CHRIST AS WISDOM FROM GOD, AND RIGHTEOUSNESS, AND HOLINESS, AND REDEMPTION

J. M. Macfarlane

1 Corinthians 1: 30, 31; Luke 12: 20, 21; Romans 6: 20–23

This verse in 1 Corinthians 1 speaks about the things

that Christ has been made to us, “who has been made to us wisdom from God, and righteousness, and holiness, and redemption”. It is an interesting set of things and if these are the things that He has been made to us, I think we can conclude that these are the things that we need. People have all sorts of ideas about the things that they need, but this is revealed from God, a short list of things that we need. I do not expect that you will see reference to a list of human needs of this kind in the newspaper tomorrow. There may be reference to poverty, and poverty comes in many dimensions. What you will find is human wisdom being applied to these things, because it is all that mankind has at its disposal in its present condition away from God. People wonder about things that happen in the world but they happen as they do because mankind has responsibility which it seeks to exercise apart from any communion with God. That is the character of the world. People tend to blame God for things, but responsibility lies with mankind; God has put it there. If men and women were not responsible, there would be no point in preaching the glad tidings, because the word of God addresses people who are responsible. Generally, people do not want to have anything to do with God in the discharge of that responsibility and that is why things in the world are as they are. People attempt to deal with things with the resourcefulness of the moment or according to the accumulated wisdom of mankind.

It is striking, then, that in this section Paul speaks first of all about wisdom from God. The context for this was that Corinth was a Greek city and Greece represented the best development of human wisdom, I suppose, when this was written. It had been superseded in power by Rome, but intellectual achievement was still associated with Greece and what the apostle Paul is announcing is the way that God had come in in His answer to the human condition, in contrast to the wisdom of mankind. He speaks about a different kind of wisdom and his simple statement is that Christ Jesus has been made to us wisdom from God. We have to consider this, because attention to the things that are the subject of the glad tidings is a matter of wisdom. It is for that reason that I read the section in Luke’s gospel, because a man is there who is about to have to give account to God as a responsible person. What God confronts him with is not exactly his righteousness or his unrighteousness, nor his holiness or lack of it. He is addressed by God as a fool, and that is a sobering thought. He does not say ‘wicked man’, or ‘unrighteous man’, or ‘unholy man’, or ‘impious man’, and perhaps all of these things might have been applicable, but He says to him, “Fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee”. So what we have to see is that it is a matter of wisdom that heed be paid to the word in the glad tidings and this word presents the work and the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The apostle begins this section that finishes where we have read in 1 Corinthians 1, at verse 17 where he says, “Christ has not sent me to baptise but to preach glad tidings”, and immediately he says, “not in wisdom of word, that the cross of the Christ may not be made vain”. Now if the wisdom of God is so radically different from anything of human origin, then I think the apostle’s reference to the cross of Christ provides the key. On the one hand mankind has its programmes and initiatives and development arrangements, and God treats the whole of this human activity, that operates without reference to Himself, by drawing attention to the cross of Christ. The Lord Jesus was crucified at Golgotha, and we have often been reminded that Golgotha means “place of a skull” (John 19: 17); it is the ultimate comment on human wisdom. We have to dispose of it completely and consider only God’s way of salvation. You may feel that the cross, at the place of a skull, is not a pleasant picture and certainly it is not. If God is a God of love, as we are assured, is there no other way? The cross is not a pleasant spectacle because of the character of sin as offensive to God. At the cross, God dealt with the issue of sin that stands between God and men. The God we are speaking about is a holy and righteous God, and man’s unrighteousness put a distance between him and God which man himself could never cover. On the cross the Lord Jesus Christ gave His life as a sacrifice for sin and, in the three hours of darkness, He dealt with the issue of sin in a transaction that took place between Himself and God. It was enshrouded in darkness because it was between Christ and God alone. The circumstances were awful and horrifying but as nothing compared with what it meant for the Lord Jesus Christ, the One who, as to Himself, was “holy, harmless, undefiled” (Hebrews 7: 26), to be made sin in order to satisfy God in respect of sin. We have assurance in the inspired word that, by this means, sin was dealt with.

He “bore our sins in his body on the tree”, 1 Peter 2: 24. He “made peace by the blood of his cross”, Colossians 1: 20. These were the accomplishments of the Lord Jesus when He laid down His life on the cross.

So the wisdom of God comes in a word of this character. You say I cannot fathom it. You are not meant to fathom it; it was fathomed by Christ alone. You do not have the capacity, nor do 1, because of the unholiness that is naturally ours, to deal with sin according to the demands of a perfectly holy God. And so the word comes as the word of the cross “to them that perish foolishness, but to us that are saved it is God’s power” (1 Corinthians 1: 18). Then Paul continues to speak further about the way that God has wrought in the answer to the issue of sin and the way in which it is so different from anything that man might have devised. Verse 21 is one which has often intrigued me: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom has not known God, God has been pleased by the foolishness of the preaching to save those that believe”. Note well that “in the wisdom of God” you have access to all that has accrued from the work of the Lord Jesus Christ by the exercise of faith. God is not asking for your comprehension of these things, or any sort of intellectual grasp of it, because it is beyond you and it is beyond me. All we can say is, glory to God that there was One who was able to deal with it in its every dimension, and that the benefit of it comes to you and to me simply by the exercise of faith. You say, Well I have concerns about these things but I do not have the faith for it. God will even provide you with the faith. It says, “through faith; and this is not of yourselves; it is God’s gift”, Ephesians 2: 8. No one can sit in a preaching or in any other circumstance and say, I have serious concerns about how I stand with God because I am not sure whether I have the faith for it. It is yours for the asking. Express your concerns to God and find that He will communicate to you even the faith that you must exercise in order to make salvation your own.

Paul continues then to speak about the way in which Christ has been made righteousness, “who has been made to us wisdom from God, and righteousness”. As you have some grasp of the fact that your responsibility will render you accountable to God, you realise that you will be unable to stand before Him except as righteous. That is what His presence demands.

Having placed your faith in Christ, however, you have a righteousness before God that is as acceptable to God as Christ is. God has been glorified in the work of Christ and a righteousness of that character is available to you. It is in Christ, “who has been made to us ... righteousness”. Now in the world around people will attempt to establish their own righteousness. People will say that they have not done anyone any harm and they do the best they can, and so on; but remember the perfect and absolute standard that God requires.

People look upon one another and they deal in averages but when set in contrast to the absolute and perfect righteousness of God, human moral averages are of no value whatsoever. The prophet in the Old Testament has to say, “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64: 6), and that must extend to the best that human kind can offer. It is one of the distinguishing characters of the Christian

message, against other religions, that it takes the righteousness of an ordinary person in his natural condition and says it is of no value whatsoever in establishing acceptability to God. I am led to believe, for example, that a Muslim will maintain that he can stand before God in his own righteousness. Now that is a standard of righteousness that is immeasurably below the one that is presented here. In verse 29 it says, “so that no flesh should boast before God”.

No one can stand before God and say, I will offer my own righteousness to Him. It would be utterly inadequate and offensive to God, because effectively it would be saying that God’s standards of righteousness and holiness were sufficiently low to accommodate what I am offering. Would you like to spend eternity with a God whose standards were as low as that?

That is unthinkable. It is to the eternal benefit of you and me that we must answer to a God whose standards of righteousness and holiness are absolute and perfect; otherwise how could you put confidence in Him?

A righteousness as perfect as God demands is available to you to be able to stand in His presence. God can view you as you stand before Him justified. This means that the issue of your sins is not just one that has been met. If I have any understanding of it at all, justification means that sin does not come into consideration at all as you stand in the presence of God.

That is the extent of the accomplishment of Christ. If you look for a proof of it, the proof of it is that God raised Him from among the dead. If the removal of sin meant that He must be made sin, then His resurrection meant that sin attached to Him in no degree whatsoever. It had been removed completely. We read in Romans that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6: 23). If sin had attached in any residual way to Christ, then He could not have come out from the dead, but He was raised because of the completeness of the removal of sin. He has been glorified too and received into the glory of the presence of God. May you be able to grasp these things by faith

and find the joy of having them as your own. This righteousness is one which you can lay hold of for yourself, as you must do because God is looking at you as an individual. It was interesting to read this afternoon in the book of Ruth where one of the distinctive features is that God deals with individuals and, in your particular individual need for righteousness. He has provided for you.

Paul then speaks about holiness. According to the translator, the word used here for holiness is ‘the practical effect produced, the character in activity’. You have righteousness by the exercise of faith, but holiness is different. It is not simply that you now have a status by accepting the work of Christ by faith that fits you acceptably for the presence of God. What holiness means is that there is some development in a way that is different from the natural unholiness of the man of the flesh. God is holy. The Word speaks of “holiness, without which no one shall see the Lord”, Hebrews 12: 14. Not only are you righteous by faith in Christ, but there is a practical difference in the way in which your life is lived.

It is not elaborated in the section here, so I have read in Romans 6 simply to give an indication of the way in which it is developed by the apostle. In that chapter he is speaking about righteousness, the fact that “when ye were bondmen of sin ye were free from righteousness”, and then he goes on to say, “What fruit therefore had ye then in the things of which ye are now ashamed? for the end of them is death”. Fruit means practical results that God finds acceptable. One Man is acceptable to God, and fruit is that which is a reflection of Him. There is a new order of man under the eye of God. Since the resurrection and the glorification of the Lord Jesus Christ there is an order of man that gives pleasure to God. It is found both in Him personally and also where there is life according to His order. I believe that is what is referred to here, that Christ is made unto

us holiness. It is not a matter of status before God. It refers to the practical effect in our lives, which are transformed because a completely different principle regulates them. Power is given for this and it is the power of the blessed Holy Spirit of God. Holiness is referred to in His title. His title is the Holy Spirit of God. The Christian not only knows that he is secure for eternity but he can step out confidently in life and know that, as a result of Christ’s glorification, the Spirit is given. Thus he can walk here in a practical way that can be described as holy and, as a result of that, there is something yielded from his life that is to the pleasure of God. There is something that reflects Christ to God, “your fruit unto holiness, and the end eternal life”. Eternal life means a whole manner of life that is different from the kind that you see around. On it is the stamp of death, “dead in your offences and sins” (Ephesians 2: 1); that is the condition of natural man. The Christian lays hold of something that is different and can be described as eternal life. There is fruit to God and someone that is bearing fruit to God is not a person who is dissatisfied. If there is fruit to God, be assured that there will be a kind of satisfaction that is not even suspected in the empty and disappointed world that exists around us.

Finally, “and redemption”. Perhaps we might have tended to put redemption along with righteousness, but the fact that we are not only saved but redeemed is something that is worth remembering. God can lay claim to us because He is the Creator but, as a result of the incomparable and immeasurable spending on the part of God in giving His Son, He also has the claim of Redeemer over us. God views us as His possession. This is another thing which will practically transform your life. You are not at your own charges. Again, if we can refer to the reading in the book of Ruth, Elimelech and his wife and his two sons went from the land of Judah down to the fields of Moab because things went against them. Redemption money had been paid for these people and God had a claim over them in a way that foreshadowed the claim that He would make in Christ by redemption. I do not think that in moving down to the fields of Moab they were in the good of that. If God has a redemptive claim over me it means that I am His and that I am under His direction, and not free to operate as might suit me best according to the principles that might once have motivated me.

Things are different. The apostle Paul could say, “God, whose I am and whom I serve”, Acts 27: 23. Christ was His Lord and Paul was the servant of the One who was the Lord. “Whose I am”, I think, indicated that he was continually conscious of the fact that he was a redeemed person and that God had this claim over him. God has a claim over me, but it is a claim of love. His expenditure is a measure of the extent to which He loved us—“God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son”, John 3: 16. The expenditure beyond human reckoning that was involved in the accomplishment of redemption is a measure of the love of God. Is it not rather wonderful to have a sense of being owned by One who has paid for you as an expression of the extent to which He loved you?

Accepting that I am Christ’s possession and that He is my Lord means that there is regulation for my life. It is a wonderful regulation which brings liberty rather than limitation and will keep us in the love of God so powerfully expressed in securing our redemption. May there be greater depth in our appreciation of the greatness of the way in which God has operated for our blessing and His glory, and may we thus be moved to the worship by which God is enriched, so that there might be an acceptable return for the spending that has been His. He desires that we might be responsive to Him. May it be so, for His name’s sake.

Preaching at Kirkcaldy
21 January 1996

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