Divinity and High Standards

There are three ways of reacting to God's command to be holy as he is holy. We can lessen his holiness and feel righteous--or unrighteous--in ourselves, or we cal recognize his holiness and his sufficiency.

The commands of Scripture must not be made a dull blade, but must be recognized as sharp with God's divine standard. The commands hold forth the standard of God, and thus God's perfect goodness, as a standard we could never meet. If we seek to dumb down the commands, we must lose a sense of God's holy goodness.

If we are seeking our righteousness in ourselves, the commands will make us guilty or proud. If we know we depend on an alien righteousness, the commands will instead make us acutely aware of the necessity and sufficiency of Christ. We feel crushed by guilt only when we think that it is up to us to carry the burden of guilt. When we recognize that our guilt is a burden Christ bore, and which Christ only could bear because he fulfilled the standard we could not fulfill, because he is the standard, then the commands of God show us how great a salvation we have received: how free a gift we have been given, how dependent we are on that gift, and how unimaginable the goodness of God is. We would never have set so high a standard as God sets, for we know we would fail, but God sets the highest standard for himself, and calls us to try it, to show us how true and good and powerful he is, and how beyond human wisdom his wisdom is.

If our religion did not hold out commands high above any we would set for ourselves, if Christianity did not call us to come and die to ourselves, if it did not set a standard which we could not hold each other to for fear of hypocrisy, then we might argue that it was a merely human religion. But the commands are so far above any this world has produced, yet so true to what we are most certain of that the fulfillment of these commands would outshine the most righteous human of our imagining. Because the commands outstrip our wildest dreams of righteousness, we can claim with confidence that this must be of God, that this religion cannot be a mere invention, for no one would dare to invent this. No one would dare to hold himself to this standard. Unless that someone were God or had the righteousness of God. God came down, and we now have his righteousness, so that we can confidently face commands which we still do not fully satisfy, and be confident that we stand secure in the righteousness of Christ who accomplished all that God called for.

To lower the standards is to cheapen the Gospel, because it makes our salvation petty and our God meager. To raise the standards is only legalism when Christ is not permitted to satisfy them for us, and then it leads naturally to lowering the standards to be within our reach. We can only be consistently legalistic by lowering the standard. Raising the standard places the emphasis on Christ's righteousness, not our own.