The Big Mistake
W. Carl Ketcherside
[Page 152] |
The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former.--Jonathan Swift.
Suppose you were asked to state your opinion as to the gravest error contributing to the division in the religious world. What would be your reply? Would you mention the assumed infallibility of the pope of Rome? Or the doctrine of inherent total depravity? Or the dogma of transubstantiation? It is not one of these great items of controversy. Actually, there is almost universal agreement in the error and few Christians have ever given it a minute's thought.
To lessen suspense let me say that I think the most fertile source of difficulty is the mistaken view that the new testament is composed of twenty-seven books or letters. The truth is that not one word of the new testament has ever been written with ink or put on paper, and the Bible clearly teaches that this is so.
You must remember that the word "testament" means "a covenant." The two words are used interchangeably in your Authorized Version. The new testament is God's new covenant, the old testament was God's previous covenant.
The old covenant was given to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. It was written on two tablets of stone. It consisted of ten commandments. Those to whom it was given broke it repeatedly. The result was that God, the party of the first part, predicted that the day would come when he would make a new covenant. It would not be like the one he made when he freed his people from the bondage of Egypt.
The distinctive difference was clearly stated. "For this is the covenant I will make with them after those days...I will put my laws into their mind, and on their heart also will I write them." The result of this new covenant is defined, "And I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people."
Careless students have always assumed that this meant that God would give his followers a series of apostolic letters, and through study they would absorb them into their minds and hearts. If this were
[Page 153] |
But the first testament was definitely said to be written in tangible fashion on a material medium. The second was to be different. It was not to be inscribed on a secondary substance. It was to be written directly on minds and hearts.
The word from which we derive "covenant" or "testament" can probably best be translated agreement. It is interesting that J. B. Phillips so renders it. "But Christ has been given a far higher ministry for he mediates a higher agreement, which in turn rests upon higher promises. If the first agreement had proved satisfactory there would have been no need for the second."
What is this agreement, this new testament? It is eternal reconciliation with God, won for us by Jesus Christ, when his own blood acted as the key for his entrance into the Holy of holies. Upon the basis of that redemption, purchased while we were yet sinners, God proposes to receive us as his own. He accepted Jesus in our stead because we had nothing to offer, and now if we accept Jesus in our stead as all we have to offer, the agreement is ratified by blood.
This is not as easy as it sounds. From one standpoint it appears that we are merely on the receiving end and this is true. But from another standpoint, to accept Jesus in our stead actually means the death of all we have held dear. Our dreams of personal greatness, our ambitions, our intellectual attainments, our social prestige, and in short, all of the things in which we have trusted and exulted, are found to be useless, fit only to be buried into the garbage can.
It is a little like bringing an armload of currency out of your private safe only to have a numismatic expert tell you it is counterfeit. All of your dream castles are shattered. At first you cannot believe it. You frantically try to salvage something good out of the worthless heap. You say that this bill or that one looks real. It is all a fake, you are told. And precisely at the moment when you are willing to admit to God that you have nothing with which to purchase salvation, he tells you it was never for sale anyhow.
All of these years you have just been deluding yourself, promising that somehow, some day, some way, you would be good enough that you could step up to the window and say to the recording angel, "I'd like to speak to the manager, please!" You've lived over a hundred times the imaginary encounter when you piled your treasured thoughts, your wisest words and golden deeds, on the divine desk, and said, "Count them!" And now you have to give all of it up and admit that you are penniless, bankrupt, homeless, and naked, and that you always have been and did not know it.
It isn't easy for one who has been so wise to acknowledge abject ignorance, or for one who basked in imaginary affluence to admit that he has actually wallowed in penury. But when we arrive at that place where we fling out everything, every minute fragment of self-esteem, and we are down to the bare walls, we are ready to start living. Up to that moment we have been dying!
Please forgive me for saying that one reason we have been so far off is because of the Big Error. We've always thought of the new testament, the agreement, as being a collection of letters and short documents written by the apostles or their contemporaries, and so we have regarded the covenant as being a law, the new law of God. If we could understand every statement and implication correctly, and keep it meticulously, we would be saved. If we missed any point or overlooked anything, we would be damned.
The basic problem in our thinking was that with our philosophy we were hopelessly damned before we started. No one can keep a law perfectly, and unless you do, you die. The very minute we convert God's dealing with us into a code, and predicate salvation upon it, we are gone, for no law can give life. And we
[Page 154] |
A little clear thinking should have shown us the fallacies in our thinking, for they are as big as balloons. I cannot take time to detail them all, but allow me to mention one or two. If salvation is predicated upon law-keeping the law must be enunciated fully before any one is inducted into the relationship created by that law, else those under it will be committed to that of which they are wholly ignorant.
The first covenant was legalistic and God led the people to Mount Sinai where he spelled out the law and had it written in a book, after which Moses sprinkled the book and all of the people. In the case of the new covenant many had died for the faith before a single apostolic letter was written, and it would not have been written then if the brethren in a remote province had not developed warped ideas about the second coming of the Lord.
Moreover, if the apostolic epistles constitute the new testament, or covenant, only one of the apostles could have possibly understood all of its requirements, and that only because he outlived all of the others. But it is certain that eleven of the apostles did not see all of the epistles, and doubtful that the twelfth did, since they had been written to widely scattered areas.
Again, the primitive saints could never have known whether they were fulfilling the terms of the covenant or not, since only a few localities had apostolic letters, and these were not collected and compiled as we now have them for several centuries. There were even questions at first about whether some deserved to be in the canon, and these questions had to be resolved.
The new testament is not a book. It is not a compilation of writings. Letters and books are written with pen and ink and paper, as John plainly says (2 John 12; 3 John 13). Paul says just as plainly that the new testament is not written with pen and ink (2 Corinthians 3:3). Thus, what Paul wrote, and what John wrote, was never referred to as the new testament, or agreement. The Bible does not say there are twenty-seven books in the new testament. It plainly says that the new testament, of which the apostles were made able ministers, is not written in ink.
The new covenant is a person and the relationship created by the new testament is a personal relationship. God said, concerning Jesus, as the context clearly shows, "I will give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles" (Isaiah 42:6). Again, "I will preserve thee and give thee for a covenant of the people" (Isaiah 49:8). Jesus is God's new testament. To receive him is to embrace reconciliation. "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself."
This is the real difference between the old and new agreements. The first was written on tablets of stone, the second on fleshy tablets of the heart. The second is written with the Spirit of the living God, and not with ink. The first was of the letter, the second is of the spirit. The letter kills but the spirit produces life. No law, no written code could ever produce life.
Men and women were under the new testament and were a part of it, who never saw or read a single one of the letters which the apostles wrote. The new covenant was complete on Pentecost. It was perfect that day. Nothing was ever added to it. Those who embraced the testament on that day, embraced it in all of its life-giving fulness. They were born again. They were children of God. They shared in the indwelling Spirit and he brought to their whole being new strength and new vitality.
Our relationship is a covenantal one. There is no other divine-human relationship. God is our God and we are his people on the basis of a covenant. That covenant is proclaimed by the gospel. We enter into it by proper response to the gospel. The gospel is not a system of doctrines, a collection of letters, a code of laws, or a compilation of apostolic principles.
[Page 155] |
Every individual on the face of this whole earth who has personally shared in the death of Jesus Christ and has thus broken the tyranny of sin over his life, is in Christ, and Christ is in him. Such persons are themselves "a letter that has come from Christ...a letter written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, written not on stone tablets but on the pages of the human heart." If "you have been adopted into the very family circle of God" you are a new testament letter, the only kind there is, for it is specifically said that the new covenant is "a covenant expressed not in a written document, but in a spiritual bond" (2 Corinthians 3:6). Nothing can be plainer than this. The new testament is not expressed in a written document!
Then, what are the apostolic epistles? The answer is quite simple. They are letters written to a covenant people. Not one of them has anything to do with bringing people into the covenant. They are no part of the new testament. They were all written to people who were already in the testamental kinship, and precisely because they were in it. They are doctrinal, intended for the instruction of the children of God.
The gospel is for the world, the apostolic doctrine for the saints. The gospel introduces into the testamental association, the doctrine teaches us how to live in it. There is as much difference between the gospel and doctrine as there is between a daily newspaper and a marriage guide or a mechanic's handbook.
There is the same difference as there is between a seed and plant food. The gospel is the sperm from which we are begotten, the doctrine is the bread upon which we feed after we are born.
Why is the mistaken identity of the new testament so tragic? The answer is obvious. If our relationship to God is a covenantal one, contingent upon our grasp of the new testament, and if we conceive of the new testament as the collection of twenty-seven letters, we must conclude that no one can be a child of God who does not fully grasp every point of those letters.
Most of those who postulate that this is the case have never calmly thought about the absurdity of such a position. This would mean that those who were initiated into Christ in the morning would have to be excommunicated in the afternoon, unless in the meantime they had come to a perfect understanding of every apostolic statement. If they were permitted to stay until they had time to learn, some infallible soul would have to determine the time required, or they would have to be allowed to continue so long as they were learning. If this latter situation prevailed it would be an admission that the apostolic doctrine was not the basis of fellowship or covenantal acceptance.
If it be admitted that God accepts one at baptism with certain mistaken views and erroneous ideas, then those views and ideas can never afterwards be urged as a basis for rejection of the one who holds them, else God will be placed in the position of discarding a child for a birthmark even though he accepted him into the divine family with that disfiguration at first.
In the physical realm no one expects a person at birth to eat all of the food he will require through his life, and if he lives for eighty years he is required to eat daily. By the same token a child of God cannot be expected to eat at the time of the new birth all of the truth he will ever digest or assimilate. Just as one's digestive ability has nothing to do with his acceptance into the physical
[Page 156] |
All of this simply means that it is the gospel, not the apostolic doctrine, which brings us into the fellowship, and thus it is the gospel which is the basis for our given unity, the unity of the Spirit. One should not use the apostolic doctrine in such a manner as to destroy the work of the gospel, for the kingdom of God must not be divided against itself. There are some fairly ignorant children in God's family, as is demonstrated by the fact that some cannot distinguish between seed and bread, but we cannot start driving out those who do not know it all, else we will utterly divest the divine commonwealth of all of its citizenry.
I shall regard every person who has obeyed the gospel as a letter of God, the new testament written with the Spirit upon human hearts. I shall remain one in heart with all such persons on earth regardless of where I find them for the new testament has also been inscribed upon the fleshy tablet of my heart. I know that the Spirit of God has written upon my heart. I know that I am redeemed, reconciled and justified. I am in the covenant and the covenant is in me. Because I am in the new covenant I shall read the letters addressed to a new covenant people. But I will not confuse my birth certificate with a cookbook or a text on mathematics. It is one thing to be born, a wholly different thing to learn how to solve problems as you grow up.
(Editor's Note, Those who desire to pursue this subject further may do so by reading the author's book, "Covenants of God," a 384 page volume which examines at length the nature of God as a covenantal being. The price has recently been reduced to $2.95 per copy).