I recently reviewed a book written by David Rudel called The Gospel You’ve Never Heard (you can find the review on this blog) and noticed that one of the points Rudel made was that there’s a relationship between how Paul refers to being “saved” in his letters and the giving of the Spirit. As I was reading Colossians last Shabbat, I noticed Paul mentioning the Spirit and, applying this perspective, started taking notes on Paul’s observations. This blog post is the result. Unless otherwise stated, all passages referenced are from Colossians.
If being “saved” has to do with receiving the Spirit and, according to Rudel, the special gift of the Spirit, is to enable us to obey the teachings of Yeshua (Jesus) and the Word of God (Torah), then I think it’s important to connect those concepts together when reading Paul’s writings. Let’s take a look.
1:8 The Spirit gives love.
1:9 The Spirit gives knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.
1:10 For the purpose of living lives worthy of the Lord, pleasing to Him, being fruitful in every good work, and multiplying in full knowledge of God.
The above verses all speak of the gifts of the Spirit. It’s interesting to examine verse 1:8 in light of what I wrote previously and comparing it to John 14:15: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” So if the Spirit gives love, then love gives us the ability to keep Yeshua’s commandments, since Yeshua didn’t teach anything that contradicted the Word of God as a whole, then his commandments are God’s commandments.
Taking a look at verses 9 and 10 in the same chapter, the Spirit gives “knowledge, wisdom, and understanding” and for “the purpose of living lives worthy of the Lord.” If you apply Rudel’s interpretation of the purpose of the Spirit as enabling believers to be obedient to God, then this all makes a great deal of sense. By obeying the commandments, we are expressing our love, not only to the Messiah, but to God the Father and to each other.
In Matthew 22:34-40, Yeshua defines the two commandments on which all of the Torah and the Prophets are based and presumably, the two commandments on which all of Yeshua’s teachings are based. The first commandment is taken from Deuteronomy 6:4 which is also the basis for the Shema:
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”
This fits very well with everything that’s been said, both by Paul in Colossians and by Yeshua up to this point, but there’s more. Yeshua connected this great commandment to another one, taken from Leviticus 19:18:
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
I’m adding some inference here, but it seems that, if Yeshua is connecting the commandment to love God with everything you’ve got, with the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, then you can’t do one without the other. If then, the Spirit gives love and the ability to understand and obey these commandments, then the gift of the Spirit is the freedom to obey the commandments and the freedom to love outside of ourselves. Reconnect all of this to Rudel’s interpretation that Paul is using the term “saved” as connected with the “giving of the Spirit”. Being “saved” then, isn’t just a matter of an event that happens to us individually, but something that enables us to act beyond our own interests and to truly be devoted to God and His Will, which includes devotion to our neighbors.
I won’t go into a long discourse of who a “neighbor” is. The parable told in Luke 10:30-37 concludes that the neighbor of a believer isn’t just other like-minded believers; a neighbor is anyone, even someone we don’t like and even someone we don’t have much in common with. Keeping all this in mind, since we as believers possess the Spirit of God within us, that Spirit enables us to do some pretty amazing things:
- We are freed to love God.
- We are freed to fully comprehend the commandments of God as taught by Yeshua.
- We are freed to obey God’s commandments as taught by Yeshua.
- We are freed to love other people, even those who we don’t have a lot in common with.
Compare that to the general “way of the world” and I think you’ll see some fairly startling differences. I know that we are all taught these things in principle, but not in relation to “being saved”. When we think of “being saved”, we tend to think of something that starts and stops with us as individuals. We figure that, once we’re saved, that’s the “end game”. If nothing else happens, as least we “make it”. However, that doesn’t seem to be the whole point Yeshua and Paul are trying to make.
The point as I see it from this brief analysis, is that it’s not all about “me and Jesus”, it’s about God and everyone else. We are freed to do something significant about God and everyone else, not freed to save our own soul and that being the end of it. In fact, the “saving ourselves” part may be quite secondary to everything else I’ve written in this blog post. Nowhere in my bullet list above did I say “We are freed to go to Heaven” (and at the end of the Book of Revelations, we don’t go to Heaven, God comes to us…but that’s another teaching).
The point then seems to be that, once we receive the Spirit and are freed to do His will, we do His will, which is to love God with everything we’ve got; with every fiber of our being, and also to love our “neighbor” as ourself. If you have the heart and the Spirit to do those things, then the rest is taken care of by God.