1Cor 7:17-20 - Estate Keeping - Part 4

Staying Right Where God Put You

17 Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches. 18 Was anyone at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was anyone at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision. 19 For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but keeping the commandments of God. 20 Each one should remain in the condition in which he was called.


This section underlines the point made earlier. Our circumstances are ordained for us. It is God’s providence. While we do not blindly become fatalists and sit in a corner unwilling to engage our circumstances, we will often come to that place where saints in the past have come - having done all, having sought God’s help and grace and still being faced with a difficulty - the place found is the one where the saint says, "It is the Lord, let Him do what seems good to Him." {1Sa 3:18}

No saint can believe that God works all things together for his good and not accept the overarching sovereign providence of God. He either causes directly or indirectly, through nature or through the freely exercised wills of human beings, every single detail of our lives for a precise purpose. I suppose some who subscribe to Open Theology or to post-Wesleyan Arminianism might have the sort of God Who is continually and infinitely recalculating and re-ordering things according to the whims of his creatures; a reactive God; a God-on-a-string; a less-than-sovereign God. This is not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible knows the end from the beginning not because He has a supernatural "looking into the future to see what His creatures will do - and then adjusting accordingly" approach, but because He had a purpose in mind when He created the universe and He is carrying that purpose out.

This is why believers, faced with and alienated from the world they once loved, must accept that their very immediate circumstances are God’s will for them in Christ Jesus. What they do about those circumstances is relational and not legal. They work it out with God. They have changed sides in a war. They have had their eyes opened to a universal deception. They are faced on all sides with the results of the fall in themselves, their families, their neighbourhoods. It doesn’t go away just because they are saved. And clearly, they are not to run away from these things. They were, in all likelihood, saved for the specific purpose of being salt and light right where they are. The greater the difficulty, the greater the need for grace and the brighter the light can shine. That’s not how the world thinks, is it?

The world says something that sounds the same, but that is a deception. The world says, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going," or, "God helps those who help themselves." The Christian says, "God helps those who are totally helpless." Not that Christians don’t buckle down in the direst of circumstances and produce amazing, even supernatural feats of endurance, courage and resiliency. They have always done so throughout history. But if you ask a true Christian how they did it they will always point to God and His upholding, sustaining grace - and not to their own effort. Christians go to God for grace in all things and give all the glory to Him.

Some of these 1st century Corinthian converts faced difficulties, just as we all do - similar difficulties - those tribulations which are common to man and those peculiar to Christians. God does not remove us from our circumstances - He uses them in order to grow us in the faith and the personal, relational, experiential knowledge of Him.

In the early church two of the most prominent heresies - and therefore two of the greatest dangers - were legalism (particularly residual Jewish legalism) and gnosticism. They were often intertwined because they both sought ultimately to deny or add to the absolutely free grace of God in Jesus Christ. They are, in fact, expression of humanism or of humanistic religiosity.

Corinth was not immune from these influences. Some insisted that Christianity should include elements of Judaism - by which is meant observing certain ritual aspects of Judaism as a requisite for true holiness. Nothing was guaranteed to make Paul madder than such an assertion because it elevated the outward observance over inward reality. Circumcision was, for example, an outward sign of a previously existent covenant relationship between Abraham and God. {Ro 4:3} It was a harbinger of the grace that would come full-fledged, historically and effectually in Jesus Christ; the New Covenant. And it was not called "new" for nothing. It was new because it replaced the old - it fulfilled in reality what the old represented in typology.

Thus Paul taught what God intended him to teach - that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness (as a means of justification) for those that believe. {Ro 10:4} Jesus kept the law perfectly on our behalf so that we would be justified through faith in Him and His finished work. Neither should Christians seek to justify themselves after they are saved, which many of us do. We are not justified by grace in order that we may then go on to sanctify ourselves through works righteousness. But it is a well accepted tenet of Christian theology that "we are saved by faith alone, but that faith that saves is never alone." Meaning that true faith is evident in spiritual fruit, including deeds of righteousness.

The requirement for obedience is not dispensed with for the Christian. It is magnified. Because grace is free he does not say, "Let us sin the more that grace may abound!" He is more likely to say, "Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord." He will look into the perfect law of God (which has not been abrogated, but rather fulfilled on our behalf in Christ) and, beholding himself as in a mirror, will run to Christ for grace an power to live as he ought to live. And this "ought" is clearer and deeper and more cutting and more impossible to keep the closer the believer comes to God. Dependency upon God multiplies exponentially as the light gets brighter.

Note then that Paul, in admonishing the Corinthians not to fall into legalistic observances, also does not tell the Corinthians to ignore the commandments of God. God’s laws are not legalism - what we make of them and how we respond to them often is. God’s laws are the schoolmaster that brings us to Christ - and that keep us there. For it is only in Christ that we found an alien and perfect righteousness that was pleasing to God for eternity - and it is only in Him that we shall learn how to appropriate that righteousness as our own.

So, God saves us where He finds us - and He does so exclusively by grace. Nothing of our lives up until the point where we are ushered into the kingdom counts for anything because if any man is in Christ he is a new creation - old things are passed away and everything is become new. It may not feel like it, but that is the reality that is waiting to be discovered and experienced by the newborn as he grows in grace. Paul is conveying this truth here to the specific circumstances that are present in the Corinthian church at the time.