by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
as published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
Virtually all Christian denominations believe in the Bible, but the question is: “What is it that they believe the Bible is?” It is a book that has been subject to more criticism than any other book in the history of the world. It has been burned, banned, outlawed and discredited. Every so often, there is some television program or other that trots out one “scholar” after another to make a claim that the Bible cannot be taken as the Word of God. Some “scholars” insist that the Bible is not the Word of God, but only “contains” the Word of God and it is therefore up to “scholars” to decide which parts really are God’s Word and which parts aren’t. This, of course, only turns the Bible into the product of man’s conjecture rather than the revealed truth from God.
Certain “scholars” insist that the Bible wasn’t written by the biblical authors the manuscripts themselves insist wrote them. Citing nothing other than human guess work as a basis for their assertions they make arrogant claims: “The writings of the New Testament were mostly made up by over zealous early Christians.” “They (the manuscripts), need to be demythologized in order to be understood properly.” Groups like the Jesus Seminar vote with colored beads to “decide” which sayings in the New Testament Jesus really said and which ones were “made up” later by others. And what’s left when all the so-called “scholars” get finished? Precious little!
Taken away by such arrogant “scholarship” is the Good News, the Gospel of Jesus Christ itself! Stolen is man’s only answer for sin, which is our lawlessness before a perfect and holy God. Sidetracked is the heart of all Christian theology: That our heavenly Father sent His eternally begotten Son who was God in human flesh to finally fulfill the perfect demands of God’s Law that no other man could fulfill. If we couldn’t be holy, then God’s Son, Jesus the Christ, would be holy for us! Additionally, the biblical credibility thieves have also attempted to steal away the very real payment that was made for our sins by the same, one-of-a-kind Son of God. That’s exactly why Jesus permitted Himself to be nailed to a cross and to suffer our eternal punishment for our sins so that all who trust in His saving work alone might not have to endure the eternal punishment that was what we so fully and completely deserved.
No greater crime could ever be perpetrated on humanity than that which some “scholars” have committed. They have attempted to steal our hope, our only hope and pass it off as theological scholarship dressed up in the refinements of academia in a vain attempt to give their conclusions-in-search-of-evidence some mantle of credibility.
The Bible does not “contain” God’s Word, it is God’s revealed Word. If you can’t trust all of it, then you can’t trust any of it. It’s all or nothing at all! It is exactly this conclusion to which St. Paul wrote in his second letter to Timothy: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (II Timothy 3:16-17) St. Peter wrote of the same high view of the Scriptures when He wrote: “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (II Peter 1:20-21) Some have even attacked these passages on the grounds that only the Old Testament was considered “Scripture” at the time of the apostles, but neither is this so. In II Peter 3:15-16 St. Peter writes concerning the nature of St. Paul’s letters with these words: “...just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some thing that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”
Such modern day skeptics of the Scriptures would do well to give ear to the warning Peter provides about those who would distort His Word! It is the precious gift of salvation in Christ Jesus that is at stake when the Word that reveals this Gospel is denigrated and demeaned. God speaks the truth in His Word!
by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
As published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
Who is the Jesus you know? For some Jesus was just a man who lived a very long time ago and who said some nice things. For others Jesus is just a man who was a prophet who came with a message from God. For yet others Jesus is a man who became a god. For those who know the Jesus of the Bible, He is far more than a man. He is God in human flesh!
Christology is what theologians call the study of the person of Christ. In particular Christology studies how the Jesus of the Bible can be one person with two natures – a human nature and a divine nature. For the first four centuries of Christendom Christology was debated throughout the Church. Finally, in 325 AD the Emperor Constantine called an ecumenical council at Constantinople, (present day Istanbul), of all the pastors or bishops of the Church to examine the apostolic Scriptures and get back to the “primitive” Christology of the Scriptures. It wasn’t easy and it finally took another ecumenical council in 381 AD at the City of Nicea to complete the work of the first council.
Some scholars have made the assertion that the Council of Nicea “rewrote” the Christian faith, but nothing could be farther from the truth. As one reads the documents that were produced in the Constantinoplitan/Nicene Councils what becomes abundantly clear is the dedication those early Church “fathers” had to the Scriptures. The theology that is known today as the Nicene Creed is a testament to their faithfulness to God’s Word.
Today, it is interesting to note that many people who attempt to make Jesus a mere human are using exactly the same arguments that were used in the first four centuries of the faith. And the problem of the person of Jesus Christ is exactly the same. Then as now, some wish to deny that Jesus the Christ was fully human, (if not, He couldn’t have fulfilled God’s perfect Law as a human for us), and others wish to deny that He was fully divine, (if not His death could not have been an adequate payment for humanity’s sin since no mere man can die for someone else’s sin.)
Jesus once asked His apostles, “Who do you say that I am?” It was Peter who answered with absolute clarity, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” Just as significant as the answer was Jesus’ response to Peter’s statement. Jesus said, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 16:15-17) Jesus’ response confirms Peter’s answer. Jesus is the Messiah (“Christ” is Greek for the Hebrew “Messiah”), the Redeemer long promised since the fall of humanity into sin in the Garden of Eden. He is the “seed of the woman who will crush the head of the serpent.” (Genesis 3:15) He is God with a human face!
So Christology is not some esoteric study of a theological concept. It is the heart of the faith. The answer to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?”, is the single most important question for every single man, woman and child who has ever walked the earth. Our eternal destiny rides on our answer to that one single question. But here’s the comforting good news, God reveals to us, through His Word, the Bible, who He is just as the Father revealed to Peter who Jesus was. He is the Savior of the world, the unique, one-of-a-kind Son of God who lived for us, who offered His lifeblood for our sins so that we may answer the question with Peter, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Our Savior Jesus Christ is co-equal in every respect with the Eternal Father and the Holy Spirit. His two natures, divine and human, make it possible to relate forever to our Creator God
by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
as published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
I can’t count the times that people have told me that they’re Christians but don’t go to any church. That’s always been a puzzle to me and when I inquire as to why someone would come to such a conclusion the answers usually puzzle me even more.
Often I hear that a person won’t go to church because it’s full of hypocrites. My tongue-in-cheek response is usually, “Well, there’s always room for one more.” You see, any Christian congregation is made up of sinners who occasionally act like it. In fact, that’s one reason that we have churches is to have a sanctuary for people wounded by sin. The hypocrite rationale is actually a bit arrogant. It seems that the individual who makes such a claim wants a congregation to deliver what he himself is unable to deliver personally. The congregation has never presented itself to be anything but a refuge for sinners.
Any Christian congregation is a good deal like your family. There are members of your family and mine who are not all that easy to get along with. You know who I mean! But just because that is true doesn’t mean you kick them out of the family. A congregation is really an extended family and there will be personalities that occasionally rub others the wrong way. The challenge, then, is to remember that they are, in fact, family and learn to live, forgive, and carry on. Just like regular family. Perhaps it would help to remember that God continues to forgive the likes of us, so maybe we can find a way to forgive each other too!
Just for the record, if congregational life is merely optional, then what were the apostles doing running around the Mediterranean Basin establishing – you guessed it – congregations? More over when those congregations were without a pastor, the apostle Paul insisted that they were lacking something (a shepherd for that flock) and specifically told Titus to go to the various congregations without a pastor and appoint one. (Titus 1:5) From the viewpoint of the Scriptures it seems that both congregations and pastors constitute a divine design, not a human invention.
One of the reasons I am puzzled by the reticence of Christian folks to associate with a congregation is the lack of logic in the proposition. Let me explain. If we claim to be fellow sinners whose only hope is the life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, that automatically makes us part of the Body of Christ, (according to I Corinthians 12.) So what do God’s people do? They hunger after God’s Word and the Sacraments He has established for the strengthening of our faith and for the assurance of the forgiveness of our sins. So what does it mean when Christians deny themselves the hearing of that precious Word, the participation of the Body of Christ in the Sacramental life of the church, and the mutual fellowship of God’s people? Can you see why I am puzzled?
I realize that nothing happens in a cultural vacuum. I grew up in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. At that time a good number of us accepted the mantra that all institutions were to be regarded with suspicion if not out-right disdain. I’m afraid that we may have thrown the proverbial baby out with the bath water. It is true that all institutions are made up of humans and are therefore given to human short comings. But then who isn’t? But it is also true that despite our short-comings, the congregation is the place where our Christian faith really hits the road. It is in the congregation that we see the Body of Christ at work. Here we see God’s people lifting one another up in prayer. Here we learn more about the incredible love of God from His Word. Here we gather around the Lord’s Sacramental Table of grace, and touching the lives of one another as the hands of Christ. In short, the congregation is one of the main places we see God at work. Why would any Christian not want to be a part of that?
No, the congregation isn’t a perfect place, but it is God’s divine design for His people. Come, consider what the hand of our living, loving and perfect God can do with His imperfect people! Come, enjoy the gifts of God He has prepared for His children.
by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
as published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
BEWARE THE WARNINGS OF SPIRITUAL “TERRORISM”!
Cults and cult leaders fill their rosters with former Christians in this country. They are able to accomplish this because those Christians they seek to recruit have inadequate understanding of the faith in which they were raised and are therefore vulnerable. The moral of the story is, “Know Thy Stuff!” St. Paul put it far more eloquently in Ephesians 4:11-14:
“It was he [Christ] who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.”
Some cults are more subtle than others. Some come in the guise of the Church or in the form of a parachurch organization. Here the evil one, Satan, is at his crafty best. Not only does he draw people away from the blessings of God in His Church, he even gets some in the Church to fund it! One must never forget how clever Satan really is!
So how can a Christian know if they are being approached by or drawn into something that is cultic? I would suggest the following:
1. Study the Word of God with those Christ has appointed, (as in those noted in the Ephesians passage above.) Pastors are God’s shepherds for the flock of God and have received intensive and specialized training to enable them to teach the Word in its truth and purity and administer the Sacraments according to Christ’s institution. Such leaders are always measured against the Word of God and if their teachings conform to that Word, they are to be trusted.
2. Never be satisfied with a minimal understanding of spiritual things. In a world filled with every kind of voice each claiming to know the truth, a Sunday school level of understanding is never sufficient. A strange thing will happen to you if you engage in such study. The more you study, the more you’ll want to study more. You’ll never get enough of the love of God!
3. Know the warning signs of cultic involvement:
a. Any kind of individual or organization that substitutes anything other than God’s Word as a means to solve your problems is cultic. If what you are considering attempts to insert the wisdom of men, psychological techniques, human traditions, or spiritual forces other than the healing which is ours in Christ Jesus, it should be abandoned immediately!
b. If what you are involved in makes worship and fellowship with the whole body of believers in a Christian congregation secondary to spending time the teacher/leader individually or in a group, then the activity is cultic. Cultic activities tend to make what they have to say or what they do as supremely important often encouraging withdrawal from other Christians.
c. If what you are involved in takes an unusual amount of time away from your family, then the activity is cultic. One sure sign of cultic activity is the discounting of time spent with family. If the activity encourages or insists that a person spend 2-4 days per week with the individual leader or group, this is a clear violation of God’s express will with respect to the importance family.
d. If what you are involved in becomes something on which you have become dependent for a sense of well-being, then the activity is cultic. If spending time with the leader/teacher or with a group outside of the Church becomes more important than your congregation, your family, or your personal relationships outside of the activity, then you are engaging in cultic activity.
e. If the activity you are involved in uses the Scriptures only as pronouncements of law, then the activity is cultic. Lots of cults dress their teachings in the garb of the Scriptures. It gives credibility to what they say and legitimacy to the leader/organization. However, if the Scriptures are only used to provide new rules on how to live better rather than being motivated to live out of love for God alone through the power of Jesus Christ, you are engaging in cultic activity.
Personal healing and wholeness are given through the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. God’s Word, the Bible, brings us that precious truth as well as the healing we seek both for our personal relationships and for our relationship with God. It was precisely for the healing of all relationships that Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us. Listen to His voice and what you seek will be found. His voice is heard through objective means: His Word and Sacraments. Do not be led astray by any other voice!
Knowing God is To Know His Son
by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
as published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
With the exception of a very small percentage of the American population who claims atheism as their faith, most people in our nation acknowledge that there is a God. Some think that just because they believe in God means that they have nothing to fear from Him. Others conclude that as long as they do the best they can, then they will be OK with God when they die. Where do these conclusions come from? Human reason perhaps, but most certainly not from the Scriptures.
Believing that there is a God doesn’t seem to work out very well for some folks in the Bible. In the Gospels of the New Testament (the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), Jesus occasionally came upon people who were demon possessed. In one of those circumstances the poor, occupied fellow came running up to Jesus and the evil spirits in the man cried out in these words: “What do you want with us, Son of God?” They knew exactly who Jesus was, the Son of God! Did knowing who Jesus was help them? No way! Just because someone believes there is a God doesn’t mean they have a positive relationship with Him.
As for “Doing the best we can.”, well that doesn’t seem to work very well either. The Pharisees in the New Testament were the model religious citizens of their day. They did the very best they could to comply with the Law of God, which is summarized in the Ten Commandments. In fact, these guys were constantly in Jesus’ back for not being as strict as they were in keeping the ceremonial laws of the Jewish people. So they really did the very best they could. How did Jesus respond to their effort? In Matthew 23 we see the most angry words of Jesus in all the Scriptures aimed directly at the Pharisees. In part they read: “Woe to you, teacher of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.” (Matthew 23:27-28) I guess doing the best we can won’t help us very much either!
So, if acknowledging the existence of a “Big Man Up-stairs” isn’t going to help and if doing the best we can only results in God’s anger toward self-righteousness, what’s a person to do? You may not like the answer: You can’t do anything!
In the Bible there is a parable, (a story to make a point), of a shepherd and his lost sheep. (Matthew 18:12-14) The shepherd has 100 sheep, but one wanders off. The shepherd then leaves the 99 in the pasture and goes after the lost one to find it. Did you get that? The sheep doesn’t go looking for the shepherd, the shepherd goes looking for the lost sheep. God calls us to faith in Him and when we believe in the Good Shepherd even that is a gift from God!
And what faith does God call us to? To faith in what His Son has accomplished on our behalf! Not what we have accomplished on God’s behalf! And what has Jesus accomplished in which we put our faith? We trust in the perfection of Jesus’ fulfillment of God’s perfect Law for us, since we have all failed miserably to keep it ourselves. We trust in the payment which Christ made for us through His suffering and death on a terrible Roman cross. We trust in the victory of Christ’s resurrection from the dead as a certain sign that the payment He made on the cross as our substitute was perfectly acceptable to the Father in Heaven. God’s holiness is satisfied! His justice is satisfied! We are declared to be acceptable even to the holy, almighty and righteous God because our sin has been completely taken away!
So forget about those completely inadequate humanly invented ways of pleasing God. They won’t work! God the Father has already provided the one and only solution to our sin, and His name is Jesus!
by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
as published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
Understanding the Bible isn’t always very easy. Even St. Peter said of St. Paul’s letters, “His letters contain some things that are hard to understand...” (II Peter 3:16b) How, then, can we understand what God is saying? Here’s one help that can make a very big difference. All of Scripture is divided into either a message of God’s Law or His Gospel. If we do not properly distinguish between Law and Gospel, the reader will always view the message of the Scriptures as confusing or contradictory.
On the one hand God strongly punishes sinners who have violated His Law and therefore, have violated His person. On the other hand passages abound that speak about God’s great mercy and compassion. Some have even mistakenly thought that one angry “god” is portrayed in the Old Testament, while a kinder, gentler “god” is shown in the New Testament. This is plainly a confusion of the Law and Gospel messages in the Bible.
The Law makes demand after demand on us that we sinful humans cannot possibly keep. Jesus also laid down the Law in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-7:29). Even the beauty of the Beatitudes is nothing but a statement of the Law. The central point of the Sermon on the Mount is found Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” OK, let’s see the hands of all the perfect people out there! (I can assure you my hand is down!) The role of the Law is to demonstrate that no amount of human effort or good works will ever be sufficient to make God happy with us. Yet in non-Christian religion after non-Christian religion the way to God or heaven or Nirvana is by means of good works, good Karma, or adequate worthiness. The Law makes it clear that we cannot meet such impossible demands in any way. Doing the best we can just won’t cut it with God.
That’s exactly where the Gospel messages in the Bible come into play. The Gospel only offers us free gifts of the forgiveness of sins, eternal life with God, and a whole new kind of life while we continue to reside on this earth. The Gospel demands nothing and offers us everything without a price connected with it at all.
What is this Gospel? It is the Good News that God’s Son Jesus Christ has come to us in human flesh. In His humanity, He has keep all the conditions of the Law on our behalf. What’s more, He has taken the punishment we deserved for our sins when He suffered and died on the cross. And there’s even more! Since the fall of man into sin, (Genesis 3), the wages of sin has been death. But after Jesus the Christ (“Christ” is Greek for the Hebrew “Messiah”), fulfilled all the requirements of the Law on our behalf, after He took the punishment we deserved for our sins on the cross, He claimed His and our victory over sin, death and the grave when He rose from the dead on Easter morning! All of this is a free gift that cannot be earned or deserved by human effort. That’s the Gospel!
So when you’re reading your Bible remember that God is not a schizophrenic deity who has two personalities. He does, in fact, punish all sin with eternal death and hell. The only question is, “Who receives the punishment, us or His Son?” For those who trust in their own ability to keep the Law or “Do the best they can.”, there is nothing but sin, death, the grave and hell, because we simply can’t get it done. But for those whose confidence is found in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, there is nothing ahead but the free gifts God grants to us through the merits of His Son, Jesus the Christ. As St. Paul puts it in Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Law and Gospel in one verse!
by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
as published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
When God’s people study the Holy Scriptures they frequently have differences of opinion regarding the meaning of this subject or that. What are people to make of that? Some have simply said, "Well, it’s just a matter of individual interpretation.”, and let it go at that. Others have made a doctrine out of the divergence of opinion by saying that the truth simply can’t be known and in so doing stop seeking after the truth altogether and even make a case that multiple truth is acceptable or even preferable. The trouble with this is, of course, that the truth is sacrificed on the altar of subjectivity. God no longer speaks with authority because we’ve determined that lots of people can hold lots of different or even conflicting ideas about the same subjects and that’s OK. I would suggest that this does a disservice both to God who has revealed His truth in the Scriptures and to the Church that the Word is to strengthen.
I would ask, “How many correct interpretations are there?” The only acceptable answer to this question is, “There is only one correct interpretation – God’s.” How can I say that so categorically? The reason is due to the nature of God Himself. We know from the Scriptures that God is absolutely holy. That means He has no flaws of any kind. He always gets it right, every time and anytime. It would be a violation of His own divine, holy nature to speak anything but one single truth. In other words, God cannot possibly speak in multiple choice truth.
You may think, “Well, that’s fine for God, but what about me? I am not holy. I am human and fallible.” Indeed so it is with all of us. According to the Bible we are all born with our backs toward God, so-to-speak. St. Paul put it more precisely. He describes the condition of man before he is a believer in grim terms indeed. In Ephesians 2:1-5 he describes the unbeliever as spiritually dead. Then in II Corinthians 4:1-4, he tells us that we are also spiritually blind. Then it gets worse! In Romans 5:6-11 we are told that our condition without Christ as our Savior is that of an enemy of God. No wonder we have such trouble trying to discern the truth!
But God has not left us without hope! He has sent His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ into the flesh. He is not a man who became a “god”. Rather, He is God who took on human flesh! Fully human, fully divine He comes as an offering, a sacrifice for our sins. He comes to help the spiritually blind see. He comes to open the ears of the spiritually deaf. He comes to turn His enemies into His friends forever. That is exactly why He is the very central figure of all human history.
“But, pastor” you say, “Believing Christians still have differences when they read the Bible.” Yes, sadly it is true. What goes wrong? Rather than simply letting the plain sense of Christ’s words speak clearly we insert our human reason in the middle of it all. When things don’t make sense to us rationally, we invent ways to unscrew the inscrutable. When we add reason to the text of the Scriptures we mess it up every time. It is the text that has to have the final say even it its difficult to believe. For example, we learn from the Scriptures that God has three persons, (Father, Son and Holy Spirit), but at the same time He declares Himself to be One God. Now to human reason that makes no sense at all, but to attempt to explain it so it is acceptable to our reason we make a real mess of it. Let God speak and let faith be faith.
Finally, never stop searching after the one truth that God has revealed through His Word, the Bible. Don’t cop-out by giving up and surrendering the truth in the quagmire of conjecture and subjectivity. Never, ever settle for “lowest common denominator” theology. The teaching (doctrine) of the Church is one and can never be divided. It is only falsehood brought about by saying more than the Scriptures say (legalism) or falsehood brought about by saying less than what the Scriptures say (liberalism) that has divided the Church and caused speculation that God must speak with “forked tongue”, when He does not at all. As St. Paul says in Ephesians 4:4-5, “There is one body and one Spirit – just as you were called to one hope when you were called – one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”
by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
as published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
Righteousness is a “Church” word. Pastors use the word a good deal but rarely explain its meaning to the people. Righteousness is used by pastors a great deal because it is a critically important word. Primarily it is a word which describes God Himself. God’s righteousness describes not an attribute or characteristic of God but it describes His very make up, His very essential perfection. In other words, righteousness is not just what God does, its what He is.
There is another use for the word righteousness in the Scriptures. It is demanded of men that they should be obedient to God’s Law in such a way that they too are righteous. Herein lies the problem: There is no human being on the face of the earth that can ever measure up to the righteousness of the Law which is an expression of God’s own righteousness. Of course, that has never stopped us from trying!
One religion after another exhorts us to improve our behavior and thus please God. Unfortunately, the requirements vary from religion to religion. Some are less rigorous than others. Some simply require that we only need intend to do our best even if we can’t achieve it. It’s the intent of the heart that counts. In popular American culture this religion is often heard when we hear some one say, “We just need to do the best we can.” Then, we are assured that God will be pleased with us. This is a sort of “lowest common denominator” righteousness.
Another religion will provide a detailed list of things that covers every facet of life in order to inform us how to obtain a level of righteousness that will make us acceptable to God. Dietary laws, requirements to pray a certain number of times each day, setting aside a certain proportion of one’s income for the poor, required pilgrimages, and the like. If these are all done, and with the proper attitude, they you are considered righteousness enough to merit paradise.
The true Christian faith is quite different in this regard. The beginning of faith in Christianity is the realization that we have and cannot obtain any level of righteousness that is our own. It is basic to the Christian faith that we understand our status before a holy and righteous God as being completely without standing altogether. To put it another way, we are actually unrighteous! We deserve nothing but both earthly and eternal punishment forever. This is true because we are conceived and born as sinful human beings. Sin isn’t just what we do or fail to do, it is what we are by our very nature. When we look at God’s perfect Law we find nothing there but condemnation, death and hell. If we try to fulfill the righteousness of the Law, then we find the accomplishment completely impossible. How then can we find righteousness?
The truth of the matter is that righteousness finds us! In fact it is not even our own, but belongs to someone else. It belongs to Jesus Christ. God graciously knew that unrighteous humanity literally didn’t have a prayer of obtaining real righteousness. (Remember righteousness is God’s own essential perfection.) So, in deep and abiding love, He sent His only Son into the world in human flesh – God with a human face – to provide true righteousness to fallen humanity. Every act of His kindness, His healing, His Law-keeping, His graciousness, His compassion, His love, He gives to those who have been called to faith in Him. Those who bear the name Christian have received the gift, not of human righteousness, but of Jesus’ divine righteousness! His good works become ours! His perfection is ascribed to us!
But then there is still our sin. Jesus is the Father’s solitary answer to our sins as well as our unrighteousness. You see, God is not only righteousness, He is also justice. God won’t sweep sin under some proverbial rug or wink at it, or pretend it doesn’t exist. Instead He punishes each and ever sin ever committed. He doesn’t miss one! And it is here that we learn of the amazing grace of our heavenly Father. Instead of punishing us, He expends His full, righteous, divine wrath and judgment against sin on the innocence of His own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. When Christ is nailed to the cross, so too are our sins. Our punishment is meted out on Him instead of us!.
This is the only path to true righteousness! The great exchange which God gives to those who trust in the merits of Christ is that He receives our just punishment for sin, and we receive the precious gift of His perfect, divine righteousness. Therefore, when God sees those whose trust is in the payment for sin that Jesus made on our behalf, He literally sees His Son! Instead of seeing our innate unrighteousness, He sees the resplendent righteous perfections of His Son! We, then, are as welcome in heaven as His own Son!
So it’s time to forget the impossible dream of obtaining our own righteousness and cling to the only righteousness that will be able to stand before the Almighty Holy and Righteous God. That would be the righteousness of Jesus Christ our Lord.
by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
as published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
During the past four decades many Christian denominations have become, well, sappy. Theology has been abandoned for something called the “Social Gospel”, which is just doing nice things for people. Now I am not at all opposed to Christians and congregations expressing their faith in doing nice things for people and indeed the Holy Scriptures urge us to do so as the fruit of our faith. However, good works are the fruit of the faith, not the faith itself.
If you study the various other religions that populate this globe you will soon discover that they all believe in doing good works as does Christianity. But there is a huge difference in the way that good works are viewed by the Christian faith. In other religions good works are the means by which we curry “God’s” favor. Here’s the plan: If you do enough good things, then “God” will be pleased and will let you into heaven or reincarnate you to a higher plain, or grant you more inner enlightenment or whatever the “payoff” is in other religions. In stark contrast to other religions Christianity views good works simply as the expression of thanksgiving for what God has done for us through Jesus Christ. In other words, good works don’t earn us anything because Christ has already done that for us through His suffering, death and resurrection from the dead.
What has sadly happened in some quarters of Christianity is the insane desire to be so friendly with other religions that some have adopted the non-Christian view of good works and abandoned the historic Christian teaching concerning them! To say it another way some denominations have adopted the unbelieving way of seeing good works as the ultimate expression of our Christian faith. To do so confuses the fruit that grows in the life of the Christian as a result of God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ with the earning of merit leading to salvation. Some refer to this as the “Social Gospel”.
What Social Gospel actually means is that it is more important to do nice things for others than it is to proclaim God’s great message of eternal salvation through the merits of Christ alone. Ultimately this puts the cart before the proverbial horse, and messes up the message of the Gospel altogether.
I remember once a neighboring pastor in the town in Montana in which I served a congregation called me and asked if I was going to attend the anti-nuclear protest rally scheduled in our area. Since I am not opposed to nuclear weapons as a deterrent to war I said that I wasn’t planning on being there. She then got a bit steamed and declared: “Don’t you know that the anti-nuclear movement is the Gospel?”
There you have it. Social Gospel at its worst! Silly me, I always thought that the Gospel was the message told throughout the Holy Scriptures that mankind had fallen into sin and rebellion against God but God, moved my His great love for us sent His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ to satisfy the holiness and justice of our Creator by sending the punishment we deserved on the innocence of His Son. I always thought that the Gospel was the Good News that we need no longer live in fear of God, but can know Him as our greatest friend who has withheld not even His most precious Son so that we could know beyond a shadow of a doubt that all our sins have been forgiven because they have been fully paid for by Christ alone. I always thought that the Gospel was the astounding great news that the grave is no longer the end of life, but that through Christ’s resurrection from the dead we too shall live again with God forever in heaven.
Well, I still think that the Good News about Christ crucified and risen is the Gospel! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
as published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
There are certain things that we Americans (and lots of others) really don’t like to hear. First, we don’t like to hear that we are sinners! We’d all like to think that we’re all pretty nice people who try their best to be good. But then there’s reality. Every last one of us is guilty of being thoughtless, hurtful with our words and often selfish in our actions. One of the things we need to understand about sin is that being a sinner is not a comparison game. We aren’t more or less sinful if we compare favorably or unfavorably with another person. In the Scriptures we are told that our problem with sin is directly connected to a violation of God’s holiness and will. So how much sin does it take to be less than holy? What’s even more disconcerting is that the Scriptures also tell us that being a sinner is more about who we are rather than what we do or fail to do. The Old Testament prophet Isaiah hit the nail on the head when he said, “We all like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way...” (Is. 53:6) David, the great king of Israel, tells us plainly that we are conceived as sinful beings. (Ps. 51:5) So the Church has confessed over an over again that we are by our very nature sinful and unclean. Which means, of course, that we are completely unacceptable to God since He is utterly holy.
Second, we don’t like to hear that there is nothing that we ourselves can do about our estrangement from our Creator by our own effort, and have absolutely no way to merit God’s forgiveness. Often we are urged to keep trying to be better people. If that’s the case then I must ask, how good do you have to be? Sadly, the answer is always, “I don’t know.” Doing our best leaves us a long way from the holiness of God. If you want to earn your salvation, here’s all you have to do, follow Jesus’ instructions in the Sermon on the Mount and, “...be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Mt. 5:48) So go ahead and try, try, try until you’re perfect and then you can rest assured that God will let you in the gates of heaven.
Do you realize that all other religions in the world – except Christianity – operate on the “try, try, try” method? A Muslim must try, try, try to fulfill the five pillars of the faith. A Buddhist must try, try, try to follow the eight-fold path of enlightenment and acquire sufficient good karma to earn a transition to a better plane of existence/consciousness in the next incarnation. Secular humanists insist that it is our job to try, try, try to “leave the world a better place than when we were born.” Just try, try, try!
Christianity alone insists that you can’t possibly try hard enough. Recall, if you will, that Jesus saved His harshest words for the Pharisees, who interestingly were “trying” harder than anyone. (Mt. 23) It seems that God really hates self-righteousness, but He does so with very good reason!
Jesus despises self-righteousness (attempting to justify one’s self on the basis of being good), precisely because He has come to be righteous for us. Jesus was God who took on human flesh in order to do what we can’t do: be sinless. Since the fall of Adam and Eve into sin, we have all been sinners and since a man could not keep the Law of God, it had to be a man who finally kept it. Jesus did! And as a free gift, His very righteousness is given those whose faith is in Him alone (not in continued vain attempts to try harder.) Moreover, since God is just, He must punish sin and the punishment prescribed in the Scriptures for sin is death and eternal life in hell forever. Here’s some very good news for us sinners indeed: God the Father sent the full punishment for all our sins on His Son Jesus when He suffered on Calvary’s cross two thousand years ago on Good Friday. This is the amazing grace and love of the Father.
by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
as published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
Traditional Christianity with its liturgies and doctrines has fallen out of favor in recent decades. At least if you listen to modern theologians and media outlets it certainly seems that way. Now we want a god” of our own invention. We prefer a god we can custom design to match our own opinions about him. Along with re-inventing government, we may as well re-invent god in the process. And to make it all seem nice we’ll just decide that everyone is worshiping the same god but just in different ways. After all tolerance is a virtue, isn’t it? Instead of man being made in God’s image, it just might be more accurate to conclude that we create God in our own image instead.
And while we’re at it, let’s decide that the Bible isn’t really God’s Word after all. Maybe parts of it are and parts of it aren’t or maybe none of it is. The Bible will just cramp our style if we want to define God in our own way and according to our own ideas of what He might be like. And while we’re disposing of the Bible, let’s just get rid of any notion of absolute truth. After all, no one seems to be able to agree on what is true so we’ll just decided that whatever I believe is true is true and whatever you believe is true is true even if they contradict each other completely.
By the way, if nothing is really true or truth is contradictory, then let’s get rid of our old notions about morality while we at it. Hey, after all, everyone else is doing whatever they want to, why shouldn’t we? Live together without benefit of marriage? Hey, why not! Divorce your spouse for any and every reason? Well go ahead. And since the old model of family (Dad, mom and the kids), isn’t working out very well since about half of all marriages end in divorce, well then, let’s just redefine the family into whatever we decide it should be.
What do we get if we do all of the above? We get 21st Century America! We get sexually transmitted diseases! We get broken children from broken homes who repeat the cycle of brokenness! We get a world in which nothing is true and everything is subjective and relative! We get a real mess!
If you think God will tolerate any notion about Him, then you haven’t read the First Commandment lately. “You shall have no other God’s before me.” Or how about the wisdom of some of the other Commandments? “You shall not kill.” “You shall not commit adultery.” “You shall not steal.” “You shall not bear false witness.” “You shall not covet.” Doesn’t sound all that flexible, does it? Some mistakenly think that the Ten Commandments are put there by a mean-spirited God who just wants to spoil all our fun, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the Ten Commandments (which reflect God’s holiness and are a summary of the entire Old Testament), are put there precisely because God loves us and wants us to enjoy life to the full. If we do what they command, we will be protected from the terrible fall-out that inevitably comes when we break them. They are a divine hedge of protection around His creatures unfolding for them the best that life has to offer!
God is simply not amenable to being defined however it suits us. Indeed every “model” of self-invented “god” becomes a god who resorts to a “to-do list” of things that humans must do in order to be loved by such a god. But that is not at all the revelation of Himself that God makes in His Word, the Bible. Here’s the big surprise! The real God knows we can’t keep His laws! He knows that we have a problem called sin and, what’s more, He has provided a singular solution to our lawbreaking. His only begotten Son, Jesus the Christ, is His solution! Jesus keeps the law of God as a man born under the law exactly because we can’t. Besides that, Jesus (the man without sin) offers His life as a sacrifice in our place for our sins. God demands perfect law-keeping, and Jesus delivers with His perfect life. God demands that every last sin ever committed by anyone be paid for, and Jesus offers His suffering and death in place of our own. The real God knows that we can’t overcome death but Jesus, His Son can’t possibly stay dead because He is not at all guilty of sin.
Just a couple of weeks ago the Christians throughout the world celebrated Easter. Easter is not about bunnies and chocolate eggs, it’s about the final and great deliverance of humanity from our slavery to sin, death and the grave. To those whom God has given the gift of faith and trust in what His Son has accomplished, there is no better day than Easter! It is God’s triumph for us!
by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
as published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
Why do bad things happen in our world? Does God cause them? Is it different for Christians than for other people, and if so, in what way? These are good questions that deserve a well-reasoned and biblical answer. I would begin with a simple formula: “Good things come from God. Bad things come as a result of sin or as a result of living in a sin-fallen world.”
We are all well aware that when we do bad things, eventually we will suffer the consequences of our actions in this life. Who among us hasn’t experienced the painful awareness that we’ve brought on our own problems because of selfishness on our own part? Indeed, how frequently do we have to trace the painful moments in our lives right back to our own stupidity? God is not under any obligation to keep us from being stupid! In fact, it is a basic “right” He has given us to tell Him that we wish to do things our own way whether or not He approves. We call this our human free will and more often than not, it gets us into a lot of trouble.
Then there are those times when bad “stuff” just happens to us because of the self-centeredness of others. The boss who steals your good ideas and passes them off as his own. Or the spouse who thinks he is a good husband but spends many a night in the bars with his buddies while his wife is left alone. The examples could go on and on. Are these God’s fault? Of course not! Again it is sinful self-centered selfishness that is at the root of the problem.
How about diseases and natural disasters that ravage lives throughout the world cutting across every culture, every society and every nation? Is God responsible for cancer and stillborn babies? Is it God who afflicts the world with automobile accidents and hurricanes? To answer these questions it is necessary to go back to the creation of the world. In Genesis we read that God made everything and when He had completed His creative work, He pronounced it “very good”. There was never any intent in all of God’s creation to have disease, natural disasters, suffering or death of any kind. It was just as God had made it...perfect.
Now Adam and Eve are seduced by Satan in the Garden of Eden and everything goes bad because of their selfish actions. The relationship between man and God is ruined. The relationship between man and man is now couched in selfishness, and the relationship between man and the very creation itself is thrown into turmoil. It all stemmed back to human sin. Sin is not just what we do or fail to do, it is the condition in which we are conceived and born and it is the condition in which the world itself functions. Bad things happen because of sin or because of living in a sin-fallen world.
The Good News is that God has not abandoned us to live this way forever. Because He loves His fallen creatures, He sent His Son Jesus Christ into our self-centered world. Because we sinful humans can’t “fix” our world or ourselves, Jesus has come to do what we could not accomplish. In our sinful selves, we can’t do God’s will in our lives, so Jesus as the perfect, sinless God/man has kept God’s will for us and given us His own perfection in the eyes of the Father. Since God is holy and just, He must also punish sin, not just ignore it for that would violate His own nature. So Jesus the Christ takes humanity’s eternal punishment as our substitute when He suffered and died on the cross. Finally, Jesus claims the final and perfect victory over sin’s result: Death. Because Jesus rose physically from the dead, the eternal curse of death is broken for all whose complete trust is in what Jesus has accomplished rather than on any human contribution to our own salvation. Good things come from God!
Finally, Christians live in a sin-fallen world too, just like everybody else. Because of that we contract diseases, have accidents and get caught in natural disasters as well as do others. But we know that such evil does not come from God our Father. Furthermore, the Scriptures tell us that when hardship comes, God will graciously use it to our good (Romans 8:28) in order to draw us closer to Himself and to make us stronger. We also know that God always keeps His promises and that He has promised to return to this sin-broken world one last time. When He does come, all that has gone wrong will be set right for those whose faith is in Jesus Christ. Then there will only need to be this formula: “Good things come from God.”
by Rev. Richard A. Bolland
as published in the Pagosa Springs Sun
On Tuesday, September 11th, I had gotten up early, and was eating breakfast at a Denney’s Restaurant in Pueblo, Colorado. After finishing I got into my car and headed for Rocky Ford, Colorado to attend a pastor’s circuit conference there. Turning on the radio I was stunned by the news of not one, but two planes crashing into the World Trade Center in New York. A few moments later reports came in about a third plane impacting the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. It was difficult to believe that what I was hearing was real, but, of course, it was. Then it got worse. Now the radio was reporting that first one and then the other tower was collapsing and I could only imagine the loss of life that such a catastrophe represented!
It took about an hour to drive from Pueblo to Rocky Ford that morning and in the span of that brief time, our nation and the world changed. Emotions filled me. I was amazed by what I heard. I was deeply saddened by what I heard. I became very angry by what I heard. Then I realized that I too had changed. The change in me might well echo the change in you that occurred that day. And what was the nature of that change? All of us received a violent reality check. Suddenly the things we were sure of were no longer certain. We had been sure of our national safety. Certainly we were the only “superpower” on the globe so we had to be safe. Certainly we had the greatest military on the face of the earth, so we were not vulnerable to attack, at least not on the scale we witnessed on that terrible September morning. What was the change? Before we thought everything was under control, and now we knew that it wasn’t.
Every day we begin by thinking that this day will be reasonably predictable, but September 11th made us realize that such thinking is an illusion. In Matthew 24:6-8, Jesus says: “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.”
Jesus had a good handle on reality! He was never surprised by the events of His day and He was never surprised by the events of His life. Since He was fully God (Col. 2:9), He understood that as long as human history lasts on this globe the results of man’s rebellion against Him (called sin), would show its ugly face. If any of us harbored any idea that sin wasn’t real or that mankind is basically good, those illusions were fully exposed for the folly they were on September 11th. Even television news anchors who never speak of spiritual things were suddenly commenting on the evil they had witnessed.
What are we to make of such a life-changing, world-changing day? First, let us take Jesus’ advise, “...see to it that you are not alarmed.” Christians who understand the insidious nature of sin will understand that the events of September 11th are sadly “normal” for a sin-fallen world. Second, let us remember that it was precisely for the defeat of evil and sin that Jesus took on human flesh, suffered and died or us. He even died for the sins of the terrorists who did this terrible evil. To say any less is to discount the value of His life. Yet to those whose complete trust is in Christ alone for their salvation, here is also amazing assurance that our sins – no matter how grievous or long-standing, are truly covered by the suffering and death of Jesus the Christ.
Third, since we do live in a sin-terrorized world, let us be at prayer. Let us pray for our President, George W. Bush, for the Joint Chief’s of Staff, for the congress, that we would refrain from revenge, seeking justice and self-defense of the nation instead. Let us pray for the men and women serving in the military for their safety and their success in defending our nation’s freedom. Let us pray for the citizens of this nation that we end our illusion that we do not need each other. Let us issue prayers of thanksgiving for the grace of God shown us through the acts of kindness, self-sacrifice, and the out-pouring of help from our fellow citizens on behalf of those for whom the sadness and loss are the greatest.
Finally, let us thank God for the nation in which we live, for even though we have been badly shaken, we are still most blessed. As St. Paul says in Romans 8:28, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
