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As is often the case, people unjustly persecuted in one place for taking a stand against error run to another where they errantly promote something just as bad. In this case, Rogol, with Ford’s consent, promotes the doctrine of forensic imputed righteousness.
With this as background, I would like to analyze a few telling statements from Rogol’s article (pg. 10, Feb. 2008, “Good News Unlimited”) since it exposes a common misunderstanding about the Wedding Garment Parable. Rogol writes:
“And, the wedding garment given to each guest by the king, to be worn over the guest’s clothing, signifies the life of Jesus which he lived out for us in a perfection ….”
Notice the phrase “to be worn over the guest’s clothing.” Rogol defines our clothing as the sinful nature. Imagine, a street bum, us, with tattered clothes trying to put a tuxedo on over the top of our rags! Is this what Yeshua meant by donning a wedding garment? What Rogol is promoting is Luther’s doctrine where we get to remain sinful while the sin is whitewashed with a coat of new paint to hide it. Is this what God is interested in?
Not at all. The Scriptures tell us that we must put off the old man – those old tattered clothes, and then don the real righteousness of Messiah Yeshua (Colossians 3:9-10). This is what God desires.
Rogol contends that accepting a wedding garment over sullied clothes, “signifies our act of faith, accepting the perfect life ... a confession of our sinfulness and unworthiness, in need of a better righteousness than we have.” But he means it only as a legal fiction; that is, in God’s sight, where the person does not really become righteous. It sounds really pious until we remember that accepting real righteousness from Yeshua into our lives, to be made part of us, is even more a confession of our need. For the person who will not take off the dirty garments first to put on the righteousness of Messiah has no consciousness of the impropriety of going to a wedding with the dirty clothes hidden under the garment provided by the King!
We must remember that Satan’s method of deceiving the elect of Israel is to mix truth with half truth and error. An error, just like the dirty garment, is syncretistically mixed up with biblical truths like the wedding garment until the sheep miss the point of the parable altogether, which is to put oil in our lamps, and seek to learn God’s ways and make them a part of our life.
Yeshua wants us to show up at the wedding feast with His righteousness, not cloaked over our sins, but accepted by us and incorporated into our lives. The nonsense taught by Martin Luther was no closer to the truth than the Catholic doctrine. In fact, it was yet one step further away from the biblical truth. Martin Luther was compelled to unchain the Bible from the pulpit in order to defend his version of truth against the Roman Curia. But what inspired the Reformation was not Luther and his version of truth, but the fact that the people by Divine providence could now read the Bible for themselves!
I will now bring up another statement by Rogol that is most revealing:
“While the blood of the cross provides forgiveness for us, the imputed righteousness of Christ provides perfection for us which we need for acceptance by a holy God.”
What we have here is a gospel with a form of godliness, but without the power of transforming lives. We are forgiven, but apparently the job of forgiving was not complete in the eyes of Luther and company. It seems that after forgiving us, God was still not going to accept the forgiven persons because they were sinful. Sounds like the forgiveness was really Indian giving here --- you are forgiven, but I cannot accept you because you are a sinner. Let us dice up what ‘non acceptance’ means. It is the opposite of forgiveness. What Yeshua gives, the theologians take away. The definition of forgiveness is the cancellation of the debt we owe.
But God does not want us to remain in our sins, so He covenanted with us to give us the righteousness of Messiah, not as whitewash over our sinful natures, but as a progressive, real, and deep transformation of our lives into the likeness of His righteousness, to be culminated and completed at His return in the Divine day of cleansing at the end of the age. If we are unable to become perfectly righteous, then God’s goal is not to see us as righteous as a whitewash over our sinful nature, but to remove the sinful nature and make us truly righteous with the righteousness of Messiah. Then He will be YHWH OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS (Jer. 23:6; 33:16).
The Passover is almost here (March 23-29). This year it coincides with the Catholic days, which is not surprising since the Catholic celebration is a corruption of the biblical Passover. So let us put off the leaven of sin, and put on the real righteousness of Messiah.
