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The not-Jesus-enough human
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Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know
Acts 2:22
As relates to holiness, the most crucial takeaway from Dr. Steve Deneff’s third Lesson is the fact that many Christians underestimate our humanity. They see our humanity as so unhuman that it is hardly Jesus. That is to say, if Jesus shows us the perfect human, then the concept of humanity many of us have is not quite human. It is far less than true humanity. We are so in tune with the fallenness of our humanity that we underestimate what God created humanity to be and what God might want to do in us today through the power of the Holy Spirit. And we fail to see Jesus as a model for what is possible for us to be as humans.
When Jesus was on earth, he was showing us what humanity could be here and now through the power of the Holy Spirit. He was not showing us an impossible dream. Everything that Jesus did while he was on earth is something that we can do through the power of the Holy Spirit. “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12).
What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! … through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.
Romans 7:24-25, 8:2
Nowhere is the underestimation of God’s power more clearly seen than in the pervasive misinterpretation of Romans 7. How many Christians identify with the words of Romans 7:19: “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing”? Surely, that is Paul indicating his own sense of defeat in the face of sin.
Yet it is the consensus of biblical scholars that Paul was not talking about his current state here. He was playing out what he set out in Romans 6 – “Thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin … you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness” (Rom. 6:17-18). He plays out first in Romans 7 what it is like to be a slave to sin, but then he reaches the climax of liberation from sin in 7:25: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ”!
Romans 8 then goes on to proclaim the victorious freedom from the power of sin that should take place in Christ. He even says that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:8, ESV). That is, those who are still slaves to sin as in Romans 7 are not pleasing to God. Rather, “walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Gal. 5:16).
To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is “remains.”
- C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Deneff’s point is that we have underestimated what humanity was made to be, and we have underestimated what God wants our humanity to become even here, even now. Holiness is not just something that we will only partake of when we get to heaven. Hebrews 12:14 says that “without holiness, no one will see the Lord.” It is clearly something we should eagerly pursue right here, right now!