No 42: To Disarm the Rulers and Authorities

'The legal case is closed', as Piper writes in this inspiring chapter.  Exactly so. 

One of my favorite words of Self-revelation by God comes in the letter of St James: "Mercy triumphs over judgment" (James 2:13).  Judging is one of the things God can do and will do, but He has always preferred not to.  Jesus, teaching us as He always did to be like our Father, said: "Do not judge, or you too will be judged" (Matthew 7:1).  Indeed, if you think about it, forgiveness is 'breaking the rules'.  It is saying: I have a case here, but I'll drop it.  Not condescendingly, or keeping it on the books; but utterly renouncing it.  That's what God does: He abandons the mechanisms of law.  Why would He do this?  Out of pure love and grace, for "God is love" (1 John 4:16).

And because He can - it's quite easy for Him, for He can sovereignly do what He chooses with all His natural, moral and spiritual creation.  "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion" (Exodus 33:19).  "The Lord your God is a faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations [i.e. forever, poetically] of those who love him and keep his commands" (Deuteronomy 7:9).

But it is not at all easy for us.  In fact, it was impossible.  Our first parents chose to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, rather than the tree of life; and ever since then, laws of good and evil have dictated how our hearts and minds work.  It was to rescue us from this " law of sin and death", as St Paul mystically writes in Romans 8, that God came to live amongst us as an ordinary Jewish man, Jesus of Nazareth.  Jesus perfectly embodied God, and this is what He told us about God's eternal intention: "I do not come to judge the world, but save it" (John 12:47).

I watch, and receive faith.  I watch God on the Cross forgiving and abandoning any case against me, when that crime of all crimes should have surely given Him one.  I receive, finally, faith to be forgiven, accepted and loved - no matter what my past.  My heart and mind are healed and, finally, it becomes possible for me to become like God and no longer to judge.  Then I find myself in the Kingdom of Heaven, where there is no judgment (cf Matthew 7:1).