Integrity of the Gospel: Guv’nor, Meet the Glory
- ISSUE: Affairs are two people, each “turned in on oneself” using the other. No love there, but surely a lot of law squeezing between the sheets, right there in bed with them. Just ask the Guv or his Argentine girlfriend. They both were guilty as hell.
- UPDATE: "…moral lapses of Republican Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina will damage the GOP brand in the South. Sanford, who is married with four sons, had been a strong public advocate of ‘family values,’ but he has been making headlines because of his admitted affair with his Argentine mistress, Maria Belen Chapur."
- UPDATE: "South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has cleared his schedule this week to take a personal trip with his wife, three weeks after announcing his extramarital affair with an Argentine woman, his office announced Wednesday."
You have heard of Governor Mark Sanford? He’s back.
For a day or so Michael Jackson’s death grabbed the headlines; then his funeral drowned-out Sanford again. But sequentially, like an unending soap on daytime TV, squeezed between Jackson’s death, his memorial, and debate about where to plant his body, the story of Sanford’s affair with an Argentine mistress has long enough legs to jump from South Carolina where Sanford is governor to California where in Los Angeles Jackson reigns as king in his death as he never did in life. But intermittently, Sanford resurrects: several lead stories in a couple of days, see above, and here.
More than mere tabloid sex keeps the story alive.
Sanford had already admitted to adultery, five liaisons, in fact; he apologized to everyone, but insisted he would stay in office. He cited ancient Israel’s King David as reason for doing so. You know Bathsheba and all that? Of course, David had Bathsheba but one time, not five; but then he did do away with the lady’s husband.
Perhaps Sanford now owning up to several more than just five trysts with his lover is his way of keeping up with David. Then, too, he says he’s crossed the line with other ladies, as well.
But how did David get in the mix? Here emerges the drama turning cheap tabloid trash into a dynamo for the political press. Pundits smell more than a little hypocrisy from a sitting governor whose rise to Republican stardom began with winning a congressional seat way back in 1994. That’s when the ‘family values’ revolution engineered by Newt Gingrich threw the House of Representatives into wide-open, holier-than-thou, back-to-the-family Republican arms. Back then, Freshman Congressman Sanford was as holier as they come.
Now, the odor of two-faced legalism that exempts the politician from rules made for the public wafts through this whole affair like stink from my long-dead-dad’s Limburger cheese. Like a bumbling clown with a fan at a funeral, Sanford’s inept efforts to cool the affair keep the smell of something rotten hidden in the casket floating around the room.
Cubby’s Law
The smell intensifies when Sanford claims he has the moral support of a spiritual advisor who for awhile even led a Bible ‘boot camp’ in the governor’s home with the governor, his wife, and several other couples attending. Subject of the exercise: marital relations. It happened on Sunday afternoons – a good holy time – in May 2009, long into the affair.
In fact, the guv had let his illicit cat-housing out of the bag in a letter Mrs. Sanford came across back in January 2009. Upon being caught he claimed "he wanted to end the affair in person and, with his wife’s permission, went to New York with a ‘trusted spiritual adviser’ serving as chaperone." The guv and advisor met the lover and "the three went to church and dinner together and parted ways the same night," the AP reported (as appearing in the Washington Post.)
Bizarre? How stinky can this get?
Very. Seems the governor didn’t end the affair at all. The May marital boot camp series climaxed in June with him running off to Argentina to be with his lover; and then returning to own up publicly to his sin; but only after he had lied about going to Argentina, covering up with a made-up story about hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Boot camp in May; booty camp in June: is there a connection?
Without claiming clairvoyance, let me offer a clue from St. Paul.
"I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ‘Do not covet.’ But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetous desire. For apart from the law, sin lies dead" (Romans 7:7, 8).
In short, the law arouses passion for the forbidden. It is supposed to. Here we note that in spite of Paul’s clear statement about this not so cool affect of the law on human passions, spiritual advisor Warren "Cubby" Culbertson seems to make law the centerpiece of his counsel. Culbertson offers a series of studies titled "Cubby’s Notes."
While stating elsewhere that one is saved by grace, Culbertson claims that the "law of God is a tutorial vehicle nurturing a Christian’s transformation into God’s image." He references 2 Corinthians 3:18. Problem is the verse says nothing of the sort, nor does Scripture anywhere else say so. Scripture says just the opposite: the law is a trip-wire on the booby trap of illicit passion, intending to make what is illicit blow up in my face: "when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died" (Romans 7:9). The law dutifully warns against what is forbidden; but it just as dutifully awakens the "flesh"—that condition of wanting all that is separated from God, wanting what is forbidden. So want to guess where the guv’nor’s mind was on Sunday afternoons while Cubby laid down the law?
You can bet the governor was not so much the token hypocrite pretending to listen as the enthusiast listening with all his might. In doing so, he set himself up to be the victim of an IED, an Intentional Explosive Device—the law, doing just what God designed it to do.
The curse of a category error
Sadly, if we are to take Culbertson at his word, he makes a monstrous category error, not merely innocently mixing apples with oranges, but tragically inverting the antidote with the poison, life with death, the Spirit with law. This is not to say the law is poison, but that sin is; and that law serves to purposely aggravate sin just so as to expose it, impose a death sentence on it, and justly execute the sinner. So the "very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me" (Romans 7:11ESV). The law truthfully promised life by exposing human sinfulness and weakness while pointing to the solution, Christ and the power of the Spirit; the law fully intends that I run to the cross and there be saved by dying to law and sin to live to Christ. Blinding me to the power of the cross, sin deceives me by making me think as moralizing sinners do that the law intends that I do what I cannot: check passions at the door to get inside the holy club; the overpowering, deceitful focus inside becomes, as sin intends, the law and passion; but where this is the focus, passion explodes into action. I die by IED as the wages of sin, under judgment, condemned eternally. Thus, where law is the poison of sin will be, too.
So in fact the law (here the Torah in the context of all Old Testament Scripture) was in no sense a tutorial, but a tutor; that is, the law was never a tablet of moral lessons to follow, but rather "our guardian until Christ came" (Galatians3:24ESV). The law was Israel’s caretaker by covenant, and that of the entire world by extension through Israel. "The whole world is a prisoner of sin…so that law was put in charge to lead us to Christ,’ is how Galatians 3:22, 24 reads in the NIV. The law was the caretaker of those under the curse of the law directing everyone to Jesus to be saved, so as to be delivered from the curse to receive what the law could not provide—transformation by God’s very presence, his glory, his life received by faith. But this is vastly different from saying that the law is the Christian’s "tutorial vehicle." God forbid that it should be; for to take up the law as the vehicle of "a Christian’s transformation" is to impose the curse of a monstrous mistake whereby one deforms rather than transforms by putting the believer back under the curse as the prisoner of sin and law: "For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor…for all who rely on works of the law are under a curse… held captive under the law, imprisoned…" (Galatians 2:18; 3:10, 23ESV; see 10-29).
Hello, Gov’nor! Got our mind on God?
The Purpose of Torah
The law, Paul says, meaning Jewish law centered in the Torah, "is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted" (1 Timothy 1:8-11ESV).
In short, the law cannot be applied lawfully to the just, those vindicated by the blood of the cross, ‘born again’ believers being ‘transformed.’ Rather, law is used lawfully only to prove that one is a guilty rebel by stirring up passion for sin, making sin utterly sinful with death as its wage. It condemns the unjust, the unsaved whose natural hostility to what is holy opposes "sound doctrine…the gospel of the glory of the blessed God…"
It follows that sound doctrine of the gospel that indeed transforms cannot be the outcome of Culbertson’s boot camp if his "Cubby’s Notes" mark the course. Consider that he instructs, "Take your own spiritual pulse…Do you ‘joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man?’ Are you with your mind ‘serving the law of God?’" quoting Romans 7:22, 25. Culbertson implies this describes a Christian properly being transformed.
Tragically, he inverts what Paul says, and apparently leads his listeners astray in doing so. Without judging Sanford’s spiritual state, were Paul a fly on the wall in Columbia for the governor’s news conference, he would flit to Sanford’s shoulder and whisper, "You are the man, Guv’nor! I was talking about you in Romans 7!" The straying Governor owns up to this without meaning to when he contrasts himself with Culbertson, referring in a news conference to Culbertson as "a spiritual giant," a giant that he, Sanford was not but obviously longed to be; and he longed to be just because he "joyfully served the law of God with the inner man" and with his "mind" was "serving the law of God," but just because of that couldn’t keep a key member of his outer man, the flesh, in his pants.
Reading Romans 7 in context, Paul is saying that the worst adulterous, unsaved sinner—or backslidden saved sinner (have it your way, because either way Paul describes an awakened sinner serving the flesh)—convicted affectively by ongoing sin must answer to Culbertson’s questions, "Yes!" because these verses describe Israel personified under the law, aware of its demands but unable to comply. Israel admired the law sincerely, and was convicted by it. But rather than doing it, it did them: it aggravated their sin stirring hunger for the forbidden, showing that the law is righteous in then slaying the sinner.
It follows that the Lord Jesus Christ went to the cross as the curse of the law (Galatians 3:13) executed on the entire human race, but also as a sin offering (Romans 8:3NIV, NASB) for those who would believe in him as Savior and Lord. Thus, at the cross God executed judgment on sin; there he "condemned sin in the flesh" (Romans 8:3). Thus, Christ "died for all, and therefore all died" (2 Corinthians 5:14); so "the world has been crucified to me, and I unto the world" (Galatians 6:14) not as a super-spiritual experience of dedication but just because all died when Christ died on the cross. There God executed judgment on the old Adam sending Adam’s race with Christ into the grave. There that race remains "dead in transgressions and sins" (Ephesians 2:1) until the day when the secrets of men’s hearts will be exposed; that is what the law does to men, but can do no more. "If a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law" (Galatians 3:21).
That the law was never intended to impart life or righteousness comes clear in Romans 9-11 where Paul laments Israel’s rebellious effort to establish their own righteousness as God’s people in isolation from the Gentiles with Torah-keeping as the badge of family identity (Romans 10:3). The effort failed for good reason: rather than proving godly sonship, Torah only proved membership in Adam’s fallen family, a condition of isolation from God and each other the Bible calls sin, or more broadly, the flesh. The law exposes this condition by arousing sin to action, showing sin to be "utterly sinful." The law was added, Paul had said, "so that the trespass might increase" (Romans 5:20), climaxing in ultimate human sinfulness, the turned-in-on-oneself-involvement that crucified Jesus, and in doing so fulfilled the ultimate goal of law (Romans 10:4). Israel’s self-serving effort to make the law be other than God intended reflects in Romans 12—the grand climax to Romans 9-11, by the way—what Paul calls "the pattern of this world." This "pattern" is changeable only by a change of nature secured only by becoming a literal, connected-by-the-Spirit member of Christ’s body. The world’s pattern contrasts with, not law, but "the good, pleasing and perfect will of God" as tested and approved by a renewed mind, a "mind set on what the Spirit desires" (Christ and what belongs to him) not a mind set on the law, because "if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law" (Galatians 5:18)!
New Way of the Spirit
If the law is in any way God’s will—Culbertson adamantly insists it is, and we agree, but not with the way he thinks it is—then far from transforming the believer, the believer transforms the law from a mere rule book into a personal, living, spiritual encounter the believer can "test and approve." This puts into practice Romans 8:5-17, where Paul says "those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires…the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace…for you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’" In contrast with Romans 9-11, then, Romans 12 is a climatic statement of righteous living by sons of God in the power of the Spirit reflecting the fruit of family identity joining Jew and Gentile in one body of Christ (Romans 12:5).
We conclude, then, that the law partners with the flesh to inspire passion and prove human sinfulness; but the Spirit and the flesh are another matter: they repel each other like conflicting magnetic fields; they are absolutely opposed (Galatians 5:17). The flesh—Gr. sarx, not the body, but material being in service to sin—is the sworn enemy of the Spirit because "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2 Corinthians 3:17) to do other than what the flesh, inspired by law, demands.
Specifically, this is freedom from the fear-full old way of law-letter in order to serve God in the new way of the Spirit-life (2 Corinthians 3:6). Paul is referencing Exodus 34:5 where the Israelites "saw Moses, his face radiant, and they were afraid to come near him." In contrast, by the Holy Spirit without fear "we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another" (2 Corinthians 3:17, 18). We behold this glory not in the law, Paul clarifies, but rather "God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The fading glory that was once on Moses face (but never in the law) has gone, which fact Israel refuses to see due to the veil on their hearts; in contrast, the eternal glory has come for all who believe (compare 2 Corinthians 3:7, 8, 11, 13, 15; with 4:6). Thus, wherever by the Spirit we behold the glory of Christ in the gospel of the cross to which the law, the flesh, and sin have been nailed (Colossians 3:13-15), the flesh is powerless for "those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires" in order to "live by the Spirit…walk by the Spirit" (Galatians 5:24-26). What the law could not do, weakened by the flesh, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ has accomplished.
Consider that the Holy Spirit of God, not law, raised Jesus Christ declaring him to be Lord, and along with him the Holy Spirit of God, not law, raised all those who are in him by faith "in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit" (Romans 8:3, 4). The righteous requirement of the law is not obedience to rules but "what the Spirit desires", or "things of the Spirit" (v. 5NIV, ESV), which is Christ and the things of Christ because Jesus said plainly regarding the Holy Spirit that "He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you." It follows that the same Holy Spirit of God alone can transform anyone.
Guv’nor, meet the meet the gospel!
Indeed, meet glory of the Lord shinning from the face of Jesus through the sinless blood of his cross proven so by his resurrection through the power of the Holy Spirit. Being in Christis synonymous with power to put down the passions by "being transformed into the same image."
"You were called to freedom," Guv, not to fear-full passions aroused by law. "Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’" (Galatians 5:13, 14).
Sin, Luther thought, was to be "turned in on oneself." Affairs are just that; two people, each "turned in on oneself" using the other. No love there, but a lot of law first forbidding, then tantalizing, and finally squeezing between the sheets, right there in bed with them.
Just ask the Guv or his Argentine girlfriend. Tantalized by what the law forbade, trapped by what the law aroused, they tasted, savored, swallowed, and even feasted; but be sure they remained hungry, unsatisfied and as the guv said, "Afraid." Guilty as hell. That is law, doing what it is supposed to do, but no more than that. Because it cannot.
