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.

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!

What Love Looks Like

Texts: Numbers 21:21:4-9; John 3:14-21

WHAT DOES SIN LOOK like? What does Love look like? More to the point, what does Love look like, the kind of Love with the power to overcome sin?

Our modern culture is sure it knows what love looks like. Love is always nice and caring and therapeutic. It never, ever, gives offense. It never tells anyone he’s wrong or implies that anyone is headed in the wrong direction. Love never says No. What really matters in love is that each person’s wants and desires and yearnings should be indulged and gratified. And if anything gets in the way of that gratification, including any law of God or man, it should be ignored or struck down.

That’s how our culture sees love. But can that love overcome sin?

I suppose that depends on our picture of "sin." In our world today, sin is usually seen as "brokenness" or "disease." It’s not anything we did or do or are, it’s something that’s been done to us. So that even if we end up hurting others or ourselves, that’s not really our fault. We’re gripped by an addiction! We’re suffering from an emotional disease! Something outside ourselves makes us do antisocial things and we just can’t help it.

Maybe the indulgent, therapeutic kind of love can deal with this kind of "sin." It "deals" with it by overlooking it and minimizing it and curing it. It says, "What you did isn’t so bad and you’re okay just the way you are!" It says, "You’re a victim and with our help you won’t have to face anything bad or difficult, ever again!"

These pictures of sin and love are widespread in our culture. So widespread, in fact, that you may be thinking, "Yes, love is the opposite of being judgmental! And sin really is nothing but brokenness, and we need therapy and healing, not condemnation!" And in our human relations, certainly there are times when judgment must be reserved. Certainly, there are occasions when the sinfulness of this world system gets hold of a person, and he or she absolutely needs to get psychological help in order to get free of that phobia or neurosis or whatever, before he or she can do what is right and good.

But for most of us most of the time, it’s convenient to see love as indulgent and sin as something we can’t help, because it vindicates us as good, okay people.

It works wonderfully-- until we look at the God-Man Jesus Christ, and gaze upon His understanding of sin, and see the kind of love it took to overcome sin. Then our blindness is stripped away and we see the enormity of our offenses, and how great and awesome is the love of God that defeated it for our sakes.

What does sin look like, according to our holy God? In John Chapter 3 the Jewish ruling council member Nicodemus has come to Jesus by night to learn more about this wonder-worker from Galilee. Jesus immediately comes to the point of His ministry on earth: To bring new, eternal life to dead, lost sinners, so they might enter the kingdom of God.

But Nicodemus doesn’t get it. He misunderstands what Jesus means about being born again. And when Jesus uses the example of the wind to show how the Holy Spirit can do whatever He wants without human help, Nicodemus replies, "How can this be?" So in His mercy our Lord gives him a picture of human sin and divine love that he surely cannot misread, an example from Israel’s history that surely Nicodemus has known from his youth. Jesus says to him, "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man [that is, Jesus Himself] must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life."

So we look at our reading from Numbers, and we think, Hey, what the Israelites did doesn’t seem that bad. We’d complain, too, if we’d been tromping around a desert for forty years eating the same old manna and never knowing where our next drink of water was coming from! Wasn’t the Lord a little, well, cruel in putting His people to death for such a small offense?

But when we defend them and prosecute God we prove that we, too, are guilty of the same sin. Think who these people were! Think who this God was, that they were blaspheming against! They were the children of the Lord’s promise. He was and is the Lord of heaven and earth, who’d rescued them with power from the overwhelming might of Egypt. He’d fed them miraculously with the bread of angels, as it says in Psalm 78. He provided them with all the water they needed! He gave them victory over every army that marched out to block their way! Year after year after year they’d seen that the Lord God of Israel could be depended on totally. When they complained on the way around Edom, they weren’t just speaking against Moses and their living conditions, they were speaking against the Lord Himself! And we are exactly the same, when we exalt our desires and fears up against the faithfulness of God.

The Lord sent our spiritual ancestors a punishment that was a picture of sin itself. What does sin looks like? It looks like snakes that bite us so we die. Sin is hissing, insidious, and sneaky, and it fills us with the fire of death. The Hebrew word translated "venomous" actually means fiery, and I’m afraid that by using the familiar term our modern translation has lost us something.

Ancient writers spoke of a little red serpent called the "dipsas," whose name means "thirst." It could bite a man without being felt, but its venom would engender a raging, burning thirst that made the bitten one run mad and commit any crime or dishonor to slake it. All the time the victim would think it was thirst alone that was the problem, but drinking all the rivers of the world dry could not keep him from fiery death.

That’s a picture of sin. We think our problem is something outside ourselves, something we desire, and if we can get it we’ll be all right. But the venom of sin is in us, working through all our members and taking us down to death.

Whether the fiery serpents in question were the dipsas or some other kind of poisonous snake, they were a perfect image of the Israelites’ sin.

But Israel in the desert couldn’t pretend it was mere hunger and thirst that was killing them. They couldn’t even pretend it was the fiery serpents themselves, as if death would stop if God would be more "loving" and take the snakes away. They faced the fact that it was their own sin they were dying of. They repented and said to Moses, "We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us."

So Moses prayed for the people. But it’s striking: Numbers does not tell us that the Lord took the snakes away, at least, not at that time. Something crucial had to happen first.

The Lord commanded Moses to make a model of one of the snakes and transfix it on a tall pole and set it up where the people could see it. Moses made it out of bronze, and if you’ve ever seen new bronze, you know it’s a bright fiery reddish-gold. The dying ones were to look away from themselves to an image of their death fixed to a pole, and by looking they would live.

Even today, superstitious people make charms and amulets that are supposed to ward off evil. But this wasn’t like that. The bronze serpent raised up by Moses didn’t prevent snakebite; it healed and saved those already dying of it. And the power was not in the image itself, it was in the Lord their God. The Israelites had refused to see that He was able to bring them safely to new life in the Promised Land. But now in this crisis they had to look to His remedy if they wanted to live, no matter how strange or repellant it appeared.

Our Lord Jesus said to Nicodemus and He says to us: God’s provision for our salvation is like His provision for His people Israel. It is only by looking to the Son of Man lifted up on the cross and believing in Him that we can enter the kingdom of God and have eternal life.

We all know John 3:16. It says, "For God so loved the world, that he gave only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life." The love the world believes in says God gave His Son to be our Good Example, to show us that if we try hard enough we can overcome our sins. But the burning, relentless, pure love of God tell us that God gave us Son to be crucified to bring new birth to people who were perishing in sin.

Jesus tells us that He wasn’t sent into the world to condemn the world. Why? Because we humans and the systems we create aren’t really that bad? No. Jesus didn’t need to come to condemn the world, because the world and its inhabitants are condemned already.

We get the mistaken idea that we all start out neutral. If we’re ordinary worldly sinners we think we make ourselves worthy of eternal life or death depending on whether our good deeds outweigh our bad ones, or the other way around. If we’re a certain kind of religious sinner we think we start out neutral and God arbitrarily sorts us into the "saved" and the "damned."

But no. You and I and the littlest baby born a minute ago are all born damned. It’s the default position, as they say in the computer world. And until grace of God intervenes we like it that way. "This is the verdict," our Lord says, "Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil." Without Jesus Christ crucified we would all willfully go on in death and sin, hissing and murmuring and biting against the one true and holy God. But God sent His Son into the world to make it possible for us not to be damned. He caused His Son to be transfixed on that cross to make it possible for us to come out of darkness into His glorious light. It is all God’s love working in us and for us!

The bronze serpent lifted up in the wilderness was a symbol of the people’s death; in the same way, the cross of Jesus Christ lifted up on Calvary is a true picture of our death that He died for us. In His cross we see all the vicious ugliness of our sin. On the cross we see the righteous, holy Lamb of God made sin for us. His cross was the cross we had earned and His death the death we deserved. Nevertheless, by looking to that terrible object in faith we come to enjoy all the beauty and peace of eternal life. In that cross we see the ultimate demonstration of the overflowing love of God!

This is marvellous good news! Look and see what good news it is for you! The light of God is showing you that sin is far more horrible than the world can ever picture, yes, but the love of God is far more glorious and powerful to defeat sin than we could ever imagine or hope!

What does our sin look like? It looks like the evil of the innocent Son of God dying in agony on a cross. What does God’s love look like? It looks like the grace and mercy of the innocent Son of God dying in agony on a cross! Dying, He destroyed our death; rising, He restored our life!

So rejoice in His victory, and live in the new birth you have received in Jesus Christ! When you are tempted to minimize the evil and effect of sin, see how your Saviour suffered to overcome it. When you feel the venom and thirst of sin in your life, look to Jesus lifted up to be your refreshment and cure. When you feel that you can never be good enough for God, see Christ’s arms stretched out on that fatal tree, and be assured that He has been good enough for God for you.

Look to Him, and live. For our crucified Lord is not merely a picture of the sin-overpowering Love of God-- Dying and rising, Jesus Christ is the Love of God Himself.

The Treaty of Calvary

Text: Romans 4:13-17; 5:1-11

WHEN I WAS A KID IN SCHOOL STUDYING American History, we learned about April 19, 1775. That was the date of the famous "shot heard round the world." That’s when our colonist forefathers stood up to the British troops at Lexington and Concord, and the Revolutionary War was begun.

Of course we also learned about July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was ratified in Philadelphia. And October 17, 1781, when the British surrendered at Yorktown. And of course, we learned about September 17, 1787, the day our Constitution was adopted by the Constitutional Convention.

But somehow we never heard much about September 3, 1783. Anybody here remember what happened that day? No? That’s the day of the signing of the Treaty of Paris, when Great Britain and the brand-new United States of America agreed to terms of peace. That’s the day the Revolutionary War officially came to an end, and we had won.


It’s easy to overlook the Treaty of Paris. For one thing, it happened, well, in Paris, France. Here in southwestern Pennsylvania, it’s not too hard to visualize the battles and struggles of the Revolution itself. We don’t have to go that far to see where they took place. And every time we travel the Washington Trail, Route 68 in Butler County, we remember the exploits of the man who would later lead our forces to victory. But Paris, especially Paris in 1783 is so far away-- it’s hard to get our imaginations around anything that happened there.


And then treaties are basically about politics and diplomacy and legal affairs. Terribly dry and boring, not exciting like battles and sieges and deeds of heroism. No wonder September 3, 1783 doesn’t stick in our heads!


But the Treaty of Paris was essential for the birth of our nation. Without the Treaty of Paris, we’d still be at war with Great Britain. At the very best, we’d only have a cease-fire. And if the Crown of England ever felt it was worthwhile to resume hostilities, they could do that. It would just be the same war going on and on.


George III agreed to the terms of the Treaty of Paris because we, the American colonists, had won the war. He was the head of the greatest nations in the world at the time. But after six and a half years of struggle, he simply couldn’t keep pouring in men and money and materiel and munitions to put down those pesky colonials across the Atlantic. So he had his ambassadors sign the Treaty.


Like most treaties, each side got something out of it. We got the best of it, of course: We got our independence and the rights to the land claimed by the thirteen former colonies. But the British got some benefits, too, like the right to navigate on the Mississippi River, the right of pro-British combatants to be free from American prosecution, and the right of pro-British colonists to sue for the recovery of confiscated property.


But suppose a rabble of rebellious revolutionaries and terrorists declared war against a great superpower, a high and glorious Emperor or King. Suppose unlike our colonial ancestors, these rebels had no excuse or cause for war. Suppose under the King’s rulership, they’d been free and responsible citizens with everything they could ever want or need, but they rebelled anyway. Suppose even that the great King had delegated much of the rulership of His empire to these ungrateful wretches, but it wasn’t enough for them, they wanted to put down the King and be kings and queens themselves.


Suppose this war of rebellion had gone on for years, decades, centuries. Suppose the cruelty, brutality, treachery, and desecration of these terrorists was without boundary or limit. And suppose the great King had all the men, money, materiel, and munitions to put down the rebellion whenever He wanted.


Will such a King conclude a treaty of peace with such a gang of bloody rebels? Will He not stop waiting for them to surrender and destroy them altogether, just as they deserve?


You’d think so, wouldn’t you? You’d think He’d bring all His power to bear and be done with this war, once and for all. He could. He’d have the right to. He’d have the power to do it. Let Him wipe them out those terrorists, and let His loyal subjects stand up and cheer!


But what if that’s not what the great King did? What if, instead, He drew up a treaty of peace with those rebels, and it was all in their favor-- life and health and property and riches and high places in His kingdom forever more! What if He sealed it with the blood of His beloved and only Son?


And what if-- what if-- the only thing required from the rebels was that they lay down their arms and accept all the good things promised by this amazing treaty? What if they’d be breaking the treaty if they insisted on trying to do good things in order to deserve the King’s offer of peace?


You’d think that King was either out of His mind-- or that He was the most loving, gracious, caring, merciful, and glorious King the world has ever known. But surely, such a King, such a superpower, has never existed-- has He? And such a treaty, could it ever be offered? How could anything like that be imagined?


St. Paul answers these questions in his letter to the Romans. In the first three chapters, the Apostle convicts all humanity of being in vicious, unexcusable rebellion against our Lord and King. That includes every man, every woman, every child; rich and poor, Jew or Gentile, slave or free, knowing God’s law and not knowing God’s law. We are all guilty of waging war against our gracious Lord, and He has every right to destroy us in His wrath.


But beginning towards the end of Chapter 3, Paul reveals how the Lord God Himself intervened to end the hostilities between Him and us. In Chapter 4, he gives an example of one man who accepted the King’s terms and inherited His promises-- our father Abraham. And in our portion of Chapter 4, Paul outlines the glorious terms of the treaty of peace our Lord and King has made with us, for our benefit and His eternal glory.


We can call it the Treaty of Calvary, and by all calculations, it was ratified at 3:00 in the afternoon on Friday, April 3rd, in the Year of Our Lord 33. On that day and at that hour, Jesus Christ the Son of God died on the cross of Calvary to seal our peace with His own innocent blood. And simply by laying down our arms and accepting His grace through faith in Him, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.


The rebellious world looks on and says, "Impossible!" And it is amazing, overwhelming, almost too good to be true. As St. Paul says in Chapter 5, verses 6 and following,


For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.


"While we were still sinners Christ died for us"! While we were still rebellious, blaspheming, self-righteous, cold, cruel, careless sinners, our God and King made a unilateral treaty with us and signed it with His own blood!


Amazing, but not incredible!


Something you may have noticed, that's going around these days in popular American culture: The constant use of the word "incredible." "Incredible" means "not to be credited" or "not to be believed," and people use it for everything. I’ve even heard Christians use it, about things that you’d think they’d want you to believe. The other day, I heard an advert telling me to send for "This incredible set of Scripture cards!" Excuse me, if it’s unbelievable, why should I bother?


The marvellous love that God offers us in the Treaty of Calvary is not incredible. In fact, the only requirement laid upon us is that we do credit and believe it. The only thing we have to do is be like Abraham and reach out in faith and simply accept God’s promises offered to us in Jesus Christ.


And yes, God’s promise to Abraham that he would inherit the world finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. The promises of the Treaty of Calvary are better than a pledge of earthly territory and property and fishing and commercial rights. They extend from this world to the world to come, and their blessings and benefits to us will never end.


Let’s look at the terms of this treaty, here in Romans Chapter 5.


First of all, now that we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Peace with God! That means your sins are forgiven! That means that your conscience can be calm and clear!


I know what it’s like to remember some past sin, and feel unsettled about it. Maybe I’ve asked forgiveness of the person I offended, but I just don’t feel forgiven. The Holy Spirit here tells me and tells you to believe God, not our feelings. The blood of Jesus has covered our sins. We have God’s peace-- let’s enjoy it!


And through Christ we have access to God’s grace and we can stand in it. We can stop acting like it’s up to us to please God in our own paltry power. We can stop trying to put God in our debt by observing the law. Our standing with our King is all by His grace. It comes simply and solely because we belong to His righteous Son, Jesus Christ. He fulfilled the law perfectly for us, and makes us worthy to come into His Father’s presence.


And through Christ, we may boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. This boast has nothing to do with what we are or have been in ourselves-- it totally has to do with what Jesus did for us.


Under the terms of the Treaty of Calvary, we can even boast in our sufferings. For now our sufferings have meaning. Now we are fighting on the side of our Lord, the most glorious and gracious God and King, and our wounds come in His service. In Christ, our suffering does not defeat us, it makes us more like Him, in endurance, character, and hope. For in all our sufferings, the Holy Spirit pours the love of God into our hearts, the love that Jesus knew when He bore the sins of the world for our sake.


Under the terms of the Treaty of Calvary, now that we have been justified by Christ’s blood, we have been saved through Him from the wrath of God. It’s not nice or popular or modern to talk about the wrath of God against sin. But deep inside, we all know our rebellion against Him deserves it. So we excuse ourselves. Or we try to heap up good works to balance out our bad ones. Or we try to run away into pleasure or depression or busyness, anything to escape facing the wrath of God. But in Christ, that threat is removed! For the sake of Jesus’ shed blood, God our King has ceased His war against us and we have nothing to fear from Him, ever again.
That reconciliation came to be while we were still God’s enemies! So now that we have been reconciled to God through the death of His Son, how much more will we be saved by His resurrection life!


For under the Treaty of Calvary, peace with God gives us so much more than His war against us being over. He doesn’t just march away and leave us on our own. No! Peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ makes us heirs of all the gracious promises first offered to our father Abraham, for all those promises are Yes and Amen in God’s crucified and risen Son. Power and glory, wisdom and strength, honor, glory, and blessing: All these are ours through Jesus Christ, who defeated death and brings us with Him to His Father’s throne.


We can boast in God, because He is no longer our divine Enemy; rather through Jesus Christ, He is our Father and our eternal Friend. He has reconciled us to Himself, He has concluded His treaty of peace with us, and nothing will ever be the same.


Think what this can mean for your every day life and for mine! We have peace with the great King: how can any enemy now have any lasting power over us? And that includes the enemies that attack us within our own thoughts and minds! God has reconciled us to Himself: now we can courageously and lovingly offer reconciliation to others. He has converted us from rebels and terrorists into His loyal subjects and royal children: now we can serve Him humbly, gladly, and willingly. We can take His direction and offer the love and peace of Jesus Christ even to people we think could never deserve it.


For we did not deserve for God to make peace with us, yet He did. We didn’t force Him to give us these blessings by winning the fight against Him or by earning them by our own good works. Yet here we are, enjoying all the joys of life and hope and peace with Him.


Rejoice in that peace! Live in it! Boast in it! And more than that, offer and extend that peace to everyone you know. For when you do, though Jesus Christ your Lord you are ratifying and keeping the Treaty of Calvary.

Afraid Yet Filled with Joy

Texts: Ephesians 1:15-23; 2:1-10; Matthew 28:1-10

GRACE AND PEACE TO YOU in the name of our risen Lord Jesus Christ!

In Matthew 28, verse 8 we read:

"So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy . . . "

Joy on Easter Sunday we know about. Christ is risen! But fear? What does fear have to do with the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ?

As it turns out, a lot. In fact, the amount of joy we feel at Jesus risen is only as great as the holy fear it brings.

St. Matthew tells us Mary Magdalene and the "other Mary" went to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week after Jesus was crucified. They intended to look at the tomb, to do more to prepare Jesus’ body for proper burial. They weren’t prepared for what awaited them there. They had every right to be afraid.

First of all, there was the violent earthquake. That was frightening enough. But more terrible by far was the angel of the Lord who came down from heaven and rolled back the stone of Jesus’ tomb. Do you think this angel was like the little winged babies you see on Valentines? Or like the doe-eyed girlie angels you see in popular art, with their sweet simpering looks and their form-fitting robes? Think again! This was a mighty warrior of God, with a face like lightning and clothing white as purest snow! This was a being from heaven so terrifying that the soldiers guarding the tomb passed out in a dead faint!

I’m sure the women felt they were about to pass out likewise! But the angel strengthened them with his word: "Do not be afraid," he told them. For they were very afraid indeed. "I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay."

The women surely obeyed and looked; how can you disobey a fearsome angel of the Lord? And now they had something else to be afraid about. For they saw the tomb was empty! And obviously, it had been empty before the angel rolled the stone away! Where was Jesus? How could He not be there? How did He get out? There was no earthly reason His body could be gone! But His body was gone. He wasn’t there; as the angel said, He was risen!

This was indeed something to be afraid of, and something to be joyful about, too. The sight of the empty tomb laid the fear of God upon these disciples. Nothing other than the direct power and presence of Almighty God could have worked the great and awesome miracle those women were confronted with that first Easter morning.

And then-- and then-- as they hurried away, afraid yet filled with joy, they encountered Jesus Himself. Did they say, "Oh, Jesus, it’s only You. Hey, You’re alive again! Congratulations, that’s really great!"?

No! They fell at His feet in worship and holy awe! They recognised in Him the physical presence of Almighty God! Once more they have to be reassured. The risen Jesus comforts them, saying, "Do not be afraid." Why? Because it’s no big deal to stand in the presence of the God-Man who has defeated death? No, Jesus tells them not to be afraid because His defeat of death also defeats our sin and rebellion, all those things that made them-- and us-- unable to bear the presence of God. Because Christ is risen, heaven and earth are no longer split asunder; they’re brought together in joyfulness and love! The resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ does not remove the fear of God that is the beginning of wisdom; rather, it catches us up into that awe and wonder, where our holy fear is as blissful as our joy, and our joy is as stupendous as our fear.

That’s how it was for Mary Magdalene and the other Mary that resurrection morning. But is that really how it is with us? This morning, are we experiencing the holy fear of the resurrection of our Lord? Are our souls truly leaping and dancing in His resurrection joy? Are we so overwhelmed by the news that we need Him to calm us and tell us, "Do not be afraid?"

If not, could it be that maybe for us Christ’s resurrection doesn’t seem all that real? Kind of remote from our personal experience?

Think of it this way: Maybe late at night you’ve tuned your radio to Coast-to-Coast AM. No, I won’t make you admit it. It’s a guilty pleasure--I know. Coast-to-Coast is driven by guests and callers who are always talking about frightful wonders. UFOs and space aliens who snatch helpless humans out of their cars and their beds! The Bigfoot monster skulking through the woods! Goat creatures with long fangs that devour cattle and sheep and even humans when they get the chance! Shadow people who lurk just beyond your range of vision and want to steal your soul! This is all scary stuff!

Or it would be, if you believed in any of it. But you don’t. Or at least, I don’t. In fact, the only thing that comes close to scaring me on Coast-to-Coast AM is the ghost stories. And that’s because I think ghosts just might possibly be real!

Does the story of Jesus’ resurrection shake up your world? Does it overpower you with holy awe? Or is it just something interesting to hear about in church from time to time, almost like something on Coast-to-Coast AM?

But there’s something else about hearing stories of UFOs and hauntings and weird creatures. When you hear that kind of tale, do you come right out and say, "He made that up," or "That’s got to be a lie"? Or do you find yourself thinking, "Well, I don’t believe in UFOs and ghosts and weird creatures, but if that other guy wants to believe in them, that’s fine with me! They don’t exist for me, but maybe they exist for him. And that’s ok."

Sometimes it scares me, that we-- even we who claim to be Christians-- are tempted to put Jesus’ resurrection in the same category as space aliens and hauntings. We say, "Well, that’s what I believe, but if you over there don’t want to believe it, that’s all right for you." If that’s you, be very afraid. From there it’s just a little, little step to denying the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a fearsome and joyous cosmic physical reality. What’s to prevent you from switching things around? You might as well say, "Well, yes, it was fine for Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to be afraid when they encountered the risen Christ. But I’ve got nothing to be afraid of-- because I don’t quite believe it!"

Christian friends, the fact of Jesus’ bodily resurrection isn’t something we or the Church made up in our heads that people can choose to believe in it or not! It’s the supreme act of God worked out in human history! Christ’s rising again is a fearsome and joyful thing, to be wholeheartedly accepted and believed-- by everyone, everywhere, and at every time. Not because we feel like it, not because it’s exciting, not because it’s convenient or helps us with our troubles-- but because it’s true.

If you don’t believe in the rising again of our Lord Jesus Christ, if you’re not trusting in His resurrection power to bring you-- yes, you-- defeat over death and life with God forever, you’ve got more to be afraid of than you can ever imagine. You’re in for fear that has nothing whatever to do with joy.

Look with me at our reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. It’s all about the awe-inspiring, knee-rattling strength God exercised when He raised Jesus Christ from the dead and seated Him at God’s right hand in the heavenly realms. It’s about the power and riches and wisdom and eye-opening revelation that mighty act means for us who believe in Christ and His resurrection, who have been made alive with Him.

But what if you don’t believe in Christ’s resurrection or its power? What if the new life in Jesus holds no awe or fear or joy for you? What if you don’t care whether it does or not?

Well then, today brings you no good news. You’re still dead in your transgressions and sins. You’re still a slave to the devil, the ruler of the kingdom of the air. The spirit of Satan, not the Spirit of God, is working in you. If the resurrection of Jesus Christ means nothing to you, if it inspires in you neither fear nor joy, if it’s something that’s fine for other people but doesn’t affect you, you are still an object of wrath and God’s rightful anger still rests upon you.

Yes, God’s rightful anger. God has every right to be angry with us for our disobedience and rebellion and blasphemies against Him. One reason Jesus had to die was to pay the just penalty for our sins. His sacrifice absorbed the righteous wrath of God that was justly directed against our disobedience and turned it away from us. Jesus propitiated the wrath of God on the cross; otherwise, we would each have to stand before God in the judgement and make propitiation for ourselves. And that would mean everlasting death.

If the cross of Christ inspires in you no holy fear; if His resurrection offers you nothing of worshipful awe and terrible joy, it may be because you think you’re worthy and able to stand by yourself before God and turn away His wrath with your own pathetic goodness. But you can’t. None of us can! So I plead with you by the love and grace of Jesus Christ, repent in holy fear and accept His sacrifice for you. Joyfully accept the eternal life He offers you in His resurrection. Your own works cannot save you in the Day of Judgement; if you try it, you’ll learn what it is to experience naked fear in the presence of God-- and it will be too late to know the joy. It’ll be too late for Jesus to say to you, "Do not be afraid." You will have made your choice. If now you reject the holy fear and awesome joy of Christ died and risen for you, on that awful Day you’ll begin to know the unholy and unbearable fear of living without Him forever.

But you whom the Holy Spirit has enlightened, you who live by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, you who yearn for the hope to which He has called you--today is the day of boundless good news! You know the fear and the joy of Jesus’ resurrection. And your fear is as blissful as your joy, and your joy is as earthshattering as your fear.

You trust that Jesus died for your sins. You feel the fear of how great your sins are, and you know the joy that they are paid for in full.

You confess that you deserved God’s wrath against you. You shudder to think of the terror of it-- and you rejoice to know that because of Christ, God’s love shines upon you instead.

You believe that Christ the Son of God has defeated death. You tremble in awe at how much mightier the life of God is than the death wielded by Satan, and you exult in blessing, because in Christ, you share that divine life to the full.

You affirm that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Mary, was a true man and also the eternal Son of God. You are overcome with the fearful wonder that God Himself, the Lord of the Universe, supreme over every rule and authority, power and dominion, high in heaven and earth over every title that can be given-- that He, even He would come near to you on this earth to save you-- and you are jubilant, because He has declared you worthy to come close to Him in heaven.

And you believe, even if you can’t quite grasp it, that Jesus in His resurrected, physical, glorified human body even now is seated at the right hand of God in the heavenly realms. You are filled with humble awe that He would do such a thing for humanity-- for you; and you look forward in joy to your own bodily resurrection and perfect union with Him.

But what if-- what if you want to feel all the emotions you should about Jesus’ resurrection, but somehow you can’t? What if you do believe in Him; what if you are trusting Him to take away your sins; what if you do look forward to the day when you will be raised with a body like His; what if you do confess that Jesus’ death and resurrection are real events that make all the difference in the world to everyone who has ever lived in the world and ever will-- but your emotions aren’t equal to it all? What if Easter comes, and Easter goes, and you just can’t seem to feel all the fear and the joy you know the day should bring?

If that’s how it is, Jesus says to you, "Do not be afraid!" Trust in Him, not in your own emotions. Trust in His cross, not in the sensations of your heart. Trust in His empty tomb, not in the ups and downs of your feelings. Believe in the sure and faithful testimony given to you by His prophets, apostles, and evangelists, recorded for you in the Holy Scriptures and written in your heart by His Holy Spirit. Receive the grace of your Lord Jesus Christ extended to you in His Holy Sacraments. Even when you can’t sense His presence in this dark world, claim His salvation, rely on His kindness, and obediently do the good works God has prepared in advance for you to do. For your salvation will never depend on the power of your own feelings. It was won and assured to you by the grace and power of your risen Lord Jesus Christ.

In His good time God your heavenly Father will fill you with the holy fear and eternal joy of the resurrection of His Son. That day will not come perfectly for any of us until we ourselves are transformed into His image and our own bodies share in His glorious resurrection. On that day, our fear will be as blissful as our joy and our joy will be as terrible as our fear. On that day, Jesus Himself will say to us, "Do not be afraid!", all earthly fears will be over and past, and we will live with Him in joyful awe and awe-ful joy forever.

__________________________________

Feast of the Resurrection, 2008

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.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Texts: Isaiah 5:1-7; Galatians 5:16-26; Luke 20:9-19

HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

You hear that line, you probably think of the nursery rhyme:

Mistress Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.

A nice little verse to teach the children, right? But many traditional nursery rhymes started out as the sung version of political cartoons. This one is most likely about Queen Mary Tudor.

Mary was the elder daughter of Henry VIII, who split the Church of England off from Rome. By the time Mary became queen, her younger half-brother Edward VI had been working several years to make England thoroughly Protestant. But Mary was Roman Catholic to the core. Whatever it took, she was going to return England to the Pope and what she saw as the True Faith of the Roman Catholic Church.

But the majority of her subjects disagreed. To them, she was "quite contrary"-- she was trying to reunite them with Rome when they wanted the Reformation. And she was making of England a strange garden. Again there were silver bells: the restoration of the pomp and ceremony of Roman Catholic liturgy, especially to the bells that are rung when the priest is said to be turning the bread and wine into the physical body of our Lord Jesus Christ. There were cockle shells: Cockle shells were the souvenir badge of someone who’d made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Spain in order to gain forgiveness of his sins. Protestants did not believe in pilgrimages to earn forgiveness. Catholics did.

And Queen Mary planted the "pretty maids all in a row." Some say that refers to the graves of all the Protestant martyrs she caused to be executed. Others say it’s a grim reference to the torture device called the iron maiden. However it was, Bloody Mary sowed quite a crop in her day, and the result was bloodshed, confusion, strife, and economic disaster.

That’s what happens too often when we human beings start sowing our gardens in this world. But when God Almighty plants a garden, then all will be well, right? Any songs about His gardening work will be songs of joy, correct?

Or maybe not.

Children sang of Queen Mary and her disastrous garden in the streets of Tudor England, but long before that, the prophet Isaiah was singing a song of the Lord God and His tragic vineyard in the temple courts of ancient Jerusalem.

How did God’s vineyard grow? Not so well, actually.

The Lord has planted it in an ideal spot with the richest soil. He’s dug the ground and cleared it of stones-- no obstacles are going to hamper the roots of His vines! He’s chosen the best vines available and surrounded it with a hedge and a wall to keep the wild animals out. He's built a watchtower to keep a lookout for thieves, and a winepress that's waiting to receive the grapes at harvest time. The Lord God has followed all the best practices of viticulture-- but instead of sweet, juicy grapes, all He gets is stinky-sour little marbles.

As Isaiah sang his song of the Lord’s vineyard, his hearers would agree, yes, there was something very wrong with those vines. The owner of the vineyard was sorely cheated. Somebody really should pay. But by the end of the song, they’d have to realize that they were the rotten, fruitless vines. They and their countrymen were the cheats, the ones who would pay:

"The vineyard of the Lord Almighty
is the house of Israel
and the men of Judah
are the garden of his delight."

At least, they were supposed to be. But the Gentile nations could have pointed their fingers at Judah and sung,

O God of Israel, God of Israel,
How does your vineyard grow?
With oppression and strife and cheapness of life
And murderers all in a row.

But the Lord didn’t plant His vineyard that way! He’d lavished every advantage on Israel and Judah! I’ve read that the only difference between a wild sour grape vine and a cultivated sweet one is the work of cultivation. If a wild vine is cultivated, it doesn’t stay wild. And if a people are graced with the Law and favor of God, they shouldn’t stay godless and self-centered. But the Lord looked upon Judah, the garden of His delight. And where He expected the fruit of justice, He found murder and bloodshed. Not just the murder of the dark alley, not just the slaying of the helpless wife by the drunken husband, but so-called "legal" murder: judges sentencing the innocent to death: the rich cheating the poor out of their houses and lands and turning them out to starve and die. The Lord reached out His hand for the fruit of righteousness: right relationships, kindness and consideration between family members and neighbors, and true worship towards Himself, but pulled it back in horror when it touched nothing but the slugs of oppression, misery, and distress.

The Lord says through the mouth of His prophet, "What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it?"

The answer, of course, is nothing. So what will God do?

He will give His people what they deserve for their sins. He will prune them through war and devastation, ruin and exile. He would no longer let them think that He does not demand justice, righteousness, and every fruit of virtue in His garden. He would no longer let them mistake His grace for indulgence and His mercy for approval of their crimes and sins.

About 700 years after Isaiah, another Prophet sits teaching in the temple courts in Jerusalem. It is Jesus of Nazareth, and He, too, sings of God the Beloved, and how His vineyard grows. This time, it seems there is fruit for the Lord to enjoy-- if only He can get what He is due.

For after the Lord purged and pruned His people in the Babylonian exile, He led them back home and planted them again in their own land. He set leaders over them, tenant farmers who were to cultivate the people and lead them in the ways of the Lord. They were to teach the people the Law and see that they bore fruit worthy of His name.

But a long time passed. And priests and scribes and teachers of the Law who were the tenants of the Lord’s vineyard forgot why they were there. They claimed allegiance to their Landlord and His Law, but they got more and more tied up with how they thought things should be. They began to look on God’s people as their own, to prune and cultivate and feed upon as they saw fit. They didn’t appreciate interference from outside, even from God Himself!

In this they were only following the bad example of religious and civil leaders from Isaiah’s time and before--and since. It’s what happens any time that the caretakers of God’s vineyard focus on doing their own will under the cover of God’s name instead of on doing God’s will in God’s name.

So when God the Landlord sent His servants the prophets to claim the fruit of godliness, righteousness, and justice, His tenants did them violence and sent them back with no grapes, only the strange red fruit of blood and wounds.

Jesus knew His hearers would be scandalized in the Owner’s behalf, just as Isaiah’s audience was. Jesus also knew they’d be ripe with fury when they realized His song was about them. At the climax of His parable, He describes a crime against God the Landlord that hadn’t been committed yet but would be soon-- the slaying of the Owner’s own Son who was sent to collect the fruit of the vineyard on His behalf. Did the teachers of the law realize that Jesus was talking about Himself? Whether or not, they seemed very eager to prove they were capable of the enormity He accused them of.

For their crimes, the doom of the tenants is the same as the doom of the bad vines in Isaiah’s song--death, destruction and loss.

That’s how it is. When God lavishes care on human beings, He expects and deserves worship and obedience in return. When God invests anyone with a sacred trust, He expects and deserves that that leader shall render up the fruit of it whenever God requires. God has a right to expect that His vineyard shall grow and bear fruit and be taken care of very, very well.

But we’ve seen that that very seldom happens. It’s not God’s fault. It’s not even a particular problem with the Jews. It’s how things are with humanity in general. The best of us given the best of advantages cannot come up to God’s righteous expectations. It’s the sinful nature and its natural selfishness. It’s the worm of original sin working away in our hearts.

Didn’t God realize that about us when He planted His vineyard? Of course He did. But both our Lord and His prophet Isaiah are speaking on our human level. We’re made in His image and we’re responsible for what we do and are before the Lord. In particular, God’s chosen people from Old Testament Israel to the 21st century church are responsible for bearing good fruit for God. Especially, we who claim the name of our Lord Jesus Christ are the vineyard of the Lord in these latter times. We are the garden of His delight. As Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, we’re to bear the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. God expects and deserves nothing less from us who have been redeemed by His grace.

If I were a preacher of a certain type, I’d start exhorting you under the pain of the fire of hell to work really, really hard to bear all that good fruit. I’d say you’d better hurry up and work on it, or you won’t inherit the kingdom of God, you’ll get the other place. But that’d be stupid. That’d be like--

Well, it’d be like the sweet pepper plants in my garden. I have four of them, but only three have set on any fruit. The fourth one has plenty of flowers, and a nubbin or two, but no peppers worth speaking of. Well, what if I were to go to the store and buy some green peppers and tied them to that plant with string? Wouldn’t work, would it? They’d just rot.

Or what say I go buy some artificial peppers at the craft store and hang them on the plant? Yeah, right. Try eating that in your salad!

It’s the same way if we try to bear the fruit of the Spirit by our external effort. It’d all be fake. It’d all be rot.

So what are we supposed to do? How can our gardens grow?

By remembering whose gardens they are. Remember: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are the fruit of the Spirit. They are the virtues and obedience that God Himself gives. They are the fruit we bear when He has given Himself to us in His Son and we are joined to Him. "Live by the Spirit," St. Paul writes, "and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature." In other words, you will bear the fruit the Lord desires.

We have to get it the right way around. If you say, "If I do this I will live," your fruit will be false and rotten and you will die. But if your mind is, "I will live by the Spirit and so do this," that is peace and pleasure and fellowship with God.

The key to it all is Jesus’ words in John’s gospel, chapter 15. No human being, Jew or Gentile, could ever be the fruitful vine that the Lord requires. No human being, that is, except the God-Man, Jesus Christ. He is the true vine whose fruit is righteousness and justice. We bear fruit only when and if we are connected by faith with Him. And no human leader or vinedresser can truly take care of God’s garden the way God Himself does by His Holy Spirit.

What does this look like in everyday life? I’m learning it’s primarily a matter of faithfulness. It’s putting ourselves under the authority of Scripture and letting the Holy Spirit its Author interpret it to us, and not our own desires.

It’s a matter of union and connection: Union with God in Spirit-led prayer and connection with fellow-believers who can encourage us to keep in step with the Spirit, even when it seems hard.

And it’s a matter of attitude. It’s the Spirit reminding you that Jesus has already borne the perfect fruit of justice and righteousness and that He wants to bear it in you. It’s remembering that Jesus obeyed God perfectly in all He said, thought, and did, and trusting Him to work out His obedience in you. It’s feeding on the most precious fruit that ever hung on a vine or a tree, the fruit of the broken body of our Lord Jesus Christ, dead on the cross for our sins and raised glorious, whole, and shining for our life and exaltation.

Don’t believe it when people tell you that the bad fruit of the sinful nature can be sweetened up by prosperity, education, and good examples. If that were the case, ancient Israel would never needed a Messiah. If that were the case, modern America would have no need for a Saviour now.

But Israel needed Jesus the Christ and so do we. And He’s here, by His Holy Spirit, ready to give you life, ready to cause you to bear fruit, ready to make your garden grow: to the glory of God the Father. Amen.

The Perfect Marriage

Texts: Hosea 2:2-20; Luke 11:1-4, 9-13

YOU’VE HEARD THEM BEFORE, those sad love songs they play on the radio.

I’m thinking especially of the ballads from the ’50s and ’60s. Like the Supremes singing in "Baby Love":

But all you do is treat me bad,
Break my heart, and leave me sad.
Tell me, what did I do wrong,
To make you stay away so long? *

Or the Hank Williams’ song that goes:

Today I passed you on the street
And my heart fell at your feet;
I can’t help it if I’m still in love with you.

Somebody else stood by your side,
And he looked so satisfied.
I can’t help it if I’m still in love with you. **

When I was a kid I thought heartbreak songs like this were sad in a romantic, far-off sort of way. Singing them was a bittersweet indulgence. But then I got older and found out what heartbreak was all about, first hand. I found out that real heartbreak was about as sweet and indulgent as starving or being smothered to death. I found out that the pain in songs like this wasn’t sentimental and romantic, it was ugly, miserable, and hard.

The Old Testament book of Hosea is that sort of heartbreak song. It’s the story of love gone bad, of a good husband done wrong and hurt mortally by his no-good, cheating wife.
It’s about a wife who only loves her husband for the luxuries he can give her, and when she thinks he’s not keeping her in the style she wants, she finds other lovers she thinks will. It’s a song about a woman who’s unfaithful because she doesn’t have faith in a husband who is always faithful to provide her everything she needs, about a husband who loves her too much to finally let her go.

The book of Hosea is a heartbreak song about God’s love for His people Israel. The marriage of the prophet Hosea himself was that heartbreak song acted out for all Israel and Judah to see. God said to Hosea, "Go, marry a woman who is known to be promiscuous." Hosea obeyed, and married Gomer the daughter of Diblaim, and she started having children that didn’t look like him. I imagine people laughed at the prophet, and said, "Well, what did you think would happen if you married a slut like her? Aren’t you the sentimental fool!"

But those people were the fools. They and their countrymen were the faithless, adulterous wife who’d cheated on their husband, the Lord God of Israel. Our passage cries out with Israel’s sin. She has been shallow, vain, greedy, and selfish. She is faithless, because she had no faith in her husband who was always faithful to her.

Verse 5 says,

She said, "I will go after my lovers,
who give me my food and my water,
my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink."

But in verse 8 the Lord says,

She has not acknowledged that I was the one
who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil,
who lavished on her the silver and gold."

The Lord was taking care of Israel all along! All along, God was keeping His covenant promise to provide for His people and make them prosperous and strong. But Israel hankered after the gods of other nations. They wanted gods they could see and carry about and touch. They wanted gods they could control and bribe, gods like the Baals, who were gods of the forces of nature, gods of wind and rain and fertility.

The Lord says,

[I] lavished on her the silver and gold--
which they used for Baal.

They used God’s gifts to serve Baal!! You married people, those of you who are engaged to be married-- how would you like it if, say, you gave your spouse an expensive car and he or she took the keys, picked up a lover, and drove off to Cancun? Gentlemen, how would you like it if on top of that, your wife called that lover her "master and husband"? After all, that’s what the word "Baal" means! You’d be hurt, heartbroken, and angry, wouldn’t you? And ladies, you’d be angry and upset if your husband did the equivalent thing to you.

These days, the adult thing is for you to control yourself, keep calm and try to work out a reconciliation. If that doesn’t work, you get a quiet divorce and get on with life without the one who was so unfaithful. Only the socially immature engage in revenge and public jealousy.

And that’s right for us humans. Because when any marriage goes bad, the right and wrong are never all on one side or the other. Any stones we throw at our spouses are likely to bounce back and hit us.

But when it comes to the marriage between God and His people, God has a right to be publicly angry. He has a right to punish. The Lord our God is completely faithful and true. He is the source of all goodness; He is Goodness itself. No matter how difficult our lives become, we cannot honestly say, "God, I stopped worshipping You because You abandoned me." God never turns His love from those who belong to Him. He never stops being faithful to His covenant with His people.

But willful sin on our part is not part of the covenant. God’s holiness will not let Him put up with sin. If God’s people are going to do evil and throw it in His face, He has to do something about it in order for the marriage to go on.

The Lord says,

Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes;
I will wall her in so she cannot find her way.
She will chase after her lovers but not catch them;
she will look for them but not find them.

God was going to make unfaithfulness so frustrating to Israel that she’d get sick of it. He was no longer going to let it pay. The Lord declares that He will show Israel it was His hand that had really given her all her good things:

I will ruin her vines and her fig trees,
which she said were her pay from her lovers;
I will make them a thicket,
and wild animals will devour them.

In the day of His judgement He will take all her luxuries and sustenance away, and no so-called Baal will be able to keep her from losing it all.

A human husband would have no right to do what the Lord does to Israel. A human husband would have sins of his own to atone for, whether his wife had cheated on him or not.

But God has the right to punish us for our sins, down to the last unspoken evil thought. He made us, He keeps us alive, He determines the exact length of our days.

But does God punish Israel’s sin because He’s standing on His rights? No, God punishes Israel because otherwise He’ll lose her to the false gods altogether. She has to be shocked into realizing that He has been her provider all this time. Israel has to learn that her covenant with God isn’t about getting stuff out of Him, it’s about knowing and loving God Himself. It’s about the faithfulness the Lord would show to Israel His bride and the utter trust she should have in Him, about the perfect marriage she will have if she lives with Him in faithfulness and love.

And so, after punishing her, says the Lord, He will court Israel all over again, as if they were back in the wilderness in the days of the Exodus. He will speak tenderly to her, and she will again sing Him love songs of pleasure and joy.

"In that day," declares the Lord,
"you will call me ‘my husband’;
you will no longer call me ‘my master.’"

That is, Israel will no longer call Yahweh "my baal." Technically, Yahweh was Israel’s particular divine master or "Baal." But when they called Yahweh their ‘Baal,’ it was too easy for them to confuse Him with all the other ‘baals,’ with all the other so-called masters or gods of the nations round about.

This was not to happen any more. The Lord God was and is the only lord, and His people are not to confuse Him with any other deity, ever again. Never again shall they call Him ‘my Baal.’ From now on, they are to call Him ‘my husband.’ In Hebrew this word is ‘Ishi.’ And in everyday Hebrew this simply means ‘my man.’

I call this astounding. The Lord will not play the domineering master to Israel His bride; no, He will be ‘her man’! As it says in verses 19 and 20,

I will betroth you to me forever;
I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,
in love and compassion.
I will betroth you in faithfulness,
and you will acknowledge the Lord.

That is, Israel will know Yahweh her God--and it’s significant that this word ‘acknowledge’ or ‘know’ in Hebrew is also the word for the knowledge a husband and wife have of one another in their most intimate moments.

But now, what about us? Are we just looking at someone else’s marital troubles, that have nothing to do with us? Is the song of Hosea like those golden oldie love songs we listened to when we were very young and didn’t really understand?

No, what God says to Israel He says for our benefit. When He talks to Israel, He speaks also to us, His Church. When He rebukes Israel for her unfaithfulness, He rebukes us also for going astray after other gods. When He promises to bring her back to Himself in faithfulness and love, He makes that promise to us as well.

How can this be? I’m sure it hinges on that one little word, "ish,’ or man. God said His Bride was to call Him "my Man." And so we do. God Himself came down to all humanity as the Man Jesus Christ, who was and is the Lord God in human flesh. And we are His bride, the new Israel, the Church. We have not replaced the old Israel the Jews; no, we have been joined in with them and made new and clean by the gift of Christ’s human blood, shed on the cross. We have been engaged to Him by His perfect obedience and love.

Christ the Son of Man came to us to show us that ultimately, life with God is about more than the good things God can give us: the grain, the wine, and the oil, the wool and the linen, the cars and the houses, the continual health. It’s about knowing Him in faithfulness and love. It’s about trusting Him to give us the highest gift, the only gift we really need-- which is Himself. It’s about the bliss of perfect unity with Him.

And so, in Luke’s Gospel, the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray. "Lord, teach us how to ask for the things we really should ask for."

And Jesus teaches them the prayer we pray over and over, the Lord’s Prayer we so often rattle off and take for granted. See what our Lord is telling us to ask for. This prayer is for the things that will keep us in faithful relationship with God and our neighbor. This prayer trusts God to give us what we really need: Food for our bodies, protection from sin and wandering after false gods, and most of all, a joyous knowledge of who God is and of His gracious will.

Jesus says, "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find." Too often, we think that means "ask for obedient children or a bigger car," and immediately, that's what we'll have.

Well, maybe God does want you to have obedient children or a bigger car. Maybe. But focussing on that in these verses is like ancient Israel treating the Lord like one of the Baals, using Him only to get earthly physical stuff. No, when Jesus tells us to "ask and it will be given to you," He wants us to trust God for a much better thing than that.

Jesus likens it to a human father looking out for his son. He says, "If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"

That is the gift God wants to give us: The gift of the Holy Spirit. That is the gift we are to desire and pray for: The gift of knowing Him personally, truly, intimately, and faithfully, like a husband and wife know one another in a perfect marriage.

I dislike having to admit this, but I read Jesus’ words and I think, "Yeah, Lord, the Holy Spirit is great, but give me a high-paying job first." And I see just how unfaithful and mercenary I am.

May the Lord forgive me for that, and may He forgive us all when we want anything or anybody more than we want Him.

The good news is that Jesus knows our weakness. He knows our greediness and our lack of faith. He took it all on Himself on the cross. He covered Himself with our sin and God in that one terrible eternal moment turned away from His Son the way a good man would turn away from his sluttish, cheating wife. But Jesus’ obedience and goodness overcame your sin and it overcame mine. Jesus engages us to Himself in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. He joins us to Himself so fully that when God looks at us, He sees not our sin, but the faithfulness of His crucified and risen Son.

God does want to give you good things. He wants to give you everything you need to bring you to His side to live with Him forever. Most of all, He wants to give you a perfect marriage with Himself. That is His will for us; may it be done on earth, as it will be done in heaven. Amen.

*"Baby Love," by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Edward Holland, Jr., 1964

**"I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love with You)" by Hank Williams, 1962 (?)