Here’s the passage in the NASB:

14 For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin.
15 For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate.
16 But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good.
17 So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.
18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not.
19 For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.
20 But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.
21 I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good.
22 For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man,
23 but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members.
24 Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?
25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.

Of the two interpretations mentioned above – the interpretations of this passage are, indeed, legion – I hold to the former: Christians wrestle with and often subdue, by the grace of God and the Holy Spirit within, the sin nature or sin principle within them. Contrary to the teachings of David Needham, Dwight Edwards, Neil Anderson, and others, we are responsible for our sins and we are the culpable agent in the perpetration of our sins.

In a discussion at Theologica regarding Christian sins, a young man who has taken the humble screen name of Seraphim declared, “My question is, is it YOU that is sinning after you are saved?” (shouting with all caps in the original). He follows the misguided theology of others in absolving himself of responsibility for sin, adducing vv. 18-20 as support for his position.

The errors and absurdities of such a position are too numerous to address here – or any place else, if stewardship of one’s time is important – so allow me to target one thing: the notion that because we do not willingly do something we are therefore not responsible for it.

To cut to the chase and restate the title of this post, sin as presented in Rom 7 can best be understood as a compulsion or, in everyday language, an addiction.

Those who have suffered or are suffering from any type of compulsion will understand what I am saying. Compulsions, by definition, are repeated behaviors designed to meet some perceived need and are neither willed nor intended by the individual. Such addictions are ego-dystonic: they are not desired by the individual and are experienced as intrusive, i.e., as originating from within but not as a conscious decision that one has made.

This, I think, is the facet of personal, indwelling sin that Paul discusses in Rom 7. Sin can have the quality of being an unwanted but seemingly irresistible power, whether obsessive (thoughts) or compulsive (deeds). Many sins are volitional, of course, and we sadly but willingly accept full responsibility for our choice. Sins born out of our addiction to sin, however, feel foreign and as though we are not responsible.

But we are responsible, even as a drunk driver is responsible for the destruction that might be birthed by his addiction to alcohol. Addictive sin is our sin and no one else’s. We have an addiction; it is our addiction by virtue of our previous connection with Adam’s race even though we are now members of the Second Adam’s race. We have been born again but, as Paul says, we have this experience or life in a physical body not suited for the task. Our bodies are psuchikos, not pneumatikos, as will be the case in our future, glorified state.

Our psuchikos or soulish bodies are the traveling clothes handed down from Adam, not Christ, and as such they continue to possess the consequences and tendencies of Sin – not “sin,” which is an act – but “Sin,” a principle that remains within us. We are whole beings, not divided up like some sort of living pie into various functions and forms. And as long as we remain in this soulish bodies, our struggle with Sin will continue.

Happily, there is no condemnation for those of us in Christ Jesus, for he has saved us from the consequence of Sin: eternal death. And even in this lifetime God has given us his Holy Spirit so that, even though Sin remains within us, we might be freed from the intractable pull of our incorrigible addiction to Sin.

Not quite one year ago, Crouch published his views in an article entitled “Learning from Fools,” (Christianity Today, February 2006, vol. 50, no. 2, p. 92); it was recently republished at Culture Makers. In this article he attempts to present his novel understanding of a pair of parables that he believes are “two of Jesus’ most misinterpreted parables.” (HT: Milton Stanley, Transforming Sermons).

I will not attempt to single-handedly refute Crouch on this matter: he has the approval of people on his side (understandably) and I am not a person who carries much weight; nevertheless, I will indulge in an observation or two. I will allow others, however, to provide the rebuttal: Brad H. Young, Norval Geldenhuys, Darrell Bock, and Walter L. Liefeld.¹ Crouch’s interpetation can be compared and contrasted with these biblical scholars.

These parables, of a man considering the construction of a tower and a king assessing a possible war, are found in Luke 14.28-33; three preceding verses are included since they provide the context for the stories.

25 Now large crowds were going along with Him; and He turned and said to them,
26 ‘If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.
27 ‘Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.
28 ‘For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it?
29 ‘Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him,
30 ’saying, “This man began to build and was not able to finish.”
31 ‘Or what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle, will not first sit down and consider whether he is strong enough with ten thousand men to encounter the one coming against him with twenty thousand?
32 ‘Or else, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.
33 ‘So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.’” – (NASB)

This passage has historically been understood to be a challenge by Jesus to his followers to consider carefully what they are about to do and the price that one must pay to be a disciple. Crouch, in parting with previous interpretations, sees it as a message about the opposite: “these stories are not about disciples, but fools”; Jesus is telling his followers that they need to “count the cost—not of discipleship, but of non-discipleship.”

Young writes,

The twin parables of the Tower Builder and the King Going to War (Luke 14.28-33) focus on the self-examination necessary to make a decision for surrendering to the call of Jesus . . .

“Jesus stresses the similarities between the word-picture of a king planning for war and the reality of an individual deciding to follow Jesus’ teachings. Would-be followers must enter the kingdom with open eyes, being fully aware of the demands.

“The focus of these two parables is the cost of discipleship. No one who begins the job and quits is worthy.”

Geldenhuys agrees while putting the parables in context:

The Saviour’s activities and words in Trans-Jordan had made Him amazingly popular with the masses, and great multitudes who had begun to look upon Him as the possible Messiah followed Him while He was on His way to Jerusalem. However, He desires to check this light-hearted manner of following Him, and so He turns to the multitudes and in a determined tone lays down His absolute demands for everyone who wishes to be His disciple and follower.”

Bock adds,

Jesus’ attention turns here to his followers, asking them to assess what discipleship requires. He wants them to be aware of what is required to walk the full route with him. His main point is that successful discipleship requires Jesus to be a priority in life. We must therefore count the cost of following him if we are going to finish the walk.”

Liefeld:

Jesus uses two different circumstances to illustrate his basic point: discipleship requires a conscious advance commitment, made with a realistic estimate of the ultimate personal cost. The practical nature of the circumstances Jesus so vividly pictures underlines the fact that Christian discipleship is not some theoretical abstract ideal but hard reality.”

Regarding the point of the parables being about the cost of discipleship, Crouch maintains that “Jesus’ first hearers would have known that label was exactly backwards.” He continues:

Make no mistake. The tower builder and the king are not models of discipleship. When does Jesus ever speak of discipleship as if it were a construction project, carefully calculated and accounted for, or a war, in which we marshal our own forces and find them adequate for the battle?

Jesus speaks of discipleship in building terms at the end of the Sermon on Mount, where he likens his followers to two men who construct houses, one on rock and one on sand. Even if he did not use a building metaphor elsewhere, this does not rule out his use of it here. After all, Jesus only once likened himself to light, water, the way, or a vine. Young says,

In the parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders, the first man constructed his home on the rock and the second used sand as a foundation . . . Mark, Matthew, and the church fathers attest to the tradition that by trade Jesus was a τεκτων, which is usually translated ‘carpenter’ . . .

“A rabbinic parable attributed to R. Jose the Galilean also uses the motif of the construction of a tower in an orchard. Clearly the building of a tower in a field was common.”

Jesus’ parable of a king considering war was particularly timely. The crowds wanted to make him king by force and Jesus may have been calling them to consider who it was that they would be up against: the full force of the Roman Empire.

Young also disagrees with Crouch’s dismissal of the builder and king as illustrations of disciples, saying,

One must carefully weigh the demands of discipleship in the same way that one plans a construction project based on a realistic estimation of the cost of labor and materials.”

Bock echoes Young’s words, arguing that Jesus uses these two parables to make his point about the cost of discipleship.

One is of a man who builds a watchtower over his land or over a city. Such an undertaking is expensive, and he must be sure such a project is affordable. Thus, it is best to estimate the cost before starting to build. How sad to start construction and not have the money to finish. All of us probably know building projects that started but did not get finished for lack of funds. What a waste to have half a building! Jesus drives the point home by picturing passers-by ridiculing the lack of closure on the project. In other words, moving toward successful discipleship takes reflection; it is not an automatic exercise. There is no positive testimony in a walk with God that is abandoned because the cost has not been properly assessed. Rather, it is tragic.”

Crouch’s perhaps views the passage in this manner in order to make a point that is seemingly important to him:

Biblical faith is the abandonment of our tower building, the surrender of our ambitions to foolishly fight our way to security.

“So Jesus invites the crowds following him to sit down and count the cost – not of discipleship, but of non-discipleship. Non-discipleship means believing that we will be able to complete our insane Babel of self-provision; non-discipleship means blindly rushing into battle as enemies of God, having vastly overestimated our ability to prevail. All this makes sense of the devastating words that immediately follow: ‘Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.’”

The problem is not that this exhortation is untrue or unnecessary; the problem is that these two parables do not teach this and if we impose a different understanding upon them we lose what they actually teach. To make this point Crouch might have turned to the twin parables of The Treasure Hidden in a Field and The Pearl of Great Price: both teach the meassage of abandonment and forfeiture that he imposes on these two parables in Luke. It is, as I said, a biblical message: right message, wrong passage.

But the message Jesus sought to convey here in Luke was clearly understood by those who heard such demands on other occasions (cf. John 6.60-66, when the multitudes walked away from his demands) and understood him to be saying the same here. The conclusions of Young, Geldenhuys, Bock, and Liefeld are convincing:

They teach human responsibility. For Jesus, the disciples must consider the all-encompassing demands of his call . . .” (Young)

“It means that [a disciple] must give Christ full control over his whole life with everything that he is and all that he possesses, and that under His guidance and in His service he should deal with his possessions in the manner that is best. . . . The important thing is that whosoever desires to follow Him must be inwardly free from worldly-mindedness, covetousness and selfishness and wholly devoted to Him.” (Geldenhuys)

“Jesus’ attention turns here to his followers, asking them to assess what discipleship requires. He wants them to be aware of what is required to walk the full route with him. His main point is that successful discipleship requires Jesus to be a priority in life. We must therefore count the cost of following him if we are going to finish the walk. His will and the direction he leads are the lodestones of our lives. We must present our lives to him and reflect values that honor God.” (Bock)

“The practical nature of the circumstances Jesus so vividly pictures underlines the fact that Christian discipleship is not some theoretical abstract ideal but hard reality.” (Liefeld)

It was approximately 40 days ago that I began this commentary on the Book of Jonah, the same amount of time that likely has passed since our patriotic prophet first began preaching in the streets of Nineveh. The climax of the events in the book seems to have already been reached: Jonah was called to preach, refused, was called again and obeyed, and the people of the city repented and judgment was spared. Happy ending; end of story.

But it does not end with three chapters, instead spilling over into four and alerting us that there is more to the book than just a chronicling of a prophet’s adventures in ministry. In Chapter Four we are allowed to view the heart of the prophet and, far more significantly, the heart of God.

1 But it greatly displeased Jonah and he became angry.
2 He prayed to the LORD and said, ‘Please LORD, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity.
3 ‘Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life.’”

In order to appreciate Jonah’s attitude, it is necessary to re-read the last verse of Chapter Three:

10 When God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented concerning the calamity which He had declared He would bring upon them. And He did not do it.

There is a striking contrast between God’s mercy and compassion in His dealings with the Ninevites and Jonah’s unhappiness and anger. When God sees the repentance of the people, He responds by not destroying them; when Jonah observes that same repentance, he burns in anger.

What Jonah says next sheds light not only on his petulance but on the entire book: his flight from God suddenly makes sense given his unloving attitude. Jonah had a clear and proper understanding of God’s character; his Theology Proper was pristine. The problem was that the prophet did not have a corresponding heart of love and compassion. God is about to cure that in this chapter.

Jonah knew what God was like and what He was likely to do: he describes God as gracious, compassionate, longsuffering, full of lovingkindness, and forgiving. He not only knew God to be this way through his education but also through his experiences, for God had demonstrated these very virtues in His dealings with Jonah in the first three chapters of the book!

Why did Jonah not respond to God’s work in his life? We are not told directly, but at least part of his resistance was likely due to his patriotism and pride in being an Israelite. The Jews knew they were God’s chosen people but did not fully understand the enormous responsibility that comes with such a privilege. Rather than develop a missionary attitude toward the surrounding nations, they instead developed a strong sense of identity as a sovereign nation. They, much like the church today, became a fortress to protect themselves from the unholy influence of the world. Ironically – again, much like the church – in their zeal for holiness, i.e., to be set apart, they became unholy in their attitudes toward the lost.

[Excursis: At the time of this writing, I am engaged in a conversation with Andy at SmartChristian regarding the Emergent Church Movement. As Andy points out, much of the ECM is a reaction to the disparity between what the church believes and what the church does. The ECM calls for authentic living (hardly a novel concept) but jettisons some of the basic, fundamental beliefs of Christianity in the process.

I mention this here because of God's dealings with the nation of Israel in general and Jonah in particular. As I just mentioned, there was an enormous discrepancy between what Jonah knew and experienced (passively), and what Jonah practiced (actively). But God did not respond to this tragic lack of orthopraxy by abandoning the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God continued to work within the framework of His truth to establish His kingdom and accomplish His purposes. McLaren's divergent movement stands in stark contrast to how God resolved the hypocrises recorded in the Bible. (Further evidence of God's commitment to His eternal message and means can be found in the Lord Jesus Christ's dealings with the seven churches in Rev 1-2.)]

Jonah, of course, is not the first prophet to wish to die: we hear a similar plea from the lips of Elijah. The reason, however, couldn’t be more different. Elijah had just finished a “ministry” [read: "conflagration"] with the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel but was now fearful that his ministry to the nation had failed; thus, he wants to die. Jonah, however, has just successfully preached a “revival” that results in the temporal salvation (at least) of perhaps 600,000 people. For this, Jonah wants to die! A striking contrast in the attitudes of two prophets, one who perceives himself to have failed God and another who feels that God has failed him.

4 The LORD said, “Do you have good reason to be angry?”
5 Then Jonah went out from the city and sat east of it. There he made a shelter for himself and sat under it in the shade until he could see what would happen in the city.
6 So the LORD God appointed a plant and it grew up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort. And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant.
7 But God appointed a worm when dawn came the next day and it attacked the plant and it withered.
8 When the sun came up God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head so that he became faint and begged with all his soul to die, saying, “Death is better to me than life.”
9 Then God said to Jonah, “Do you have good reason to be angry about the plant?” And he said, “I have good reason to be angry, even to death.”

God’s question to Jonah appears to be both rhetorical and a rebuke: the obvious, sane answer is that Jonah has no right to be angry. By his behavior, Jonah demonstrates that he is, indeed, angry about the salvation of the Ninevites.

Perhaps believing that the repentance was not genuine or that God would Himself “repent” and destroy the city, the prophet heads out of town to the foothills just to the east. There he builds a hut where he can watch what he anticipates is about to transpire.

As an object lesson, God causes a plant to grow which provides additional shade and comfort for Jonah from the relentless, searing heat. Then, just as quickly, God causes the demise of the plant and stirs up a scorching, penetrating east wind to make the already-miserable prophet even more miserable!

Again, Jonah wants to die. First he wanted to die because 600,000 Ninevites did not die; now he wants to die because his favorite plant did! He is the forefather, it would seem, of many extreme environmentalists who bemoan the loss of a spotted owl or a fish but do not bat an eye when millions of lives are snuffed out through abortion.

This is not to say that environmentalism is not important; in fact, Christians should be leading the way since we understand that we are stewards of God’s creation. It is to say, however, that it is only a human – not a fish, fowl, fruit, or flower – that bears the image of God and can enter into a personal relationship with Him. The value of human life far exceeds that of other life forms, even though those other forms do have value as well.

God again asks a rhetorical question but this time Jonah, in his anger, responds with his justification for wanting to die. God quickly ends the debate:

10 Then the LORD said, “You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight.
11 “Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?”

God’s point is simple: Jonah has had compassion on a plant that he did not plant, cause to grow, or tend to; should God not have compassion on people He created, sustained, and loved?

That Jonah learned the lesson is without question: he did, after all, write this book. In revealing his own cold, unloving heart – as well as God’s incredible grace, forgiveness, and love – Jonah demonstrates that he did learn a valuable lesson, one that is preserved for us in the Bible. In recording his own sins, he evidences a humility that we can at last admire and aspire to.