What Kind of King, What Kind of Kingdom?

Texts: Psalm 75; Mark 10:32-45

    HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED to you?  There's a person you admire, a family member, a teacher, a political figure, anybody.  You know his character, his opinions, the principles he bases his actions on.  You're sure you know what to expect from him as he lives his life.  But one day, you think you hear him say something that doesn't fit with what you know about him.  He'll say something is not a certain way when you'd expect him to say it is.  Well, maybe you misheard.  Forget about it.

    But then he says something else along the same lines.  What?  Well, maybe he just misspoke.  And you let it go.  But then he says or does it again, and it wasn't a slip.  You admire him, you respect him-- gosh darn it, you know him!  So automatically your mind works to make this new, contradictory information harmonize with your image of him.  And you go on like that, until the time comes when you have to face facts: These new, disturbing things really reflect who your hero is, and the image you had of him or her up to now is false, or at least inadequate.  Something has to give: Your allegiance to that person-- or the deficient idea about him you previously held.

    Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance.  That's when two things you think you know are out of tune with one another, but you do your best to make them harmonize because you don't want to give up what you basically believe on the matter.  We've all experienced it at some time or the other.  In our passage from Mark chapter 10, this lack of harmony engulfs the disciples, the Twelve, and especially the brothers James and John.  They think they know all about Jesus and His role and mission on this earth and they want to keep on relating to Him according to that knowledge.  But Jesus knows they don't have the whole story about Who He is and what He came to do.  The entire gospel according to St. Mark records how Jesus worked to make them-- and us-- give up our inadequate image of Him and embrace the real Jesus and His real kingdom, so we can turn to Him and be saved.

    Humanly-speaking, we can't blame the disciples for their deficient ideas.  After all, hear what it says in Mark 1:14-15:

    After John was put on prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.  "The time has come," he said.  "The kingdom of God is near.  Repent and believe the good news."

Jesus' basic message was about the kingdom of God: the blessed time when the righteous would be rewarded and the wicked punished and the Lord God Himself would reign in the person of His promised Messiah.  By His proclamation Jesus made it clear that He was the One who was bringing the kingdom in.
    And hear what the Scriptures say in the seventh chapter of the book of the prophet Daniel:

        As I looked, thrones were set in place, and the Ancient of Days took his seat. His clothing was as white as snow; the hair of his head was white like wool. His throne was flaming with fire, and its wheels were all ablaze. . . . 

        In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence.  He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

    Here we see the glorious Son of Man, and by that title the promised Messiah would be known.  The eternal kingdom, that is, the kingdom of God, would be given to Him to rule over, and it would never be destroyed. 

    So what do we hear Jesus of Nazareth calling Himself?  In Mark 2:10 He says: "That you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins . . . " And in Mark 2:28: "The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath."  And so on through the Gospel of Mark, not to mention many other times Jesus takes that title to Himself in Matthew, Luke, and John.  So Jesus without apology steps into the role of the Son of Man Daniel spoke about, and His miracles and teaching proved He deserved it.  This Jesus was the One who would reign as King over the indestructible divine kingdom, and His reign would have no end.

    That's how the disciples, including the Twelve, saw Him.  And they were right to see the Lord Jesus that way, as far as their perception went.  But their ideas didn't include what had to happen before the Son of Man could be awarded "all authority, glory, and sovereign power."  And when Jesus tried to teach His followers the whole truth, they didn't want to hear it, in a very real way they couldn't hear it, and they went on acting as if He'd never said anything on the subject at all.

    Though they couldn't ignore Him on it altogether. At the beginning of our target passage in Mark, we read that "they were on their way up to Jerusalem, with Jesus leading the way, and the disciples were astonished, while those who followed were afraid."  From the ordinary point of view, they were just heading for Jerusalem as they would every year to celebrate the Passover.  But even the half-committed crowds that went along with Jesus just to see what miracles He'd perform next knew that Jerusalem wasn't a safe place for the Rabbi to be.  And His behavior was so odd!  He wasn't strolling along with them, singing the customary Psalms and anticipating a glorious time in the holy city.  No, as another translation puts it, He was "forging ahead," His head down like a charging bull, a Man on a mission determined to get that mission done.  What could it all mean?

    The disciples were astonished, the ordinary disciples and the Twelve as well.  From their point of view, Jerusalem was the last place Jesus should go at the moment, Passover or no Passover.  How did this seemingly self-destructive behavior fit, how could it fit with His identity as God's elect King and Ruler of the heavenly kingdom?

    And then Jesus turns up the dissonance.  He takes the twelve apostles aside and says,

     "We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise."

The Son of Man?  Betrayed, flogged, and killed?  Preposterous! Impossible!  Jesus can't possibly mean it.  Never mind that this is the third time Mark records Jesus making this prediction.  It just didn't fit.  And as for His statement that three days later he will rise, what could that possibly mean?  As we see from what happens on Resurrection Day, that didn't register with the apostles at all.

    No, the disciples' idea of the Son of Man had nothing to do with disgrace, suffering, and death, it was all about ruling and glory.  Right after this, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, approach Jesus.  How have they explained their Master's strange behavior to themselves?

     Well, maybe He was going up to Jerusalem to declare Himself Messiah and King.  Yes, that would be it.  By the word of His mouth, with mighty signs and wonders, Jesus would overwhelm the Romans and the Jewish religious establishment.  He would take His stand in the Temple, the Holy Spirit would come down in power, and everyone would fall at His feet and crown Him Lord of all.  Definitely something to be astonished at, but it would fit.

    So since the kingdom must be coming in its fullness very, very soon, the brothers ask Him to grant them the seats at His right hand and His left when He sits enthroned in His glory.  As good Jews they're visualizing the thrones set in place in Daniel's vision.  It wouldn't be mere pomp and ceremony.  What they had in mind was the ruling power and authority and might the Son of Man would wield. James and John want to share it when King Jesus sits triumphant in His everlasting kingdom.  Co-prime ministers of Christ the King, that's what they want to be.  The kingdom, the power, and the glory may belong to our Father in heaven, but they're looking forward to a time in the very near future when a good chunk of it is delegated to them.  Talk of death, suffering, and disgrace is out of tune here; let's keep hold of eternal power and splendor.

    They don't know what they're asking, Jesus replies.  "Can you drink the cup I drink and be baptised with the baptism I am baptised with?" 

    Oh, yes, certainly they can!

    Did our Lord look at those two with loving pity when they gave that eager reply?  What did they think He meant?  Yes, there was a cup of the king: It was the cup of joy, the cup of salvation, the cup of overflowing provision.  And though the Bible doesn't tell us a lot about the preparations a king-elect would undergo before he was crowned, we do know from Exodus 29 that before a high priest was consecrated, he was to be thoroughly washed-- baptised, really-- to purify himself for his office.  And certainly the prophets say that the Messiah was to be the great High Priest as well as Israel's everlasting King. Likely there other rites before a coronation, like fasting and prayer and seeking the face of the Lord.  Yes, certainly, James and John could handle that!

    But James and John don't know that Jesus will have to drink the cup of God's wrath, as we read about in Psalm 75.  He will drink it down to the dregs, so that the wicked of this earth, including you and me, might be transformed through Him into children of God.  That cup of wrath was drunk by Christ alone, but the sons of Zebedee and all of us who belong to Jesus must be prepared to suffer for the sake of His name, before we can expect to reign with Him in glory.

    And James and John don't understand that the baptism Jesus will undergo will be the baptism of death.  He will be plunged into it fully for our sake on the cross, and after three days emerge living and glorious as the risen Son of Man.  Only Jesus could die that death for our sins, but all of us who bear His name must put to death our selfishness, our pride, our wills, even our physical lives; all we think we know and all we think we are.  All must be submerged and drowned to death in the blood of His cross.  Only then can we rise with Him to eternal life and kingdom glory.

    Yes, James and John will certainly share in Jesus' baptism and cup, and so will you and I who are baptised in His name.  But as to rewards and places of authority, the humble Son of Man declares that they are the Father's alone to give.  As we read in Psalm 75,

    No one from the east or the west
            or from the desert can exalt a man.
    But it is God who judges:
            He brings one down, he exalts another.

    The sons of Zebedee were looking to the main chance and working for their own advantage.  But in their indignation the other ten disciples were just as far off the mark, and in their situation we'd probably do the same.  Why shouldn't one of them get the best place?  Why not you, why not me?  But Jesus frankly, even ruthlessly destroys their false idea about the workings of the kingdom of God, both now and in the world to come.  He says,

        "You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,  and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.  For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."    

This is the truth about the kind of king Christ is and the kind of kingdom He came to establish.  He's not an earthly ruler and His rulership doesn't follow earthly rules.  "Long live the king!" is the traditional cry.  But Jesus came to be put to death.  Many in the Church today can accept the idea that Jesus came to be a model  of service to our fellow man.  But this idea that the wrath of God was upon us all, and only the shed blood of the sinless Son of Man can turn it away, that doesn't fit.  They explain it away by saying the cross was only symbolic, or just a supreme example of love.  But Christ our King was enthroned upon that cross, and without it there would be no kingdom for Him and none for you and me.  We must accept our need for His death, for only then can we truly be His disciples. 

    It's not for us on this earth to be coveting glory for ourselves in God's kingdom to come.  Rather, let us receive the aid of the Holy Spirit as we humbly walk in the way of the cross.  Jesus has reconciled us to God through His suffering so we who belong to His kingdom can follow Him in humility, patience, service, mutual submission, and love.  It is our glory here on earth to suffer for the name of Christ: sometimes directly in times of persecution; sometimes simply by praising and trusting Him in the ordinary troubles and pains of this life.  There will be transcendent glory to come, but for now, He calls us to drink His cup and undergo His baptism.

    Brothers and sisters, what will you do?  Will you try to minimize your need for the cross?  Will you attempt to explain away Christ's command to be the slave of all, so you can keep your deficient idea of Who He is and what He came to do?  Or will you accept that the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give up His life as a ransom for many?  Worship Him as He is, your broken and bleeding Savior.  Follow daily in the path of His sacrifice, serving others for His sake.  And know that by His faithfulness and His atoning death, you will stand before Him in His kingdom, praising the Father in the glory of His resurrection.  Amen.

One Mission, One Love, One Glory

Texts:    Isaiah 6:1-8; John 16:12-25; 17:20-26

        DOES IT REALLY MATTER what sort of Being we believe God is?  Our Christian confessions teach us to worship one God in three Persons, eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  But what does that have to do with daily life? With all the confusion, turmoil, and economic upheaval of our times, with all the cares and responsibilities we have on our shoulders, why not simply think of God as God and not worry about theology?  Shouldn't we just love our neighbor and try to make ourselves worthy of spending eternity in God's presence, whatever we conceive God to be?  After all, doesn't getting too picky about doctrine just make trouble with other people and add more stress we can't afford?

    . . . In case you might be wondering if I think we should give in to this way of thinking, let me make it very clear that I do not.  The fact that God is a Trinity is crucial for our life in this world and our hope for the next.  We Christian believers all must reject any other way of thinking about God first of all because He Himself has revealed Himself to be one God in three Persons.  And the Scriptures make it clear that it's only because the one, true, creator God of the universe is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it's only due to the wonderful reality of who and what He actually is, that He is able to redeem, renew, comfort, and guide us as we travel through this painful and perilous world.

    Why do people so often say it doesn't matter how we imagine God?  It's because we have a mistaken and distorted imagination of ourselves.  We're inclined to consider ourselves pretty good people at heart, and all we need from our deity is a little encouragement and reward to make us even better.  The job description for a god like that isn't very strict.  Any old god will do, providing he, she, or it is nice enough.

    It's not just unbelievers who're prone to think this way.  That's what we were born believing about ourselves and God, too.  But then the genuine Triune God bursts in on our darkness and we discover a whole lot of things about our sinfulness and His holiness that shock and disturb us terribly.  We learn that only a God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can rescue us from the mess we're in and transform us into the glorious human creatures He intended us to be.

    Remember what happened to Isaiah.  Compared to most people of his time, he was a righteous man.  He was God's prophet.  But that day in the temple the Triune God chose to open Isaiah's eyes to what divine holiness really is.  He revealed Himself to Isaiah-- as the Scripture says, "I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple."  Isaiah saw the seraphim and heard them cry that the Lord is not merely "Holy!" but "Holy, holy, holy!"  The doorposts and thresholds shook with the power of their voices and the whole temple was filled with the smoke, the incense of God's glorious presence.

    What a wonder, to be granted a vision of the living God!  But at the same time the Lord God revealed Isaiah to himself-- and he was devastated.  He, who seemed to be so righteous and good, was convicted of his utter wretchedness and sin. "Woe to me," he cried.  "For I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty!"

    What is Isaiah to do?  The very holiness of God condemns him!  "Unclean lips"--Bad language-- speaking slightingly of his neighbor-- grumbling about the gifts God has given-- that doesn't seem very bad, does it?  But Isaiah understands that his unclean lips are the fruit of an unclean heart, and under the vision of the threefold holiness of God he stands utterly and justly condemned.

    But one of the seraphim touches Isaiah's lips with a live coal from the altar of sacrifice.  He declares, "See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for."  How?  Could a man have been saved by a piece of glowing charcoal from the high altar of the temple in Jerusalem?  No, but the fire represents the atoning sacrifices offered on the altar and those animal sacrifices looked forward to the final and totally sufficient sacrifice that 700 years later was to be offered by the Son of God Himself on the altar of the cross.  Isaiah is redeemed in advance by the second person of the Trinity, and called to take God's message to his world.

    What is the mission the Triune God gives Isaiah?  Initially his job will be to show to the people their sin in light of God's holiness.  But when the time comes, the Holy Spirit will send Isaiah with the good news of the love of the Father to be shown to Israel and all the world.  That love will come in the person of a Son, a Servant who is a Man, but who can claim all the rights and prerogatives of God.  The Lord's ultimate goal is to cleanse His chosen ones from their sin, that we might live with Him and see His glory.

    By the power of the Holy Spirit, we have faith that this promised Messiah was the Man Jesus of Nazareth.  Again, those who do not believe, those who underestimate the terror of their sins, think that Jesus was simply a good man who came along to urge us to try a little harder.  And that doctrines like the Trinity were just made up by theologians to confuse laypeople.  Our readings from St. John show us how false this is.

    What does Jesus say of Himself?  In chapter 17 our Lord is concluding the great prayer He prayed for all His disciples in the Upper Room, before He was arrested and crucified.  In verses 20-26 He is interceding not only for the eleven apostles and the other disciples who had followed Him up to then, but also for those who would believe in Him thereafter.  That's us!  Jesus is praying that we-- us-- might participate fully in the life of the Godhead, be incorporated, wrapped in, enfolded into the glorious reality of who God is, now and forever.   Think on this, next time life hardly seems worth it, when this world seems meaningless and even those you love don't seem to care.  Jesus declares that He was sent by God the Father to bring you into total union with Himself! 

    But how can we, mere fleshly human beings doomed to die, think of being one with the everlasting God unless one who is both God and Man comes to bring the divine and the human together?  And how can Jesus claim to be in the Father and the Father in Him if He Himself is just a good man and not Himself God?  It would be impossible!  God in His holiness is so far above the best of us, we could never approach Him in our own power without being totally destroyed.

    But Jesus Christ the Son of Mary declares that He has this union with the everlasting Father God.  He claims that in Him all who believe the good news about Him are able to enter the unity that is the One and enjoy the community that is the Three.   He prays that even now among ourselves, in our everyday lives as members of His church, we will begin to taste the delights of the blissful fellowship that is Almighty God! 

    He prays that as we are brought to complete unity with Him and with one another, we will be loved by God the Father even as He loves the Son, and the world, the unbelieving, God-rejecting world-- will be forced to sit up and take notice. 

    And again in verse 24, Jesus prays that we would share His divine glory, the glory given to the Son in the Father's love before the creation of the world.

    Brothers and sisters, if Jesus is not God; if God isn't Trinity, this prayer is meaningless.  It would even be blasphemy.  Jesus would have no claim on the Father and no divine glory to reveal.  In Isaiah 42:8 the Sovereign Lord says, "I will not give my glory to another, or my praise to idols."  But Jesus has the right to God's glory, for He is one with the Father.  He didn't just say this, He proved it by rising from the dead.

    And what of God the Holy Spirit?  In our passage from John 16, Jesus declares that the Spirit of truth will take what belongs to Himself-- His truth, His mercy, His power to save, His resurrection life-- all the benefits we have in Jesus-- He the Spirit will bring this to us and so bring glory to Christ, glory that is His by the will of the Father. 

    Jesus' will is that we should see His divine glory, and love and worship Him all the more as we are drawn by the Spirit closer into the heart of our Father God.  But didn't Isaiah see God's glory, and didn't it nearly destroy him in misery and fear?  What has changed?

    What has changed is that as He prays Jesus the Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, is preparing to go to the cross.  There He would offer Himself as the perfect and final sacrifice to God for the sins of the world.  Because He is Man, He could die for us.  Because He is God, He could perfectly satisfy the holiness of the Father.  Because the Holy Spirit is God, He can bring all the good of Christ's atoning death to you, to save you and cleanse you from all that makes you unclean.  You don't have to struggle for God's favor-- God the Son has gained it for you!  You don't have to worry that God would never accept you-- Jesus has made you one with Him and therefore one with the Father.  God the Holy Spirit comes to remind you of these things.  He is the Spirit of Christ within you, keeping you in God's love and care even when you're so upset you can't even pray for fear.  The Spirit makes Christ known to us, even as Christ reveals to us the Father, that the love the Father has for Him might be in us and Christ Himself might fill us in every part of our being.

    Does it matter whether we believe that God is Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?  It matters; yes, it matters more than anything else in all of life ever can.  Reject this truth about God, and we worship nothing but an idol of our own making; we will be excluded from His presence.  Accept the Triune God, and know unity with Him who has no beginning and no end. God the Father sent His Son into the world to show His love to His chosen children, that we might see His glory.  Receive His gracious love by the power of the Holy Spirit, bringing us truth in the word of the apostles.  God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, holy and blessed Trinity.  He dwells forever in joyful, glorious unity, and He invites you together with all believers to enter in and find your salvation, delight, and eternal glory in Him.

Higher Than the Angels

Texts:   Hebrews 2:5-18; Matthew 22:15-33
 

IS THE RESURRECTION OF THE dead and the life of the world to come essential to Christianity?  Would following Christ be any less worthwhile if we had no hope of personally rising again at all?

    The Scripture teaches us absolutely, yes, without this hope, our faith would have no worth at all.  As St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:19, "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men."  And in verse 32 of that same chapter he says, "If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'" Isaiah, St. Peter, St. John, St. Jude, and many more of the inspired writers of God's word also agree that we are meant for a life in God that does not end with our last breath, but continues in the power of the risen Christ forever more. 

    In the same way, the writer of the letter to the Hebrews  wants us to realize that Jesus Christ in His own body made the ultimate, perfect sacrifice in order that we might be raised with Him and live forever in the very presence of God.  Jesus' whole purpose on this earth was to live and die so He could destroy death for us, His brothers and sisters, and bring all of us together with Him into the glory of the kingdom of heaven.

     The Sadducees knew that the resurrection of the dead was key to our Lord's teaching, though they didn't believe in it at all.  If they could undermine Jesus' doctrine of bodily resurrection, they could demolish Him and His entire ministry.  St. Matthew records the encounter between Jesus and the Sadducees in chapter 22 of his gospel.

    You'll remember that Jesus is teaching in the Temple the day after His triumphal entry into Jerusalem And that the Sadducees weren't the first to come at Him that day with what they thought were sure-fire "gotcha" questions.  The Pharisees and the Herodians had failed, but the Sadducees thought they could do better.  Again, this Jewish sect didn't believe in life after death.  They denied the existence of angels and demons.  They maintained that only the five books of Moses, Genesis through Deuteronomy:; that is, the Torah, were authoritative for God's people Israel.  They claimed to be more faithful to the exact words of Moses than the Pharisees were with their oral law.

    So that same day at the Temple, Matthew tells us, the Sadducees came to Jesus to challenge Him on the resurrection of the dead.  Their question was designed to make the doctrine-- and Jesus-- look so ridiculous and even so immoral as to blow Him and it away like chaff in the wind.  The question is based on the Mosaic law about levirate marriage.

    Briefly, levirate marriage (from the Latin word levir, meaning "husband's brother) was instituted by God to make sure that no Hebrew line would die out or lose their inheritance in the Promised Land.  Remember, under the old covenant given at Sinai, the promises of God were centered around possession of the land.  Here's how the command reads in Deuteronomy 25:5-6:

    If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband's brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her. The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel.

    Usually, marrying your brother's widow could count as incest, but in this case, the need to maintain the family line took priority in the sight of God.

    Given all this, the Sadducees raised a hypothetical question concerning a whole family of seven brothers, none of whom can manage to beget children.  All of them in turn try to do their levirate duty towards one wife and widow, and all die childless.  Hey, Jesus, what about that?  "At the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?"

    They think they've got Him.  Jesus will have to deny the law of levirate marriage as given by God to Moses.  Or He'll have to overturn the principle that God makes marriages, as written in Genesis.  Or He'll condemn Himself by approving a vile incestuous arrangement where one woman has relations forever with seven husbands at once.

    Jesus confounds this immediately:  "You are in error, because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God!"

    Where were the Sadducees so wrong?  They were assuming that people who believed in life after death were looking forward to a mere continuation of this earthly existence, but without the disease, deprivations, and troubles.  The Sadducees claimed to be ever so exact and careful about the word of God as recorded by Moses, but they really didn't understand it at all.  If they'd really known the Scriptures, they would have seen God's wondrous power recorded there and recognised His ability to bless and favor His chosen people in ways they could never have imagined ahead of time.  They would even have discovered hints that man made in the image of God does not end when his body is consigned to the dust.

    No, responds Jesus, the life of the world to come will be wonderful, new, and different.  "At the resurrection," He says, "people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven."  Moreover, the same Torah that the Sadducees accept and claim to defend itself testifies that God's saints live on after physical death.  Had they not read what God said to them in Exodus 3:6?  The Lord testified to Moses at the burning bush, "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob."  Not, "I was," but "I am now and ever shall be their God," How?  Because by God's power His saints yet live.  So, declares our Lord Jesus, "He is not the God of the dead, but of the living!"

    Isn't it satisfying to see Jesus defeat His enemies?  May it satisfy us even more to hear Him uphold our hope for eternal life and blessing with Him.  When Jesus extinguished the argument of the Sadducees, He did it for us, and for all who believe in His name.  As Hebrews tells us, Christ was born and died to bring many sons to glory; that is, to resurrection life.  He claims you and me and all who believe as His brothers and sisters, and makes us holy like Himself.  We will be raised again in perfectly renewed bodies like His own, and then He will proudly present us to His Father and ours:   "‘Here am I,'" He will say, "‘and the children God has given me.'"

    Hebrews 2:14 says that by His death on the cross Jesus destroyed our fear of death.  Not as if to say, "Don't worry, death's nothing to be afraid of, it's only like a dreamless sleep." Rather, He gives us a firm and certain hope of new life with Him in glory.  How?  By Jesus' sacrifice of Himself, wherein He made perfect atonement for the sins of God's people.  Sin handed us over to the devil.  Sin brought upon us the wrath of God and condemned us to die.  But like a faithful high priest Jesus has ministered the sacrifice of His own body to God in our behalf, that our sins might be taken away and we might share in His life that nothing can destroy.

    The Sadducees erred with their limited, distorted view of what resurrection life would be.  But frequently, sincere Christians also carry around a mistaken view of the life of the world to come.  Again, in Matthew 22:30 Jesus told the Sadducees, "At the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven."  And from this many people mistakenly conclude that human beings are transformed into angels when they die.

    Should a preacher say anything against this?  After all, if it gives someone comfort to believe that his or her deceased loved one is an angel in heaven, why disturb it?

    But I must disturb that belief, because God's promises to us in the resurrection of the dead are so much greater, so much more marvellous, so much more comforting, that I would fail both God and you if I didn't tell you about them, if I caused you to miss out on the peace the Lord has for you, or robbed Him of the praise He is due.

    When Jesus says the resurrected saints will be like the angels in heaven, He is telling us that in the world to come, there will be no need of marriage.  The joy and communion happy married couples experience is only a foretaste of the holy union of spirit that all of us will know with God and one another when our bodies are raised and made new.  This is the joy the angels know now, and we will know then.

    But the writer to the Hebrews says even more about human beings and angels.  In 2:5 he reminds us that it wasn't to angels that God subjected the world to come.  No, it was to Man, to the Man Jesus and to all the human beings who like you and me are included in Him.  In verses 6 through 8 he quotes Psalm 8, which we used as our Call to Worship.  This psalm reminds us that at creation we were made a little lower than the angels-- which is to say we were different from angels, but still ranked very high in God's estimation indeed.  Everything was put under the feet of our first parents-- but as we know, they sinned.  So our Lord came from heaven and was born as the Son of Man.  He who was the King of angels was found in human flesh and became a little lower than they.  And now through His obedience unto death He is highly exalted, higher than all angels, archangels, principalities, and powers, crowned with honor and glory.

  Jesus has regained for mankind the rank we had at the beginning, and brought us higher still.  Jesus our Lord did not become an angel when He rose again, and neither shall we.  No, we become something better: glorified and honored human beings, whom Jesus the Son of God is not ashamed to call brothers and sisters, members of His holy family.

    And see what it says in verse 16 of this chapter: "For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham's descendants."  Remember, all who receive the promise of God in faith are children of Abraham, and by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that includes us.  Again, "It is not angels [Jesus] helps." Knowing that, is there anyone who would still wish to become an angel when they die?  Do they not want to be helped by Jesus who died for them?  Do they not want to live forever in a renewed and glorified human body like His own?  The blood of Christ was never intended for the fallen angels, the demons, and them it cannot save.  The holy angels are without sin, and don't need a Savior.  But we are frail and fallen human beings, born in sin and doomed to die.  We do need His sacrifice and for us-- for you!-- He shed His blood that you might be raised to new and eternal human life in Him. 

    Claim your humanity!  Wear it proudly, for your risen Lord sits in heaven forever as the glorified Son of Man, and you are His flesh and blood, a member of His own family.  Honor the holy angels and accept with thankfulness their ministry to you, but do not worship them or desire to take their place.  No, the place you have in Christ is so much better, so much higher, so much closer to the heart of God.  For you are His redeemed, born again to give Him eternal praise and glory, and in the resurrection His power will create for you a new life more wonderful, blessed, and truly human than anything we can think, conceive, or imagine.

    To Christ who sits on the throne be all honor, glory and majesty, with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, now and forever.  Amen.

Christ's Resurrection and You: Where Is He Now?

Texts:    Hebrews 4:14 - 5:10; 7:23 - 8:2; Acts 1:1-11

    SHORTLY AFTER EASTER, I GOT a message on Facebook from my oldest niece.  She said she and some of her friends were discussing Jesus' resurrection, and they found that there was a question that stumped them all.  That is, where had Jesus gone after that? When did He die the second time?  Where was He really buried?  And where could she look in the Bible for answers about this?  She wanted to know for herself, and she wanted to tell her girlfriends, too.

    Immediately I shared with her the good news of our Lord's ascension that we are celebrating today, and pointed her to some verses that would assure her that Jesus had never died again.   I felt bad that I couldn't do more at the moment, since I was in the middle of something, but I hoped I'd given her even to start on.

    But I felt worse-- shocked and saddened, actually-- that my 40-year-old niece and her friends would have the need to questions like that at all.  She attends church regularly.  From what I know of him, her pastor seems to have his head screwed on straight when it comes to doctrine.  How could she even imagine that Jesus could have died a second time and not understand that He's in heaven even now in His glorified human body? How terrible for her to be thinking that Christ's victory over death wasn't final and absolute!

    But then I had to think: How much do any of us, even us Christians, think and know about the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ?  This past Thursday was Ascension Day.  How many of us commemorated it then?  We have the big celebration of Easter, then next thing we know, it's Pentecost Sunday and the Holy Spirit's coming.  And sometime in between, Jesus just seems to have slipped away.  Where did He go?  Where is He now?  I had to be glad my niece was asking the question in any form at all.

    Our reading from Acts shows us that Jesus did not merely slip away: He departed, and He did it openly.  Remember how in the Upper Room before His crucifixion, Jesus told His disciples that it was needful that He go away, so He could send the Holy Spirit to them. But for forty days after He rose they'd been seeing Him in that very physical resurrection body of His-- physical, except that in it He could transcend physical limitations like distance and solid walls and locked doors.  And it seems that the disciples were getting used to that.  It was just like old times, almost, having Jesus around eating with them and teaching them.  The disciples had to be shown that that time was coming to an end, that now a new order was to begin when Jesus would send the gift His Father promised, even the Holy Spirit.

    Moreover, the disciples had to understand where Jesus had gone.  He couldn't just fail to show up one day, and never return.  St. Luke leaves no room for any theories about Jesus quietly retiring to the countryside like I heard somebody or other theorize recently, or going off to India to become a guru, like the New Agers believe.  Jesus made sure the disciples saw Him physically taken up before their very eyes.  A cloud enveloped Him until both He and it were no longer visible.  This was no ordinary cloud of water vapor.  The disciples were Jews and knew their history. They would certainly realize that this was the cloud of God's presence that led the children of Israel in the wilderness, the cloud of glory surrounded Jesus, Moses, and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration. This cloud was a visible manifestation of the presence of God Himself, and in it Jesus stepped directly from the realm of this world into the heaven of God His Father.

    But you can't blame the disciples for standing there looking "intently into the sky as he was going."  Or for keeping on looking after He had disappeared.  We'd do the same.  It took two men in white--angels-- who suddenly stood there with them to tell them that Jesus had been taken from them into heaven.  The angels promised, too, that He would come back in the same way they'd seen Him go-- riding on the clouds of heaven.

    And between the time of His ascension, and the time of His return in glory, where is our Lord Jesus?  He indeed is in heaven, at the right hand of the Father in glory.

    So what is He doing now?  Has He finished with us, now that He is high and exalted?  Is He simply back to enjoying the rights and privileges of being the Son of God, with never a thought for His people here on earth?  Never think it!  There's a 19th century Welsh hymn whose chorus is a dialogue between the men and the women of the congregation.  It begins with the question, "Who saved us from eternal loss?" ("Who but God's Son upon the cross?") and it ends with the women asking, "Where is He now?" and both men and women sing together, "In heaven interceding."

    That's exactly where He is, and exactly what He's doing there.  This is the meaning of Christ's ascension, and the wonderful truth our verses from the Letter to the Hebrews reveal to us.  Jesus is indeed the One who intercedes for us before the Father.  He is our great High Priest who even now represents us to God, Who even now can point to His one, perfect, and everlasting sacrifice that forever will atone for our sins.

    In Hebrews 4:14 Jesus is described as our great high priest who has gone through the heavens.  The ancient Jews understood that there were ranks of angels and other heavenly beings, and ranks of the heavens in which they dwelt.  Paul speaks of this in 2 Corinthians 12, when he tells about a man in Christ-- himself, actually-- who was somehow caught up into the third heaven, the paradise of God.  By saying that Jesus had gone "through the heavens," the writer makes it clear that our Lord has gone all the way into the divine Holy of Holies, all the way into the presence chamber of almighty God.  Nothing stopped Him, nothing disqualified Him; Jesus is right there sharing His Father's throne.

    Therefore we have every reason to hold firmly to the faith we possess.  So we trust and believe that Jesus Christ died for our sins, and that His blood atones for all our unrighteousness, redeems us from death, and makes us holy before God.  We have faith in Jesus, our great High Priest.

    I think we Christians, especially we Protestants, have gotten so used to the idea of Jesus as our Intercessor that we forget it means He is our High Priest and that we need one just as much as ancient Israel did.   They needed a high because they were in themselves unholy in God's sight, under His wrath, and they needed sacrifice offered for them so they could be accepted by God.  So do we.  Not just anyone could make this offering. The high priest represented all the people, especially on the Day of Atonement when he took the blood of the sacrifices into the Holy of Holies.  He was one of them, a Jew like they were, but he had a special appointment from God.  The priest was to be God's chosen man, who could identify with the people and he with them.  That's what we need as well.

    The Jewish system found its fulfillment in Jesus Christ, incarnate by the Holy Spirit through the Virgin Mary.  He is definitely is a high priest who can sympathize with our weaknesses.  In Hebrews chapter 1 we read that Jesus the Son of God took on true flesh and blood and shared in our humanity. He wasn't an angel or a mere divine appearance, He was a man like us.  Like us, on this earth Jesus was tempted in every way we are.  But unlike Aaron and his descendants, Jesus did not fall into sin. Unlike them, He did not have to first sacrifice a bull for His own sin-offering before He could make atonement for the people.  Jesus our sympathetic High Priest  was holy and without sin.  Therefore, He can represent us in heaven as an Intercessor who is totally acceptable to our holy God.

    With Jesus as our high priest, we can approach the heavenly throne of grace with confidence, knowing we'll receive mercy there for His sake.  Verse 2 of chapter 5 says that the high priest "is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness."  Jesus knows what it's like to be in this mortal flesh.  Again, He does not have to offer sacrifices for His own sins, but in verses 7 and 8 we can see how in His heart and in His flesh He suffered for us, how as a Man He truly had to go through the ache and agony of sorrow over our sins, how finally He had to submit to the torture and death of the cross.  Jesus the Son of God earned His high priesthood as the Son of Man, and so, even now, He is in heaven sympathizing with our weaknesses, dealing gently with us when we go astray, and representing us in matters relating to God.

     But we see in 4:4 that it wouldn't have been enough for Jesus to be our fellow-human, if God had not personally chosen Him.  God called Him to the honor of the high priesthood, just like He called Aaron in the early days of Israel, so long ago.  In the words of Psalm 22, the Lord God has said,

    "You are my Son;
        today I have become your Father."

And in Psalm 110 God says to Him,

    "You are a priest forever,
        in the order of Melchizedek." 

    Jesus Christ has been appointed by the Father to be our representative forever.  He's not like the priests of the line of Aaron of the house of Levi. The Aaronic priests could not continue in office forever; they were mortal and one after another, they all died. In contrast, God says that Christ is a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.  Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of God Most High, is referred to in Hebrews 7:3 as being "without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life."  Figuratively-speaking, he is deathless, and so he is a walking prophecy of the Son of God who lives forever and exercises the same kind of priesthood that never ends and never can be destroyed.

    We don't have to worry about Jesus our High Priest dying a second time and leaving us with some inadequate or unsympathetic successor.  No, because He lives forever He is able to save completely everyone who comes to God through Him, because He ever lives to make intercession for us.

    Let us take comfort in these words.  I know my sin, and I know I need a lot of interceding for.  And I think you realize the same thing about yourself.  There will never come a time when Jesus our ascended Lord stops pleading for us before the Father.  He always lives, and because of that, Jesus can keep on interceding for us.  At the same time, interceding for us is what Jesus always lives for!

    Jesus meets our every need.  He has ascended to the Father: as verse 7:26 puts it, He is exalted above the heavens.  So while He has experienced human weakness and can sympathize with us, at the same time He is holy, blameless, pure, and set apart from sinners.  That's the kind of high priest we need.  Jesus is acceptable in God's presence and so His prayers on our behalf are acceptable to God.

    Jesus is qualified to be our eternal high priest by His merciful humanity, by His divine appointment, by His suffering and intercession for us here on this earth, by His deathlessness, by His purity and holiness, and by His ascension to the throne of God.  All these qualities were required in the One who was to be our Intercessor and Advocate before God the Father.  As Hebrews 8:1 states, "We do have such a high priest, who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven." This is a sanctuary much holier than the Most Holy Place of the tabernacle or the Temple could ever be.  Jesus serves in our behalf in the very presence of God; this is what He ascended into heaven to do, and what He now lives and enjoys living to do.

    So now, whenever you are in trouble, whenever you are tempted, whenever you think the world, the universe, and God Himself are all turned against you, think.  Remember.  You have a great High Priest, Jesus the great High Priest, Who for you has gone through the heavens to the holy heart of God, and even now He sympathizes with your weakness and deals gently with you.  No sin that you can repent of  is beyond His power to forgive, for He sacrificed Himself for sins once for all when He offered Himself.   When you're convinced that you can never be good enough for God, think.  Remember.  Jesus is your holy and blameless High Priest, and He credits His perfect obedience to you.  When you don't know how or what to pray, think. Remember.  Jesus is there, even now, representing you to His Father and yours.  He is able to save you completely, for He always lives to intercede for you.

    So let us hold firmly to the faith we profess.  Christ our crucified and risen Lord has gone through the heavens and has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.  "Where is He now?"

    "In heaven interceding!"

The Vindication of God

Texts:    Colossians 2:1-15; Matthew 28:1-10

      SEVERAL YEARS AGO, A BOOK of essays was published called God in the Dock.  It's by C. S. Lewis, and the title comes from criminal trials in Great Britain, where the defendant stands the whole time in an elevated open box, exposed to the stares and censures of everyone in the courtroom.  Lewis's argument is that we modern people no longer see ourselves on trial before God the Judge; rather, we put God on trial and act as judge over Him.

    You know how it is.  We put God in the dock for public disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, and tornados; for private suffering like disease, poverty, and murder.  This is the wrong way around, since it's our sin that disrupted creation and causes us to do evil to one another every day.  If God wanted to, He'd have every right to wipe every one of us out all at once, for the wages of sin is death, and all of us are sinners.

    But there was a time when God was really in the dock.  It was a dark Friday afternoon outside the city of Jerusalem, nearly 2,000 years ago.  On that day a Man hung on a cross, being shamefully tortured to death for the crime of claiming to be God.  At the foot of that cross, and in hiding in the city, were women and men who knew that Man had never done an unjust or wicked or sinful thing in His life.  Yet this Man was suffering the most degrading, agonizing, disgusting form of execution practiced by a civilized society, a death designed to show to everyone what a low, despicable being the crucified criminal was.  Was that Man really guilty of what His enemies charged?  Were all His friends and disciples wrong in calling Him the Righteous One?  Or was the holy God actually turning His back on a truly innocent Man? After a few hours the Man was dead and buried-- and the wages of sin is death.    Could this Man ever be vindicated?   Could God?

    We know that that Man dying on the cross outside of Jerusalem that day was Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.  For the rest of that Friday, all the Sabbath, and into the eve and morning of the first day of the week, His disciples hid and mourned and simply could not understand.  God was in the dock, and it seemed as if the verdict would come in "Guilty."

    But as the Gospel according to Matthew tells us, early on the first day of the week, just as the sun was beginning to rise, Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary" went to Jesus' tomb.  Matthew doesn't tell us whether the women knew that the tomb not only was closed with the customary stone, but also was sealed and guarded.  He only tells us they intended to "look at it," and very likely, to mourn.

    In any event, it didn't matter.  For as the two Marys approached the tomb where Jesus lay, a violent earthquake shook the ground and angel of the Lord came down from heaven, rolled back the stone, and sat on it.  His appearance so frightened the guards they fainted away  like dead men.  And Jesus' tomb?  It was -- empty.

    Empty before the stone was rolled away.  Empty before the earthquake sent the ground reeling.  Empty before the angel descended and sat and greeted the women as they approached.  "Do not be afraid," he said to them, "for I know you that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said."

    "He is risen, just as He said."  And then, as the women hurried away to tell the Eleven the incredible news, Jesus Himself met them.  As it says in verses 9 and 10, "‘Greetings,' he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshipped him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.'"

    Jesus the Crucified One was risen!  He was alive!  He was risen, just as He said, risen indeed!

    Brothers and sisters, the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ means many things to us, in this world and the next.  But one of the most important and magnificent things it declares is the vindication of God.  God was in the dock in the crucifixion of His Son.  But now, Jesus Christ is risen from the grave, and God the Son, God the Father, and we who believe in Him have been fully justified against any imputation of sin or censure: Divine vindication has come.

    First of all, the Man Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has been vindicated.  Did anyone think He was dying for His own sins on that cross?  No! The resurrection proves He was the Sinless One, dying for the sins of the world.  The resurrection of Christ proved that He, Himself, was totally righteous and innocent.  The grave could not hold Him, death had no power over Him.

    The resurrection vindicates Jesus' claims to be one with God, to be God Himself.  Only God has life in Himself; only God has power over death.  In John chapter 10, Jesus tells His opponents,

    The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.

Jesus had declared that He would rise, that He could rise, for He is the only-begotten Son of God the Father.  In Him all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form (Col. 2:9).  He is the head over every power and authority, including death.  And by His resurrection, His divine claims are proven true.

    The resurrection vindicates Jesus' word as the word of God: "He is risen, just as he said."  Any human can preach comfort and holiness and beautiful ethics and morality.  But only someone who was God and who spoke the very words of God could promise that He would come back to life after being crucified, and actually do it.

    The vindication of Christ our God assures us that He and His word are to be trusted.  His sinless life and death has the power to save us from death and hell.  His word is to be received as the very word of God, for He was and is God, come to us in human flesh, risen from the grave, and ascended in that same flesh into heaven. When He says He will give eternal life to whomever believes in Him, we can take Him at His word.  Jesus was no criminal blasphemer, suffering on a Roman cross for His own sins:  He was and is the glorious Son of God, and as He hung there dying (as it says in Colossians 2:15), He was [disarming] the powers and authorities, [making] a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross."

    The resurrection of our Lord Jesus vindicates God the Father as holy and righteous. The dying thief whom Luke records admits that he and his fellow-thief were suffering the just punishment for their crimes, but this Man Jesus had done nothing wrong.  The disciples on the road to Emmaus, who didn't believe Jesus was already risen, asserted that He had been a godly and true prophet; in fact, they'd thought He was the Messiah sent to redeem Israel.  How could a good and righteous God allow a Man who had kept His Law perfectly to suffer death and decay like any other sinner?

    But, as Peter preached on the first Pentecost, God did not abandon Jesus to the grave, nor did He allow His Holy One to see destruction.  In raising His Son from the dead, God the Father proves that He is righteous and is on the side of the righteous.  God is vindicated against any charge that He is indifferent to evil or blind to what evil men and evil forces do.  No, even on the cross God was defeating evil, and the resurrection of Christ points forward to the Last Days when all righteousness will be vindicated and death, sin, and the devil will be crushed under the feet of our triune God forever.

    The vindication of God the Father in the resurrection of Christ assures us that the prayers of His saints are heard.  We can trust that at the right time He will rescue us from all our troubles.  And in the meantime, we can know that our sufferings have meaning and purpose.  God is our heavenly Father who loves us, and though, as Peter tells us in his first epistle, "for a little while [we] may have to suffer grief in all kinds of trials[, t]hese have come so that [our] faith-- of greater worth than gold, though refined by the fire-- may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed."

    The resurrection of Christ is not only the vindication of God, it is also vindication from God, vindication for us sinners whom He has called to belong to Him.  God is too holy to look upon sin; we sinners cannot endure in His presence.  Our sins have earned us the punishment of eternal death.  On the other hand, He has chosen us before the creation of the world (as it says in Ephesians 1) to be adopted as His sons in Jesus Christ.  How can God the Righteous adopt unworthy sinners without violating His holy justice?  How can He maintain His holiness and still fulfill His plan to admit us into His love?
    In Romans 3, Paul writes that God presented Jesus

    . . . as a sacrifice of propitiation, through faith in his blood.  He did this to demonstrate his justice . . . at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

The resurrection of Christ proves that His death was an atoning sacrifice for our sakes.  It demonstrates that His blood totally paid the penalty for our sins, and in Him we can stand fully accepted before the throne of God, as His beloved daughters and sons.  Christ is risen, and we are vindicated before our holy God.

    In our Colossians reading, Paul reminds us that formerly, we were dead in our sins.  We were "uncircumcised in our sinful nature,"  which is to say that we were outside of the saving covenant between God and His faithful people.  But now, God has made us alive with Christ, the One who was dead and is risen again.  Now we "have been given fullness" in Him and share the divine fullness which is His.  We have "been buried with Him in baptism and raised with Him through [our] faith in the power of God, who raised Him from the dead."  Colossians 2:14 assures us that in his death, Jesus "canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross."

    When Jesus was crucified, our sins and guilt were crucified with Him.  And with them died the punishment we deserved for them under God's righteous Law.  In Christ we are fully vindicated.  All charges against us have been wiped away!  As it is written in Romans 8, who can bring any charge against God's elect?  God Himself justifies and vindicates us!  Who can condemn?  Jesus Christ, who died and was raised to life, sits at the right hand of God interceding for us!  In the resurrection of Christ we can be assured that all our sins are forgiven.  And not only that, but through our risen Saviour we also enjoy all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, knowledge of the deep, deep love of God and wisdom of how He used the shame of the cross to bring us, even us, to the joys of life eternal.

    And so, as Paul urges us in Colossians, let no one deceive us by fine-sounding arguments.  Let no one take us captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, that depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.  God is out of the dock, and in Christ, He has cleared us from all charges as well. 

    So don't allow yourself to be put in the dock again.  The basic principles of this world say that the dead do not rise.  Too bad for the basic principles of this world.  God has come from beyond this world and raised up His Son Jesus Christ and raised us up with Him, as well.  Unbelieving human tradition tries to tell us that Jesus didn't exist, or if He did, He didn't rise and it shouldn't matter to our faith if He didn't.  But Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep in death, and all our hope in heaven and on earth depend on this truth.  Human tradition says it's up to us to vindicate ourselves in the eyes of God and the world.  We have to do good deeds and keep all the rules.  But Jesus Christ is risen, and we who were dead and helpless in our sins have been raised with Him.  He and He alone has brought us into His everlasting covenant by a circumcision not done by human hands but by Christ Himself in our baptism.

    The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the vindication of God.  The women who met Him outside the tomb that morning fell down at His feet and worshipped Him. They did right, for He was their Lord and their God.  And by His blood and rising, He is ours.  Do not be afraid.  Heed the voice of the angel; obey the word of your Lord Himself.  Go quickly and spread the good news: Your full vindication has come, for Christ who died is risen, He is risen indeed!

Who Is This?

Texts: Deuteronomy 18:15-19; Zechariah 3:1-2, 6-9; 2 Samuel 7:11b-16; Matthew 21:1-16

    ALL WEEK PILGRIMS HAD been surging into Jerusalem.  The Passover was near, and hour by hour more and more people approached the gates to the city.

    But today, five days before the Feast, something was happening on the road from the Mount of Olives that was out of the ordinary even for this holiday time.  Down from the Mount rolled a stream of pilgrims shouting, "Hosanna to the Son of David!"   "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!"  And "Hosanna in the highest!"

    All this clamour seemed to be addressed to a Man riding in the midst of the crowd, seated on a young donkey with its mother close by.  The exultant pilgrims were cutting branches off the palm trees and spreading them  and their own cloaks on the road in front of Him.  Closer and closer to the city the loud and excited procession approached, until the Man and His supporters swept in through the city gate and into the Temple courts.  Still they cried out, "Hosanna!  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!"  And the Man rode on, tall and regal on the cloak-draped beast, the very image of a King taking possession of what was His own.

    On Jerusalem and her citizens the impression was nothing short of seismic.  From one end of the city to the other the news spread, and their hearts were shaken to the depths.  "Who is this who has come?" they asked.  "Who is this?"

    From the Man's crowd of supporters the reply came, "This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee."

    Who is this?  Who is this Jesus?  People are still asking the question today.  Every year about this time unbelievers with little scholarship and less reverence claim to answer that question with their latest ideas.  They say, "He was an ordinary man buried in his family tomb."  Or, "He was a co-conspirator with Judas trying to gain political control."  Or, "Jesus was the husband of Mary Magdalene."  You've heard all the sensationalist theories, and I hope you know they're only good for making the authors money off of people fool enough to believe their lies. 

    But the question is still remains: Who is this?  Who is the One who rode into Jerusalem that Sunday afternoon so many centuries ago? 

    We don't need to come up with new theories: the Scripture itself answers question.  Not just with a few facts about a Rabbi who once walked the hills of Galilee and Judea; no, the Word of God shows us the living Jesus and reveals who He is for us today and will be forever.

    Who is this, riding into Jerusalem?  The Galilean crowds say to the people of the city, "This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee." 

    Could they have meant that Jesus was the prophet from Nazareth, so no one would confuse Him with some other prophets of God that were around?

    No.  Absolutely not.  Everyone knew that John the Baptist was the first prophet God had sent the Jews since the death of the prophet Malachi over four hundred years before.  From then until John, no person had spoken in the name of the Lord, at least not with God's approval.  But for the previous three years Jesus of Nazareth had been proving by His words and miracles that He had every right to speak in the name of the Lord.  He was the only prophet worthy of the name in Israel. Jesus, moreover, had shown Himself to be greater than any prophet who had come before.  His words were more authoritative than those of Moses.  His miracles were more wonderful and divine than those of Elijah and Elisha.  He was not simply a prophet, He was the Prophet.

    As we read from the Book of Deuteronomy, fourteen centuries before Jesus walked this earth the Lord God put His words into the mouth of His servant Moses.  Moses said, "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him."

    What does it mean to say "a prophet like Moses"?  Hear what the Lord Himself said about Moses, as it is written in Numbers 12, verses 6-8a:

    When a prophet of the LORD is among you,
          I reveal myself to him in visions,
         I speak to him in dreams.
    But this is not true of my servant Moses;
          he is faithful in all my house.
    With him I speak face to face,
         clearly and not in riddles;
           he sees the form of the LORD.

The promised "prophet like Moses" would speak with the Lord face to face.  He would hear and know the word of the Lord directly, and not through dreams and visions.  He would be "faithful in all God's house," and would declare the message of God fearlessly, without worrying what people might say or do to him.  The great Prophet to come would be one of the children of Israel. And the Lord commanded that the people must listen to him.

    Jesus was and is the Prophet like Moses whom the Jews had been awaiting for so long.  The cheering Galileans who marched beside Jesus as He rode into Jerusalem that day knew He was.  And by the grace of the Holy Spirit, our ears are opened to receive Him as the Prophet, too.

    The Apostle John writes, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."  The Greek for "the Word was with God" can be translated "the Word was before the face of," or "face to face with God."  From all eternity, Christ the Lord beheld the form and face of the Father directly, without needing any go-between.  As a Man on this earth that relationship and direct communication between Himself and the Father continued unbroken until the agony of the Cross.  John reports that Jesus said, "My teaching is not my own.  It comes from him who sent me.  If anyone chooses to do God's will, he will find out if my teaching comes from God or not."  Jesus received the word of God directly and He proclaimed it faithfully.  Just as with Moses, and even more than Moses, Jesus' word was and is the will of God for His chosen people.  The Lord said through Moses in the desert,

    I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers; I will put my words in his mouth, and he will tell them everything I command him. If anyone does not listen to my words that the prophet speaks in my name, I myself will call him to account.

Who is this,  riding into Jerusalem?  It is Jesus Christ, God's final and greatest Prophet. And to Jesus all mankind must listen, and Him all mankind must obey.

    Who is this, who enters the Temple area in such righteous zeal?  This Jesus acts as if He had the right to drive out those buying and selling there.  Wasn't it the priests of Israel, and especially the high priest, whose duty it was to make sure that the temple of God remained a house of prayer for all nations?  For the Temple was where the people met with God.  It was the place where the sacrifices were offered to make atonement for sin.  As Solomon prayed at the first Temple's dedication, "May your eyes, [O Lord], be open toward this temple day and night, this place of which you said you would put your name there. . . . Hear the supplications of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray towards this place. Hear from heaven, your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive."  The high priest was charged with keeping himself and the Temple holy and pure.  And only he might carry the blood of the sacrifice into the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement, to turn away God's wrath so the people might live. 

    But as we read in the book of the prophet Zechariah, the high priests of Israel were sinful men themselves.  Joshua was high priest in Jerusalem after the people returned from exile in Babylon, and humanly-speaking, he was a pretty good man.  But even he is covered with such sin, his robes are so dirty before the Lord, that Satan in strict justice has every right to accuse him.  But the Lord rebukes Satan, and says that Joshua is a burning stick snatched from the fire.  The Lord then addresses Joshua and says,

     "Listen, O high priest Joshua and your associates seated before you, who are men symbolic of things to come: I am going to bring my servant, the Branch.  . . . and I will remove the sin of this land in a single day."

This Joshua and his fellow priests are men symbolic of things to come, in the day when God would send the righteous Branch of Jesse spoken of by the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, through whom God would remove His people's sin in a single day.   Joshua and the other priests were emblems of the great and perfect High Priest to come.  The robes of this High Priest would be pure and His sacrifice for sin would be perfectly acceptable to God.  The name Joshua itself means "Jehovah saves," and it's the Hebrew version of the Greek name "Jesus."  The writer of the book of Hebrews says that Jesus is our High Priest forever.  Jesus is the One who is "holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens."  He is the One who sacrificed for our sins once for all when He offered Himself.  He is the One who serves in the sanctuary of heaven, in the true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by man.  He is the One who has the right to cleanse the Temple, the right to encourage the praises of the children shouting "Hosanna to the Son of David!"-- even though the impure and faithless chief priests of His day wanted Him to keep them quiet. 

    Who is this, striding into the Temple and overturning the tables of the moneychangers?  It is Jesus, our great High Priest, who took the blood of His own body into the Holy of Holies of heaven, and made full atonement for all our sins.

    And who is this, whom the crowds on the road and the children in the Temple hail as the Son of David?

    As we read in our selection from 2 Samuel, God promised King David that

    I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son.

In the ordinary course of this world, God fulfilled this promise first of all in David's son Solomon.  He was born of David, his kingdom was established, and he built the house for God's name.  And God kept on keeping this promise in David's grandson and great-grandson and great-great-grandsons.  When it was necessary, God punished them "with the rod of men, with floggings inflicted by men," but David's line was never destroyed.  Even in the days of the Exile, the Davidic line continued, and ever since, the Jews had looked forward to the coming of the ultimate King of Israel, "great David's greater Son."  For in him God would keep His promise to David, in which He said, "Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever." 

    And now, on this first Palm Sunday afternoon, men, women, and little children are crying out to Jesus, "Hosanna to the Son of David"  "Hosanna!" they cry.  "Save us!"  And Jesus accepts their praise.  Before His conception, the angel told His mother Mary that her Son would sit forever on the throne of His father David.  All through His ministry,  Jesus announced the coming of the kingdom of God and in His commands and parables He made it clear that He Himself was the ruler of that kingdom.  Jesus before Pilate declared that He was a king, and not just a king of any single nation in this world; He was king of a kingdom that transcends this world, a kingdom that will endure before God forever.

    Who is this, riding into Jerusalem like a king ready to take His throne?  It is Jesus, the Son of David, the One to whom every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

    Who is this Jesus?  He is our King, enthroned on the Cross where He won the victory over Satan, sin, and death.  Under His gracious rulership we bow in humble joy and receive health, bounty, nurture, and peace that nothing on earth can give.  He is our High Priest, and the Cross was the bloody altar where He offered Himself up as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world.  In His broken body and shed blood alone we find redemption and are cleansed to stand in the presence of God.   He is our Prophet, the Prophet, and from the Cross His blood speaks the divine word of judgment against sin and the gracious word of hope for ransomed sinners.   From His mouth and His alone we receive the true meaning of the Scriptures and are called to eternal life.

    Jesus is your Prophet, Priest, and King, and He is mine.  So come to His Supper, all you who are baptised into His name.  At His Table He comes to you humbly, no longer on a donkey, but in these elements of bread and wine; on these He has promised to set His seal. Lift up your hearts to heaven and receive Him by faith, with thanksgiving. 

    Hosanna to you, Christ Jesus, our Prophet, Priest, and King.  Blessed are You who come in the name of the Lord.  Hosanna to the Son of David.  Amen.

The Victory That Overcomes the World

Texts: Jeremiah 17:5-14; 1 John 5:1-6

THESE PAST FEW DAYS I'VE been digging in my garden, getting some things planted. You'd think it wouldn't be much of a project in the vegetable garden. I've been turning over the soil there the past five or six years; I live close to the river and the soil is very sandy; it should be nice and loose. But it takes hours of work every spring.

You see, I have a couple of big maple trees in my back yard, and their roots creep under the ground right into my garden beds. It takes a lot of labor with the hoe and the spade and the tree branch loppers to get them out of the way.

If my trees could talk, they'd likely say something like this: "Sure, you want us to stop our roots just at the border of your vegetable garden and flower beds and go somewhere else-- like under the neighbors' lawns. Not happening. Of course we're putting our roots where you plant things! That's where all the loose dirt and the fertilizer and the water is!"

Trees as trees are not dummies. They go where the water and nutrients are. It only makes sense.

So why, then, do we human beings not do the same? But our natural tendency is to seek out the very conditions that bring us death. Here's how the prophet Jeremiah puts it in the 17th chapter of his book:

This is what the LORD says:
"Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who depends on flesh for his strength
and whose heart turns away from the LORD.
He will be like a bush in the wastelands;
he will not see prosperity when it comes.
He will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives.

Can any bush survive in conditions like that? But we're like that when we turn away from faith in the Lord. We trust instead in ourselves. We rely on what other people can do for us. We run after money or power or anything other than God. The Lord Almighty is a river that never runs dry, but we send out our roots into the wastelands of our own self-sufficiency and self-deification.

How different it is when we trust in the Lord! The Scripture says:

"But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
whose confidence is in him.
He will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit."

Even when external conditions aren't good, God causes those who trust Him to prosper and bear fruit. He nourishes us into becoming the kind of people He wants us to be, people who love Him and our brothers and sisters the way He created us to do.

So why do we turn away from Him?

We do it because as Jeremiah says, "The heart is deceitful above all things." We lie-- even to ourselves. We convince ourselves that we really are trusting God when we're really depending on ourselves. We claim to be doing what He commands, but we're doing what we want to do when we want to do it. It's the same with every person who has ever lived. We don't trust and obey God and if somebody points that out, we deny the problem in any number of ways.

Only the Lord can search our hearts and examine our minds, to reward us according to what our deeds deserve. A lot of people think that's good news. They say, "I'm not a particularly religious person, but God will look at my heart." But if your faith is in anything or anyone other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, you don't want Him examining your heart; you want to run and hide. For the human heart is not only deceitful above all things, as it says in verse 9, it is also "beyond cure."

So what are we to do? The glorious throne of God is our sanctuary and refuge, but how do we get there? The Lord Almighty is our spring of living water, but how can we drink from it? We keep on turning away; we keep forsaking the Lord, and it seems our names are written in the dust, to blow away with the next wind.

Anyway, how can a dry bush reach out its roots to the living God? The world has us in its dusty grip and gives us only defeat and death.

Jeremiah and the Jews of his time couldn't answer that question. They knew it was up to God-- if we go down to verse 14, we read, "Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed; save me, and I will be saved, for you are the one I praise." But how could God heal a deceitful heart that was beyond cure? How could He revive a dead shrub in the desert, that was ready for the fire?

The good news is that God does accomplish all this, through His Son our Lord Jesus Christ. He cures us, He revives us, and better still, as the Apostle John tells us in the fifth chapter of his first letter, He makes us to be children of God.

God didn't have to do this. But He took what was dead and out of His own will and in His good pleasure He begat us as His spiritual children, giving us faith to believe that Jesus of Nazareth really was and is the Christ sent from God. Our trust in Christ is evidence that we have been born of God already, not something we did to make it happen.

When we believe that "Jesus is the Christ" we're agreeing with God about His mission on earth. We say, "Yes, Lord," to all the prophecies of Old Testament history that told what this unique prophet, priest, king, and suffering servant would someday do. We're saying, "I believe that Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled all that and is the one and only Messiah who was to come." He is the arm of the Lord who brings us salvation; He is the sinless Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

We could never make this confession on our own. God first had to give us new birth from above.
But in His love God did reach down and makes this happen in our lives. Through His Son Jesus Christ He takes dry bushes out of the wasteland and remakes us as tall, healthy, fruitful trees planted by a river that freely flows. He gives us the right to love Him and call Him "our Father," not as His creatures, but really and truly, as His born-again daughters and sons. At the same time, He opens our hearts to love all our brothers and sisters who, like us, have been born anew as members of His worldwide family, the Church.

Faith in God is linked inseparably with love for our brothers and sisters in Christ. God says, "Love Me, love My children." But it can be is so hard to love other people, especially other people in the church! Does St. John mean we have to go around feeling gooshy emotions towards each other all the time?

But John says nothing about feelings. He says, "This is how we know we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands." You want to love others? Love God first and obey His law, and that will put you in the right heart for loving your neighbor.

It's popular for people to say, "Jesus only gave one command, for us to love one another." That isn't quite true, but suppose it were. Would that mean we could do we want in life, provided we were nice to other people whenever we felt like it? Absolutely not! In the first place, what we call love is nothing close to the self-sacrificial, purifying, unquenchable love that the Holy Spirit calls us to in this letter. In the second place, all the Law of God: the Ten Commandments, all the ordinances, even the ceremonial law-- it's all a picture and prescription of what love for God and man looks like in practical terms. True, some the parts of it were destined to expire with the coming of Christ, things like animal sacrifices and the kosher laws. But even they told supremely of God's loving desire to preserve a people for Himself and through them to bring salvation to the world. The commands of God revealed in the Law teach us what it means to love Him and His children.

And, John says, His commands are not burdensome.

What a minute. Does he think it's easy to love other people? we ask. He must not have known characters like the ones we have to deal with!

That's our old sinful nature is still in us, getting in the way of who we are in Christ. The a problem is not with the commands, the problem is with that still-sinful part of ourselves.
No, when we are living by the river of water that is trust in our Lord Jesus Christ, God's commands become for us more and more a privilege and a joy.

This is true for you only if you've already been born of God and you already believe faithfully on our Lord Jesus Christ. If that's foreign to you, don't waste your time trying to obey God's commands. Rather, throw yourself immediately on the mercy of the God who made you and pray He will remake you as a child of His own.

As in the days of Jeremiah, the world is always at us. We're constantly bombarded with forces that stand opposed to Jesus Christ and to us as His younger brothers and sisters. But, John says, anyone who is born of God overcomes the world.

How do we do that? By our faith in the saving work of our Lord Jesus, who is the Christ. This is the victory that overcomes the world. This is the rolling stream we keep our roots in and so we live and thrive. Do you want to have confidence in this life and solid hope for the life of the world to come? Believe that Jesus is the Son of God. Trust that He was more than just another great teacher-- rely on Him as God from all eternity, come to earth in human flesh to die for you on a cross and to rise from the grave to give you new life with God.

John writes, "This is the one who came by water and blood-- Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood." Theologians don't agree on exactly what this means. But John Calvin has a suggestion, which commends itself to my spirit, and I hope it does to yours. Jesus Christ came to us with the testimony of water and blood, and those elements speak to us of the Old Testament system of washings and animal sacrifices. Before Him those rites and rituals looked forward to what Jesus would do once for all to cleanse us from the filth of sin and to make blood atonement for it. When Jesus died on the Cross He fulfilled everything those old Covenant rites pointed towards. And in evidence, when He had died, His Father and ours allowed a Roman soldier to pierce His side so that blood and water poured out of it.

There's nothing miraculous in that of itself. That's what happens when the blood separates due to the kind of death Jesus died. But by the grace of God it serves as a sign to us who believe that Jesus is the one who washes and makes clean, and whose blood provides expiation for all our sins. John certainly took it that way; in his gospel at chapter 19, verses 34 and 35 he says, "One of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. The man who saw it [that is, John himself] has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe."

But we also have the testimony of the Holy Spirit, witnessing to our souls that Jesus Christ really is the Son of God, that He really did come in the flesh and that through faith in Him we really can overcome the world. The Spirit confirms in our souls that we truly have been born of God and that we can joyfully love Him and the brethren despite all the onslaughts of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

As Jeremiah said, a glorious throne, exalted from the beginning, is the place of our sanctuary. We have entered into that sanctuary by the blood of Jesus Christ, shed for us. His blood is a river deep and pure, flowing forever so you can put down your roots and thrive. Faith in Him is your victory; love for God and your brothers and sisters is your battle plan and the name of Jesus is your shout of triumphant praise.

Give God thanks that He has brought you out of the dry and waterless places of life without Him and planted you by His streams of living water. Rejoice that He is your Father and you are His child. Serve Him in reverence and love, in the name of Jesus Christ who died and rose again for you. Alleluia, amen.

Fear, Love, and the Salvation of God

Texts: Acts 8:26-40; 1 John 4:7-21

THERE'S A LOT TO BE fearful about these days. The economy's going down the sewer. There's a strange new kind of flu going around. The Middle East is blowing up worse than ever. And the politicians in Washington seem to spend all their time thinking up new ways to take away our rights and liberties, not to mention our money.

The world is filled with Fear, and to paraphrase a certain poem, "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, maybe you haven't grasped the situation!"

With all this, the Apostle John comes along with His First Letter and says, "Perfect love drives out fear." He commands us to love one another, and that will prove whether we have perfect love, as in, "The one who does not love does not know God."

That's putting a big burden on Love! Maybe you remember the hippie days of the late 1960s, early '70s. A lot of us were running around babbling about Love, Peace, and Flower Power. It was all "Make love, not war." The idea was that if we would all just bliss out and love everybody, all the nasty, scary things in the world could be magically overcome or ignored into oblivion. I was just young enough during that time to be skeptical about how that was going to work. And in the end, it didn't. My Baby Boomer generation turned out to be just as greedy, hateful, and rapacious as any other, we were just more sneaky and sanctimonious about it.

Is this the kind of love the Apostle John is talking? The warm-fuzzy, head-in-the-sand, self-seeking human love that fades out when the situation gets scary or just inconvenient?

No, John is speaking of the tough-as-nails, purifying, self-giving, fear-defying, eternal agape love of Almighty God. He begins our passage with this command: "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God." This love of God is what we're to do our loving with, not some feeling we've imagined or felt or come up with on our own.

In the Greek this passage actually begins with "agapetoi ," which means "Beloved," or, "You who are loved with the love of God." So verse 7 could well read, "You who are right now already loved with the purifying, selfless, fear-defying love of God, love one another with the purifying, selfless, fear-defying love of God, for purifying, selfless, fear-defying love comes only from God." In other words, you've already got what you need right now to obey this command and stand up to fear, because you've received it from God Himself.

In the same vein, verse 8 would read, "Whoever does not love with this purifying, selfless, fear-defying love of God does not know God." Obviously not, because God Himself is this sort of love, and only those who know Him can love this way.

Moreover, the love of God will certainly show itself in anyone who has it. Not all at once, but if someone claims to know God and never, ever shows any sign of Christian love, you have every right to doubt his or her salvation.

But this agape love of God: how do we know it can face down all our fears and make it possible for us to love one another?

We know it, as John writes in verse 9, because God sent His only-begotten Son into the world that through Jesus Christ we might have-- not just bios-- physical life-- but zoe-- the eternal life of God. Think of what Jesus Christ did for you and me on the cross! He faced down all the terrors of sin, death, and hell. He defeated every last thing that we should ever be afraid of.

Verse 10 gives us a true picture of God's purifying, selfless, fear-defying love: It's not that we came up with this kind of love towards God and He rewarded us by loving us back. That's putting it the wrong way around. No, God initiated this love. He embodied it in His Son and His sacrifice for us. When Jesus shed His blood, beyond all else He dealt with the most fearsome thing you or I would ever have to face. Not disease, not death, not even all the devils of hell: Jesus turned aside or propitiated the wrath of God. He, the innocent Lamb of God, died in the place of us guilty sinners. And why? Because God so loved the world, as John writes in his Gospel. Because, as Paul writes in Romans, God was demonstrating His love for us, even while we were still rebellious sinners.

So, John continues in verse 11, "Beloved, since this is how God loved us, we also ought to love one another."

Let that sink in for a moment . . . God loved us when we were wretched, wrong, and undeserving. In response, we are to love one another with purifying, selfless, fear-defying love . . . even when the other person is wretched, wrong, and undeserving.

Oh. So we're supposed to let others walk all over us? After all, Jesus put up with cruel insults and dehumanizing treatment! Is that the love God demands that we show others?

But look at Jesus. No one victimized Him, not even when they nailed Him to the cross. The Scripture clearly teaches that Jesus humbled Himself and laid down His life willingly. When He submitted to humanity's scorn and cruelty, He did it on purpose so humanity might be redeemed from sins like scorn and cruelty. The love of God demonstrated in Jesus Christ always triumphs over the evils thrown against it, and raises us up to new life. The love of God can never condone sin, or promote it, or give up against it. The love of God wants nothing but the best for the object of His love, and that best is Jesus Christ and everything He gives.

Make no mistake: The purifying, selfless, fear-defying love of God working in us will call us to endure pain and insult from the unredeemed world. If you are persecuted for Jesus' sake, you follow in His steps. You exhibit Jesus Christ and His salvation to the world, that more and more people might be saved.

John says in verse 12, "No one has beheld God at any time"-- not with the physical eyes, that is. But as we love others as God loves us, with the same purifying, selfless, fear-defying love, the world will see in us an image of God working in love. As we grow more and more like His Son, that image is being perfected in us. How can you know if you're really saved? You know it by the presence of the Holy Spirit in you, bringing you along, conforming you to the image of Jesus Christ, assuring you of God's gracious love for you, encouraging you to show His love, helping you to repent when you fall short, and never, ever giving up on you.

Again, what's the primary way we show the purifying, selfless, fear-defying love of God? As verse 14 says, it's by bearing witness that the Father has sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.

Notice what John says. For many years, "Christian witnessing" has meant "telling people how Jesus has improved my life/made me a better mother/made me a nicer person," etc. What I'm about to say may go against everything you've ever heard on the subject, but hear me: That is not Christian witnessing. Yes, Jesus may well have done all that for you. But our true witness to Christ is telling the old, old story of how God's only Son came in love to take on our flesh and hung on a cross to take away our sins and rose from the dead to bring us new life. We testify with John in verse 15, that if anyone confesses that this risen Jesus is the Son of God, God will make His home in that person and that person will forever be at home in God. That wouldn't be possible without the cross. And the cross was possible only through the purifying, selfless, fear-defying love of God that we have come to believe.

This is the loving witness we see in Acts, in the account of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. Philip the deacon could have had every reason to be afraid in this situation. An angel speaks to you, that's frightening enough. But then the Spirit directed Philip to speak to a total stranger who by his clothes and jewelry and the style of his carriage was obviously a high government official. Philip's fellow-deacon, Stephen, had been martyred not long before. How could he know this official wouldn't turn him over to the Jewish authorities? And then, the man was a foreigner. And he was a eunuch-- pretty much all courtiers were in those days-- and the Law of Moses forbade any man with damaged genitals to be admitted to full fellowship with the people of God. What if Philip were doing something, well, unkosher in offering the Gospel to him?

The striking thing is, fear is the last emotion you'd attribute to Philip. There's simply no question of it. He's so full of the love of Jesus Christ that he comes right up to that man in his chariot and strikes up a conversation. He preaches Jesus Christ to him out of the Scriptures, just as we are commanded to do, and the Holy Spirit confirms the love of God towards that Ethiopian and moves him to believe and be baptised and go on his way with joy.

That is what our attitude will be when we love with the love of God. John says it again in verse 16: God is love. The world says, "Love is god," by which they mean unbridled sex and selfishness and emotional highs that don't last. That kind of love is cheap and shabby compared to the everlasting love that God is. God gives us His glorious, strong, fear-defying love to live in. It's like a castle He builds for us. It's fortified against all assault, and that castle of love is God Himself. He keeps us and defends us and perfects us in His love. He shields us from everything that could make us afraid.

Especially, His love for us in Jesus Christ shields us from the fear we would otherwise have on the Day of Judgement. We don't think much about the wrath of God against our sins. We don't spend time fearing it. But in the end-- literally-- it's the only thing we should really, truly be afraid of. Financial hardship, illness, starvation, grief, frightening as they are, they all come and go. Even if they end in death, people will say, "Well, now he (or she) is at peace." But the righteous wrath of God says No, for after this comes the judgement. His verdict will be final and those who have rejected Christ and His love will bear the horror and fear of their decision into eternity.

But if truly we have received the love of God shown us in Jesus Christ, we have no need to fear the Day of Judgement. We can be confident in that dreadful day, because already in this world God is working out His love in us, making us into models of Himself. There is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear.

Yes, but how do we get this perfect love? I used to think it was up to me, and knew I would never succeed. But the Holy Spirit helped me understand what John is saying here. You and I cannot gin up this perfect love. Rather, this perfect love is the purifying, selfless, fear-defying agape love of Almighty God. It's the love He puts in us by faith in the death and resurrection of His Son our Lord Jesus Christ.

In verse 18 it says that "fear has to do with punishment." Wait a minute: Aren't we afraid for a lot of other reasons as well? But when you think about it, the root of fear really is dread of punishment or retribution. Have you ever noticed how physical pain or sadness or uncertainty is worse when it's tied up with the feeling that you're alienated from other people and from God? Suffering is more fearful and harder to bear when you feel it might somehow be your fault.

I'm thinking of a situation in my own life. I won't go into detail, but members of my family and I find ourselves deeply concerned about a certain relative of ours. I've been very afraid and worried for her. And I find myself saying to myself, "Of course I'm afraid and worried for her! I love her, don't I?" But I have to admit that what I'm encouraging in myself really isn't love. Love is warm and expansive and open, even when it's full of sadness and pity. What I'm feeling over my relative is tight and cramped and closed. It has to do with me trying to atone for my own guilt in not doing more to prevent the situation. It's about me not quite trusting God to take care of her when I can't, so I make myself sick over the situation and imagine that means I'm in control.

I admit it: I am not yet perfected in love. And, I'm willing to guess, neither are you. We still fear. We still wallow in our guilt instead of giving it up and accepting the forgiveness Jesus won for us on the cross. We still try to make our faulty human love do when we could love with the saving love of God. Nevertheless, bit by bit, more and more, we love, because He first loved us.

And in case we should think this is all just a bunch of nice-sounding religious philosophy, John brings us down to everyday specifics in verses 20 and 21. Church member, do you consider yourself to be a lover of God? All right, how do you treat your brothers and sisters in Christ? How do you treat your pastor? Do you encourage them, build them up, support them, work in harmony with them, and always seek their highest good? Or are you always looking out for that juicy bit of gossip to spread? Does it give you a charge whenever you can undermine your opponent, so he or she won't look good? Do you keep a list of grievances and refuse to forgive, especially people in the church?

The Holy Spirit has a word for people who behave like that, and it is "Liar." For how can anyone love the unseen God as his Father if he hates someone who is his brother in Jesus Christ, whom he sees face to face?

No, the end and object of God's love for us is very practical. We must obey the command of our Lord Jesus Christ and love one another, as He has loved us.

And let us rejoice in that! God has loved us and does love us, with a love that is pure, selfless, and fear-defying. He proves it to us by the salvation He gives us in His Son Jesus Christ. Down with fear and let us stand firm in His love. This world throws many fearsome things at us, but what's the worst it can do? We and those we love could die, true. But for us who are God's beloved, to die is gain, for it means forever being with our loving Lord. In this encouragement, beloved, let us love one another with a purifying, selfless, fear-defying love, for purifying, selfless, fear-defying love is from God.

Alleluia, amen!