First, Paul informs us that the faith by which we are saved is “the faith of Jesus.” Notice that it is His faith, not ours, that saves. Paul wants us to understand that in Christ we encounter God’s faith operating toward us before we exercise faith toward Him. Within the narrative framework of the gospel, God made promises through the Hebrew prophets. In fact, the Old Testament is a covenant document laying out all God promised He would do through the Messiah in order to maintain relational faithfulness to fallen humanity at any cost to Himself, even to the point of death. That’s the whole Old Testament in a nutshell. “The faith of Jesus” is the New Testament term that encapsulates what this entire covenant-keeping reality looks like. It means that God, in Christ, acted with perfect fidelity toward fallen humanity.
What is the gospel, according to Paul?
The gospel is the good news that the covenant of love has been fulfilled in the divine-human person of Christ on all levels of relationship:
God toward humanity
Humanity toward God
And humanity toward humanity
In Christ, relational integrity is fulfilled in all directions.
The God of Abraham is a God of covenant-keeping fidelity. He is completely trustworthy, reliable, constant, and unswerving in His love for us. He is faithful toward us even though we have been faithless toward Him. Our sin cannot change His heart from faithful to unfaithful. This is what Ellen White articulated as God’s “changeless love for the human family” (Testimonies to Ministers, p. 92). Jesus is the complete fulfillment of God’s covenant promise from both the human side and the divine side of the relational equation. As God, He was relationally faithful to humanity. As man, He was relationally faithful to God and all others. The circle of faithful love that was broken by sin is reconnected and set in reciprocal motion by Christ.
That’s the gospel.
So, then, because Paul is reasoning forward from the Old Testament foundation of God’s covenant faithfulness to us, he does not tell us to exercise faith in Jesus in a vacuum, but rather on the solid premise of God’s faithful love brought to light in Christ. The faith of Jesus, Paul reasons, is the gospel, and as such is the impetus for our faith in Jesus, which is not the gospel, but rather our response to the gospel. Therefore, Paul warns us against imagining that the restoration of the broken relationship falls to us, “by the works of the law.”
Absolutely not!
To operate from that premise is to deny God’s good character, to deny His faithful love, to deny the fact that He kept His covenant promise in Christ. “For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no longer of promise,” Paul reasons. That is, if we expect God’s favor in response to our law-keeping, then we stand in denial of His covenant promise. Legalism isn’t merely a misguided expenditure of effort, it is an insult to God’s character. It is a refusal to believe in God for who God really is. Legalism assumes that I am better than God, that He is the one in the hard, cold, estranged state, while I, by my law-keeping, can get God to move toward me.
Paul then questions, “What purpose then does the law serve?” If God didn’t intend for us to keep the law as a means of salvation, what is it for? And here comes the masterstroke of Paul’s theology:
It was added because of transgressions, till the Seed should come to whom the promise was made . . . . The law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. Galatians 3:19, 24-25
While the law possesses no power to save, it does serve the vital role of a “tutor,” a “schoolmaster” (KJV), a “guardian” (NIV). The law was “added” or made necessary because of sin, to serve as a teacher to keep human conscience alive with a sense of right and wrong and, thereby, to arouse in us a sense of need for a Savior. According to Paul, the law operates as a teacher and a protective measure, but it cannot save. Jesus saves, and He does so in such a way that His covenant faithfulness draws us into covenant faithfulness with Him. The law recedes in its exertion of authority as our tutor to the degree that love governs us from within. So, then, Paul’s view of the law does not generate disobedience to the law, but actually produces obedience of a more mature kind, of the covenant kind, arising from a heart of love and not from a sense of obligation in order to merit salvation. Paul’s logic is tight. To live toward God as if outward compliance to the law could earn salvation is, in fact, a denial of the gospel. Salvation by works is a futile attempt for the simple reason that we cannot get from God by our law-keeping what He’s already given us by His free grace.
After negating the law as a means of salvation, Paul then articulates what we might call the power equation of the gospel. “Righteousness,” Paul explains, only comes “by faith” (Galatians 5:5). I cannot attain righteousness by pursuing it as an end in itself, as a moral goal to be achieved, as something we do by trying hard enough. Faith alone is the means by which righteousness can be attained. That is the first thing Paul wants us to get clear in our heads. But then he goes one vital step further: while righteousness is only attained by faith, faith only “works by love” (Galatians 5:6, KJV).
The word here translated “works” is energeo in the Greek, from which we get the word energy. Paul is saying that God’s love, as revealed in Christ, is the power source that awakens faith to action. Righteousness is the what, and faith energized by love is the how. There is an axiomatic relationship between righteousness, faith, and love—and love is the catalyst that sets the experience in motion.
This is why it is vitally important that the law never be preached except in the context of the gospel. To preach the law without the gospel is evangelistically disastrous and spiritually dangerous, according to Paul. It is, in fact, a form of spiritual abuse. “The letter kills,” he warns (2 Corinthians 3:6). Preaching the law apart from the gospel kills people spiritually, emotionally, and relationally, because the law without the gospel can only impose “condemnation” (verse 9), which can only drive people to either legalism or despair.
Paul is not teaching antinomianism. He’s not against the law. Far from it. He’s for the law in the only way being for the law is really for the law. The law serves its correct function, he insists, as a tutor that reveals our need of a Savior. Legalism is the real antinomianism, while giving the false impression that the law is defended. The fact is, antinomianism is on display when we preach obedience while failing to preach the gospel.
If we genuinely embrace what Paul teaches in Galatians about the moral law, then, on a deep mental and emotional level, we will thrust ourselves with helpless dependence upon God’s grace for our rescue. All sense of self-dependence will be shattered in one painful yet liberating burst of self-negating realization. The deep, subconscious, carnal security we find in our natural legalism will be yanked from our ego-centric souls and we will run in nakedness to Christ for the covering that His righteousness alone can provide.
With that work done, Paul can then ingeniously frame the idea of “law” in terms of things the law is not “against”:
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. Galatians 5:22-23
So simple and so profound at once!
The law of God as a behavioral code—expressing itself in the form of authoritative moral mandates—stands “against” the inclination of fallen human beings to violate one another with behaviors that are contrary to love. But where the fruit of the Spirit is present—love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control—there is no law, in a sense. In what sense? Well, in the sense that while the law has vanished from consciousness as a moral code forbidding certain behaviors, it is inscribed on the fine mental, emotional, and volitional makeup of our hearts. And this is what Scripture calls “the new covenant.”
The NEW COVENANT
The gospel of Christ is the means by which God is restoring the world to a condition in which each person is responsibly self-governed from the inside out, with no need for being governed from the outside in. This is called the new covenant:
This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” Jeremiah 31:33-34
The new covenant is God’s law written in the heart. This is a biblical way of expressing the idea of the human being operating by the internal principle of love with no need for the law to be externally imposed. To the degree that God’s law of love is written in my heart—woven into the fabric of my own thinking-feeling-choosing process—the law as an authority over me becomes unnecessary.
The law of God is a transcript of God’s character. It is not a legal structure above God or external to Him. The legal language of Scripture is simply a practical explanation of the love by which the moral universe operates, or an expression of the outworking of the innate goodness of God’s nature. God’s law is not arbitrary, as there are no arbitrary elements in His character. He has made things the way they are as an expression of who He is. Hence, the principles of God’s character, the principles of His law, are inherently built into all of creation. Expressed in positive terms, this love is manifested in the ceaseless giving of each free agent to all others. Expressed in negative terms, God’s love forbids living for self by violating others. But where there is no sin, the negative formulation of the law would be unnecessary. Ellen White probes this concept in a fascinating way regarding the angels:
In heaven, service is not rendered in a spirit of legality. When Satan rebelled against the law of Jehovah, the thought that there was a law came to the angels almost as an awakening to something unthought of. Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing, p. 109
Before sin entered the universe, created intelligences did not live with a conscious awareness of a law. The Ten Commandments in the form of a legal code engraved on tables of stone did not exist. And yet it did exist. The law was innate to their angelic natures. Spontaneously, as the outworking of God’s character, which was inscribed upon their internal makeup, the angels lived for God and for one another with no sense that there was a law telling them to do so.
After sin entered the universe, the idea that there is a right way to live and a wrong way to live became a topic for conscious evaluation. Sin suggested an alternative way of living. God went on record explaining the difference between right and wrong. The issues began to be articulated in terms of law and sin. So it began to be seen that God’s love is right in stark contrast to everything contrary to love, which is the essence of all wrong. Hence the idea of righteousness versus sin emerged. Righteousness, on the one hand, is more than legal requirement. “Righteousness is love, and love is the light and the life of God” (Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing, p. 18). Sin, on the other hand, is anything contrary to righteousness, which is to say, anything contrary to love. Sin is not, therefore, merely the breaking of legal requirements that exist on tables of stone. Sin is the breaking of God’s heart of love in the form of any relational violation.
Expressing the ideal to which the new covenant reaches, Ellen White articulated the matter in language almost too lofty for fallen human minds to grasp:
All true obedience comes from the heart. It was heart work with Christ. And if we consent, He will so identify Himself with our thoughts and aims, so blend our hearts and minds into conformity to His will, that when obeying Him we shall be but carrying out our own impulses. The Desire of Ages, p. 668
She would have us imagine ourselves doing whatever we want, and the whole time doing what God wants. The new covenant envisions a complete marriage of human desire with divine desire as one seamless impulse—no discord, no tension, no opposing interests, and no externally imposed top-down authority necessary.
If, as the anti-trinitarianism suggests, God is fundamentally hierarchical in His own makeup, operating by authority dynamics that move from the top down, then the relational dynamics of the new covenant are inconceivable.
How so?
Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it, now that we’ve seen the beautiful highlands of covenantal freedom to which we may ascend in Christ.
If the Bible’s description of the new covenant is true—and we have every reason to believe that it is—anti-trinitarianism would have us believe that human beings can rise to a higher standard of freedom from authority than God Himself experiences. Of course, no anti-trinitarian intends to convey such an idea, but it is the logical outworking of their hierarchical doctrine of God if reasoned through consistently. Intentional or not, therefore, a consistently held anti-trinitarian picture of God negates the gospel of Christ and the new covenant dynamics entailed in the gospel.
In our final chapter, we will explore the church as the relational laboratory in which the implications of the new covenant are to be worked out to the glory of God.
1 Yes, there are trinitarian branches of Christian theology that subscribe to subordinationism, most notably Catholicism and Calvinism (Reformed Theology), and both have their reasons. But other theological systems lie outside of the scope of our present consideration of anti-trinitarianism.
2 For a detailed exegetical treatment of 1 Corinthians 15:28, see The Sonship of Christ.
“A beautiful communal love lies at the center of reality, and we are invited in. In fact, one of us is already there, awaiting our arrival.”
CHAPTER TEN
The Covenant Community
In order to comprehend the messianic identity and mission of Jesus, we must be intellectually obedient to the narrative arc of Scripture. Anti-trinitarianism essentially diverts us from following that arc by concocting an identity for Christ that is foreign to the actual story the prophets tell. And if we fail to discern the identity and mission of Christ, we will not possess the raw theological materials from which to construct an accurate vision of the church, which Christ founded for the purpose of living out, as a community, the glorious covenant implications of His identity.
In this final chapter of our journey, we will trace the natural outworking of the biblical narrative. In so doing, the rather intentional point of the story will become so beautifully evident that we will see by sheer contrast that anti-trinitarianism is an exercise in missing the point.
Looking Backward to Look Forward
As the messianic “Prince of the Covenant” (Daniel 11:22), Jesus came to our world saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17).
He was not, however, simply announcing Himself to be a king of the same fundamental character as all the other kings before Him. His kingdom was to be of an essentially different order than all others. The Greek word here translated “repent” is metanoeō. It means, change your mind, think differently, perceive things in a way you never have before, turn around and go the opposite direction.
For the people of His time (no less than for we ourselves), to grasp the kingdom of Jesus would require a complete re-orientation on the landscape of reality. He wasn’t anything like what they expected. The collective Jewish imagination held a cherished vision of what the messianic king of Israel would be like, and Jesus was about to shatter that vision. Following Him into the new kingdom would require a total paradigm shift.
To understand what Jesus is doing, we need to remember the backstory from which He is enacting His mission. He is fully aware of the covenant script of the Old Testament. After all, He is the Yahweh God who actively engaged with the patriarchs and prophets within that script. He is, therefore, the very same Yahweh who told Israel that He was opposed to monarchy as a governing system (1 Samuel 8). So when He comes into the world announcing that He is launching a new monarchy, we can be certain that subversion is in the works.
Consider the basics of the backstory.
Act One
Through the prophet Moses, Yahweh (the pre-incarnate Christ) delivered the children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage. Moses explained to them that God’s plan was that they would exist in the world directly under God as His covenant people. They were to be led by Yahweh under the educational influence of His prophets, as opposed to being under the ruling governance of kings.
Prophets are educators, not rulers. The function of a prophet is to teach the people God’s covenant principles and call them to account when they are not operating by those principles. To be educated by God’s prophets is to be cultivated toward free and responsible self-governance, whereas to be ruled by kings is to be relieved of responsibility and stunted in moral development.
Moses explained that following God’s covenant principles would result in such extraordinary national flourishing on all levels—socially, agriculturally, economically—that Israel would become like a light on a hill to the other nations. Gentiles would be attracted to Yahweh through the demonstration of His covenant principles in Israel (Deuteronomy 4-5). In this way, Israel would be a “kingdom of priests,” not of monarchs (Exodus 19). Israel would mediate the knowledge of Yahweh and His covenant to all the other nations of the world and invite them to join the thriving system. In this way, Israel was to overtake the world, not by military conquest, but by disseminating covenant knowledge for the blessing and elevation of all peoples. But Israel was persistently resistant to the covenant plan outlined by God through Moses.
Act Two
As the story unfolded, the children of Israel pandered after the governing system of the nations around them. “Give us a king,” they demanded. Through the prophet Samuel, God told the people that monarchy was a bad idea and explained what the dire consequences would be: the king will take your daughters as concubines, take your sons off to war, and tax your lands in order to pay for his military exploits. But the people insisted, “No, but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Samuel 8). They were opting to live under authoritarian rulers rather than become a people of responsible self-governance.
Yahweh never wanted His people to operate like the other nations of the world, with one man at the top ruling “over” them. To the contrary, God’s people were to be a covenant community of equals under Yahweh’s benevolent system of love. But the people insisted on monarchy as their governing system, so God accommodated their rebellious desire. The first king of Israel was Saul, followed by David, followed by Solomon, followed by internal conflict, which led to the division of the kingdom into Israel in the North and Judah in the South, followed by a long succession of mostly despotic rulers who proved the fundamental evil of monarchy.
From the time of King David onward, Old Testament prophets began to appropriate the language of monarchy to foretell the coming of a messianic king who would occupy the throne of David. But the prophets indicated in various ways that this “king” would be different. Just how different He would be could not have been fully imagined.
Act Three
Having rejected God’s covenantal system and having adopted the monarchical-military system of the Gentile world, it was inevitable that Israel would find itself engaged in constant war and eventually dominated by stronger kingdoms. In due course, sure enough, Israel came under the military boot heel of Babylon. After 70 years in Babylonian captivity, Israel came under Persian rule, then under Greek rule, and then under Roman rule. The decades lapsed on, and then the centuries, with Israel under the domination of Gentile nations. Incorrigibly resistant to God’s covenant system, the Jewish people imagined that they needed a warrior messiah who would rescue them from their Roman overLORDs by means of violent revolution.
Then Jesus came.
But He wasn’t the shock and awe military messiah they wanted, so they crucified Him as an enemy to their violent ambitions.
Mimicking and Mocking
When Jesus came into the world as the long-awaited Messiah, rather than overtly rejecting monarchy, He commandeered it. He completely flipped the notion of “king” upside down. As we watch the deliberate maneuvers of His public ministry, it becomes evident that He is mimicking monarchy while mocking it as a failed system. The people want a king, so He gives them one, but nothing like what they expect. In Christ, “king” is redefined as servant, and “kingdom” becomes a non-violent community of forgivers.
Once the people get a sense of the kind of power He possesses, they are eager for Him to establish a throne in Israel and conquer the Romans. Instead, King Jesus proceeds to heal the sick, feed the hungry, bless children, hang out with the moral outcasts of society, become the friend of sinners, throw forgiveness around as if it were free, open the door of fellowship to Gentiles, rebuke the religious leaders for their self-righteousness and bigotry, teach His followers to forgive their enemies and respond to evil with good, announce the end of the prevailing religious system, and declare that He is starting something of an entirely different order. And if all of that is not enough, He then allows Himself to be arrested, unjustly condemned, and crucified, all while obviously possessing the raw power to decimate His enemies, leaving everyone feeling like, “We thought He was the one, but apparently He wasn’t.”
But He was.
It’s just that He had to completely shatter their delusional expectations of a world ruled by power in order to construct from the broken pieces a world ruled by love. As we read the Gospel accounts, it becomes clear that Jesus engaged in a deliberately satirical enactment of king and kingdom. “Give us a king,” the people had been clamoring for centuries. So, He gives them a king to end all kings. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” He announces. And then He proceeds to reenact Israel’s history with a plot twist nobody sees coming.
First, He is baptized, paralleling Israel’s new birth through the Red Sea as God’s only begotten son among the nations.
After His baptism, Jesus goes into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil, paralleling Israel’s journey into the wilderness after the Red Sea crossing. But whereas Israel failed in the desert, He comes through the ordeal victorious.
Coming out of the wilderness, He calls twelve disciples, paralleling the twelve tribes of Israel. These twelve men are Israel 2.0. They are the beginnings of a new covenant people, called the “church,” through whom God’s covenant purpose will be fulfilled.
Having reconstituted Israel with the twelve disciples, He leads them to a mountain and reteaches them the law, thus reenacting the giving of the law to Israel at Mount Sinai. The Sermon on the Mount constitutes His kingdom manifesto, but it is not like anything anybody has ever imagined (Matthew 5-7). Yes, there’s going to be a revolution, but it’s going to be a non-violent revolution, according to Jesus, a revolution of love, not of power, a revolution that fights, not with violence, but with forgiveness. Evil will be overcome with good.
As Jesus proceeds to advance His kingdom, it is evident that He has no structural or positional authority. The authority He has is inherent to His character and teachings, not His position. His authority arises intrinsically from the veracity of what He says and does. What He teaches rings true to the way people intuitively know things ought to be. As He speaks, the effect is unlike anything the people have ever experienced. “And so it was, when Jesus had ended these sayings, that the people were astonished at His teaching, for He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Matthew 7:28-29). The people are staggered by the things coming out of His mouth. They are saying things like, “No man ever spoke like this Man!” (John 7:46). The truth of Christ is not an arbitrary set of propositions. It is love applied to all levels of life. The authority He exercises is not an arbitrary exertion of will “over” others, but the innate moral authority of love.
But the Sermon on the Mount isn’t sinking into their understanding so easily. More teaching needs to be done, because the power-over-others orientation is deeply ingrained in human nature. Just watch these guys and their mom in action:
Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Him with her sons, kneeling down and asking something from Him. And He said to her, “What do you wish?” She said to Him, “Grant that these two sons of mine may sit, one on Your right hand and the other on the left, in Your kingdom.” But Jesus answered and said, “You do not know what you ask. Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They said to Him, “We are able.” So He said to them, “You will indeed drink My cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with; but to sit on My right hand and on My left is not Mine to give, but it is for those for whom it is prepared by My Father.” And when the ten heard it, they were greatly displeased with the two brothers. Matthew 20:20-24
Oh my!
Now what?
Well, now Jesus explicitly repudiates the top-down system of the world, hearkening back to His pre-incarnate plea with ancient Israel to refrain from adopting monarchy:
But Jesus called them to Himself and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles LORD it over them, and those who are great exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant. And whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” Matthew 20:25-28
This is amazing!
Jesus is launching the ultimate counter-narrative to the common story of dominance and violence we humans tell ourselves over and over again. He does not present Himself as merely more powerful than all the other kings of history, but rather as operating by an entirely different kind of power. The basic orientation of the world is toward power over others. Jesus comes along and establishes a power-under-others dynamic. He’s not even suggesting a modified version of the prevailing system. He just explicitly says, “It shall not be so among you.” What, precisely, shall not be so among the followers of Jesus? People exercising authority over one another, that’s what!
With the words, “It shall not be so among you,” Jesus was establishing an alternative system to the one the world commonly employs. His church was to be a new world planted within the old world, a parallel social order operating alongside and in contrast to the prevailing order. By establishing His church, Jesus is essentially saying, Here is how the whole world ought to operate and ultimately will operate when things are finally back the way God intends them to be.
Directly after Jesus repudiated the rule-over-others system, He engaged in an act of subversive theater. Knowing that the people were eager for Him to be crowned king of Israel and conquer the Romans, Jesus tells His disciples to go to a particular village and “find a donkey.”
What?
Maybe He means a stallion?
A war horse rippling with muscles would be more fitting for the occasion.
But, no, He is rather specific. He wants a donkey. Bewildered, they do as He says. Once the comical beast is brought to Him, Jesus does something so against the grain of “normal” that the point cannot be missed. He mounts the donkey and rides into Jerusalem as a mock king. He tells His disciples to announce Him with the words, “Behold, your King is coming to you, lowly, and sitting on a donkey” (Matthew 21:1-11). It’s not meant to be funny. It’s meant to be a theatrical rebuke to the messianic expectation of Israel and to the entire world system.
At this point, pretty much every person is scratching their head and trying to figure out what He’s up to. All they’ve ever known is the Gentile system of top-down authority. His actions are making everybody nervous, especially the ruling class of Israel—the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Scribes. They have “taught” the people to know their place, and their place is beneath their leaders. Now they have a fella on their hands who is obviously more powerful than they are in every way, and He just rode into Jerusalem on a donkey of all things. The message is clear: your entire structure is wrong at the foundational level, and it’s coming down. Jesus is clearly denouncing the core principle they depend on for their elevated status “over” the people. He is, with shocking boldness, overturning the system that props them up.