This is the fourth and final installment of my interview with Justin Holcomb, who wrote Rid of My Disgrace with his wife, Lindsey.

Please note: Justin and Crossway (the publisher) are making a chapter of the book available for free to Common Grounds Online readers.

To buy the book, Rid of My Disgrace, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1433515989/commongrounds-20

For Part 1 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-abuse-and-gospel-interview...

For Part 2 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-assault-and-gospel-intervi...

For Part 3 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-assault-and-gospel-intervi...

For more on Justin Holcomb:
http://theresurgence.com/authors/justin-holcomb
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GL: The third and final section of the book is a smart, concise and beautiful depiction of shalom, sin, sexual assault and the gospel. If I were a seminary or Christian college professor I would make this third section required reading to show biblical theology explained and demonstrated. Why did you include this third section? What was your thinking about why this would be a helpful resource?

JH: The third part (chapters 10 through 12) is for further study for anyone who wants to read about the biblical understanding of sin, violence and sexual assault, and God’s response of redemption.

Most of the book is a clear, compelling, and passionate application of grace to disgrace. We anticipated readers thinking, “This all sounds wonderful, but on what basis can they actually say these amazingly hopeful things and really mean it?” Part three of the book is the theological heart of the book because it is the foundation for all the good news we communicated earlier in the book.

Chapter ten, which the publisher made available for Common Grounds readers here [hyperlink], investigates the original peace (shalom) inherent to God’s creation, the cosmic treason of human sin, and the violence that follows. We trace a biblical theology of violence in general and explore what the Bible says about sexual assault in particular. The Fall and sin invert mutual love and harmony into domination of and violence against each other. Sex, the very expression of human union and peace, becomes a tool for violence after the Fall.

Chapters eleven and twelve trace the drama of redemption starting in the Garden of Eden leading to the cross and resurrection and finally completed in the new creation. God’s steadfast unfailing love (hesed) and grace are the threads throughout the Old and New Testaments.

Chapter eleven surveys significant, redemptive events in the Old Testament while chapter twelve shows how God’s desire to restore peace and bring redemption is fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When victims can identify with the horrendous victimization of the cross, they are more meaningfully able to celebrate the victorious resurrection of Christ. Jesus suffered violence that mirrors much of what victims experience today (shame, humiliation, silence, betrayal, pain, mockery, injustice, loneliness, etc.). While Jesus’ suffering and death were real and brutal, there was resurrection after Good Friday. The cross is both the consequence of evil and God’s method of accomplishing redemption. Jesus proves, by the resurrection, that God redeems, heals, and makes all things new.

GL: I love the way you contrast shalom and violence, disgrace and grace. Readers of this interview should simply get the book to see your more detailed work in explaining these concepts, but give us a brief version here, please.

JH: Disgrace is the opposite of grace. Grace is love that seeks you out even if you have nothing to give in return. Grace is being loved when you are or feel un-loveable. Grace has the power to turn despair into hope. Grace listens, lifts up, cures, transforms, and heals.

Disgrace is a deep sense of filthy defilement encumbered with shame. Disgrace destroys, causes pain, deforms, and wounds. It alienates and isolates. Disgrace makes you feel worthless, rejected, unwanted, and repulsive, like a persona non grata (a “person without grace”). Disgrace silences and shuns. Your suffering of disgrace is only increased when others force your silence. The refusals of others to speak about sexual assault and listen to victims tell the truth is a refusal to offer grace and healing.

To your sense of disgrace, God restores, heals, and recreates through grace. A good short definition of grace, from Paul Zahl’s book Grace in Practice, is “one-way love.” This is the opposite of your experience of assault, which was “one-way violence.” To your experience of one-way violence, God brings one-way love. The contrast between the two is staggering.

One-way love does not avoid you, but comes near, not because of personal merit but because of your need. It is the lasting transformation that takes place in human experience. One-way love is the change agent you need for the pain you are experiencing.

Can you receive grace and be rid of your disgrace? With the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the answer is yes. Between the Bible’s bookends of creation and restored creation is the unfolding story of redemption. Biblical creation begins in harmony, unity, and peace (shalom), but redemption was needed because tragically, humanity rebelled and the result was disgrace and destruction—the vandalism of shalom.

In Genesis 1 and 2, we see that God’s plan for humanity was for the earth to be filled with His image bearers, who were to glorify Him through worship and obedience. This beautiful state of being, enjoying the cosmic bliss of God’s intended blessing and His wise rule, is called shalom.

Shalom means fullness of peace. It is the vision of a society without violence or fear: “I will give you peace (shalom) in the land, and none shall make you afraid” (Lev 26:6). Shalom is a profound and comprehensive sort of well-being—abundant welfare—with its connotations of peace, justice, and the common good. Shalom means harmonious and responsible relationship with God, other human beings, and nature. In short, biblical writers use the word shalom to describe the world of universal peace, safety, justice, order, and wholeness God intended (Isaiah 32:14–20).

Genesis 3 records the terrible day when humanity fell into sin and shalom was violated. Adam and Eve violated their relationship with God by rebelling against his command. This was a moment of cosmic treason. Instead of trusting in God’s wise and good word (Gen 2:16-17), they trusted in the crafty and deceitful words of the serpent (Gen 3:1-5). In response, the Creator placed a curse on our parents that cast the whole human race into futility and death. The royal image of God fell into the severe ignobility we all experience. This tragic fall from grace into disgrace plunged humankind into a relational abyss.

God’s good creation is now cursed because of the entrance of sin (Gen 3:14-24). The world is simply not the way it’s supposed to be. The entrance of sin into God’s good world leads to the shattering of shalom. Sin, as Cornelius Plantinga writes, is “culpable shalom-breaking.”

Evil is an intrusion upon shalom. The first intrusion was Satan’s intrusion into God’s garden, which led to Adam and Eve’s tragic disobedience—the second. When sin is understood as an intrusion upon God’s original plan for peace, it helps us see the biblical description of redemption as an intrusion of grace into disgrace or light into the darkness of sin or peace into disorder and violence. Just as sin and evil is an intrusion on original peace, so redemption is an intrusion of reclaiming what was originally intended for humans: peace.

Sin wrecks the order and goodness of God’s world. Sin is the “vandalism of shalom” (another phrase from Plantinga).

God’s image bearers were created to worship and obey him and to reflect his glory to his good creation. After the Fall, humankind was enslaved to idolatry (hatred for God) and violence (hatred for each other). Sin inverts love for God, which in turn becomes idolatry, and inverts love for neighbor, which becomes exploitation of others. Instead of worshipping God, our inclination is to worship anything else but God. Idolatry is not the ceasing of worship. Rather, it is misdirected worship and at the core of idolatry is self-worship.

Instead of loving one another as God originally intended, fallen humanity expresses hatred toward their neighbors. Sin perverts mutual love and harmony, resulting in domination and violence against others. Both the vertical relationship with God and the horizontal relationship with God’s image bearers are fractured by the Fall. Evil is anti-creation, anti-life, and the force that seeks to oppose, deface and destroy God, his good world, and his image bearers. Simply put, when someone defaces a human being—God’s image bearer—ultimately an attack is being waged against God himself.

The foundational premise of the Bible after Genesis 3, therefore, is that this fallen world, particularly fallen humanity, is violent. The cosmic war begun by the serpent in Eden, described in Genesis 3, produces collateral damage in the very next chapter. Immediately after the Fall, there is a radical shift from shalom to violence, as the first murder takes place in Genesis 4. After God shows regard to Abel’s worshipful offering, Cain responds by raging against God and murdering his brother (Genesis 4:5b, 8). The downward spiral of humankind and the constant spread of sin continued as God’s blessing is replaced by God’s curse.

Violence is both sin against God and his image bearers. In our hatred for God, we hoard worship for self and strike against those who reflect God’s glory.

But because God is faithful and compassionate, He restores His fallen creation and responds with grace and redemption. While the Fall brought a curse upon creation, God did not leave his image-bearers to rot under its effects forever without hope of rescue. From the very beginning, God made provisions through establishing sacrifices to deal with guilt from sin.

The Old Testament prophets are filled with images of a time when God would put things right again, and when shalom would be finally and permanently restored to God’s creation. The restoration of shalom is frequently united to the coming of the Messiah, the long awaited deliverer, prophesied throughout the Old Testament. The hope of shalom was the hope of Israel. And the hope of Israel was the only hope for the world. According to the book of Isaiah, the hope of Israel was clearly embodied in the messianic child of Isaiah 9 and the suffering servant of Isaiah 53. This figure, the messianic child and the suffering servant of Isaiah, is one in the same: a suffering messiah who brings shalom.

God’s desire for shalom and his response to violence culminates in the person and work of Jesus Christ. The restoration of shalom is fully expressed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and its scope is as “far as the curse is found.”

The cross is God’s attack on sin and violence; it is salvation from sin and its effects. The cross really is a coup de grace, meaning “stroke of grace,” which refers to the deathblow delivered to the misery of our suffering.

Jesus Christ came into this violent world that was shattered by sin, and he suffered a violent death at the hands of violent men in order to save rebellious sinners, rescuing them from divine wrath, and supplying them with divine peace, mercy, grace, and love. The sinless one suffered disgrace, in order to bring sinners grace. Jesus is the redemptive work of God in our own history, in our own human flesh.
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Justin, thanks for taking the time for this interview. I hope CGO readers will engage Rid of My Disgrace and get better equipped to love those who have been hurt by sexual assault. You and Lindsey have given a GIFT to the church with your work on this and I pray your work is circulated widely.

CGO readers: please take advantage of the gift of Chapter 10 from the book. Justin and Crossway (the publisher) arranged to make the chapter available for free.