When God fulfills his World Renewal Plan through Jesus, his Son, he is not only setting up a government (Kingdom metaphor), but also creating a family. This, once again, means that our metaphors for God’s World Renewal Plan will often times flow back-and-forth.
You will notice that Paul does this mixing of metaphors in his own writing. Paul not only talks about Jesus as the King (Messiah), but as the one through whom believers received access to be members of the family of God. Ephesians 2:19 Paul writes, “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens [Kingdom metaphor] with the saints and members of the household of God [family metaphor].” We see this same kind of language in Romans as well. In Romans 4:11b–12 Paul says:
The purpose was to make him [Abraham] the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted them as well, and to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.
Here, Paul uses only the family metaphor. He does the same in Romans 8:15–17 when he says:
For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him order that we may also be glorified with him.
Paul isn’t the only one to do this. John 1:12–13 reads this way: “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”
The bottom-line is this: according to Paul (and other NT writers), salvation is the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham. God made a covenant not with Abraham as a political nation, but as a family. This means that we have the blending of both citizen and children language to conceptualize salvation. Either way, within both covenantal frameworks, salvation is not all about the individual but about a people. In turn, holiness is not all about the individual, but about the covenant people of God. Holiness is for a people through a people. When we limited our language about holiness to the individual, and having a “circumcised heart” or a “completely devoted will,” we run the risk of cutting short a full-orbed, Pauline understanding of holiness. Yes, on the one hand, holiness is about the circumcision of the heart and a fully devoted will, but it starts there and finished by reaching out into and through God’s people in the form of mission to the world.
Excerpt from Holiness In Fresh Perspective: Covenant, Cross, and Kingdom (Wipf and Stock).
