Dear Friends of “Dial Daily Bread,”
What brought ancient Israel’s ruin? She refused to accept her Messiah’s message, which exposed a deeper level of guilt than she had previously realized. The Jews of Christ’s day were not by nature more evil than any other generation; it was simply theirs to act out to the full the same enmity against God that all the fallen sons and daughters of Adam have always had by nature. The divine Son of God came to them on a mission of mercy. As our natural “carnal mind is enmity against God” (Rom. 8:7), they simply demonstrated this fact visibly in the murder of their divine Visitor. Those who crucified the Savior hold up a mirror wherein we can see ourselves.
Laodicea’s repentance will go down to the deepest roots of this natural “enmity against God.” This deeper phase of repentance is repenting of sins that we may not have personally committed, but which we would have committed if we had the opportunity. The root of all sin, its common denominator, is the crucifixion of Christ.
“Opportunity” has come to others in the form of temptations through circumstances we ourselves may not have encountered. None of us can endure the full consciousness of what we would do if under sufficient pressure—terrorism, for example. (The enforcement of the “mark of the beast” will surely provide the ultimate “opportunity.”) But our potential sin is already recorded in “the books of heaven.”
Only the full work of the Holy Spirit can bring to us the full conviction of the reality of sin; but in these last days when sins must be “blotted out” as well as pardoned, this is His blessed work. No buried bacteria or virus of sin can be translated into God’s eternal kingdom.
The Laodicean call to repentance is the essence of the message of Christ’s righteousness. Whatever sins other people are guilty of, they obviously had the “opportunity” of committing them; somehow the temptations were overpowering to them. The deeper insight the Holy Spirit brings to us is that we are by nature no better than others. Christ’s righteousness is 100 percent imputed to us; we don’t have even one percent that is ours by nature. When Scripture says that “all have sinned,” it means, as The New English Bible translates it, “all alike have sinned” (Rom. 3:23). Digging down to get the roots out—this is now “present truth.”
There is no way that we can appreciate the heights of Christ’s glorious righteousness until we are willing to recognize the depths of our own sinfulness. For this reason, to see our own potential for sin is inexpressibly good news!
--Robert J. Wieland
From: "As Many As I Love": Christ's Call to Laodicea, 1986.
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