…For now is our salvation nearer than when we believed (Romans 13:11),
Today, the Apostle Paul speaks to us as subjects of a kingdom which is in the world but not of it. As Christians, we owe our ultimate allegiance and duty to the Lord who ‘…preserveth all them that love him, but scattereth abroad all the ungodly’ (Psalm 145:20); the God who before we loved Him, He first loved us. The word ‘first’ carries a tremendous, heartbreaking weight in that last sentence. Christ meets us in the lowest valleys of our depression. He seeks us in the dark alleys where we hide our secret sins. He carries us when the paralyzing despair of this world overcomes us. He is there, and He is there, ‘first’.
We are the undeserving recipients of a new life in a new world where our worst mistakes are blotted out of history by the blood of the divine lamb. The Kingdom of God then is formed from the reclaimed souls of the wounded and the damned caught up in the amazing and terrifying love of God. My every footstep is a gift; my every breath is on loan; my heart beats at His pleasure.
We must banish the lies of our sick world and hold on to this picture of true reality if we wish to understand the nature of the debt Paul speaks of today; he writes, ‘Owe no man anything, but to love one another’ (Romans 13:8). Paul does not think the subjects of the Kingdom of God are somehow exempt from honoring their earthly debts. We must pay what we owe and give no reason for our neighbors and enemies to speak ill of Christ or His church. So much of Chapter Thirteen of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is about our relation to our earthly leaders and neighbors and how this temporary connection must still be a place where the restored divine image of the reborn children of God shines in the darkness. Christians should be the best citizens and the best neighbors because we know the mechanisms of history are governed, for our benefit, by the Almighty God of the universe. What does Paul say in Romans Eight: ‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose’ (Romans 8:28). ‘All things’ includes being beaten and jailed by ignorant agents of his own government; ‘all things’ includes the millions and millions of crosses carried daily by the people of God in this and every age until Christ returns to bring justice and peace where bad leaders and unfaithful neighbors have spread only lies and strife.
So, we must pay our earthly debts of treasure and loyalty, but because of what God has made us, we have a debt we must repay every single day until we return to this earth in glory among the countless ranks of Christ’s army of righteous vengeance. Paul writes that the only debt we are to carry is to ‘love one another.’ This Christian debt of love is an unlimited, unpayable debt because the Christian does not love so that he may be saved; no, the Christian loves his neighbor and his enemy because God loved him when he was an enemy combatant against the true and the good. God loved him even when he declared his allegiance to sin and death by rebelling against the beautiful and ordered universe to which our fallen world moves closer and closer each second of every day. God’s grace, His unmerited favor, has changed us in such a way that we can no longer look for merit before we bestow love upon another. No one deserves to be loved, and that is why we must love; we must love as God has loved us.
The Apostle Paul, guided by God the Holy Ghost, would have us see love in a way our many enemies, both human and demonic, have done their best to beat out of the collective memory of what was once the Christian West. Love is presented to us by those enemies as a twisted cocktail of feelings and perverted goods, transformed into a philosophic or ‘sciencey’ sounding veneer lightly covering the grim desire to fill the gaping wound in our hearts with the flesh of another. This false love is the polar opposite of the man and woman who in marriage become one flesh banding together to live as an illustration of God’s saving work in the world, or the friendships which grow and thrive on each person selflessly sacrificing for the other. No, in the fake love we are taught to accept by movies and songs and our educational system, every relationship is about power and the daily fight to consume rather than be consumed.
We see this horror illustrated in last week’s decision by the United Kingdom’s House of Commons to repurpose their National Health Service into a living, breathing denunciation of the Hippocratic Oath: ‘First do no harm.’ Because our world is still haunted by the moral framework of Christianity, people use euphemisms to describe acts of hideous barbarity: ripping a struggling child from the womb is ‘reproductive health’, giving free needles to drug addicts is ‘harm reduction’, and encouraging the state to execute disabled people is called ‘assisted dying.’ This state murder is of course sold as the ultimate expression of self-possession: a win for the fundamental right to decide when one dies, but this desire shared by both libertarian and socialist, is itself a product of mankind rebelling against the natural order. It is in fact an incredibly instructive example as we see people literally rebelling themselves to death in support of a sick fantasy. None of us has control over when and how we will die; we didn’t create ourselves, and even if we murder ourselves, we will awaken before our Creator who sits ready to judge us for how we have treated the precious life He has given us. Christ’s resurrection from the dead proves it is not the state’s executioners who have the final say as to when we live or die; no, it is the One the Creed we recited today tells us will return to ‘judge the quick and the dead.’
And with the love of that Crucified and Risen Savior flowing through our souls, we must ask, what do we owe the sick and the dying? Or even more elementary, what does it mean to be alive? The Anglican priest and theologian John Stott once made this observation: ‘I sometimes hear old people, including Christian people who should know better say, “I don’t want to be a burden to anyone else. I’m happy to carry on living so long as I can look after myself, but as soon as I become a burden I would rather die.” But this is wrong. We are all designed to be a burden to others. You are designed to be a burden to me, and I am designed to be a burden to you. And the life of the family, including the life of the local church family, should be one of mutual burdensomeness. As Paul says, ‘Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2).’ We have to know our value; We were not created to be cogs in some state designed economic machine; we do not live to be the summation of our favorite brands; no, we are image bearers of the Almighty God who made us to rule over nature and cast our dominion across the stars. This short life is our training ground for eternity, our seminary instructing us for forever. Caring for others and being cared for is an absolutely essential part of becoming the kings and queens of a new history, not etched in shame and suffering, but rather written in the sacrificial love which created the world and will one day save the world.
Living in this divine, saving love explains why the early Christians spent so much time going into the forests of the Roman Empire to find and save babies left to die by their pagan parents, or why Christians refused to participate in the blood sport of the Roman arena, or why they risked their lives to tell the Gauls and Norsemen and Aztecs to stop sacrificing humans to their demon gods, or why they insisted that the weakest in our society (babies in the womb, the elderly, the disabled, slaves) were owed a debt of love to God humanity must repay precisely because it is hard. As the children of these brave men and women we should be saying, ‘Thank God it is hard; please God make it harder so that the sweet-smelling sacrifice of my life can rise above the putrid stink of our selfish and suicidal world.’ This sacrificial life is the law of love because it is the law of Christ, and for the Christian, it has to be Christ or nothing.
Why? History’s most important events took place in the ministry and death, resurrection and ascension of Christ our Lord (try and figure out why it’s the year 2024 if you don’t believe me). When Jesus said, ‘It is finished,’ on the Cross at Calvary, the last chapter of our fallen world was written and sealed. We live in the epilogue of the first creation, the final wrapping up of all things which only keeps going because of the boundless mercy of God: the searching love of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost drawing all the children of grace home. The second Advent of Christ is coming, and it draws nearer than when we first believed.
Let us then join the apostles and martyrs, prophets and kings to pay gladly the unpayable debt of love we owe to the God who is love, and may we wear His armor of light until the Son of Man returns to bring the light which will have no end.