GRADING ON THE CURVE

GRADING ON THE CURVE

                I don’t know how they do it today but in my day some teachers would grade on the curve. That is to say, if the test, because of its unusual level of difficulty, caused the general grade of the class to be lower, the teacher would grade according to the mean level of the scores. If the highest score was only 70%, then everyone below the 70% would look a little better with their score.

                I think that method served to make sure that the test was not unreasonably difficult. After all, any teacher could throw together a bunch of questions, or even trick questions that could cause nearly everyone to fail. So grading on the curve keeps the tests fair and reasonable.

                So when it comes to keeping the Ten Commandments, one might think that since as the Bible says, “None is righteous, no not one” Romans 3:10-12, Psalms 14:1-3 and “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23 that God might look at humanity’s failure as a whole to keep the Commandments and He might then grade on the curve, therefore giving people a better chance at a passing grade.

                In class in school, when the teacher graded on the curve, there was always that ridiculously brilliant student that would get somewhere between 98 and a 100% on the test and so everyone groaned and thought unkind thoughts about the one that always seemed to ruin the curve with their high score.

                But God had a very different way of handling the problem of our 100%failure. Instead of grading on the curve, God came into the world as one of us and scored 100%, then He died at our hands and rose again from the dead to become our high priest of a New Covenant. This New Covenant didn’t grade on the curve, either, but rather offered to place Jesus’ 100% score on our report card. This is amazing grace.

                But what is so impossibly difficult about ten simple little commandments that upwards of 10 billion people throughout history have never been able to keep it? Ten little rules about loving God and loving each other… what could be so hard?

                And yet we fool ourselves if we set out with confidence to keep them.  Right there at the foot of Mt. Sinai, even as the mountain still rumbles with the presence of Almighty Good, Israel makes this promise saying: “All that the Lord has said we will do.” Ex. 19:8. And how did that work for them? As soon as Moses was gone a little longer than they thought he should be gone, they reverted to the ways of Egypt and a bunch of them start dancing naked around a golden calf and having orgies to boot, since that is a part of pagan temple practice… you know… fertility and all of that… today we just hunt Easter Eggs. But I digress.

                When Adam and Eve sinned and chose Satan as their new god, something fundamental changed in them and therefore something fundamental changed in everyone that was born after them. Their bodies were no longer temples of the living God and they had literally no way to get Him back.

                This is why God had to dwell in a tabernacle. He could no longer dwell in human beings. So He had Moses build a tabernacle to represent the nature of man (body, soul and spirit) in order that He could teach us what God must do in order to restore us to that relationship that Adam and Eve lost.

                This is why keeping the Law will never repair your breaking of the Law. You are still saddled with the same flesh and so there is no way back, no matter how many resolutions you make. In fact Gal. 5:17 says:

                For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things you please. But if you are led by the Spirit you are not under the Law. Gal 5:17, 18.

                So when people tell you that the way back to God is to keep the Commandments, there is something fundamentally wrong in their understanding. You cannot repair the breach by keeping the Law any more than Adam and Eve could have worked their way back into God’s presence by more fervently eating from the tree of Knowledge of good and evil. They needed the Tree of Life, but it was no longer within their reach.

                Jesus is that Tree of Life and the only way back to Jesus is to enter into His death by faith and then be raised up by the power of His resurrection. We can’t just change our ways. We must die to Satan’s kingdom and that death is only possible through the death of Jesus Christ. This is why Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be born again. John 3:3 It is also why Paul told us saying:

                “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.” Phil. 3:7. In other words all that he had built as his legacy under the Law, he now considered to be rubbish compared to knowing Christ. As an Old Testament believer he was still in the flesh and the Spirit of God was dwelling in the temple down the street but not in him. So no matter what kind of edifice he was building under the Law, it could not fundamentally change the fact that he was still in the flesh and the flesh is at war with the Spirit.

`               So what was Paul doing to try to compensate for his fleshly ways? He was fervently hunting down and killing those who had become temples of the living God, simply because the life they were now living seemed to Him to be contrary to the Law upon which he depended for his righteousness.

                Today our attempts at pleasing God under Law are much more subtle. We see the good things we do and our obedience to the Law to somehow be building in our account something valuable for the kingdom. IF I feed the poor, such as our church did yesterday. If I devote myself to help on the worship team with its practices and dedication… if I go the extra mile and make it to church on Wednesday night, or pray for people, surely that will gain me favor with God.

                Unfortunately, or actually fortunately, God doesn’t see any of that. All He looks for in and on me is the robe of Christ’s righteousness and the blood of Jesus that covers my sins and my sinful nature. So we live under largely false pretenses when we do what is good. We think we are doing it to gain brownie points with God, but even the good we do is as filthy rags.

                So if I live a good Christian life and I feed the poor and go to prayer meeting and love my church family and my neighbor and love God and give myself to His ministry in the world, it is not to gain favor with God. He does not grade on the curve. My feeble efforts add nothing to my salvation for there is always Someone who got 100% on the test and that was Jesus. If I am going to gain favor with God then I am going to have to wear His robe of righteousness and plead His blood over my natural born sinfulness and ways of the flesh.

                I don’t do what I do, write what I write, sing what I sing and give what I give to build favor with God. I do all of those things because I have become a temple of the Holy Spirit 1 Cor. 3:16, 17 and to the extent that I live by His Spirit rather than by my flesh, to that extent I live a righteous life. It is all Him and none of me.

                “Well then” you may say as some do today, “If the things I do don’t add up points with God, then I may as well sit on the couch and eat jelly donuts and watch TV and wait for Jesus to come.”

                But this thinking is drastically wrong. The Holy Spirit will never direct you to sit on your couch and to eat jelly donuts and watch TV. It is the flesh that wants to do that, not God. And Romans 8:14 says this about that:

                “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.”  Romans 8:14 So it is not enough to claim you have the Holy Spirit because you got a good feeling at church. When the Holy Spirit enters your temple, it is going to change everything… your motives… your actions… your love… your compassion… your giving… everything is going to change because you are no longer driven by the flesh, but you are being transformed by the Spirit.

                You have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless you live, yet not you, but Christ lives in you, and the life that you now live in the flesh you live by faith in the Son of God who loved you and delivered Himself up for you.”Gal.2:20 And that key text is bracketed by the text that comes before it and the one that comes after it.

                “Through the Law I died to the Law, that I might live to God.” Gal. 2:19 and “I do not nullify the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly.” Gal. 2:21

                Jesus came and died in order to remove the Law as our source of pleasing Him and in its place He gave us His own Spirit so that when we live by that Spirit, the Law will be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. Romans 8:4

                We can preach the Law to sinners because they are still under the Law and they will be until they enter into Christ’s death. The Law is that means by which they will die. It brings them to the foot of the cross to find forgiveness and a new life. But the Law can go no further than that because it is an instrument of death and not life. Its job is to identify and condemn sin.

                But when it comes to preaching to the saints, then we must urge each other to live by the Spirit and not by the flesh. We need the God kind of love in our lives and this is a love that flesh cannot produce. We need His love or we are just clanging cymbals. 1 Cor. 13:1

                1 Cor. 13 tells us what a God kind of love is like. Galatians 5:22 shows us the fruit of the Spirit. 1 Cor. 14 shows us the gifts of the Spirit by which we may minister to others. 1 Cor. 12 gives us a list of the Spiritual gifts that He has given to the church. Have you found yours?

                So if we are going to live by the Spirit rather than by the flesh, we are going to engage in the work of the Spirit and not the works of the flesh. We are going to seek God to know which gifts He has prepared us to work in and then receive and to operate in those gifts for the betterment of others. They are not self-centered gifts… not party favors handed out for our own gratification.

                This Christian life is a supernatural life. It far exceeds what flesh can do and whether we write, or sing, or teach, or feed the poor, or love our brothers and sisters in the faith, or go to the mission field, or give, or pray or anything we do, it must be supernatural… above and beyond that which flesh can do.

                When we live by the flesh, then we seek to conform others to our religion, our point of view, our doctrines, but when we operate in the Spirit we minister the things of the Spirit to them in the hopes that the Holy Spirit will find a home in them and to begin to transform them into the image of Christ. We can argue our doctrinal points of view all day long and never get out of the flesh. The New covenant operates on a whole new plain. It is the ministry of the Spirit of Christ to conform people to the image of Christ and it does so not by facts and mental philosophies, but by receiving the very Spirit to Christ into our temples so that Christ may begin to be seen in us.

                Jesus brought us a New Covenant because the Old Covenant was inadequate in every way. It was limited to the weakness of the flesh. So the Old Covenant had the purpose of defining our sin and bringing us to our death in Satan’s kingdom so that we could be born again into the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We no longer find our rest in festivals and new moons and Sabbath days, which were only a mere shadow of what was to come, but the substance belongs to Christ… and Jesus said, “ come unto Me and I will give you rest.”

                Here Jesus is giving us a new way to find rest. It is not in the keeping of a day, but in dying to our own works of the flesh and then being born again into the work of His Holy Spirit. This is our true rest and on that principle every other commandment falls within its train. “All who are being led by the Spirit, these are the sons of God.

                God doesn’t grade on the curve. There is only one righteous and that is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. “And the witness is this, that God has given us eternal life and this life is in His Son. He who has the son has the life, and he who has not the Son has not the life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, in order that you may know that you have eternal life.” 1 John 5:11-13.

                If you do not know that you have eternal life today then perhaps it is because you are living by the Law rather than by the Spirit of Christ. We can’t have it both ways. We are either living by the flesh and governed by the Law, or we are living by the Spirit and covered by the robe of Christ’s righteousness and the blood of Jesus and empowered by His Holy Spirit. We are either in the Old covenant or in the New Covenant. In the Old Covenant we find our rest in the observance of a day, while in the New Covenant we find our rest in Jesus Christ.

                In this I am not picking on the Sabbath per se, because keeping Sunday, or Wednesday or Friday will not get you to God either… being born again and living by His Spirit is what will cause you to live in fellowship with God through Jesus Christ. The substance belongs to Christ… and we either have the life or we don’t have the life.

                God doesn’t grade on the curve. Our best efforts will not bring us a passing score. Only Jesus scored 100% and our life is in Him and not in ourselves… not in the Law but in Christ… for now our obedience must be supernatural, borne of the Spirit and not of the flesh.

                So let me leave you with this final text for it is the heart and core of the Gospel of the New Covenant:

                “Now we know that whatever the Law says it speaks to those who are under the Law, that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin. But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe; for there is no distinction for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:19-23

                Isn’t this exactly what we have been saying throughout this lesson? And verse 31 goes on to say that this life in Christ does not nullify the Law, but establishes it. That is to say if we understand the function of the Law to bring us to our death in Satan’s kingdom, so that we can be born again to live by the Spirit of Christ, then we understand the proper function of the Law whereas making the Law a part of our salvation in the New Covenant is a misuse of it.

                Again I say: ”God does not grade on the curve:" Only Jesus Christ has had a 100% score and so we must be found in Him, having not a righteousness of our own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith…” Phil. 3:9

                In the New Covenant there is a new day of rest established called “Today.” For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works as God did from His. This is the rest of the New Covenant and the Sabbath pointed forward to it, but could not bring it, because Rest is not found in the Law but in Christ. Hebrews 4:7-11. Place your full faith in Jesus today and you will find rest for your soul.