Old Testament Foundations: A Biblical View of the Relationship of Sin and the Fruits of Sin: Sickness, Demonization, Death, Natural Calamity, by Peter H. Davids
Luke presents this picture a little differently. It is after a successful confrontation with the devil that Jesus goes to Nazareth and quotes his programmatic passage from Isa 61:1-2 (Luke 4:18-19). The goals of Jesus’ mission have to do with those suffering the effects of sin: the poor, the prisoners, the blind, the oppressed. The fact is that Jesus does announce good news to the poor (Luke 6:20) and does heal the blind (Luke 7:21-23; 18:35-43). He does not release any prisoners from human jails, although God does do that in Acts (Acts 12:11, where “the Lord” could be either God the Father or Jesus), but he does release people who have been bound by Satan (Luke 13:10-17). Thus it is quite reasonable to view the works of Jesus in Luke as the reversal of or the remedy for the fruit of sin.
In another narrative Luke suggests that Jesus reverses the ultimate fruit of sin, namely death. This is clear in Luke 7:11-17, where he raises the son of the widow in Nain. This is also the case in Luke 8:40-42,49-56, the raising of Jairus’ daughter.25 Likewise Luke has three apparent resurrections in Acts, Acts 9:36-43; 14:19-20; 20:7-12. Only the first and third narratives clearly state that the person was dead, so the second, Acts 14:19-20, could simply be a remarkable healing. Yet the statement that the people believed Paul to be dead and the symmetry between the two narratives in the Gospel of Luke and the Acts narratives suggests that it is viewed as a resurrection.26 Naturally, none of the writers trace the various deaths to specific sin, certainly not to the sin of the individuals who died, yet could anyone who was a reader of the Old Testament be unaware that death was the result of sin? And would anyone in the New Testament period, Jew (except such Jews as the Sadducees), Jewish-Christian, or gentile-Christian see the resurrection of the dead as anything less than a foretaste of the age to come (cf. Heb 6:5)? Given this general theological context, it is likely that Luke views these events as examples of the coming great reversal of death in the eschaton.
While the Johannine tradition also recounts one resurrection of the dead, that of Lazarus in John 11, the culmination of the Book of Signs,27 it puts the wider issue of the reversal of the fruit of sin somewhat differently than the synoptics do. When Jesus heals the man at the pool of Bethesda in John 5, he later instructs the man, “Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you” (John 5:14, mēketi hamartane, the negative plus the present imperative indicating the cessation of something on-going). This not only assumes that sin had been the cause of the illness, but also that the man might continue or already had continued in his sin and needed the exhortation to stop. Here is a case in which the fruit of sin was reversed before the sin itself was dealt with. But that is in line with 1 John 3:8, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.” While the focus of 1 John is on sin itself, the fruit of sin is also the work of the devil. Jesus works in one case from root to fruit and in the other from fruit to root. Both have to be removed.
The fruit of sin is reversed through the work of Jesus in two ways—through His sovereign grace and through the repentance and faith of men and women. First, there are what we may call the works of sovereign grace. The works of sovereign grace are the invasion of the Kingdom of God into this world. Those are the situations in which no one but Jesus appears to have faith and yet significant healing/deliverance results. For example, the demonized man in the synagogue in Capernaum (Mark 1:21-28) does not appear to have come seeking healing nor to have had any expressed faith. The presence of Jesus revealed the demon, and Jesus expelled it. Other activities in this category might include the raising of the son of the widow at Nain (Luke 7:11-17), the stilling of the storm (Mark 4:35-41 and parallels) and perhaps the calling of Levi (Mark 2:13-17). This latter incident deserves some comment. However honest a tax collector Levi was (if “honest tax collector” was not an oxymoron to first century Jews), he was experiencing an effect of sin, rejection and alienation from his community. He does not seek Jesus, but Jesus calls to him as Jesus is passing by. Levi responds to the sovereign action, as does Zacchaeus in Luke 19. The result is a reversal of the alienation caused by sin as the person enters the community of the renewed Israel. In the case of Levi, he becomes one of the Twelve along with Simon the Zealot (Mark 3:18 and parallels). If this reading of the text is accurate,28 then bitter enemies were reconciled through a sovereign act of Jesus. Similar deeds can be reported for his followers in Acts.
Second there is repentance and faith, which from the human side appear to call forth from Jesus the reversal of the fruit of sin. That Jesus responded to faith is clear from such passages as Mat. 9:1-8 and parallels, the healing of the paralytic: “When Jesus saw their faith …” In this case the faith appears to be in the men carrying the paralytic, not in the paralytic himself, but wherever the faith was located, Jesus responds. He first forgives the paralytic’s sins and then heals him. The leper in Mark 1:40 clearly has faith. Mark 6:5 indicates that the lack of faith in Nazareth prevents the reversal of the fruit of sin, i.e. the working of miracles.
The faith spoken of in the New Testament is basically a confident trust in a person, namely in Jesus or his Father.29 That is, it is not primarily a belief that something will happen (although because one knows the person it contains the belief that the person could do what is desired), and certainly not a belief that something has already happened although all evidence is to the contrary (the New Testament is relentlessly reality-oriented to the degree that it allows the observable to indicate the reality of the unobservable, cf. Jas 2:14, 17, 20, 26; no one is ever called to believe that what he or she sees is not real), but rather a trust in a person who can make things happen no matter what the odds are against him.30
Category: Biblical Studies, Fall 2006
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