Ash Wednesday Reflection - The Bait of Satan

Today is Ash Wednesday. Ashes are symbolic of grief (2 Samuel 13:19, Esther 4:1), mourning (Psalm 102:9, Job 2:8, Jer 6:26) and repentance (Job 42:6, Daniel 9:3, Matthew 1:21) in the Bible. Today, it seems there is an aversion to preaching on the need for grief and mourning over our sins. In fact, even repentance of sin is rarely spoken off. Some preachers even denounce the preaching of sin based on God having forgiven all our sin, past, present and future sins. So why dwell on our sin? Why keep condemning yourself when you are forgiven? Actually, the preaching/teaching of sin and the need to repent of it is not dwelling on our sin. It is not condemnation. Instead, it confronts us with our sin so that our need for a Saviour is awakened again. Paul said it best in Romans 7:24-25, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Confrontation with our sin also leads to confirmation of our Lord Jesus’ unconditional love for us. Repentance is not self-condemnation. In fact, it strengthens our faith as we lean only on the promises of God who gave his Son to die on the cross for us. Repentance and forgiveness and unconditional love are all messages emanating from the glorious Gospel.

Unfortunately, these truths of the Gospel are not being taught in balance. Instead, the Gospel preached today sways towards dwelling only God’s unconditional love, i.e., the goodness of God seen in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. The theological truth of unconditional love for us can cut both ways. It is used by the Holy Spirit to grow us spiritually  as we respond to God’s unconditional love in forgetting our sin even when we are at our worst. However, it can also be the bait of Satan to lure us away from growing in obedience. Satan’s best tactic is always perverting the truths of God. Using this truth then, Satan lulls us in our state of numb comfort into an apathy that disregards the idea of growing in grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. After all, ‘once saved, always saved’ so why worry about our penchant to sin. We can always justify ourselves later with cliched Christian jargon like ‘God knows my heart’, ‘Jesus has taken all of my sins from me and cleansed me from all unrighteousness’, ‘I cannot give an accounting of myself and so I will depend on the perfect advocacy of Christ when I stand before God’, etc. All that is not wrong, I too subscribe to these theological statements. However, if that is where we have chosen to remain in our Christian lives without seeing the need for spiritual progress, then maybe we need to re-think a bit: is our faith in our Lord Jesus Christ or is our faith in our own faith of Jesus Christ? If our faith is truly resting on the Lord, then there must be signs of spiritual progress and overcoming of sin in our life. Although it is impossible to be completely sinless, one can still achieve victory over sinful patterns in our life. However, if our faith is resting only on our own faith of Jesus Christ, the unconditional love of God and the righteousness of Jesus becomes a ‘get-out-of-jail’ card for our sin. It becomes an excuse for our apathy towards growing spiritually and ignoring our need to grow spiritually. As Ps Mah mentioned on 7 Feb 2021, faith always has an object. The question is whether the object is our Lord Jesus Christ or our own faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is a difference that has eternal implications for every Christian. Real faith or blind faith?    

So who or what does our faith really rest on? Finding that answer is critical to our future. The Continental Divide is a geographical feature in North America that determines whether water flows into the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Rain or snow on the east side of the Continental Divide flows toward the Atlantic Ocean while rain or snow on the west side drains and flows toward the Pacific Ocean. At certain points, it may be just a ridge less than a meter wide. Yet even that small measure is enough to determine where the water will end up, as it travels hundreds of kilometers away to the sea. Thus, the determination of where our faith rests may seem like a small division. We think this is a theological divide that we can ignore since we are ‘sincere’ in our faith. However, it is not something to be dismissive of. We may even feel right and be sincere in our faith but yet end up still sincerely wrong. The consequences are just too grim and so we need to get our faith right while we are still here. Jesus has said you will know a tree by its fruit. John the Baptist clearly taught that repentance must bear its fruit. So too our repentance and faith in Christ must bear fruit instead of being a 'get out of jail' free pass that gives us a license to continue in our sinfulness.