offering as an animal “without defect” (Leviticus 1:3). How could we, sinners that we are, hope to be blameless when we face the Lord in the resurrection?
This innocent blamelessness which God demands was the condition of our first parents in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were not two individuals from an already evolving race of primitive or proto-humans. The Scriptures declare that God truly created Adam and his wife on the sixth calendar day of existence, that is, on the Friday of creation week.
God gave to Adam the first law for these reasons:
1, For his own glory. God declared that he is the Creator and Lord over man, and that man must serve and obey God as his servant and his creature.
2, For man’s free service. God did not create human beings as stupid creatures, but with perfect powers of reason. Man had the faculty of free choice in his original created state so that he could serve God willingly.
3, As a schoolhouse. The first commandment was to avoid eating from the fruit of a particular tree in the garden. This was the ‘ets ha-da’an tov vara’, “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:9; 2:17). This schoolhouse of obedience would have pleased God and would have been very useful to Adam and all his family. “For if man,” (Professor Gerhard states) “had persisted in holy obedience to this commandment, at the appointed time he would have been transferred from his earthly Paradise into heaven without the intervention of death or pain and would have been confirmed in goodness” (On Sin §5).
The fall from this state caused Adam, Eve, and all of their natural descendants (that is, the entire human race apart from Christ) in the state of original sin in addition to all of the actual sins, sins of both commission and omission, which we do throughout our lives. We are left incapable of anything but sin and more sin, for every inclination of our hearts is evil from childhood onward (Genesis 8:21). We no longer have a free will to obey God, but only to disobey him, for even in our very best works, we sin. Now, the external cause of sin is the devil and his arena, the world (John 16:11). The mob in the stands and bleachers of the devil’s arena all shout perverse and wicked things at us, and sway us with the tide of their sinful impulses, and try to pressure and bully us into doing sinful things to join them in their folly. But this isn’t all, because there is also an internal cause to sin, which is the sinful flesh with its inherited, original sin. The devil, the fallen world and our fallen, sinful flesh work in harmony with one another to ruin every thought, word, and action we possess, so that we sin whether awake or asleep, happy or sad, and no matter how deeply into God’s holy Scriptures we search: We remain sinful. In every least little matter, we stand condemned: “All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law’” (Galatians 3:10).
How, then, does righteousness come? We do not have it. We cannot participate in it. We cannot decide to achieve it, nor can we contribute to our salvation in any way. Here is where the theology of the Bible is different from all man-made religions. Nothing in them comes close to the solution God has given to man: By the grace of God, Christ won our salvation for us. He did not set aside the punishment our sins deserve. Instead, he did the unthinkable; the unimaginable. The best human reason could not and cannot solve this dilemma, but God’s solution is utterly rational, clear, and obvious when it is revealed to us:
God saves man himself, by suffering the punishment we deserve in our place.
This was always God’s plan of salvation. Throughout the Word of God, Old and New Testaments, the grace of God is inseparable from the person of Jesus Christ. It was he who, having become a man, took our place to live the holy and innocent life demanded of us, and to suffer the consequences and punishment of our sins, the eternal death in hell to which we stand condemned. He did it all in our place, and now his holy blamelessness is ours through faith. By keeping our faith strong, the Lord keeps us blameless to the very end, which is the day, the Last Day, of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
You need not imagine what it would be, to be blameless in every way. You only need to wait. Trust in Jesus, because when he calls you home, you will wear his righteousness and live in it forever.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – 1 Corinthians 1:8 To be blameless