How Long, O Lord?

Texts: Revelation 6:9-17; Luke 18:1-8

IF YOU WATCH VIDEOS on YouTube, or if you read online news reports, you've probably noticed a pattern in the comments. Say it's a news story about a pilot who's successfully landed a plane in the worst of conditions. Or maybe it's a video of the old Rescue 911 show, and a family has safely escaped a fire in their house. Some commenters will give God the glory. They'll say, "It was a miracle they escaped! Praise God!" And just as inevitably, ten other people will jump in with "What? How can you praise God for that? If God was good, he wouldn't've let that house catch on fire! And what about all the other houses that catch fire and all the people inside burn to death? Your god is evil! Or he doesn't exist! I don't think he exists and I hate him!!"

But you know what? It's not just atheists and scoffers who wonder how a good God can put up with evil. People who know God and love Him also struggle with the fact that justice seems to be in short supply in this world.

What is Justice, anyway? It's rendering each person what he or she has the right to and what he or she deserves. Sometimes individuals deserve bad things, sometimes they deserve good. Sometimes we forfeit our rights by our bad behavior, and we deserve to lose the benefit of them. However it is, Justice balances out the scales so good is paired with good and evil is matched with evil.

But we don't see it that way on this earth, do we? We see people whom we consider to be good receiving bad things all the time. Often the evil comes from other people, and it seems like our human justice system never gets around to punishing the guilty. Sometimes, the evil comes from nature or even seems to come from God Himself. As when someone we love gets incurable cancer. Or a child struggles with a terrible learning disability. Or a family member loses his home in a flood. And meanwhile, those we consider to be wicked seem to have no troubles at all. Where's the Justice in that? This world has a saying, "Justice deferred is justice denied." Is God unjust? Why doesn't He even everything out now?

But the Bible teaches that a day of Justice is coming in God's good time, a Day when Christ will return as Judge and lay down the verdict on Evil and mete out rewards and punishments according to what each person deserves. Both of our readings look forward to that Day, and they teach us to pray for its coming and to have faith in God, that He will indeed make Justice prevail in heaven and on earth.

In our passage from St. Luke, Jesus tells a parable illustrating how we, His disciples, should always pray and never give up. Yes, let us pray for healing for ourselves and our loved ones. Let's intercede for new jobs for the unemployed and petition God for solutions to our worries. Let us cast our cares on the Lord, for He cares for us. Let us do all we can in this world to live justly and see justice done to our neighbor. But first and foremost, as it says in verses 7 and 8, let us pray persistently for God to bring about ultimate divine justice for His chosen ones-- which is to say, let us pray without ceasing for the glorious return of our God and Savior Jesus Christ. For it is only when He returns that true Justice will have its day.

But how long, O Lord, how long? The widow in the parable knew she was in the right in her case. The unjust judge knew it, too. But he was so selfish, he couldn't be bothered to render the verdict she deserved. Or maybe he'd already ruled in her favor, but he'd done nothing to enforce the decision. This judge had no conscience before God, he didn't care what other people said about him, and he couldn't be bothered to do what he should. But the widow was going to bother him and bother him and bother him until he did his duty. He was a judge; it was his job to make sure that justice prevailed. For some time he ignored her. Maybe she'd go away. But she didn't. She kept bothering him: "Grant me justice against my adversary!" And finally, finally, out of his own selfishness, he finally does what he should have done all along: The unjust judge makes sure this widow gets justice.

Jesus says, listen to what the unjust judge says. The unjust judge finally does right by the widow because she's kept on bothering him with her petitions. So--- if a wicked man can be prevailed upon to do what is right because he's been hammered by a widow's pleas, how much more will the good and gracious God of heaven bring about justice for His chosen ones, who cry out to Him day and night? How much more will He defeat their adversaries and bring them into the good they deserve, at just the right time?

Who are these chosen ones? They are Christ's elect, whom the Father foreknew before the creation of the world, to be adopted as His children through the shed blood of Christ. Brothers and sisters, we are Christ's chosen, and though all the forces of earth and Hell should come against us because we belong to Christ, all the more should we cry out to Him for justice against our adversaries.

Our passage from Revelation chapter 6 shows this from another point of view. St. John in his vision of the End watches as the seven seals of the book of judgement are opened one by one by Christ the Lamb. When He opens the fifth seal, John sees under a great altar in heaven "the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained." These martyrs cry out in a loud voice, "How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?" How long, O Lord, until we get justice? Our voices cry out to you day and night! They are each given a white robe-- which stands for the righteousness of Christ-- and are told to wait a little longer, for just the right time. For when? For when the number of their fellow servants who were also to be killed for the name of Christ was competed.

I have to admit that there's been something about this Revelation passage that has bothered me. It's just that, these martyrs are under the altar, and the altar represents the place of atonement, and our atonement is Christ. Moreover, St. John sees this altar as being in heaven. So, if these martyrs have found their refuge in the atonement of Christ, and they're in heaven, why are they so vindictive? Why are they so eager that their blood be avenged? Isn't it time they forgave and forgot?

Aren't Christian martyrs just ordinary human beings whom Jesus redeemed from their sins? Wasn't it the Holy Spirit who made sure they stayed faithful to Christ even to death? How could they claim anything for themselves?

And all the chosen ones of God: We didn't chose ourselves, did we? No. How can we claim to be more righteous or deserving than any other human being? It wasn't our works that got us into God's favor! Without the blood of Christ covering us, we would be just as lost and unholy as anybody else! How can we justify praying for Christ to come and judge the earth?

The answer lies every place the Bible speaks of God's love for His saints and His hatred of evil. It leaps out at us whenever we read that the Church is Christ's body on earth. We are His representatives here on earth, and the Word of salvation we carry into the world is the message of the living Word, Jesus Christ. Whoever persecutes His saints-- that's us, brothers and sisters-- persecutes Him. God has chosen us for Himself in Jesus Christ, and identified Himself with us and us with Him. So it is just and right that the souls of the martyrs should call out for vengeance on the earth. It is right that we His chosen ones should cry out day and night for Jesus to return and sit as Judge over this present evil age. Because ultimately, the One who deserves to have His right upheld is God. God is the ultimate object of justice. It is God Himself who must receive all the blessing, honor, praise, and glory He is due. As St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15, the time will come when Christ will hand over the kingdom to God the Father, after He has destroyed all (rebellious) dominion, authority, and power. All His enemies will be put under His feet, and the last enemy to be destroyed will be death. That will be ultimate divine justice.

So how can we not pray earnestly and persistently for that day to come? Should we not call out for the justice that will once and for all defeat evil and Satan and all who belong to him will get the punishment they deserve?

But how long, O Lord? Why can't God reach down and deal the evil of this world right now?

That's what some of these scoffing Internet commenters ask. They don't realize that if God were to make an end of evil in this world right away, He'd also have to make an end of them. We humans deceive ourselves when we think we ourselves are good and evil is Out There someplace. Evil resides in each of our souls, and none of us can begin to be free of it until Jesus clothes us with His righteousness and brings us from death to life. Strict justice would mean every last one of us should be separated from God forever, but Jesus paid the full price for our sin, so as it says in Romans 3, God is shown to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. Through His blood we are not only justified, we are made holy before God and finally will be presented to Him glorified on the Day when Christ returns.

This is God's will for all His elect. And He is biding His time until all the company of His chosen is complete. There are some who are elect who are still dead in their sins, and one day the Holy Spirit will call them into life. There are some of the elect who have not yet been born. Every last soul whom the Father has given to the Son will come to Him, and every last soul who will have the honor of being killed for His sake will make their testimony in their blood, before the end will come and ultimate justice will prevail.

But how do you know if you are among God's chosen who know their cause is just and right? It's not my place to pry into the secret counsels of God. But if you want to be among Christ's chosen, that's a good sign. If you have a passion for justice and you look to God instead of away from Him to find it, that's a good sign. Jesus asks in Luke, "When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?" Faith is a sign of those who belong to Him, of those who trust Him to make things right in His good time. Faith is a sign of those who love His appearing and who earnestly pray that it will be very soon. Faith is a sign of those who preach and testify to the Gospel of Jesus Christ died and risen again for the salvation of the lost, so that the full number of the elect will be speedily completed.

The sign of those who are not chosen? They are the ones described in verses 15 through 17 of our Revelation reading, the ones for whom the second coming of Christ is hateful, the ones who know they deserve His wrath and have rejected the blood that could have saved them from it. They beg the mountains to fall on them and hide them from the justice of God! Heaven forbid that anyone we love should be in that number! This is the tragic fate of all those who ally themselves with Satan and death and who turn away from the Lamb who was slain.

But you, people of God: Do you love Christ's appearing? Are you looking forward to the day when He will return and all evil, sadness, and death will be wiped away? Let us pray earnestly and persistently that Christ our righteous Judge will come quickly and bring justice to us, His chosen ones. For we belong to Him; and in Him, His cause is ours, and our cause is His own.

God at Work

Texts: Romans 3:1- 4:8; John 6:24-29

WHEN I WAS A KID, I COULD NEVER see the point of the Labor Day holiday. The day was about labor, right? So why did people get the day off?

Of course, I learned in time that Labor Day doesn't celebrate labor, it celebrates laborers. Especially workers who often were taken for granted for long centuries of human history. It was established in 1894 to highlight the achievements of men and women who worked in the mills, the factories, and the mines of America.

And America's workers have a lot to be proud of. Historically, we have the most productive labor force in the world. It stands to reason that labor should have a day to boast in what they've done for America and the world.

But it's not just America's workers who want to take pride in their accomplishments on the job. Everywhere in the world laborers want to feel that their efforts count for something. We have a basic human need to stand on our own feet and know we've got things under control for ourselves and our families. As it says in Ecclesiastes 2:24, "A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God . . . "

That's how it is in this world. We can say that's how things should be in this world; "under the sun," as Solomon puts it.

But human labor and human capability has a limit. There's one job only one Worker can do, and that's the job of reconciling lost and sinful humanity to the almighty Creator of heaven and earth. That one Worker is God Himself, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We humans can do a lot in this world to keep body and soul together and find fulfilment doing it. God gives us the time and talents and strength to make our living, and we have to put our backs into it ourselves if we want to get along. But only God Himself by Himself can accomplish the work of salvation and sanctification that brings us into His kingdom of everlasting life. Only He can overcome the sin and wickedness that separates every human creature from Himself.

But as we know, human history has been one long process of mankind disagreeing with that principle. We think that when it comes to our salvation, God helps them who help themselves.

From the dawn of time, every tribe and nation in this world from has been aware that there is a High God to Whom they owe worship and right moral behaviour. Every person ever born has it written on his or her heart that certain things are right and certain things are wrong; that there's a good way and a bad way to treat God and our neighbor. It teaches that God has the right to expect good behavior from us. This is called natural law, or conscience. It's not the possession of any particular faith or religion; it's what God has put within us because we are human beings made in His image.

Then there's also a distinctive people, the Jews, and the Lord God revealed to them His spoken and written Law. They didn't have to guess at what they had to do to please God and live; they had it down in detail.

But Jew or pagan alike, humankind has always distorted the law of God and watered it down into something they could manage. They felt that they could do enough to please God, and God would reward them for their hard work with prosperity in this life and maybe even eternal blessedness in the world to come.

Was the Creator of heaven and earth impressed? Did He look down on humanity and say, "Oh, my, you're doing your best, you should be so proud of yourselves! You've worked so hard, I'm going to give you a Labor Day parade!"

No. Rather, in Romans 3:19, the Apostle Paul, speaking by the Holy Spirit, says "Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God." The pagan peoples stand guilty because they've perverted and departed from the natural law written on the heart. The Jews are convicted because they have disobeyed the Law revealed through Moses. What's just as bad or worse, when they were supposedly trying to work to please God, everyone to whom Paul writes has been trying to earn their own righteousness by observing the law according to their own version of it. But the Scripture says that no one can stand righteous in the sight of God by doing that, no matter how hard they work.

But what about us, citizens of the United States and the western world? We live after the cross of Christ. Even if we don't actually belong to a church, our ethics and morals are pretty much based on the law of love that Jesus preached, right? If we just follow Jesus as our good example, and do the things He would do, won't that will be okay with God?

All the time we hear people say, "I work hard to do what's right. God will let me into heaven because of that." People say, "God knows I'm doing my best. He knows my heart, that'll be enough."

But even for us today, that is not enough. "Doing our best" and "making a good effort" is still us trying to justify ourselves by works of the law. We've lowered the standard for what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves and to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, but even so, we're still laboring to earn God's favor, so we can boast that we deserved it.

The Scripture, however, is clear. We are all defendants in God's courtroom, and every mouth is silenced before Him. The whole world is accountable before God, including ourselves. No one will be declared righteous by works of the law; rather, the law-- the revealed law and the natural law-- the law full and forceful from the hand of Almighty God-- shows us what great sinners we are. Jesus Himself proclaimed that the fountain of wickedness is us is the very heart that we think will earn us our ticket into heaven. And once the law makes us truly conscious of sin, we won't be boasting that God will accept us because He knows our hearts. We'll want to run and hide from His righteous anger.

What can we do? Our condition is nothing to have a parade about! Not unless it's a parade to the gallows.

The answer is, we can do nothing. God, the great Worker of salvation, does it all. As Romans 3:21 says, "But now--" Now, that we have been declared guilty and worthy of condemnation-- "Now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known." The law and the prophets all testified that this righteousness was coming. It came to us through Jesus Christ our Lord; He brought us perfect redemption through His sinless life, His atoning death, and His glorious resurrection. God Himself has worked to give us access to His own righteousness through faith in Jesus, and not even that faith was a work of ours. As it says in Ephesians 2, "It is by grace you have been saved, through faith-- and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-- not by works, so that no one can boast."

Our salvation is God's great labor from start to finish. Only He could have done it. The righteousness and justice of God demanded that sin be paid for. We couldn't pay it. No matter what we did, we could never be good enough to ward off the wrath of God that we deserved for our sins. But it was also the loving will of God that He would justify His elect. What was God to do?

What only God could do. God the Son, the second Person of the Trinity, came into the world as a perfect Human Being and died as a sacrifice of atonement to God. His blood covers all our sins. That way, God's holy justice is satisfied and He is able to say to those whom He calls to faith in Christ, "You are perfect and righteous in My sight."

This is what God did for you when He brought you to faith in Christ by the voice of His Holy Spirit. This is what He may be doing for you even now as the power of His word works in your life, convicting you of your sin and convincing you to trust in Christ alone for your salvation. This is God at work! This is the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, may His name be praised forever!

But you may have noticed something about yourself; I'm sure I've noticed it about me. It's that even after God has called us to faith in Jesus Christ, there's still that old sin nature hanging around in us. And it whispers, "You really did part of the work in your own salvation. God must've saved you because of something good you did or were!"

And isn't that what unbelievers think we Christians believe about ourselves? That we think we deserved to be saved because we're actually holier or better than other people? Heaven help us, sometimes we give them good excuse to think that. Let me ask you this, what is your attitude towards flagrant sinners? What do you think about homosexuals and drunkards and bitter-tongued gossips and adulterers? What's your attitude towards corporate CEOs or government officials who apparently are cheating the public? Does that immediately drive you to pray for their salvation? Or . . . ?

Let's admit it. The temptation is to say, "Thank God I'm not like that! Those people should try harder to do what's right! God should punish them and give them what they deserve!"

I hope you resist that temptation. I hope you flee it with every fiber of your being. It's true, people like that don't deserve God's mercy. Neither did you or I. Romans teaches that none of us has the right to boast of being holier-than-thou. We are not, not, not justified by our works of righteousness, or by anything we earned or deserved. No, we were saved by Christ's work of righteousness imputed to us by the one God of all.

We don't used this word "imputed" or "imputation" every day, but it describes what God does for us. Think of somebody who's horribly in debt. And a kind and rich person comes along and credits the entire amount of the debt to the debtor's account and totally pays it off. That money is reckoned as his and he gets the good of it. What he can't do is boast that it's his own money or that somehow he deserved it.

That's what God did for Abraham and what He does for us. Abraham simply believed that God had accepted him and he believed God's promises of blessing to him. Ultimately, Abraham's faith looked forward to the Messiah Jesus who was his many-times-great grandson. In the same way, it's not up to us to earn our righteousness, but simply to accept the righteous sacrifice of Christ in our behalf.

The Galileans who saw Jesus feed the 5,000 chased Him back to Capernaum because they wanted more of the physical bread He'd given. Jesus says, No, that's not the bread you should be working for, but the food that endures to eternal life that He, the Son of Man, would give them. These people were like us. They wanted everlasting happiness with God and they wanted to know what they had to do to get it. We'll work for it, Master, we really will! That's what we say, too. "What must we do to do the works God requires?" And Jesus answers, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent."

This isn't "your work" that you have to do. It's the work of God that He does within you! God is the one worker of our salvation, He is responsible for it all. He saved us and He can save the most flagrant of sinners, regardless of who or what they may be.

And it's His work, not ours, that keeps us in His grace. Maybe you've picked up the idea that you were saved by Christ's death on the cross, but now it's up to you to make sure you stay saved. Brothers and sisters! It's all a gift! It's all God's workmanship! We can't brag about our salvation and we can't brag about how He's making us holy! Right now He's working in you by His Holy Spirit, forgiving your sins, making you more like Christ, drawing you to love your fellow-Christians and also all the poor dying sinners who need the Savior just like we do! It's all God at work!

So now, take a holiday from your own works, because God has put in all the labor for you. As you do His will, know that it's His Spirit working in you. With all God's justified and grace-imputed people, sing with King David that

"Blessed are they
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the man
whose sin the Lord will never count against him."

Blessed of the Father, rest in the work He does for you. And if anyone wants to boast, let him boast joyfully in the Lord.

To whom be all honor and glory, wisdom and strength, now and forever. Amen.

Worthy of His Calling

Texts: Malachi 3:13 - 4:3; 2 Thessalonians 1:3-12

WHY SHOULD ANYONE WANT TO become a Christian? If you or I were talking to an unbeliever, someone we knew and cared about-- and the subject of church came up and that person should ask, "Why should I become a Christian? What’s in it for me?" how should we respond?

Maybe we could tell him about the fellowship and good times he could find as a member of a Christian church like 1st Presbyterian.
Maybe we could point to all the good works Christians do for other people and say how good she’d feel to be part of that.

Or, we could tell him that believing in Jesus will make him more fulfilled as a human being, that Jesus will give him a sense of purpose and higher goals for living. We could tell her that once Jesus is in her life, she’ll have new and wonderful ways to make her marriage better and help her raise obedient, well-adjusted children.

Or how’s this? We could even tell him (though really, we shouldn't) that faith in Jesus Christ will make him happier, more comfortable, and more prosperous in this world; and, if he cares about such things, it’ll also guarantee him happiness and security in the world to come. We could say that when you’re a Christian, Jesus solves all your problems, that once you have true faith, you won’t have to struggle with anything anymore. I mean, there are popular preachers out there who say that, and look how many people they have in their pews!

We could say all these things to an interested unbeliever. And some of them (some of them!) are true to an extent. But none of them get to the heart of what God has in store for us when we confess our faith in the Savior, Jesus Christ. If we wanted to be truly honest with our unbelieving friend or neighbor or family member, maybe we should quote to him the words of the late Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "When Jesus calls a man, He bids him come and die."

Ouch. That’s not a church marketing pitch designed to win a lot of customers, is it? And maybe, yes, that’s not what we’d want to lead with. But if we said that, it would be true, and once our unbelieving friend or you or I or anyone else understands the depths of that truth, we’ll see that it’s the most comforting, fulfilling offer we could ever be made. The call to become a disciple of Jesus Christ is God’s call for us to identify with and participate in the sufferings of His crucified Son. Christianity is all about the cross. Our very baptism depicts us being immersed in the death of the wounded Messiah. But that’s really good news! Because only by dying to ourselves, our wants, our needs, our sense of who we are and what we can do and what we should be, can we be raised with Christ to the new life of joy and fulfilment and meaning God has planned for us. Only by humbling ourselves and wanting and worshipping God for who He is-- adoring our Triune Lord in all the glorious splendor of His holiness because He eternally deserves it--can we find glory and meaning in this life on earth and beyond that, in our life face to face with Him in heaven.

Which is why St. Paul, in our reading from 2 Thessalonians, reminds us that our relationship with Him through His Son Jesus Christ is a calling. From our human point of view, we church members may think we analyzed the pros and cons of buying into this Christianity deal and said Yes because it made sense or seemed like a good way to live. But you and I could never even consider, never even imagine, never even desire belonging to Jesus Christ if God Himself from all eternity had not elected to bring us into fellowship with Him through the shed blood of His only-begotten Son. How could we? Like everyone else, we were lost in trespasses and sins. We were rebels against Him and His righteous will. We didn’t want God. Maybe we wanted some things we could get out of Him, but we didn’t desire God for Himself! And because of our idolatry and sin we deserved God’s wrath just as much as the most vicious serial killer or genocidal tyrant.

Now frankly, when I turn that around and preach it at myself, I want to say, "Hey, wait a minute. I’m not that bad! Actually, I’m a pretty nice person! And so are most of the people I know, even the unbelievers!" But that very thought alerts me to yet another area in my life where Jesus bids me come and die. I may think I know what’s what in this world and how things really are. But God in Christ calls me-- and you-- to give that up and see things His way instead. He calls us to accept the utter wickedness of sin-- any sin-- and the utter burning holy righteousness of God. At the very least, He calls us to submit to what He says about us and our helpless condition and have faith that His will and wisdom are always best, whether we understand it now or not.

But there is another sense in which our calling as Christians is a call to suffering and death. We see it in 2 Thessalonians 1:4 and 5. Paul says, "Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring. All this is evidence that God’s judgment is right, and as a result you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering." When we live openly and honestly as Christians in this fallen world, we will suffer persecution. It may be mild, it may be severe, but it goes with our calling. When God in His sovereign power claims us for His own, He makes us new creatures through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We no longer are the same kind of human beings we were when we were born in sin into this world. No, through Christ we are now children of God, sons and daughters of the Lord and Creator of the universe. It’s natural that those who are still in rebellion against Him will hate and despise and persecute us as well.

Here in America, that persecution hasn’t been the open sort of trouble that came upon the Christians in Thessalonika. Or that comes even now to our brothers and sisters in places like India and Somalia and Viet Nam. But if we are Christians called by God, if we are worthy of the calling laid upon us, there will be times when we certainly will encounter trouble, misunderstanding, opposition, and even outright persecution because we are who we are. In those times the first thing that has to die is our dream of fitting in with everyone else. "Can’t we all just get along?" is not necessarily a Christian principle! Yes, be at peace with everyone, inasmuch as it lies with you, as our brother the Apostle Peter wrote. But far above that, let us strive to be at peace with God our Father, who has made us His own. Being a Christian means desiring His pleasure, His promises, His rewards above everything this world can give, even when we see none of that coming true in the present time.

I wonder if our frequent failure to grow as Christians and as churches has a lot to do with our taking a consumer view of our relationship with Jesus Christ. If we buy into Him because we think He’ll make us more fulfilled and comfortable, how can we be the world-changing soldiers of the King every child of His should be? Suffering and persecution comes with the package. To think otherwise would be like somebody who joined the US Army strictly because of the college tuition and job benefits, then was astonished because the Government sent him overseas to fight. I remember a case like that back in the early ’90s, when the First Gulf War was going on. A woman, a medical doctor, had joined up for the educational benefits. But when her unit was called up to go to Iraq, she refused to go with them to exercise her skills in the field. She claimed going to a war zone wasn’t what she’d joined the Army for. There was a court-martial, then a civil case, and the judges all ruled against her. Regardless of any benefits offered, the Army is about fighting the enemy. You should know that going in. In the same way, the Christian life is about putting God first in everything, and being willing to take the flak the world will fire at you because of it.

But as we heard before, we don’t really join God’s army, we’re drafted into it. We’re called. At the end of this service, we’ll be singing, "Once to every man and nation/ Comes the moment to decide." And it’s true: from our side we do have to make a decision for Christ. But understand, we can make that decision, we can say Yes to Him, only because God has first laid His electing hand upon us and brought us already into His fellowship. And as He does He gives us all the benefits of belonging to Him through His Son.

The complainers in our reading from Malachi didn’t want the benefits of God. They wanted the benefits of this world, right now. "It is futile to serve God," they say. "What did we gain by carrying out his requirements and going about like mourners before the Lord Almighty?" Doggonit, they’d put a dollar’s worth of ritual and fasting into the divine vending machine and now they wanted their Coke! With change!

It’s worth noting that this is the same gang of priests and people that the Lord has been bringing a case against for the entire book of Malachi. Their "worship" was insincere all along. But even in this one passage, we see the error of believing in Christ because we think He’ll satisfy our self-defined needs. Friends, we have needs only God knows about, and only by His calling and faithfulness can they ever be fulfilled.

In both our passages we see one of these needs, the need to be saved from the wrath to come. Malachi reports that those who fear the Lord and honor His name will be spared in the day of judgment, as a man compassionately spares his son who serves him. In the great day of burning, the arrogant and every evildoer, all who claim they don’t need God and don’t want God, all who want God only on their terms and according to their preferences, all such will be destroyed like stubble. Paul takes up the same theme: Through him the Spirit promises that the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven in blazing fire to punish those who do not know God and who don’t obey His gospel.

That’s not something we like to think of as happening to our unbelieving family and friends. But as Paul says, God is just. If someone says No to God, God will give him what he desires and say No to him.

But, as Malachi says, for those who revere His name, those who are the called according to His purpose, the Sun of Righteousness will arise with healing in its wings. Now "Sun of Righteousness" is a figure of speech for our Lord and Messiah Jesus, who comes as the Light of the World to bring salvation and enlightenment to all who believe. Paul reminds us that we will be glorified in Christ at His coming, and those who trouble us because we belong to Jesus will be paid back with trouble, according to His perfect justice. It must be so, for whoever will not accept the death of the Son of God in their behalf, will have to bear their own just death in themselves. This is not revenge or retribution, it is simple justice.

But beyond our need to be saved from the wrath to come, we need to know the glory and joy of true fellowship with our Lord. Malachi says that God’s faithful ones will be His, like a treasured possession a man gathers up and preserves. Or as some translations puts it, we will be His precious jewels. But the benefits of Christ are not only for the day of our Lord’s return. No, Paul prays for the Thessalonians and for us that by His power God may fulfill every good purpose of ours. This prayer is for us now, and since Paul is writing by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, we can confidently take it that he prays for things it’s God’s intention to give. God promises to bless and prosper every good work offered up in sincerity and love to His name! Even the least act prompted by your faith, He will bless; even the slightest humbling of our wills, even the least endurance of suffering or trouble for His name’s sake, He will remember and reward with good. And why? So that the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in us, and we may be glorified in Him.

This is why we should be Christians. This is why we should tell our unbelieving family, neighbors, and friends about Him and what He has done for them in His death and resurrection and invite them to become Christians, too. Not for our own glory, but for glorious fellowship and fulfillment in Him. Not through our own good works, but through His grace and His grace alone. He calls us to suffer, because when we suffer with Him, we gain the reward of His suffering; He calls us to die, that in Him we might gloriously rise. Let those who will, seek God only for the earthly goods they can get out of him; by His grace we will seek Him for Himself and the glory of His name. Christian, Jesus calls you to suffer and die with Him, and then enter with Him into glory; may our God count you worthy of His calling.

The Voice of the Lord

Texts: Isaiah 42:1-9; Matthew 3:13-17

WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE to hear the voice of the Lord?

I mean, actually physically hear the voice of God?

How would we feel? Thrilled? Privileged? Would we be pleased with ourselves because, hey, the Lord God Almighty is speaking to me!

Would hearing the voice of God with our ears be a comforting and comfortable thing? Would it assure us that we are loved and cared for by Him?

Or, rather would it not make us cower down in awestruck fear, overwhelmed by God’s glory? Would it not convict us of our puniness and our sin?

That’s how it was with the Children of Israel when they heard the voice of the Lord at Mount Sinai, after Moses had brought them out of Egypt. The voice of the Lord in their ears was too much for them! They begged Moses to ask the Lord not to speak to them audibly any more. "You talk to the Lord, Moses," they cried. "We can’t bear it!"

The psalm used in our Call to Worship, Psalm 29, is about the awe-inducing effect of the almighty voice of the Lord. And even here, it’s not the direct voice of God, it’s the voice of God as He expresses Himself through wind and thunder, through tempest and earthquake. It’s a wonderful thing to experience from a safe distance, but you wouldn’t want the full brunt of it bearing down on you.

When I was in college in Kansas, during wild thunderstorms people in my dorm would go out on the front porch and cheer God. A really bright flash of lightning would streak down, and be followed by a stupendous clap of thunder, and we’d yell, "Yeaaa, God!!"

I don’t know how many of us were sincerely giving praise and who was just being flippant. But I’d wager that if that lightning had hit us, or if that roaring wind had collapsed that concrete porch roof on our heads, we wouldn’t be going, "Yeaaa, God!" anymore. We’d be too overwhelmed to say anything at all.

And that’s what it’s like when it’s merely the voice of God speaking through Nature! How much more awesome, how much more unbearable would be the voice of God hitting our ears in its unshielded self!

We imagine it would be wonderful to hear the direct, unmediated voice of Almighty God, because we forget how utterly high and majestic He is compared to us.

It’s not just that we are created beings and He is the everlasting Godhead who dwells in inexpressible light and glory. Adam was a created being, and he communed with the Lord God in the garden of Eden as friend to friend.

No, the thing that would make the unshielded, audible voice of God unbearable to us is the fact that we are rebellious and sinful created beings. The unmediated voice of the Lord would remind us painfully of that fact, as it reminded the Israelites in the desert. It would remind us that we have broken His law and betrayed His trust. The naked voice of God speaks judgement on all our little schemes for getting in good with Him and climbing up to heaven on our little four-foot step-ladders. Actually hearing the voice of almighty God would not be a pleasant thing. It would be a terrifying and devastating thing indeed.

But our Lord God does love us, in spite of our sins. He cares for us and wants to reconcile us to Himself. So from of old He spoke to certain chosen individuals, to patriarchs like Abraham and poets like David and prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah. I would dearly love to know what that was like, whether they heard the Lord’s voice with their ears, or in visions, or only in their hearts. However it was, He made them able to bear it, so they could bring His message of repentance and love to His people.

But somehow, His people, most of them anyway, were deaf to what the prophets had to say. Their life, their hope, their entire purpose for being was bound up in the Word of God, in what the Almighty Lord spoke to them. But when He spoke to them by the prophets, His people wouldn’t listen, and when He spoke to them directly, they couldn’t listen.

But praise His name! His prophets kept on listening, and we have the record of what some of them heard. And so in the 42nd chapter of the prophecy of Isaiah, we read what the Lord said about the Servant of His who is to come.

This Servant, says the Lord, will carry the Lord God’s message of justice to the nations. He will bring the peoples of the world into the Lord’s covenant. His service-- or, we could say, His ministry (for the word "ministry" means "service") will mean light to the Gentiles, sight to the blind, and freedom for the captives-- captives of oppression and tyranny or captives to sin. All these gracious things the Servant will do.

Now here is a sad thing: Our Jewish cousins generally interpret this passage to refer to the Jewish nation. The work of this Servant of the Lord, the rabbis say, has to do with the good influence the Jews will have in the world. And it’s true, the Jews have had great and glorious influence in this present world, in all sorts of ways.

The trouble is, this Isaiah passage can’t possibly be talking about a mere mortal, or any group of mere mortals. The Lord says the Servant will "bring forth justice" and "establish justice on the earth." How can any man, however noble, do that? It’s hard enough for even the best of judges to judge with total righteousness in even individual cases. Only God Himself can establish justice over the entire earth!

And the Lord says the islands-- that is, the remotest parts of the world-- will put their hope in the Servant’s law. Is this some system of laws generated by a man or a nation? No, for even the best system of human laws, even the U.S. Constitution itself, for example, falls far short of the perfect law of God! But the law of the Servant isn’t the law of any man, it’s the law of God. If the Servant had made it up for Himself, the Lord would not praise Him for establishing it. But He not only commends Him for it, He declares that the Servant will do this in the power of God’s Spirit.

And, says the Lord, His Servant will be a covenant for the people. The passage doesn’t say, "You will administer or draw up or deliver My covenant for the people"; no, the Servant will be that covenant Himself. All the good promises and protections of belonging to God and being His people will be wrapped up in the Servant. All the pledges of God will be Yes and Amen in Him. No mere man can claim that!

Only God can do all these things. Only God can claim this glory. The Lord Himself says it in verse 8:

I am the Lord; that is my name!
I will not give my glory to another
or my praise to idols.

No sinful, fallen human being could do all these things and gain all this praise. Only the Lord God Almighty is capable of carrying out these tasks. Only the Lord God Almighty Himself can be His own perfect Servant, the Chosen One, the One on whom His Spirit rests.

But if the Servant is somehow God Himself, don’t we still have the same problem? How can we hear this message of justice and hope and liberation? For as Psalm 29 says, the voice of the Lord shakes the desert, the voice of the Lord twists the oaks and strips the forests bare!

This is how we will hear it: We will hear it softly and tenderly; earnestly, pleadingly. In verse 2 of our Isaiah passage the Lord says,

He will not shout or cry out,
or raise his voice in the streets.

The Servant of the Lord would be the Lord Himself coming to us with the voice of love and forgiveness. He would not come as a conqueror, nor as an angry overlord marching into a rebellious city to claim his rights. No,

A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.

He would support and encourage what is good; He would have mercy on our weakness. He would speak so we could hear Him; His voice would be pitched so we could respond.

It would be wonderful to hear the voice of the Lord like that. But it seems too much to hope for.

But it isn’t too much to hope for. The Servant of the Lord, the hope of the nations who was and is God Himself, has come to us, and His name is Jesus the Christ. Our passage in Isaiah introduces Him and His ministry seven hundred years before He would appear, and our gospel reading from St. Matthew introduces Him as He begins His ministry on this earth.

As Jesus our Lord comes to be baptised, we see Him coming in humility. We see Him entering into our weakness and sympathizing with our frailty. John the Baptist says, "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?" He’s right, humanly-speaking, to say this. For John’s baptism was a sign of repentance from sin, and our Lord Jesus had no sin to repent. But Jesus is the Servant of the Lord who has been called in righteousness, and He submits to baptism to fulfill all righteousness. His very willingness to share the sign and symbol of our sin-- though He never sinned Himself-- declares His good news that we can share the reality of righteousness in Him. The baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ speaks of new life and repentance that don’t depend on our efforts, but on the liberating, eye-opening, covenant-making mercy of God.

Jesus was baptised for us in the Jordan River, and as He came up out of the water, heaven was opened and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on Him. As the prophet Isaiah said,

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him.

And a voice from heaven is heard: it is the voice of the Lord God Almighty, saying, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well-pleased." The unshielded voice of God was heard by the ears of man: heard by John the Baptist and his disciples standing around, and they were not overwhelmed, they were not judged, they were not destroyed!

How could this be?

It could happen because here at the Jordan the voice of God gave testimony to Him who was and is and will always be the voice of God on earth. From now on and forever more, the Man Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, is the Voice of God speaking to humankind. From now on, what God does for mankind He will do through Christ. The voice of God at the Jordan River testifies that this one Man, this Galilean, is the Servant of the Lord who will not make a clamour in the streets, who will not rant and scream to lord it over others, but who will be the Son of Man, preaching the Good News of new life in Him, the humble King of Glory who came not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.

If you want to hear the direct voice of God, look to Jesus Christ. Look to His obedient life. Put your utter trust in His sacrificial death. Hear Him call you to share in His glorious resurrection.

Accept no counterfeits. Whatever voice does not glorify Jesus Christ, whatever voice is an enemy to His cross, whatever voice would tell you there are other ways to find divine justice, liberation, and light--that is not the voice of God. Jesus Christ is how God speaks to us. Jesus is the Voice of God to us, recorded in His holy Word, testified to in our hearts by His Holy Spirit.

Jesus is the voice of God to us now, just as much as He was to those who heard Him preach and teach in Galilee and Judea long ago. In fact, He is more so, for now He has ascended into heaven and can minister to His people in every time and place. For as the prophet says,

In faithfulness he will bring forth justice;
he will not falter or be discouraged
till he establishes justice on earth.
In his law the islands will put their hope.

This is our Saviour. This is our Lord. He calls you to trust in Him, to trust what He did for you at His cross where the voice of His blood spoke forgiveness and covering for your sins. He calls you to let Him open your eyes, that you might see your sins for the filthy things they are-- and then see them taken away, totally removed, by the power of His sacrifice. His voice is calling you out of the prison of your prejudices, your limitations, your ungodly fears and your agonizing memories. He speaks to free you from the deep dungeon of your brokenness, to bring you into the wideness of His marvellous wholeness and light.

Will you hear His voice today? You may say, I was baptised as an infant; I’ve known Jesus all my life. If that is your thought, yes, praise Him for that grace. But we who have known Jesus all our lives need to hear the voice of the Lord just as much as the one who has never heard or responded to it at all. We need to hear His Word daily to support us, to uphold us, to help us persevere until the day we are made perfect in Him. We need the testimony of His Spirit confirming His truth to us. With open ears and willing hearts, let us hear and follow our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Voice of the Lord: He calls us to repentance, He gives us hope, and He invites us to share His justice, His liberation, and His light.

And Still the Same

Texts: Isaiah 65:1-12; Luke 15:1-10

BACK IN THE SECOND CENTURY AFTER CHRIST, THERE lived a man by the name of Marcion.

Marcion believed that the god of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were two different gods. He taught the false doctrine that the Jewish god was wicked, cruel, and wrong, while the god Jesus preached was loving, good, and right.

We Presbyterians are not Marcionites. We believe that the God of Abraham is the God of Jesus Christ. We believe that the God who spoke through the prophet Isaiah is the God who inspired Luke the Evangelist, too. As two of our hymns today say, "From age to age, He’s still the same."

Sometimes, though, we wonder. Like when we look at today’s Scripture lessons. "Lord, what are you saying here? In Isaiah 65, it’s all judgement and retribution, sword and slaughter! But in Luke 15, Jesus Your Son tells us that heaven rejoices when You recover one single sinner! Aren’t You contradicting Yourself, Lord? How can these both be true?"

If honest questions like this are going through your mind, be assured that your Father God hears you in mercy and love. He wants you to get an answer you can understand. Questions like that aren’t unbelief. Unbelief is doing what Marcion did, throwing out most of the Bible because he couldn’t wait for the Holy Spirit to explain its difficulties to him. Unbelief is running up against some hard or disturbing part of Scripture and saying, "Oh, I don’t want to worship a god that’d do something like that!" and throwing Christianity out the window, without trying to get an answer.

No, your heavenly Father is the giver of good gifts, and especially He will give you the Holy Spirit and understanding if you will ask Him! What can the Holy Spirit tell us to make these passages clear?

Well, first thing, He reminds us not to go off half-cocked. We mustn’t read the Word of God with closed minds or lazy eyes. So let’s look carefully at our verses from Isaiah 65.

In the very first verses, the Lord, the God of Israel, speaks of how He reveals Himself in love to all mankind, Jew and pagan alike. Yes, Israel is His special chosen people. But even to the Gentiles (verse 1), even to those "who did not ask for me," He has revealed Himself. And to some of them, He gave grace to find Him, even though they weren’t even looking for Him at all. Even to a nation-- any nation-- who didn’t call on His name, the Lord has said, "Here I am! Look at Me!"

As for His own people Israel, as the Hebrew says, it’s like He’s spreading out His hands in prayer to them, despite their obstinacy and their wilful ways. Continuously-- "All day long"-- He calls and calls to them to return and know Him and His goodness!

Does that sound cruel to you? Does that sound like a god who takes pleasure in retribution and slaughter? No, that is a God who bends down to His undeserving human creation in patience, mercy, and love.

The teaching that God is love was not something first mentioned by Jesus or the Apostle John! It runs all the way through the Old Testament and on into the New!

But the love of our God is not careless, or indulgent, or weak. God cares how His people treat Him, one another, and themselves. He has a right to be angry when we spit in His face and say we’ll disobey, whether He likes it or not.

And most of the Jews of Isaiah’s time were spitting in God’s face. They offered sacrifices of animals and incense in gardens on brick altars, when the Lord had commanded them that their sacrifices should be offered only in His temple, on an altar of bronze.

Not a big deal, you say? All right then, why didn’t they obey God’s command? Why did they insist on making their sacrifices when and where and how they pleased? If they truly loved the Lord as He did them, couldn’t they please Him in this little thing?

But it was symptomatic of how bad their hearts were towards Him. His people practiced necromancy, telling the future by sitting in graveyards and bringing up departed spirits. Didn’t they have the living Holy Spirit speaking through the prophets to listen to? Of course they did. But they wanted their own word, not the Word of the Lord. As it says in verse 11, they worshipped the gods of Fortune and Destiny, instead of the Creator of the universe who orders everything everywhere by the word of His power!

Their ritual meals were a deliberate offense to the Lord their God. If you have a ham at home in the oven on timed bake, this condemnation of those who eat the flesh of pigs is not directed at you. After Jesus fulfilled the Law, God declared that all living creatures were clean for us to eat, as we read in St. Mark and the Book of Acts. But up until Jesus Christ, eating pork was forbidden for the Jews. God used pork and the meat of certain other animals to symbolize the unclean ways of the Gentiles that they were to reject and avoid. But here His people are happily slurping down pork soup and dog meat and horseflesh and who knows what all else, as part of a religious ritual, and along with it they’re slurping down all the other vile Gentile practices a meal like that would involve.

And to cap it all off, these rebellious souls think their practices make them especially holy! They turn up their noses at those boring, unimaginative people who kept on going to the temple to worship the Lord. They’d say to them, "Keep away; don’t come near me, for I am too sacred for you."

Did you get that? "I am too sacred for you." This, after they'd indulged in every sort of vile, God-provoking practice they could think of! They know what they’re doing is wrong in God’s eyes, but they keep on doing it, they embrace it, they identify with it, they’re proud of it-- and they put down people who won’t join them in it.

So the Lord gives the rebellious ones what they have earned. The wages of sin is death, in the Old Testament and the New. For a long time, our merciful God has been withholding the deadly wages these people have earned. But now, the day of reckoning has come. He will pay them back in full, into their laps, individually, every last penny. They did not reject the sins of their fathers: fine, they will receive their fathers’ back pay as well. All their worship of false gods in gardens and on mountain tops, all the open and deliberate defiance of the Lord their God-- it will be compensated to the full.

But why doesn’t God forgive them? Isn’t He a God of love?

George MacDonald was a mentor to C. S. Lewis, and he once wrote of a person who prayed to God, saying, "I thank thee, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that, too." And the Lord replies, "No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance. It is impossible to forgive that. It would be to take part in it."

That’s what God has to say to any petition like that. There are truly some things God cannot do. He cannot take part in evil. For the sake of His faithful chosen ones He cannot. For the sake of the Gentiles who have found Him He cannot. For the sake of the holiness of His own name, He cannot. God cannot and will not forever endure willful obstinacy and sinful rebellion, or all the world would be swept away and destroyed by it. His love is not a careless indulgence, it is a refining fire. Those who insist on remaining lost, He will give them their own will and let them have the godless life they desire. The horrible thing is, the godless life is death.

But our God is the God of patience and love, the First and the Last, from age to age the same.

And He says:

As when juice is still found in a cluster of grapes,
and men say, ‘Don’t destroy it,
there is yet some good in it,’
so will I do in behalf of my servants.
I will not destroy them all.
I will bring forth descendants from Jacob,
and from Judah those who will possess my mountains.

In mercy God the Lord will seek those who seek Him. He will give them and their flocks rest in the pleasant places of the land. He will show His love to them, even in their weakness, and forgive their sin. For when He revealed Himself, they found Him. When He called to them, they answered. When He came to seek them, they let themselves be found.

In the Old Testament and the New, our God is a God of love. His love is not alien to His justice, nor is His justice alien to His love. In Isaiah’s time, in Luke’s time, in our own time, He is still the same.

He was still the same as He lived and taught His people in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus’ parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin are truly beautiful pictures of the love of God. At the same time, they depict how terrible it is to stray out of the Father’s love and care.

It’s hard for us to grasp this. We’ve never been a smallholding shepherd with only a hundred sheep or a Middle Eastern woman who’s lost part of her dowry, that she might need to live on if her husband dies. To speak of the seeking love of God is also to speak of the terror of being lost from Him. If there was nothing wrong with a sheep going off by itself, the shepherd wouldn’t bother to recover it. If the woman didn’t care that one coin had disappeared, she wouldn’t put aside all her other chores and sweep and search till she finds it. Jesus is saying that being lost from God is a terrible, terrible thing, and that’s why His seeking, saving love is so amazing.

There is one big difference between the New and the Old Testaments, but it’s not a difference in God. It’s a difference in how He reveals Himself to us.

God revealed Himself to His Old Covenant people Israel through the Law, and called them to obey it. But they could not obey it. Even at their best, they wandered and failed. In the New Covenant, God reveals Himself to us in Jesus Christ. Jesus lifts from us the burden of keeping the Law, for He kept it for us perfectly in our place. As Isaiah says in chapter 53, "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him--" (that is, Jesus) "--the iniquity of us all."

In our Luke passage, the Pharisees and the teachers of the law think they’re sheep who’ve never strayed. But they’re just as lost and wandering as those tax collectors and sinners who are repenting their old sinful lifestyles and following Jesus and His word! Our Lord Jesus speaks ironically in verse 7 about "righteous persons" who don’t need to repent. Don’t they realize that none of us are "righteous" in the eyes of God? We are all lost sheep who need to be found! We are all sinful and need to repent. We are all under judgement; not one of us can do the least thing to save ourselves.

The New Covenant tells us, Stop trying! Without Jesus, we’re like that coin the woman worked so hard to find-- senseless, helpless, dead. We’re like dumb sheep going after the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, and straying farther and farther from our Shepherd and God. We need Christ the Son of God to clean away our sins on the Cross to restore us safely to the Father’s treasury. We need His resurrection power to rescue us from death and bring us to eternal life.

The Old Covenant law couldn’t do that for us. But the Old Testament warning remains: If you reject God’s saving love, if you insist on going your own way, provoking Him to His face and worshipping gods of your own making, He will let you have what you want. He will let you have what you want, even if your false god is your own attempt to be good instead of trusting wholly in the saving goodness of Jesus Christ. God will not send you to hell: you head there of your own volition, when finally and forever you say, "My will, not Thine, be done."

It’s an awful choice, isn’t it? Either you admit your helplessness and receive God’s love and life, or hold onto your godless autonomy and go down into darkness and death.

The Holy Spirit calls you to seek in faith the Good Shepherd who in mercy has sought you. He is the God of justice and of love, the One who was and is and is to be, and still the same. The Lord who made the world, who called Abraham and the prophets, is also the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And by faith in that same Jesus, this Lord is the God and Father of you and me. He’s been faithful to His promises of love from the beginning and He’ll be faithful to them forever. Let us praise Him for His holiness, let us praise Him for His justice, let us praise Him for His love.