The Power of Words and the Wonder of God by John Piper & Justin Taylor

Author:John Piper & Justin Taylor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion
ISBN: 9781433510496
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2009-09-01T22:00:00+00:00

that promotes self-righteousness by one’s own works is anathema to

the gospel; the only righteousness we have is not merited to us by

works but gifted to us by grace through Jesus Christ. Therefore, the

Bible uses graphic and disturbing imagery to show how vile to God

are religion and self-righteous works done in a vain effort to make

oneself acceptable in the sight of a perfectly holy and righteous God.

One example from the Old Testament is Isaiah 64:6, which says,

“We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous

deeds are like a polluted garment.” The Pulpit Bible Commentary

says that the literal meaning of the language in this verse is “as a

menstruous garment.”24

Our study takes us to the verse in the New Testament that should

have a wick attached to it for all the debate that has blown up around

it. Speaking of his religiously self-righteous way of life before meeting

Jesus, Paul says, “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the sur-

passing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have

suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that

I may gain Christ” (Phil. 3:8). That little word “rubbish” has been

the source of big controversy. Various English translations use words

such as “rubbish,” “garbage,” “filth,” “dung,” “refuse,” “worthless

trash,” and “dog dung.” Making the entire issue more difficult is that

the word is a hapax legomenon, which means it appears only once in

the entire New Testament.

Greek scholar and expert Daniel B. Wallace25 has studied this

word in great detail, and he explains: “In Phil 3:8, the best transla-

tion of skuvbala seems clearly to be from the first group of definitions

[that is, meaning (human) excrement]. The term conveys both revul-

sion and worthlessness in this context. In hellenistic Greek it seems to

stand somewhere between ‘crap’ and ‘s**t.’”26

What Isaiah and Paul are pointedly declaring is that the good

works of everyone from devout Oprah followers to the Jehovah’s

Witness grandmas who knock on doors so that they will be good

enough for God to love them—along with the family who thinks they

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are better than everyone else and able to stand before God on the

day of judgment because they avoided alcohol and tobacco and had

a lot of kids they homeschooled well and shielded from all television

by keeping the girls busy knitting denim jumpers and the boys active

learning the trivium—are as cherished a gift to God as a bloody tam-

pon or a pile the dog leaves in the yard. Why? Because any effort to

justify oneself in the sight of God rather than depending solely upon

the person and work of Jesus as the grounds for our righteousness is

a bloody mess and a steaming pile.

At this point, we can either argue with the Scriptures or consider

their relevance for our own life. My sincere hope is that we all learn

to deal with the speck in our eye before we start using our words,

including the ones we blog and text-message, to criticize the words

of others. For that to happen, we must see that shepherds and sheep

alike are prone to moments and seasons of acting like swine, wolves,

and dogs.

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