Video from desiringgod.org
I Never Felt Like God’s Enemy — Was I? - Ask Pastor John
Audio Transcript
"We just started March, and that means we just started reading the glorious letter of Romans together — “the greatest letter that has ever been written in the history of the world by anybody, Christian or non-Christian.” That was your claim last time, Pastor John — high praise from a man who has read and studied this letter countless times over more than sixty years. Coming up this Thursday, we find ourselves reading Romans 5:10 together, and it has led a podcast listener named Bethany, an 18-year-old woman, to write in to ask this sharp question.
“Pastor John, hello, and thank you for this podcast,” she writes. “I was given the great joy and privilege of being born into a Christian home and raised by godly parents, and I went to church every Sunday. I gave a credible confession of faith very young and trusted in Christ for my salvation as long as I can remember. Add all this up, and I’m having a hard time understanding how I was God’s enemy. I know I was God’s enemy, according to Romans 5:10. I guess, what does it feel like to be God’s enemy? I’m trying to understand how he and I were opposed against one another. I know my salvation will be even more glorious if I can understand this better and feel it more deeply.”
Bethany is not alone. I’m in her situation. I have no memory of being God’s enemy. I mean, I’m 79 years old. I was saved when I was 6. I’ve been walking with Christ since then. The basic issue we face is this: Are we going to learn our true condition before Christ and outside Christ from our memory and our experience, or are we going to learn it from the word of God? Are we going to feel it because it’s in the word of God and the Spirit applies it to us? Or are we going to try to dredge up some memory that may not exist at all and try to feel that? I don’t think that’s going to work — and even if it did work, it would be inadequate.
Double Enmity
Bethany refers to Romans 5:10. That’s a good place to start. “If while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.” So, she’s right to conclude that, before conversion — whatever age — before faith in Christ, we needed to be reconciled to God because we were his enemies.
That phrase “I am his enemy” is ambiguous. It might mean “I’m angry at him” or “He’s angry at me” (or both). I think Bethany is focusing mainly on how she could feel any enmity toward God. She’s never felt any enmity toward God. Neither have I, consciously. I’ve never consciously raised my fist in God’s face, saying, “You’re my enemy” or “I’m your enemy.” So, when she says she has no memory of that, as far as she knows, she means it. And she’s never felt that way toward God. And I think she’s aware that her enmity (that she’s thinking about) toward God is only half the issue of being the enemy of God. The other half is that God has enmity toward us.
Now, she’s not talking about that directly, but she does say, “I’m trying to understand how he and I were opposed against one another.” Ah, she’s onto it, right? That’s right. The reconciliation has to go both ways, both directions, in order for us to have peace with God. He’s angry at her and me and everybody because of our sin, and we don’t like him. That’s our part — we don’t like him. We consider him an intrusion upon our self-determination and our self-exaltation. That’s our enmity toward him. So it goes both ways.
“You can only know the root of your condition outside Christ by learning it from the Bible.”
See these in the Bible so people don’t have to take my word for it. Look at the amazing connection between Romans 5:8 and Romans 5:9. It’s amazing. Romans 5:9 says, “Since . . . we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” Okay, so there’s enmity toward us: “saved . . . from the wrath of God.” Our biggest problem is that God is our enemy. He has enmity toward us. He has a legitimate, just, wrathful disposition toward us because we deserve his judgment as God-hostile sinners.
Now, here’s the preceding verse, Romans 5:8: “God shows his love for us . . .” Take a step back and say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought he was angry.” “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” So, before the problem of our enmity toward God is overcome, while we were still his enemies, God does what must be done in order to remove his enmity toward us by sending Christ. This is what must be done. He sends his Son, Christ, who bears our punishment so that we might be forgiven and justified.
So, God unilaterally — quite apart from anything we do or say or think, or even our existence — on the cross, satisfies his own justice and wrath in the death of Christ so that there is no condemnation toward those who will believe in him.
Different by Degrees
But Bethany’s question is, What about my enmity toward God? I don’t remember ever feeling that. How should I think about it? How should I feel it?
Now, the first part of the answer is that Bethany is only different in degree from the person who was saved at age 35, having had illicit sex over and over, been in jail, done drugs and every other manner of evil you can think of. She’s only different in degree as to whether she or that person could feel enmity toward God.
And what I mean is that that person, looking back, knows a little bit of how bad sin is and what their condition was and would be outside Christ. But the memory of all those outward acts and even the impulses that caused them does not go to the root of the matter. You can only know the root of your condition outside Christ by learning it from the Bible. God must reveal to us the nature and the depth of our corruption and our sinfulness and our enmity to God. Experience can only take us so far, but not far enough.
Now, Bethany surely has been tempted to sin. I assume she’s a human being, right? She has been tempted to sin, and she can imagine some of what her corruption would be like if she gave in to it repeatedly. And that person who was saved at age 35 has a clear sense of what sin is like. But it’s only a matter of degree that separates them because neither of them — none of us — knows the depth of our condition if we don’t learn it from God in the Bible.
Seeing Ourselves in Scripture
Since I think Bethany and I have basically the same issue — namely, a Christian background in which we don’t have any memory of being enemies of God consciously — let me use myself as an example of how I gain and feel a true conception of my condition before I was a believer (say, at age 4 or 5 years old) and what I would be now (at age 79) without Christ in my life. Here’s what I do: I immerse myself in what God says I was, what God says I would be outside Christ. I make the touchstone of my identity outside Christ God’s word, not my memory.
For example, here’s what I preach to myself. Romans 3:9–11: “Both Jews and Greeks are under sin, as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.’” That’s me: no understanding, no seeking, no desire, no righteousness, under the dominion of sin. That’s me. And I meditate on that.
What is that? What does it look like? What is sin? Romans 1:22–23: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images.” They exchanged God for images. Romans 1:28: “Since they did not [approve of having God in their knowledge], God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.” Sin is exchanging God for the treasures I prefer rather than God. I prefer to eat of the tree of the garden of Eden. I prefer my way toward money, my way toward power, my way toward fame, my way toward sex, and God is in the way. I don’t like it. I want him out of the way. I want to do what I want to do. That’s sin. I don’t want to be subordinate to any authority outside myself.
That’s what Paul means by enmity toward God. And all of us can feel it crouching at the door. Without the Holy Spirit in Christ, it would take over. That’s me apart from sovereign grace.
What about Romans 8:7? What it adds is that, without Christ, I’m a slave to my arrogance; I’m a slave to my self-determination, my self-exaltation. It says, “The mind [of] the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” And that word cannot is crucial. My condition, apart from sovereign grace, God’s work in my life, is not just that I don’t please God or even that I don’t want to please God, but that my not wanting to please God is so deep I cannot please God. That’s my condition.
Word over Experience
We can only learn that because God reveals it to us in the Bible, not from experience — whether you were saved at 6 or saved at 60. So, Bethany, we’re all in this together. Whoever we are as Christians, we are all seeking to know who God is, what grace is, who we were and would be without him, and what we are by grace. And we can only know these things rightly, deeply, not because of our memory or our experience, but because of God’s word.
John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of Desiring God and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy." from the Transcript
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