“We are adopted into God’s family through the resurrection of Christ from the dead in which he paid all our obligations to sin, the law, and the devil, in whose family we once lived. Our old status lies in his tomb. A new status is ours through his resurrection.”
- Sinclair Ferguson, Children of the Living God (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1989), 4.
Theologically it’s interesting to compare such statements, which essentially tell us that all the heavy lifting’s been done already, with the many passionate biblical exhortations to perform good works, as if this were truly consequential – as in, for example, Paul’s “for the night comes when no one can work.”
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@Paul Martin: theologically, our new status is the only reason any of us can work even during the day! Praise God that it’s not just all the “heavy” lifting that God has done as far as our status is concerned. Dead people can’t do any of the light lifting either!
Those are two distinct issues. On the one hand, you can go back to either the moment of original creation or the moment of new creation in Christ and say we’d all be dead apart from them.
On the other hand, there’s the tension I’m pointing to between the call to do good works as if it really matters and the idea that all the good work’s been done. I think we experience both the biblical call and the call to conscience to perform good works more passionately than as a ritual performed solely to worship God. Yes, we’re instructed to love God – but also to love others.