http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15183895/does-the-new-testament-legitimize-slavery

It’s just Jesus. In Christ is all we get from God. Nothing more. Nothing other. He is the answer to our every need.

Does that disappoint you? Were you hoping for something newer? Or easier? Or cooler? Sorry, it’s just Jesus. He is who God is and all God gives us comes in and through him. Maybe that seems like dull news. But as we consider the great Reformation motto “Christ alone,” I hope to thrill you.

This one man who walked the earth long ago still lives. He interacts with us. He lifts away the blanket of guilt and blows the breeze of forgiveness. He fills in the yawning loneliness with a warm presence that will not leave us. He directs our wandering lives to eternally meaningful service. He calls us out of our endless self-loop to an abundant life of love. Just Jesus is a sky full of stars more than we can count. We can never reach the end of the beauty and mystery that awaits exploration. There’s always more.

Recovering Christ

The hallmarks of the Reformation are often expressed in five solas, five “only’s” that needed to be recovered to get Christians reconnected to the Savior. The first sola is Christ alone. All of our salvation, including our justification, comes from Christ Jesus, not from anyone or anything else.

“‘Just Jesus’ is a sky full of stars more than we can count.”

The Reformers labored to express what Christ alone meant in the context of the heavy-handed, burdensome requirements of the medieval church. The church had bottled Christ like a commodity. They had hidden him from the view of ordinary believers. But the recovery of Christ alone as the free gift of God for our justification cracked through those barriers and gave Jesus back to his people.

Of course, the Lord’s own people in every age are always prone to shade the searing light of Christ alone. So let’s consider now three aspects of what Christ alone might mean for the twenty-first century Western situation in which we find ourselves. Christ alone means God gives us Jesus in particular, only Jesus, and all of Jesus.

Jesus in Particular

Good mentors continually pressed this truth into me: There is no god behind the back of Jesus. God is nothing other than who he is toward us in Jesus Christ. Jesus “is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3). God is not an angry “Old Testament God” toward us one morning but then a sweetly accepting “New Testament God” toward us the next. When we see Jesus, we have a clear window into the triune God.

Jesus himself said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). There’s not God the Father over there and then God the Son over here (with the Spirit floating around somewhere). There’s only “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:10). In Jesus, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19). As this specific man, who stood so high and talked in this distinct tone of voice, who walked with this unique gait, and with a scent like no one else’s, God incarnated. Indeed, there is a reason only Christians worship the human founder of their faith. Because, wild as it is, we declare that precisely this Jesus, of all the humans who ever lived, is God come to us in flesh and blood.

Some have tried to avoid this scandal and seeming foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:22) by separating Jesus from his beloved title Christ. A liberal theologian once said, “There is more to the Christ than we meet in Jesus.” Another wrote of a “universal Christ.” Christ would thus be a principle or power that Jesus embodied — a principle we also can embody if we live authentically. As if!

Still others ask the question, “Who was Jesus before the church made him out to be God?” Their idea is to find the real Jesus by scrubbing away as inauthentic all his claims to be the Son of God. Couldn’t we just get back to the humble, wise rabbi from Nazareth who lights a path, among many, to the one God? No, Christ alone means this Jesus of the Gospels is uniquely the fully human, fully divine Savior.

Only Jesus

This second aspect reveals a distortion that even good Reformed Christians make. We know that Christ alone means there is no other person or path that can make us right with God. Paul wrote, “There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:5–6). Final salvation relies on the righteousness of Jesus as its sole basis. Only Jesus saves us for eternity.

That’s our deeply held confessional theology. But in our daily working theology, we may well rely more on what kinds of rightness we can generate. We can, often unconsciously, develop some self-salvation systems. No, not for final salvation, but for the immediate sense that we are doing well with God today. These are ways we reassure ourselves that we are okay. We can expose the futility of these soothing strategies by hearing how it sounds to substitute some of them for the riches of Christ alone.

In Ephesians 2, Paul reminds the church how alienated from God they had been. They were strangers to his covenants and promises, children of wrath, stuck dead in their trespasses. Then came an intervention: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:4–6).

We were dead, but God made us alive through Christ alone. There’s no more relieving and joyful news. But the truth is, I rely on other stories to comfort me. How silly they sound when inserted into this salvation:

But God, in reviewing your résumé, was so impressed that he raised you with Christ.

But God, when he noticed how great you looked after changing your diet and working out regularly, raised you with Christ.

But God, because you got his attention by your acts of creative compassion, raised you with Christ.

Ridiculous! All my reliance for rightness based on self-generated worthiness gets incinerated in the fire of only Jesus, every moment as well as into eternity.

All of Jesus

Finally, Christ alone means God has nothing else to give us than what he gives us in Jesus. But getting Jesus is getting everything. Joined to him by the Holy Spirit through faith, we receive all that Jesus is for us. So Paul could exclaim that God has relocated us into “Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30).

This glory overwhelms the eyes; we struggle to take it in directly. We get a glimpse of what it means to have all of Jesus by looking at the benefits that flow from our union with him. We return to the treasury of Ephesians, specifically 1:3–14. Paul writes that in Christ we receive:

every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places
the joy of being chosen before the foundation of the world
the promise of being made holy and blameless
the eternal adoption to himself as sons
redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses
the lavishing upon us of the riches of his grace
the gift of knowing the mystery of God’s will: his purpose to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth
an inheritance in heaven
the blessed Holy Spirit in our hearts as a seal and guarantee

“In giving us all of Jesus, the Father makes us jewels in his crown of glory.”

In giving us all of Jesus, the Father makes us jewels in his crown of glory. We become reasons for the triune God to be praised.

Christ alone means just Jesus. But this particular man Jesus is God incarnate. He only is our righteousness and our salvation, not just in eternity, but now as we live and work, needy for a sense of rightness. He gives us nothing less than himself. Christ alone. Just Jesus. That’s everything we need.

For Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. (Genesis 2:20)

Helper. Many women in our day have chafed at this word, at this characterization of our calling from God. A helper is clearly not in charge. A helper is not usually center stage. A helper may feel (and rightly!) that she has gifts and talents that enable her to do the work better. A helper rarely gets as much recognition for her work. A helper may feel like a second-class citizen. And we could go on.

Some of these assumptions may be true, some are outright lies, but all of them miss the point. Each of the above statements comes from the perspective of fallen creatures, socialized in the modern world; none seriously attempts to consider what the Creator himself had in mind when he designed and assigned callings to men and women.

“When God created male and female, he did not mean to glorify men and demean women.”

When God created male and female, he did not mean to glorify men and demean women, as if helper somehow meant lesser. God created humans — men and women together — as the pinnacle of all creation, crafting both in his very image (Genesis 1:27). He created them with distinct and complementary attributes, inclinations, and gifts that make them indispensable to one another and to his plan for filling the earth with his glory.

Helper with Equal Honor

Now, God did make man first, and he gave man the primary responsibility (and accountability) for the outworking of his plan (Genesis 2:7, 15–17; 1 Timothy 2:13) to extend his glory (Ephesians 1:10). But by giving man primary responsibility and accountability, did God intend for Adam to be a mini-god on earth, decisively higher than his wife, who was also made in God’s image?

No. Before God made Eve from Adam, he humbled Adam by permitting him to discover how impossible his task would be without help — God’s help and human help. God had already indicated that it was not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18), but then he set Adam to naming all the animals, building to the discovery that “there was not found a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:19–20). Then, at the creation of Eve, Adam’s “at last” shows the relief and delight he felt (Genesis 2:23). He knew he needed a helper for this mission.

Woman, then, was not created as a subjugated slave, but as a means of mutual blessing for them both. She was, and is, an essential partner and helper in the grand work of subduing the creation and filling the earth with God’s imagers, giving glory upon glory to the eternally worthy God.

The twisted lie that Adam is more important, that Adam’s call means power and privilege, and Eve’s subjugation, springs out of the pride that human hearts have harbored since the fall. Men too often have been puffed up to lead with domineering power, and women too often have been puffed up with righteous indignation, asserting that they have just as much of a right to power and privilege as men do.

“Self-centered, bullying leadership was never God’s plan. Neither was self-centered resentment when called to help.”

Of course, Adam could not assume responsibility (and accountability) without the associated ability (and burden) to make critical decisions. But all throughout the Bible, and especially in the life of Jesus, we see that every earthly power is subject to the righteous and holy God. A holy exercise of any ability may not please everyone, but it is never to be self-serving or oppressive, and is always to be characterized by humility and self-sacrifice. Self-centered, bullying leadership was never God’s call. Neither was self-centered resentment when called to be helper.

Pride on Both Sides

At this point, I expect some women today want to say, “But men’s leadership throughout the ages has rarely reflected humility and self-sacrifice. Men have abused power and oppressed women (and others) in every generation!” Yes, they surely have. And I’m not excusing that in any way. To the contrary, we long and pray for justice in this earthly life, and my soul trembles when I see men misuse their authority. If you believe for a moment that a righteous and holy God will not hold men accountable for such sinful behavior, you are not familiar with the God of the Bible. Judgment is real, and it is coming.

At the same time, we can’t condemn men without acknowledging that women, too, have been guilty of being more concerned about our own image, advancement, power, and perhaps even “rights” than about honoring our God by being the kind of people he made us to be. God’s people were made to humbly, sacrificially, and joyfully welcome the privilege of their God-given callings and delight to reflect God’s own beauty and righteousness in those callings. Oh, how men and women should both fall on our faces in repentance — and thanksgiving — as we acknowledge our failures and lean on God’s loving grace through Jesus.

Exceptions and the Rule

We cannot escape the conclusion, then, that God made men to act as the head of our homes and our churches. In a few cases in the Bible, as a desperate measure revealing desperate times, God called women to leadership roles typically assigned to men, but Scripture doesn’t suggest that God altered his original plan. There is no indication, for example, that after Deborah there were a growing number of women judges (Judges 4:1–16), or that Abigail, after quietly taking initiative to protect her community from the poor judgment of her “worthless” husband (1 Samuel 25:14–35), and later married David, took charge in that relationship.

When Jesus enters the picture in the Gospels, we do see women deeply involved in and around his ministry (as in Luke 8:1–3). If anyone would have been justified in lording his power and position over others, it would have been Jesus, but he never led that way (Mark 10:42–45). He clearly loved and welcomed women’s contributions to the ministry. At the same time, however, Jesus did not name women among his Twelve. Paul, too, treats women with a remarkably high regard throughout his ministry, even commending Phoebe as his messenger to the church of Rome (Romans 16:1–2), but he clearly did not ordain women as pastor-elders (1 Timothy 2:12–3:7).

God’s ways often turn ours upside down, but this we know for sure: God does not want us to sin and rebel against him, but to see the all-surpassing wisdom and love behind his design and eagerly dedicate our lives to his call. We bring glory to God when we believe and joyfully obey him.

Are We Helping?

Sisters in Christ, it is wonderful that God has called us to be helpers. We are helpers in God’s very image, and we alone are made to bear God’s image-bearers. What a sacred and holy responsibility! If God has given you a husband, you were made to fit with and help this man whom God has charged with leadership. If you aren’t (yet) married, but would like to be, the word helper is a reminder to be wise and discerning before accepting a husband. Choose a godly man you will gladly help as he leads.

If we humble ourselves before our God, we will have the opportunity to use our faith, creativity, discernment, gifts, and abilities to join with, build up, and encourage husbands, pastors, and other male leaders. If we bring a humble servant-heart and true joy in Jesus to our task, who knows how we might change relational dynamics and contribute far more than we can think or imagine?

Are we helping? Is our spirit filled with discontent and envy at the calling God has given us, or are we delighted to be given such an important opportunity to rule and reign with our men under Christ? Are we judging rather than trying to understand? Are we critical rather than compassionate and encouraging? Are we faithful — trusting that God has placed the male leaders in our lives for his good purposes?

Women, let’s set aside our own distorted views of what it means to help and ask God to show us how he planned this calling to be a blessing to us, to the men in our lives, to our community, and to all creation. We live and serve to please One, and he delighted to make us helpers in his grand plan. Oh, that we may delight in this calling too.