Luminescence, Volume 2. C. K. Barrett
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economy of words, that when Paul quotes the last of the ten commandments, “thou shalt not covet, shalt not desire,” he leaves out all the objects of the verb. Of course it is wrong to desire your neighbor’s home, or his wife. But the real trouble is desire, desiring to have for myself, when the object of desire is a religious object. But this gives us a start with the second word: flesh.
FLESH
And again, there are two kinds of flesh. One of them we do not need to talk about in this setting. We all have it. Some of us preachers have too much of it. Paul had it. There is no harm in it. “The life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” Paul was a Christian in the flesh. If we are Christians we are Christians in the flesh. There is no other way here and now in which we can exist. This is a very elementary fact of life.
“But the mindset of the flesh is death. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” This is, this must be something different. We know what the sins of the flesh, in traditional usage, are—Greed, drunkenness, fornication and the like. But Paul’s use of the term flesh is more than that. It is best defined in terms of its opposite, which is love. There is no better alternative than Luther’s “cor in curvatum in se” the heart turned in upon itself, settled in an inward direction. Love is unself-centered life, flesh is self-centered life.
And this kind of flesh can and does get hold of God’s good Law and it becomes the law of sin and death and it makes war upon the good law. The two greatest commandments in the Law according to Jesus are “thou shalt love the Lord your God and thou shalt love thy neighbor.” They are only two safe ones, and that, I suppose is why they were picked out. Love is by definition the opposite of flesh, and cannot be taken over by flesh. Anything else can be, anything else can be done with a self-regarding, self-seeking motive. Anything, including for example jobs in the Church. To borrow the theme allotted to Professor Dunn in the first Tuesday service of the term, “Beware of Religion.” A cloak of religion is a fine, and a much used disguise for a flesh-centered way of life. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, though I have all knowledge and understand all the problems of theology, if I have not love, I am no better than a noisy gong.” There is one more word: mind.
MIND
What are we to say about this? Perhaps I am forcing the pattern a bit, but I think I can say that there are two minds to match the two laws and fleshes. Once more I can use Paul’s own language—“I will pray with the Spirit, and I will sing praise also with my mind. In the meeting I would rather speak five words with my mind . . . than tens of thousands of words in tongues.” The mind here is quite simply that rational agent that knows and understands what it is doing and will not allow itself to talk nonsense. A very good and useful property shared of course by Christian with many heathens.
But there is another mind, or perhaps the same mind, renewed, refined, raised to a higher level. Again I take Paul’s own language—“I beseech you brothers and sister by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, and acceptable to God as your rational service. And do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of the mind, that you may test and approve what is the will of God, holy, and acceptable and perfect as it is.” So there is a mind that is capable not only of distinguishing good logic from bad, but a renewed, transformed mind, which is capable of discerning the will of God. This is the mind with which I serve God’s Law.
And that is the end. The end of the chapter and the end of the story, in that it is the point at which the reader stands. He still, in the words of the joyful and triumphant chapter 8, groans as he awaits redemption. We are not introduced into a state of automatic faultlessness, unable henceforth to do wrong. Over every page of my life stands a question mark. Which is it to be? The transformed mind which delights in the Law of God? Or the flesh, which delights in nothing better than itself and it therefore is subject to the law of sin? The theological question is answered NO—the Law is not sin, but this is why it sometimes looks like it. Whether or not I am sin is a question that will be answered on the last day.
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5. Editor’s Note: These last three paragraphs are crossed out in the notebook, apparently in the interest of confining oneself to the time limit, but they help us understand better CKB’s views on this matter.
“NOTHING CAN SEPARATE US FROM GOD’S LOVE”—Romans 8.38–39
[Preached thirty-two times from 10/17/43 at Bondgate, Darlington to 10/21/01 at Bowburn]
“There is no arguing with such a certainty. Either you simply don’t believe it, or you recognize it as the Word of God.” So says Professor Dodd in his very learned commentary on Romans and he is quite right. Before such an assertion the greatest scholar in the world must in the end stand silent, and either believe or disbelieve. It cannot be proved true, any more than it can be proved false. Neither St. Paul nor I nor an angel from heaven could convince you that God’s love is like that if God did not move you to believe it. To the majority of people, I suppose, it is simply not true, it strikes no answering note of reality in their hearts. But to those who do know it, it is still the mightiest undoubtable conviction that it was to St. Paul.
On May 2nd of this year (1943) I was preaching in Batley, and my host told me this story, every detail of which he knew was true. It had happened recently. A young man with a good deal of energy and initiative began to build up a business, a factory, for himself. It prospered. The man was married. They had a little girl. No one could have been happier. One day he had an accident in the machinery and was terribly maimed. The business could not be run without him. It was sold and there was no further source of income. While he was in the hospital, his little girl was taken ill and died. His wife, broken by the strain of all these things, died as well. After two long years, he limped out of the hospital, a cripple for life. There was for him, no home, no wife, no child, no business, and potentially no money. Shortly afterwards he went to the Methodist Quarterly Meeting (not the most inspiring of meetings as a rule), and there when the business was over, he rose to say that the love of God was more real to him than ever, the one sure thing on which he could rely.
Again I say, there is no arguing with or about a certainty like that. Either that man was simply deluded or he was in touch with the greatest thing in the world. We cannot argue, but we may try to understand and so to think as to make that confidence seem more real to ordinary flesh and blood human beings like ourselves. First of all let us look at this string of potentially evil things.
POTENTIALLY EVIL THINGS
These are things that might potentially separate a person from the love of God, and which a person can allow so to separate him. Some of the things Paul mentions do not worry us very much—the powers, of the height and of the depth. Here Paul is talking in the language the people of his time need, the language of astrology. It is very hard for us to imagine what that meant in the world Paul lived in. Gilbert Murray says “Astrology fell upon the Hellenistic mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island people.” Human lives were in the grip of various possible powers other than themselves. It would govern all a person’s life, if this particular star was, at his birth, “in the height” (i.e., at its zenith) or “in the depth” (i.e., at the nadir). Now it would not do at once to say that all that sort of thing is out of date. It is very real on the mission field and any missionary will tell you of the relief that comes to a primitive mind that the good Lord Jesus is master of all powers and influences that combine to plot human ruin. And I think that the reviving popularity of astrology in our own country, attested so plentifully in the cheap press, is a thing to be taken quite seriously. But there is something here for us who are not superstitious or depraved in this way.
I said, “human lives were in the grip of inescapable powers not themselves.” Have you never felt that way? Not because you thought some horrid goblin would pounce on you, of course not. But in the last few years have you not read your newspaper, pondered over the map of Europe, and felt that the world was in the grip of a demonic monster and that things were going too fast and with too much momentum for a mere human being to stand up to them? The currents of life and history are very strong,