Our Real Tangible Spiritual Resurrection Bodies

Texts: 1 Corinthians 15:12-20 & 35-49; Luke 24:33-49

AS I MENTIONED DURING the Joys and Concerns, I'm being treated for Stage 1C ovarian cancer. So a week or two ago I was sitting on a neighbor's front porch with her and her sister-in-law who was visiting from Denver. My neighbor had told her relative that I was undergoing chemotherapy, and she was very curious about the whole thing. At one point she asked, "Are you afraid to die?" I told her my surgeon says it's very probable I'm cured already, and we're just doing the chemo just in case. Still, if the cancer comes back anyway, I just have to remember how wonderfully much Jesus loves me and what He's done for me. "I believe in the resurrection of the body," I said. "You mean the resurrection of the spirit," said my neighbor. "No," I replied, "the resurrection of the body. Just like Jesus rose again with a real, glorified human body, we'll be like Him and have the same." My neighbor wasn't so sure she liked that idea. Don't our bodies just give us trouble? Who'd want to be stuck with one for all eternity?

Well, it's common for us humans not to be too excited about the idea of the bodily resurrection of the dead. Once after one of my seminary classmates had guest preached on the subject, a man of that church, one of their board members, came up to me and said, "I always enjoy it so much when you Wycliffe people come and preach to us. You always bring such novel doctrine!" "‘Novel'?" I asked him. "How's that?" "Well," he said, "I've always been taught that Jesus' resurrection body was just a spiritual one." "But," I said, "what about when He tells His disciples to feel Him to prove He still has solid flesh and bone?" "Oh," said the man, "Jesus just made it seem like He had a physical body so He wouldn't upset the disciples. He really was only a ghost!"

The doctrine of the bodily resurrection from the dead is a basic teaching of our Christian faith, but obviously many people have trouble accepting it. Even evangelical Christians can't always get their hearts around it: How many times at a funeral have you heard someone say their departed loved one is now an angel in heaven? But angels have nothing to do with resurrection. As it says in the book of Hebrews, angels are ministering spirits and Christ's promise of new life from the dead is not for them.

But it is for us, and I hope to show you how our bodily resurrection in Jesus Christ is not only true, but also is our hope and comfort and the very assurance of the everlasting love of God.

It all flows from Jesus and what He's done for us. Jesus' disciples weren't expecting Him to rise from the dead. Time and again He'd told them He'd be arrested and put to death and then rise on the third day, but their minds were kept from understanding it. So on the evening of that first Easter Sunday, when Jesus stood among them in the upper room, they were startled and frightened. Luke tells us they'd thought they were seeing a ghost! This was even after the two disciples who'd encountered Jesus on the road to Emmaus had come back to Jerusalem and reported what had happened! Now, the disciples were good Jews. They expected there to be some sort of bodily resurrection way off in the future, at the end of the age. But the idea that someone they knew and loved could be standing live and in the flesh before them after being so very dead three days before was simply unthinkable.

Nevertheless, it was true! "Why are you troubled," Jesus said to them, "and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have."

Jesus was solid, and real! No way was He just a ghost or a spirit! No way was He fooling the disciples into thinking He had a resurrection body when He did not! And as they were still standing there in unbelief and amazement, Jesus asked them for some broiled fish and ate it in their presence!

Why did He go to such lengths to prove that He was truly, really, bodily risen? Why does it matter that Jesus' resurrection was truly a rising again, in the same body He died in, and not a mere apparition?

Because, as He told the disciples, this victory over death was what the whole of the Scriptures, all of God's grand and glorious plan, had all been leading up to! "This is what is written," Jesus reminded them (in verse 45), "The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations." Without the bodily resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, there is no forgiveness of sins! Without Jesus truly risen from the dead, death still would have its hold over Him. Without Jesus' rising again in the same body that went to the cross, death would still have its hold over us! If Christ is not truly risen, our sins are not atoned for, His life was in vain, and we are still under the wrath of God and headed straight to hell.

But as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, "But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep." Jesus is the prototype, the forerunner of all who sleep in death. His bodily resurrection proves that His sacrifice on the cross was sufficient, fully-acceptable to God to atone for our sins. Had Jesus not actually risen, everyone would have known that He had died for His own errors and crimes. But He was and is the Sinless One who had life-in-Himself, as it says in the Gospel according to St. John. He rose in all the triumph of that life and He gives it to all who believe in Him. Some people will tell you that the Christian message is about being nice to other people. Brothers and sisters, every religious system in the world has taught we should be nice to other people, they just differ in which people we're supposed to be nice to! No, the basic message of Christianity, the main point of the Gospel, is that Jesus Christ is died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was raised bodily on the third day, and that through faith in Him we have forgiveness of sins and life forever. Not just some of your sins, but all of them! Peace with God and glorious joy with Him, now and always!

You may be saying, "I certainly believe that!" But some of the members of the 1st century Corinthian church were rejecting the bodily resurrection outright. Most of them were originally Gentiles, and they'd grown up with the Greek notion that the body and its flesh was at best just a vehicle, a donkey, you might say, for the mind and the spirit. At worst the body was full of corruption and evil, and no better way to see that was in a rotting corpse. Why would anyone want to come back in that? Don't we all want to get free?

This is where we see the providence and wisdom of God in choosing the Jews as His Messianic people. The Hebrew understanding was that each person was a unity of body, mind, and spirit, and to be a full, living human you had to have all three, and this is what God affirms in raising His Son from the dead. You get so-called theologians who claim that Jesus was "risen" in the disciples' hearts and imaginations and that was enough. No, that is not enough, not if Jesus was truly to defeat death, His enemy and ours. Any so-called rising of the God-Man that left His flesh to decay would have been no victory over death at all. Paul wants us to understand that in Christ there is life and victory beyond the grave, life and victory for the whole man and the whole woman. We have hope in Christ for this life and for the next.

And so faithful Christian preaching is not useless and we are not lying about God and what He has done. Your faith in Christ means something! It has a purpose, and its purpose is to unite you with your Lord who truly came back from the grave in a glorious, renewed body. Its goes to assure you that you and every Christian loved one you have lost will truly stand glorified and solid in their renewed flesh and bone, praising and serving God in the new heaven and the new earth. Even though at the brink of the grave, we mourn, but we are not to be pitied, for our hope is good for more than this life: it extends to all eternity.

Nevertheless, some hold to the conviction that this life is all there is. They were the type in Corinth who were questioning, "How are the dead raised. With what kind of body will they come?"

You can see by Paul's reaction that they weren't earnestly seeking knowledge, because his first word in verse 36 is not "How foolish!" but rather, "Fool!" Which is what you called someone only when you were sure they were a double-dyed, deliberately-blind moral trifler. Open your eyes, he says! The very course of nature shows us that it's perfectly possible for the final, mature form of a body to be different and more complex than its initial form. We see that, don't we? Think of the tomato seeds you may've planted in your garden this spring. Didn't look anything like the luscious tomatoes I hope you're eating now, did they? Not only is that tomato plant different from the seed you planted, but you don't get that plant and that fruit unless you bury that seed in the dirt and allow it to break down. In short, to die. Every day in every garden, in every farmer's field new life comes from death; isn't God, who is the ultimate Gardener, able to bring new life from our mortal bodies?

And then, there are all sorts of types of bodies in this world: human, animal, fish, bird, and on and on. We don't say, "Well, humans can't breathe in water, so I don't believe in a creature that can." No, we know that fish exist. Their makeup is different, and so they can do things humans cannot. In the same way, our resurrection bodies will be able to do things our mortal bodies cannot. The Bible does not go into a lot of detail, but from the example of Jesus, we can see that we will have power over nature so that we can enjoy it when we want to-- as in Jesus eating the broiled fish-- but we won't be hampered or hindered by it: Think of Him being able simply to appear in the upper room despite the locked door.

And for those who think the resurrection body will just be these same weak ones resuscitated, St. Paul reminds us that different bodies have different kinds of splendor. Our bodies now do have a certain kind of splendor, but it will be nothing compared to what we shall be like when we are raised from the death and are made like our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. For what was sown, or buried, is perishable. Obviously-- for the person died. But the renewed flesh Jesus gives can never die again. Dead flesh is something dishonorable, to be gotten out of sight as soon as possible. But our renewed flesh will be clothed in honor when we're raised at the last day, for we will share in the glory that is Christ's. The body that dies is weak and powerless; it is raised in the power of the everliving God. It is buried a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

But many people read this word "spiritual" and say "See! Our bodies in heaven won't be physical! We'll be like the angels, who are all spirits!" But that's making the wrong contrast. The comparison isn't between "physical" and "spiritual" as regards the composition of our resurrection bodies; no, it's between "natural" and "spiritual," referring to how each kind of body is made alive. Look at it this way: our bodies here on earth have a lot in common with those of other animals. All animals-- humans, dogs, cats, cows, whatever, have a soul or what our ancestors called "the breath of life." As Paul quotes Genesis 2:7, "the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." That's the natural way of things. And when that soul or or anima departs, the creature is no longer alive. But the resurrection body will be different. For before it was quickened by the soul, but then it will be made alive by the Spirit of God and can never die.

How can this be? Compare Adam and Christ, who is called the last or ultimate Adam. Our ancestor Adam was made of dust, and to dust he returned. Our Saviour Jesus Christ also shared our dust, but His life was from above, from heaven, and so the grave could not hold Him. Jesus is the Man from heaven who puts His Spirit in us to make us alive and to cause our weak and mortal bodies to be raised up glorious and immortal like His own.

Our flesh and blood as it now is cannot inherit the kingdom of God. But the same power that raised Jesus from the dead will raise our mortal bodies as well and make them like His own. This is a truth that all the religious systems and philosophies of this world could never conceive. It took Jesus the Son of God to reveal it to us, and He is the one who made it possible.

So give glory to God and rejoice in the resurrection victory He gives! It is your hope and your shield and the perfection of all God's plans for you. Already Jesus has put His Holy Spirit in you, as a down payment to prove that you will live eternally with Him. Not as a ghost, not as a spirit, not even as an angel in heaven, but as something much better: As a splendid, bodily, spiritual human being, who with all His saints will glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus!

The Liberty of the Lord's Day

Texts: Exodus 20:8-11 & Deuteronomy 5:12-15; Colossians 2:13-17; Luke 13:10-17

LET ME SET A SCENE before your mind's eye:

It's Sunday in rural America, some time in the 19th century. A Presbyterian family is walking through the fields, on their way home from morning worship. One of the daughters says to her sister, "Milly, I do admire the way you've trimmed your bonnet! When we get home, won't you show me how you tied the ribbon just so?" Immediately, the mother rebukes her: "Eliza, you mustn't be thinking about worldly things like bonnets on the Sabbath! And how can you talk about working on one on the Lord's Day! I'm ashamed of you!" Meanwhile, the young son has run ahead. When the rest of the family catch up, they see he's skipping stones across the creek. "Thomas!" thunders his father. "Stop that immediately!" "But Papa," says the boy, "You never said I mightn't skip stones!" "No," his father replies, "but the Fourth Commandment says we must put aside all worldly recreations today and occupy ourselves with God alone! It's our Sabbath duty!" With the children duly chastened, the family proceed home in silence.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, what do you think? Wouldn't it be a good thing if we could return to the high Lord's Day standards of our ancestors? Surely even their strict observance would be better than sleeping in and ignoring God on Sundays, or going in to work or telecommuting 24/7! Is Sabbatarianism how we should keep the Lord's Day?

I submit to you, No. The Lord's Day is not the Jewish Sabbath; it's our day of Christian liberty, and the Word of God shows us what that holy liberty is, Whom it comes from, and how it can be enjoyed.

To appreciate the liberty of the Lord's Day, we need to understand how it's different from the Sabbath ordained for our spiritual ancestors the Jews.

The Fourth Commandment, to keep the Sabbath day, is found in both Exodus and Deuteronomy. Both versions say the seventh day is to be kept holy--the Hebrew word "Shabat" (Sabbath) means "rest" and "seventh." Both renditions say that on that day the people of Israel and the immigrants within their gates were to refrain from work. Deuteronomy includes the beasts of burden, but the point is the same. But in these two readings the theological grounding for ceasing work is different. In Exodus we read,

For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

The Sabbath day ordinance in Exodus is based on God's resting from His work of creation. Did God rest on that cosmic seventh day because He was tired? No, He rested because He had finished all His creative work. Figuratively-speaking, now He could "sit down" and enjoy the "very-goodness" of what He had made. That resting of God from His work of Creation has never ended from the time the world began. And so the Sabbath commandment was Israel's royal summons weekly to enter into the rest that God enjoys forever. It was a time to rejoice in God and in God's perfect work. God was and is in control, He made all things for mankind to enjoy, and so His people were free to cease from their labors and trust Him to provide.

When the Ten Commandments are repeated in Deuteronomy, a different reason is cited for the Sabbath rest. It says,

Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.

Here is Sabbath liberation indeed! In Egypt, the children of Israel had no rest. The weeks and months were a continual round of slave labor and cruel drudgery. They could never have escaped Pharaoh and his armies by themselves. But in their utter helplessness, the Lord God had reached out His mighty hand and set them free. On the Sabbath day His redeemed people were physically to rest in the Lord, rejoicing that He had "removed the burden from their shoulders; their hands were set free from the basket," as it says in Psalm 81. The seventh day was their weekly reminder that it was not their effort that achieved their redemption, but the arm of Yahweh God alone.

So each Sabbath day, Israel participated in God's rest from His work in creation and celebrated His freeing them from bondage. The bodily rest was a picture of the spiritual rest they enjoyed in God.

At least, that was the command. But the ancient Israelites were no better at resting in the work of the Lord than we are. So God gave sanctions through Moses to punish those who broke the Sabbath rest. Those who disobeyed and did any work were liable to the penalty of death. Why was the Lord so strict about Sabbath observance for Israel? Because, as it says in Exodus 31, the Sabbath was the sign of His covenant with them.

We tend to think of the Ten Commandments as a list of rules to live by. And Commandments five through ten do apply to all nations-- they summarize the natural law that God has written on every human heart. But in the context of the Law of Moses, the Ten Words are the summary of God's covenant with Israel as His chosen people. They're the basic terms of the treaty He drew up with them as His subjects and Him as their overlord. The Sabbath command in particular set Israel apart as holy to the Lord, distinct from all the other nations. The Sabbaths reminded the people on a weekly basis what the Lord their King had done to set them free and make them into His people. It was a particular sign of the Old Covenant.

So what about us? Is our Lord's Day observance on the first day of the week a sign of the New Covenant God has made with us in Jesus Christ? Are we to be like our forebears and take over ancient Jewish Sabbath observance wholesale, in order to be pleasing to God?

The testimony of Scripture says No.  First, because for God's New Covenant people, the Sabbath is not the sign of our inclusion in Christ; rather, our covenant sign and seal is the Holy Spirit, as we read in Ephesians 1 and 4. And secondly, because the weekly Sabbath was never the actual Sabbath rest that the Lord invites us into in Jesus, the promised Messiah. It was only a symbol, a foretaste of the liberation that God our Father would lead us into through the death and resurrection of His Son.

That's why Jesus was always running up against the Pharisees over Sabbath observance all through His earthly ministry. God had always meant the Sabbath to call to mind what He'd done for His people, so they'd rest in Him and not depend on their own works to save and sustain them. But the Pharisees got tangled up in the rules and regulations that defined Sabbath-keeping, as if it in itself and not the work of God were the important thing.

As so in our Luke passage Jesus restores the Sabbath as a day of liberation by releasing the crippled woman on that holy day. Strictly-speaking, the synagogue ruler is right to be indignant about what Christ had done. But the synagogue ruler was missing the greater point. The Sabbath was always a sign of the freedom of God! What better day for this daughter of Abraham to be set free from the infirmity that had bound her for eighteen long years! And who else could set her free than the One who was God in human flesh?

In another incident, related by St. Mark, Jesus asserts that as the Son of Man, He is Lord of the Sabbath. St. John records the time when Jesus healed the man by the pool of Siloam on the Sabbath. The Jewish leaders persecuted Him for it, and our Lord said to them, "My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working." Wait a minute. Didn't God "sit down," as it were, to His eternal rest on the seventh day of Creation? Yes, He eternally rested from His work of creation, but even in that eternal Sabbath the triune God continues to sustain and redeem what He has made.

In all His works Jesus identified Himself with the God who was rested in and enjoyed in the weekly Sabbath. He established Himself as the One who would be His people's eternal Sabbath rest. Israel's exodus from Egypt was God's great and powerful act of liberation; infinitely greater is the freedom from sin, death, and the devil that Jesus won for us on the cross. The material creation that God pronounced "very good" at the beginning of time was wonderful beyond words; far more worthy of praise is the new creation Jesus makes of us through His rising from the dead.

And so in the book of Hebrews it says, "There remains, then, a Sabbath rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from His." What is this "rest of God"? It is the eternal Sabbath rest our Lord Jesus achieved and became when He rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God the Father almighty. Christian friends, we do not observe the Jewish Sabbath with all its restrictions and regulations. In fact, as Gentile Christians we should not observe it, for it belongs to the Old Covenant that has passed away, and not to the New Covenant inaugurated in the shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians says that no one is to judge us as to Sabbath keeping-- that was part of the shadow of things to come, along with the annual festivals and the kosher laws. "The reality," he says, "is found in Christ."

Indeed, if we try to take the traditional seventh-day Jewish Sabbath observance over onto the first day of the week, we're returning to slavery under the Law. Instead, we celebrate the Lord's Day, the day of Resurrection, the day when Christ like a mighty conqueror triumphed in our behalf once and for all. He disarmed the demonic powers and authorities had bound us in sin and death and forever set us free! We were dead in our sins, and He made us alive in His blood! On the first day and every day let us rejoice in the great and wondrous liberty He has given!

So in one sense, we who are redeemed by Christ are utterly free to determine how we will spend the Lord's Day. As Paul says in Romans 14, "One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike." Nevertheless, Paul also says that, living or dying, all we do as Christians is done in relationship with and to the Lord. We belong to Christ, and all our days are His! We are not free to ignore Him, or to act as if our redemption means nothing. And for the Church as a whole, the Lord's Day is different. On the first day of the week Christ's body assembles to worship Him for the great salvation He has won for us. Here together we sing His praises, petition Him for our needs, participate in His blessed Sacraments, and learn more of His glory through the reading and preaching of His holy Word. How can anyone who claims to love the Lord voluntarily fail to come into His glorious presence?

But what if our jobs keep us on duty on the Lord's Day, and every other day besides? Yes, there are times when continual labor will be necessary, when there's an extraordinary deadline that has to be met or that's the only employment to be found. But I urge every Christian who finds himself always on that treadmill to examine himself. Whom do you fear more, God or your boss? Whose work are you relying on to provide for you, yours or that of the Lord God Almighty? Offer the difficulty up to your Lord Jesus and claim your Lord's Day liberty, for He has removed the burden from your back, and from the heavy basket He has set you free.

We do not observe the Jewish Sabbath. That belongs to the Old Covenant shadow that has passed way. Rather, as children of Christ's New Creation, we have even more reason to rest in the eternal Sabbath He has won for us! Not spiritually only, for we are physical creatures as well. It is good for us to cease our earthly labors one day out of each week, to rest and enjoy God and all His works. Not because we have to, or because He'll punish us if we don't, but because we are free to! The Lord who redeemed you and loves you has given you rest!

As New Covenant people, we must know that our true Sabbath rest is not mere ceasing from physical labor. Let us watch our hearts, lest we find ourselves working, working, working to gain or maintain our own salvation. That kind of forbidden work includes following rules and regulations about weekly Sabbath-keeping to earn God's favor! Do not break Christ's Sabbath rest by trying to defeat sin by your own works and virtues. To do that is to reject Christ, and the punishment for rejecting Christ is eternal death.

No, my friends. Only the Son of Man was strong and holy enough to accomplish the great work of redemption. Only Christ could make us into His new creation. And now He commands us to cease from our work forever and enter into His rest.

Will you come and enjoy the liberty of the Lord's Day? This first day of the week is our day of Resurrection, our festal day of freedom in Christ. This is the day the Lord alone has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!

Don't Lose Your Freedom!

Texts: Jeremiah 34:8-22; Galatians 5:1-15

LET ME WISH YOU A VERY happy and grateful Independence Day.

How blessed we are to enjoy the freedoms and privileges of living in the United States of America! This nation was founded on the principle that our rights and liberties are inalienable gifts of the one Creator God and that government exists to protect and preserve those rights, not to dole them out by its own authority. Never, never should we take our freedom for granted. Always and forever must we watch and work to maintain our liberties, whether we're struggling against an intrusive government, against overreaching institutions, or against our own self-indulgence and complacency. Other nations have benefited from America's principles of economic, religious, and personal freedom, but our land is still the last best hope of liberty in this world. If America were to fall into tyranny and slavery, we wouldn't suffer alone; the darkness would fall on all nations of the earth.

But, brothers and sisters in Christ, terrible as it would be for us to lose our freedom here in the United States of America, it would be nothing to the eternal disaster we'd suffer if we were to lose our freedom in Christ.

St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians has been called a testament to Christian liberty. But strangely enough, it's not filled with joyous, God-praising, send-up-the-Roman-candles celebration. No, all the way through it's about the strictest rebuke to God's people to be found anywhere outside of the Old Testament prophets. Why? Because the members of the Galatian church weren't celebrating their freedom in Christ. No, they were on the verge of heading back into slavery! In the first verse of our passage, the apostle writes, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery." This message isn't just for the disciples who lived in the first century A.D.; it's also for us and for any other Christian person who might be tempted to let their spiritual freedom go.

To understand what the Holy Spirit is saying to us, we need to know how the institution of slavery worked in the ancient world, and especially in Israel. First of all, God never established slavery as something that was good in itself. There were pro-slavery people in these United States who claimed that in the 19th century, but they were wrong. There are anti-Christian, anti-Bible folks who claim that now in the 21st century, and they're wrong, too. Slavery in the ancient world was a human accommodation to the evils and difficulties of the human condition, and the Law of God regulated it so those evils wouldn't bear so hardly on those who were enslaved.

There were two general kinds of slavery. One was the forced servitude you got when one nation defeated another in war. It's like when Goliath challenged the Israelites and said if he beat Israel's champion, Israel would have to serve the Philistines, and if Israel's champion beat him, the Philistines would serve Israel. Then there was economic slavery, or bond-servitude, where a person would put his time and labor under the mastery of another person for a given period to pay back a debt or just to keep himself alive. Sometimes, bond-slavery was involuntary, as when a thief would be sentenced to work for his victim to make restitution, or when your creditors would be given the right to sell you and your entire family into slavery, to pay back what you owed them. Today we have bankruptcy for situations like that, but in the ancient world it was unthinkable that a debt would be dismissed by a third party like a bankruptcy court. Either you worked it off, or your creditor forgave you.

But the Law given through Moses said that if you had a slave who was a fellow-Hebrew, you could make him serve you only up to six years. The seventh year, you were to let him go free, regardless of how much he still owed. This reflected the fact that God almighty had set all Israel free from bondage to Pharaoh when He liberated them from Egypt. As they had been released from the yoke of the Egyptians so they could worship God and enjoy His Sabbath rest, so, too, their fellow Hebrews must be released from servitude at the beginning of their sabbatical year.

Nevertheless, slavery was something you wanted to avoid if at all possible. If you were a Hebrew and yoked under it, you counted the days till your seventh year would come around and you'd regain your liberty. If you were an Israelite enslaved in another country or a foreigner enslaved to an Israelite, you prayed for the day when your armies would march in and set you free.

So in Galatians chapter 15, St. Paul warns the Galatian church that if they let themselves be circumcised, it would be a return to spiritual slavery; Christ will be of no value to them at all. Today, if you're the average non-Jewish guy in America, circumcision is something your parents decided to have done or not have done to you when you were an infant, for health or aesthetic reasons. It has nothing to do with moral and ethical obligations or with one's relationship to God. But in Paul's day, it was the sign written in every Jewish male's body that he was pledged to keep the whole law of Moses down to the last I-dot and t-cross. It meant he hoped to find his blessedness and salvation in his own obedience. If a Gentile convert submitted to Jewish circumcision he voluntarily called down on himself all the covenant curses the law demanded if he didn't perfectly obey all the covenant decrees, statutes, and ordinances.

We see the effect of covenant curses in our reading from Jeremiah 34. For years past, the masters of Israel and Judah had disobeyed the law about freeing their fellow Hebrews after six years. They'd been keeping them in perpetual bondage. And now, with the Babylonians laying siege to Jerusalem, King Zedekiah and all the slaveholding people of Jerusalem made a solemn covenant to set all their fellow Jews free immediately, and never to enslave their countrymen and women at all again. When you made a covenant in those days, you didn't just lay your hand on a copy of the Torah and swear to do something; no, a covenant was made in blood. We see in verse 18 how a calf was slaughtered and split in two with the pieces laid on the ground with room to walk between them. And every man who made that covenant walked between those bloody pieces and swore before God that if he did not keep his word, that the Lord should slaughter him and make him like that dead, dismembered calf.

The Lord took this oath of theirs seriously. When these perjurers changed their minds and forced their former slaves back into bondage, God swore that He would bring back the Babylonians and give the oathbreakers into their hands for death and disgrace. They had called their own blood onto their heads, and blood it would be.

In the same way, circumcision cut a covenant of blood between each male Jew and the God of Israel. The shed blood declared, "May the Lord shed my blood unto death if I do not keep and obey all of His holy law."

But as Paul points out earlier in this letter, the law, holy and righteous as it was, could never bring anyone to the blessedness of God; rather, through our inability to keep it, it brought down the Old Covenant curses upon us.

You have probably heard from your preachers in the past that the law of Moses was made up of the ceremonial, the civil, and the moral codes. Circumcision bound a person to obey all three.

The ceremonial law set forth how the God of Israel was to be worshipped, and in the fullness of time God revealed that all the sacrifices and holy days looked forward to the perfect Lamb of God, Jesus Christ. With the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Christ, the ceremonial law was fulfilled and superseded. There is no longer any need for it.

Nevertheless, if any Christian should take upon himself Jewish circumcision, he would be obligating himself-- and his household-- to observe and participate in the temple rituals, turning his back on Jesus Christ who had come and set him free.

The civil law set out how things should be arranged politically and judicially in the commonwealth of God's holy people. God was Israel's true King, and they were to be righteous before Him. Thus the penalties that seem so severe to us, like stoning someone to death for adultery or breaking the Sabbath. These laws were designed to keep the nation pure and holy before God and the nations. In that Israel would be a fit channel for the coming of the Messiah, by whom all peoples would be blessed. Then Jesus our Messiah did come, and God made a new covenant in His blood and opened up citizenship in the holy nation to all people, Jew and Gentile alike. Ethnic Israel no longer was God's exclusive chosen people. And so Christ the civil code of the Law of Moses was fulfilled and superseded.

But if anyone should take upon himself Jewish circumcision, he would obligate himself to follow all the civil rules and bear all the penalties set out in the books of the Law.

That leaves the moral law, summed up as "Love your neighbor as yourself," and it binds all humanity, Jew and Gentile alike. Those who love the Lord can, like King David in Psalm 119, look into the law of God and marvel at its perfection, for it reflects the very glory and righteousness of God. But it also shows up how far short we fall of His glory. Never, ever, ever can we come anywhere near God's perfect holiness-- but that's the standard we have to attain, if we expect to gain life and blessing by keeping the moral law. In chapter 3 of Galatians Paul demonstrates that the law never could impart life to us. Rather, it was like a jailer who kept us locked up until Christ should come and declare us not guilty through faith in Him. Here in chapter 5 Paul says that by faith in Christ we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. Christ has come and taken the covenant curses on Himself. He paid for our lawbreaking with His sinless blood. So now the moral code has not been superseded or set aside, but in Christ we depend not upon our own obedience to gain blessedness with God, but upon His. Now the law is our friend and guide as our faith expresses itself through love to our neighbor and to God.

That is, if we truly are trusting in Christ alone and not taking on a yoke of slavery again. I doubt anyone here, male or female, loses sleep at night wondering if he ought to undergo Jewish circumcision to make sure he's in good with God. But we have a hundred different ways we try to return ourselves and others to the yoke of spiritual slavery.

Do you ever catch yourself saying, "Oh, she's a pretty good person. She does a lot of good things. God wouldn't keep her out of heaven just because she doesn't believe in Christ!" You're binding that person in slavery under the law.

Have you ever said, "I just can't forgive myself for what I did to him"? Or worse, "I can never forgive him for what he did to me"? That's rejecting the freedom you have in Christ and returning to slavery under the law.

How about the people who think that following Jesus is about doing good things and being good people so God will be pleased with them? Maybe sometimes those people are you and me! That is a turning away from the mercies and merits of Christ and obligating ourselves again to the law.

What about those who preach that the cross of Christ only served to show us how we should love other people, with nothing about how His righteous blood turned aside the wrath of God against our sin? In this way they would seek to abolish the offense of the cross. For it is offensive to our hyper-tolerant age to assert that Christ's sacrifice is the only way for anyone to come into proper relationship with our God and Father. But when we turn our backs on the blood atonement and preach the cross as merely a good example, we throw ourselves back into the clutches of the law.

We certainly are called to obedience, but obedience to the truth that is in Jesus Christ. He died for you, He rose for you, He sent His Holy Spirit to live in you and guide you. In Christ we are free to do what is good, to fulfill God's will as we could not when we in bondage to sin and the law. The sin that remains in us tries to get us to misuse our freedom in Christ to indulge our sinful natures. To assert our own rights. To abuse one another, even hurting our brothers and sisters in the church. Cling to your divine liberty and do not be enslaved to sin in the name of a false freedom! In Christ you are free to "Love your neighbor as yourself," because He lives in you, He loves your neighbor through you, and sets you free to do wonderful things in His name you never imagined you could do before.

On this Independence Day, be grateful for the earthly freedom God has given you in these United States. But even more, be grateful and praise His name forever for the eternal freedom He has given you in Jesus Christ His Son. This world will try to tempt you to find your redemption in keeping rules, codes, and laws, but that is the way back to slavery. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free: Free to be justified, free to serve, free to love. Amen.

Christ's Vision for Christ's Church

Texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6; 16-32; Matthew 28:16-20

WE CHRISTIANS HAVE OUR own language.

It's not just us, of course. So do doctors and computer programmers and football players. In the Church we have special theological words like "incarnation" and "resurrection" and "atonement." All Christians should learn them, because they say in one word what would take us preachers half a sermon to explain otherwise.

But this morning I thinking about something different, about the new and trendy words and phrases we come up with to try to keep ourselves relevant and cutting-edge. Phrases like "faith journey" and "worship experience" and "purpose-driven." Words like "missional" and "emergent" and "vision." All these terms have a kernel of meaning in them; maybe some more than others; what we must do as members of the body of Christ is make sure that those meanings match up with what the Holy Spirit has revealed to us about Christ and His Church in His written Word.

The word for today is "vision." Proverbs 29:18 says "Where there is no vision, the people perish." And it goes on to say, "but he that keepeth the law, happy is he." That tells us from the start that the true vision for God's people is always the one given by God. The Law of Moses was God's perfect picture of what life on earth would be like if His people would love Him with their whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, and if they would love their neighbors as themselves. Where that godly vision is lost, people do what is right in their own eyes, the covenant between God and man breaks down, and the end result is death.

In Christ and through Christ, we are God's new covenant people. We are the new Israel, His body, His Church. The vision that keeps us from perishing and gives us eternal blessing Christ Jesus Himself and His perfect will. This is God's revelation for His Church in every time and place. It's not something we have to reinvent to match our particular circumstances; we can read it plainly in the everlasting words of the Holy Scriptures. Hear now the vision for the Church that our Lord Himself declared to His disciples in Galilee after He rose from the dead:

"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

Christ's vision for Christ's own church is that men and women of all nations should made members of His body, forgiven and saved by Him, following Him, being conformed to His image and obeying His commands. This vision is to be carried out in His authority and under His supervision, not in our power or according to our worldly ideas. Wherever the Scripture speaks of the purposes of Christ's church, it all fleshes out what it means for us to be His obedient baptised disciples, as Jesus Himself ordains here at the end of the Gospel of Matthew.
As this congregation embarks on your interim period, you will be called upon to define your vision for the church's future. I urge you to remain focussed on the vision Christ Himself has given. Make the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit your unwavering destination. From the very beginning of your interim process, I exhort you never to confuse methods and strategies with your ultimate goal, which must always be to glorify God as you add to your number and grow as faithful disciples of His Son Jesus Christ.

If you read very many Church Information Forms, you'd be shocked to see how few church vision or mission statements say anything about Jesus Christ at all. Our more liberal brethren in the PC(USA) tend to feel that the primary goal of the church is to carry out programs of social justice. But we evangelicals do Christ no honor by adopting the latest mega-church program for seeker-sensitive church growth. Or by demanding that our pastor come up with some unique new vision that somehow will work faster and better and-- you'll pardon the term-- sexier than Christ's own vision for His own church.

The trendy term for that is "vision-casting." The idea is that if the pastor is a really good vision-caster, the whole membership will get charged up with a glorious new vision of what the church should be and do, usually having to do with numbers, quantities, budgets, and so on. And that if the leadership can't or won't do this kind of "visioning," God can't or won't do anything with that church.

This process might be all right if it would leave the origin of the vision where it belongs: with God. It's no accident that the Hebrew word that Proverbs 29:18 that the King James Version translates as "vision" is rendered "revelation" in the New International Version. The vision or revelation that keeps us alive and makes us blessed is from God and not from ourselves. Making disciples by baptising and teaching people doesn't tend to conform to visionary thinking. It's plodding, ordinary, every day work. But it's the method of church growth that Jesus Himself has ordained.

But "vision-casting" by nature seems to try to go God one better. Frankly, the term itself gives me the willies. Maybe because it sounds so much like "spell-casting," which is witchcraft. Actually, "vision-casting" and "spell-casting" aren't so far different from one another, because both have to do with frail and fallen human beings trying to manipulate God's reality in spite of God's revealed will for their own profit and ends instead of for His glory.

False ministry and false visions were at the root of the disobedience that brought God's Old Testament people Israel to destruction and exile. "Woe," declares the Lord through the prophet Jeremiah, "woe to the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of my pasture!" Woe to the priests and Levites who refused to care for the people! These shepherds were to offer worthy sacrifices to make atonement for the sins of the people, yes. That was part of their work. But they were also to instruct the people in the truth of the law and build them up spiritually. As it says in Malachi 2:7, "The lips of a priest ought to preserve knowledge, and from his mouth men should seek instruction—because he is the messenger of the LORD Almighty." But the priests and Levites of Jeremiah's time couldn't be bothered to teach the message of the Lord's will to the people. If some poor slob wanted to bring a lamb to the Temple to sacrifice it, yeah, okay, the priests'd get up and burn it on the altar, but they couldn't be bothered to instruct that Jew to make sure he understand how he'd sinned against the Lord. They didn't care whether ordinary Israelites knew what their sacrifices meant in terms of blood atonement and God forgiving them their sins. As long as the tasty animals kept coming, that was the thing. The priests and Levites by law got a portion of most sacrifices, and the ordinary people, the flock of God, represented a steady income for them, not pastoral responsibility. And so the Lord's sheep were scattered and driven away. Literally scattered, for the shepherds' neglect and the people's own disobedience brought the judgment of exile upon them, and they were taken captive by Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, and scattered among many nations in the greater Near East.

But Christ's vision for His church is that people should be made His disciples. How? First of all by baptising them. Unpopular as it may seem, it is important and essential that people be formally incorporated into His body by the sacrament of baptism. Baptism is the sign and seal of our dying to sin and rising to new life by the washing of Christ's blood, shed for us on the cross. No one can be Jesus' disciple who is unwilling to commit themselves and all they are to Him in holy baptism. For those who have been baptised previously, being His disciple in a local church involves reaffirming the covenant of baptism as we formally commit to join. Truly, there is no salvation outside the church-- for to belong to Christ is to belong to His body. And to belong to the Church Universal, we must physically join ourselves with a local congregation. This is Christ's vision for His church.

Why? Because the local congregation is where the godly teaching is done! It's where the sheep are cared for and fed. But many "seeker sensitive" or "new vision" pastors go the way of the scattering shepherds of Jeremiah's time. They say that church members should feed and pastor themselves, that all the leadership's effort should go towards attracting seekers and unbelievers. But why should a church want to attract new believers if not to instruct them in the ways of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?

You may be thinking that Concord Church would never fall into that trap. I hope that's true. But there's another snare that trips up traditional churches, that's just as deadly. And that's confusing pastoral care with chaplaincy or social visiting. Yes, we pastors must be present with the people, both in times of crisis and ordinarily, house to house. But if we drink your coffee but never offer to pray with you, if we never inquire after your spiritual welfare, if we never instruct you one-on-one in the faith once delivered to the saints, if we never call you to repentance over offenses you're trying to hide, rebuke us and call us back to our Christ-given jobs! Teaching disciples to obey everything Jesus has commanded us certainly starts in the pulpit, but it doesn't end there!

But oh! said the false prophets of Jeremiah's day! Oh! say the false visionaries of our time! Don't ever talk to people about their sin! Tell them that God loves them just as they are! You'll never meet your membership objectives if you offend people!

Yes, it's true that when God loves you, He loves you just as you are. But He doesn't love you in and with and for your sins. He loves you because you are elect in Jesus Christ and when He looks at you, He sees not your sin, but the righteousness of His Son.

That's not what the false prophets ancient and modern mean, though. They mean that sin means nothing to God and He's willing to overlook it, Just Because. But the Lord Almighty says through Jeremiah,

"Do not listen to what the prophets are prophesying to you;
they fill you with false hopes.
They speak visions from their own minds,
not from the mouth of the LORD.
They keep saying to those who despise me,
‘The LORD says: You will have peace.'
And to all who follow the stubbornness of their hearts
they say, ‘No harm will come to you.'"

Sound familiar? How many of you have been to the funeral of someone who spent his life despising Christ and His salvation, and the preacher inferred that the deceased was in heaven even now? I'm sure you never heard such a thing out of Harper Brady, but there are ministers those who think their pastoral office requires them to tell such lies, in order to grow the church!

The prophet or preacher who stands in the council of God will teach the people of God to hate their sin and to love the obedience of Jesus Christ their Lord. He or she will instruct the members of the church in the awesome greatness of God, who fills heaven and earth and sees everything, even the innermost secret places of our hearts and minds. The leader who fulfills Christ's vision for Christ's church will speak the word of the Lord faithfully, and let it do its work. Christ-centered, cross-focussed, law-and-gospel preaching is not as exciting as lights and sound systems and professional-quality praise bands. It's not as quick at gaining adherents as messages that promise instant prosperity and rapturous marriages and perfectly-behaved kids. It's not as "inspiring" as a five-year plan for three new campuses and a tenfold increase in church revenue. But it is effective in making disciples for Christ in His Church, for, declares the Lord, "Is not my word like fire, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?" That word of God kindles our cold hearts with love for Him and burns away in us all that is not holy and all that is not true. The word of His instruction breaks down our hard-heartedness and teaches us to hate our sin and turn to Him for forgiveness and peace.

"Let the prophet who has a dream tell his dream," says the Lord through the prophet Jeremiah, "but let the one who has my word speak it faithfully." Jesus Christ has set forth His vision for His church in His Holy Word, and He commands this congregation and every other church that bears His name to search the Scriptures and find it written there for themselves. Why should we waste our time on dreams the Lord has not given and will not bless? "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," says our Lord. He has the right to determine our vision for our churches, and this He has done. He has the power to make sure His revealed will will come to fruition in His Church, and this He will do.

And so, Concord Presbyterian Church, go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything our Lord Jesus Christ has commanded us. And surely He is with you always, to the very end of the age.

The Stench of Death, the Fragrance of Life

Texts: 2 Corinthians 2:12 - 3:6; John 11:55 - 12:11

Have you ever heard of dramatic irony? It occurs in a novel or movie or TV drama when the reader or the audience knows more about what's happening to the characters than they do themselves. It's especially ironic when you see the characters reacting to a situation or another character exactly the opposite to the way they should. "Meanwhile, back at the ranch," says the narrator, or, "Little did she know, but . . . "

It's fun and exciting to be in the know like that. Though it can be frustrating watching your favorite characters get themselves into trouble they could've kept out of if only they'd had the information you do. But have you ever thought that you and I and all of us human beings are characters in a drama, too? And that our eternal destiny depends on what side of the dramatic irony we fall? God is the author of this story, and it's the drama of how He brings salvation to sinful humanity and achieves for Himself the glory that's His due.

That's what the whole Bible is about. What's more, in this salvation story, God the author has put Himself into it as the main character. As writer Dorothy L. Sayers put it, "The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man . . . (The) terrifying drama in which God is the victim and the hero . . (T)he terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death."1 And the greatest challenge for us is, What do we make of the irony of the Cross? What do we think of Christ and Him crucified? Does His cross bring to us the stench of death, or does it cover us with the fragrance of life?

We may be attracted most to the stories of Jesus' ministry, how He fed the hungry and healed the sick and welcomed children and outcasts. But in all four gospels the direction of the divine drama is always towards the cross. That's where Jesus was headed ever since the angel Gabriel told His mother Mary that He would save His people from their sins. Dying for us was the Son of God's purpose in life ever since eternity, when Christ was declared by God to be the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

In our reading today from the gospel according to St. John, the momentum towards Calvary is stepping up. This chapter in the divine drama begins with ordinary Jews coming up from the countryside to Jerusalem for the Passover, wondering if Jesus would appear for the Feast. What did they hope for from Him? A military savior, someone to overthrow the Romans, most likely. The cross was not in their plans! For them, Jesus being crucified like any other insurrectionist would have ruined everything. They don't understand that their true liberation could come only from the death of their Messiah.

The chief priests and Pharisees, on the other hand. They wanted Jesus crucified. They thought that would get Him out of their way forever. Little did they know that Jesus' death would lead to His rising to new and everlasting life.

And then John moves us to the village of Bethany, a short way out of Jerusalem. Martha, Mary, and Lazarus are giving a dinner in Jesus' honor, to thank Him for raising Lazarus from the dead. What do Martha in her serving and even Lazarus, reclining at the table, know about the cross? Did they have any idea that the Lord of life would have to die?

Probably not. Why shouldn't He remain and usher in the kingdom of God, just as He was?
But then Mary-- Mary, who always seemed to do the thing that was so unexpected and so right, rose and took a whole pint of pure nard, an extraordinarily precious and expensive perfume, and poured it on Jesus' feet and wiped them with her hair. It was an offering of devotion and service to Jesus. For raising her beloved brother from the dead. For teaching her and supporting her and respecting her. Just for being Jesus, her beloved Rabbi. Jesus deserved all this and more. But did Mary herself understand what her deed had to do with the atonement Jesus would win for her on the cross? We'll see.

But Judas, now. Judas ought to have understood. There should have been no dramatic ironies with him. He was an apostle, one of the Twelve. For the past few months Jesus had been teaching him and the others that the Son of Man must go to Jerusalem and be killed and then rise again on the third day. He'd heard Jesus say that to please God and have eternal life you must eat the broken flesh of the Son of Man and drink of His shed blood. And Judas, unlike so many others, hadn't abandon Jesus when He said that. Judas should have accepted that Jesus was heading for the cross and to some extent, understood why. Judas Iscariot should have been in tune with the divine plan that Jesus had revealed.

But instead, he fails to recognize or acknowledge or honor who Jesus truly is. He (and other onlookers) are shocked and astonished! "Why wasn't this perfume sold and the money given to the poor?" he exclaims. I'm pretty sure that this line wasn't original. It sounded like a slogan then and it sounds like a slogan, now. For isn't it ironic, how so many people even today who insist on that behavior aren't talking about their own money and possessions at all, but those of somebody else. And as John reveals, Judas wasn't really concerned about the poor at all. He wanted more coins in the money bag so he, as the group treasurer, could embezzle them.

So what was Jesus to Judas? A leader to be proud of and feel good about following? A chance at power and fame? A handy source of spare income? Maybe. At this point, the idea of Jesus going to the cross would be anathema to Judas. Why, that would ruin everything!

And then Jesus speaks. "‘Leave her alone,' Jesus replied," as it says in the New International Version. Literally, the Greek reads something like, "Jesus said, ‘Allow her.'" Whichever way you put it, His word is a rebuke to Judas and all the others who do not understand who Jesus is and why He came to earth. I wonder, is this when Judas turned against Jesus and decided that delivering Him over to death might be a good idea?

"Allow her," says Jesus, "in order that--" (and this is the literal translation)-- "for the day of my preparation for burial she may have kept it." Jesus is the only one who is not caught in the dramatic irony. He's the only person in this pericope who knows exactly what is going on and is Master of the situation. Jesus alone is fully aware that He is going to the Cross to show His infinite love for Mary of Bethany and all God's elect. And so Jesus took her act of human love and sanctified it to Himself. In 1st century Jewish culture the bodies of the newly-dead were anointed with precious oils and wrapped in spices. At Jesus' word, Mary's anointing of His feet is a prophecy in action of what she and the other women would soon do for His whole dead body, and the preciousness of the nard perfume pointed to the how precious His death would be for us who believe.

It's hard for us to grasp how ironic, how against all convention it would have been for the people of Jesus' day to consider that anyone's crucifixion would be a source of life. Crucifixion is probably the most painful and hideous form of public execution known to humankind, and the Romans had raised-- or should we say, lowered-- it to a science and an art. The stench of death from the bodies of criminals and rebels hung on crosses would pervade the air outside city walls all through the Roman empire, as a warning to all who would defy Caesar's law and power. How could a crucifixion-- one Man's crucifixion, cause the cross ever after to exhale the fragrance of life? Isn't this the supreme cosmic irony? Little did we know what God was doing when Jesus Christ hung there on Calvary, but now we can know and trust that He did it for you and me.
But what of Judas' objection, that Mary should have sold the perfume and given the money for distribution to the poor? Jesus continues, "You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me."

Never interpret this as Jesus saying we can neglect the impoverished among us, especially the needy who are in this very church. Nor can we take this to mean that it's God's will that poverty should exist and we should do nothing about its causes. Just the opposite. For Mary of Bethany, there was a time to aid the poor. But that time was not now. Now it was time for her to perfume the feet of Jesus against the hour of His death.

Perhaps it seems ironic to you that Jesus would put things this way. It might be thought that Jesus, the humble lover of the poor, would always put them first! Isn't it self-aggrandizing of him to say He was worth all that He takes priority here?

It would be, if He were only a man. And that is what many people in His day thought. It's what most people in our day believe as well. But once we know that He is God in human flesh, we gladly acknowledge that first honor belongs to Him. Mary with her poured-out perfume was worshipping Him in His incarnation. Jesus by His life, death, and resurrection makes everyone rich; everyone, that is, who comes to Him in faith. Jesus by His cross turns the stench of death into the fragrance of life.

But now, in this divine drama, it seems that the camera zooms out again and gives us a look at the "large crowd of Jews" who'd come to Bethany to get a look at Jesus and at Lazarus, whom He raised from the dead. Just as with the Jews in Jerusalem at the beginning of our reading, they admire our Lord's supernatural power. They might even come to believe in Him as Saviour and God given the influence of the Holy Spirit. But as of now, their thoughts and desires are all of this world. They would be appalled by the idea of Jesus and a crucifixion.

And finally, we come again to the high priests. They want the stench of death for Jesus of Nazareth, for He and His teachings and miracles are a stench to them. There is a massive irony here, for they had been appointed to be the very custodians of the righteousness and grace of God. And here they were conspired to destroy God's ultimate messenger of grace, His only-begotten Son.

Where would you have stood in this portion of God's drama? Would you have understood that Jesus was born to die and that His cross brings everlasting life?

No, you wouldn't have, and neither would I. For it is only by the ministry of God the Holy Spirit that our minds can be opened to grasp and accept and kneel before the mystery of redemption that Jesus achieved on Calvary's hill. Until then, the death of Christ is an absurdity. A tragedy. A sad mistake. The Holy Spirit must give us the mind of Christ, so we can step outside our story and see the Cross from God's point of view.

When you see the Cross from God's point of view, you understand that it was for you that Jesus died. It was your sins, and my sins, that put Him on that tree. Yet in spite of all that-- no, because of all that, He allowed Himself to be arrested, tortured, and finally, crucified. And somehow, out of that terrible death, comes our glorious life! Somehow, by the wonderful plan of God, Jesus' suffering made Him the minister of a new covenant, sealed not with the blood of bulls and goats, but by the sinless blood of the very Son of God.

Isn't that ironic? That creatures like you and I will someday be translated into the very throne room of almighty God! But that's what Jesus did for us on His cross.

The essence of dramatic irony is that the characters don't realize what's happening to them, or they consistently misperceive and misinterpret what's going on. They do that because they're stuck in the story and can only think of their own human motivations.

But you, Christian friends, are not stuck in the old human tragedy of sin and death. You no longer regard the cross of Christ as something negative to be shunned or laughed at or abhorred. It's not that you or I have grown so wise that we can of ourselves make the right decision about Jesus and His atoning death; rather, Jesus Himself has made His decision for you. As St. Paul writes, He chose you to be like the perfume that Mary of Bethany lavished on Jesus' feet.

Everywhere we go, "We are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing." To those who persist in their sins, we are the stench of death, but to those whose hearts are open (by the power of the Holy Spirt), we are the fragrance of eternal life. This comes from the irony of the cross, that somehow, by God's sovereign plan, the worst thing in the world could produce the best thing in all eternity for us, even the salvation of our souls. In the end, we may never fully understand how it can be. And so, like Mary, let us simply pour our adoration at the feet of Jesus, and worship and adore.

What God's Word Can Do

Texts: Isaiah 55:6-13; 2 Timothy 3:16-17; 4:1-5

Good morning. It's day number 73 of the year of our Lord 2010. Do you know where your New Year's resolutions are?

Beginning of this year, I heard a lot about people resolving to read the Bible through by the end of next December. If you're one of them, I hope you're keeping to your plan.

There's one problem with Bible reading resolutions. It's how we can think of it as something meritorious we do-- or something guilt-inducing that we fail to do. Ever catch yourself falling into that trap? I have. That's the time to have a good laugh at ourselves. Boast about reading God's holy Word? We may as well brag about eating our dinners and enjoying them! God gave us food for the body to satisfy and nourish the physical man, and He gave us His God-breathed Scriptures to nourish and sustain our souls. They are His gift to us, and they come with virtue, strength, and power that proceed from His very throne. When we receive them with thanksgiving we see for ourselves what God's word can do.

Before anything else, He opens our hearts to receive the Scriptures as the Word of God. The sixteenth and seventeen verses of the third chapter of Paul's letter to Timothy read,

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

The Greek word New International Version translates as "God-breathed" is theopneustos. Other translations render it as "God-inspired." In the latest issue of Modern Reformation there's an article by Michael Allen, who teaches systematic theology at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale. Prof. Allen writes,

The Greek word theopneustos has been studied up and down, left and right. The image is that of God breathing out, a notion surely informed by the creation account when God breathed life into the dust and made man (Gen. 2:7). Just as God created by his word in Genesis, so God brings about the new creation by the proclamation of the gospel. To that end, God inspires or breathes out life into and through the writings of the apostles. The picture is not of texts, already written, now receiving blessing; rather, the notion is of texts produced by God's very breath.1

Since this is the case-- since all Scripture has been produced by God by the power of His Holy Spirit, it has divine power. Power to convict us sinners of our sin; power to apply the saving blood of Jesus Christ to our soul; power to give us new hearts and new minds and set us in the paths of eternal life through that same Jesus Christ. And once we belong to Him, all that is written in this book has power to teach, to rebuke, to correct, and to train us in righteousness, so, as verse 17 reads, "the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work."

Does this term "man of God" refer only to the preacher? True, in the Old Testament God's designated prophet is often called "the man of God." But we live in New Testament times, and we are people of the New Covenant. God Almighty has called us all to be people of God, called by His Spirit and washed in His Son's precious blood.

Nor does verse 17 refer only to men. Greek has one word for a male person, another for a female person, and a third for a human being in general. Paul's word in this text is the third one. Are you in Christ? Then God's power in the Holy Scriptures is for you, working His grace so every Christian will be equipped to do what is wise and loving and holy as we serve our neighbor in His name.

Nevertheless, God by His church does set some individuals aside for special office, to be pastors and teachers, elders and deacons, missionaries and evangelists. It is their particular job to make sure that you who belong to Christ are equipped to do every good work He has foreordained for you to perform.

It's a solemn and weighty charge. See how Paul challenges Timothy in the first verse of chapter four: "In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus." Even now, our Triune God is here, watching over and monitoring everything I say to you. It's my responsibility to preach not myself or my ideas, but the very oracles of God. Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified! Woe to any consecrated and ordained Christian minister who fails to proclaim the living Word Jesus Christ as proclaimed in the written word of the Scriptures! Woe to us now, and woe to us when Christ shall sit and judge heaven and earth. Paul invokes the holy name of "Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead," reminding us that we will all stand before Him and give an account, and especially we pastors and elders and teachers who were charged with properly handling His word. Friends, the last thing I want on my tombstone is "Here lies an original theologian." I want to preach the faith once and for all delivered to the saints, and if I ever get out of that path, I want my brothers and sisters in Christ to put me back into it.

For as Paul writes to Timothy, Christ will someday appear in the clouds-- maybe sooner than we think!-- and His kingdom will come perfectly and God will be worshipped as Lord over all. Even now, His kingdom is coming in power as faithful ministers and teachers boldly proclaim the God-breathed message of His word, which brings His new creation to life in formerly lost and rebellious souls. Shall we be excused if our preaching tears down the kingdom instead of building it up? No! We must use the Word rightly, and show the church and the world what it can do.

And so, says Paul, "Preach the Word." Proclaim Christ the living Word made flesh, crucified and risen for us. Yes, this command is addressed especially to us in the pulpit ministry. But all of us who bear Jesus' name must be prepared to explain the hope He has put in us. God gives us what we need to do that as His gracious gift: He gives us the Scriptures themselves to read and study. Faithful preaching to hear and imbibe. Bible commentaries written by godly scholars. Wise men and women in the church who understand the Word and can help us to understand as well.

And so God's word prepares us to proclaim it in season or out of season. Now, this phrase doesn't mean we should interrupt school or business or random conversations to exhort people to repent. But whenever the Holy Spirit moves in our hearts to tell someone what Jesus did on the cross to take away their sins, the Word makes us ready to obey, whether or not it's comfortable for us; whether or not the other person will receive the Gospel as good news.

Even so, the Holy Spirit in verse 2 addresses pastors and teachers in particular. The God-breathed Scripture "is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness," and that is our special charge as we minister among you. The Word corrects. It moves the Christian who is carelessly going astray back into the right road. May Toby and I and every other pastor correct according to the Word, not from our own human judgement. The Word rebukes. It confronts Christians with their wilful sins. It puts the lie to false doctrine. It snatches the rebellious from the fires of Hell. May we pastors rebuke according to the Word, not out of our prejudices and fears. The Word encourages. It doesn't despise the day of small beginnings. It binds up the wounds of the brokenhearted and nourishes the weak and the young. May we pastors encourage according to the Word, with the power and grace of Jesus Christ, not with the sloppy sentimentalism of this sinful world.

When we pastors faithfully preach the Word in season and out of season, it infuses you, Christ's body, with power to stand strong against the lies of the world and the wiles of the devil. It gives you backbone and mettle and a sure sword hand against anything that would tear you away from your salvation in Jesus Christ. The Scriptures faithfully preached give you Jesus Christ Himself, living in you by the power of His Holy Spirit, fighting and winning the good fight of God, regardless of who or what comes against you.

We pastors must show you clearly what God's word can do, for the time is short. Paul writes in verse 3, "For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine." I'm afraid this isn't just about the unbelievers Out There; it's also a warning about people inside the church.
We see it happening today, all around us. People aren't naturally interested in hearing the Word of God. The Scriptures hurt before they heal and kill before they make alive. The good news of Jesus Christ is not really good unless first we've heard and received the bad news of the Law. Sinful human hearts doesn't want to submit to that. We didn't want to submit to that, until the Word of God worked in our hearts to recreate us according to the image of Christ.

And so, in churches all over the world, men and women are flocking to preachers who will tell them what their itching ears want to hear. Pastor, give me a great "worship experience," but don't waste my time with preaching! Tell me how to get rich or how to have a better marriage, but don't say anything about the Cross! Convince me it's okay to say I'm a Zen Buddhist and a Christian at the same time, but don't claim that Jesus is the only way to God! Keep my church small and comfortable and family-like, but don't disrupt us with talk about the power of the gospel for the world! Tickle my ears with how I can feel good about myself by doing good deeds, but don't fence me in with your narrow-minded Christ-centered, cross-focussed, Law-and-Gospel doctrine!

In all these ways and more the people of our time turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. Any idea or belief that human beings make up to explain how things got the way they are and how they should be is a myth, and it's all a lie against the truth of the Word of God. And heaven help us, many formerly-faithful pastors are wavering in their convictions. Some of us are wondering if maybe it might be okay to let in a little-- just a little-- of these myths-- just to get people and their itching ears through the door-- and once they're comfortable in the pews, we'll hit them with the real Jesus. Don't we understand how false that is? Don't we realize that the only way to grow God's church is by laying the foundation of Jesus Christ dead and raised again according to the Scriptures? How can we be so weak as to doubt what God's word can do?

In our text you can feel Paul's concern to keep Timothy out of that trap. In 1 Timothy we learn of the false doctrines and false practices this young pastor was up against in his church in Ephesus. Both men and women were claiming all sorts of false things about Jesus Christ, or denying Him altogether. How easy simply to give in, to mix in a little of this and a little of that, just to keep the peace and attract more members. No, Timothy! No, Paul says to all of us pastors who hold to the reformed and evangelical Christian faith! "Keep your head in all situations!" The power of the word will keep us from being swayed by the temptations of the world. "Endure hardship!" Remaining faithful to Christ and His self-revelation in Scripture will bring us hardship, as pastors and as churches. Membership may well go down. People will call us bigots and fools, and some of those accusers will be fellow-members. "Do the work of an evangelist." There is to be no barricading ourselves behind the church doors and letting the world literally go to hell. Even against hardship and calamity God's Spirit strengthens us to go boldly into the world bearing the good news of Jesus Christ as witnessed in the Holy Scriptures! And finally, "discharge all the duties of your ministry." Every one of us has a ministry to our neighbor to carry out in Jesus' name. Everyone of us is responsible for feeding ourselves on the Scriptures and showing in the world what they can do.

We pastors have special duties, and the first of them is to open to you this book, the Bible, trusting that the Holy Spirit will work in your hearts and reveal to you God's power. If we fail to preach the Word, we have nothing to give you. Without God breathing His power into our lives through the Scriptures, we can bring only worldly hope and human wisdom.

But God has given us His holy Word, and as Isaiah the prophet says,

It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

To read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Scriptures is certainly our duty. A duty, the same way it's our duty to sit down and thoroughly enjoy a generous, appetizing, and nourishing meal spread out for us by the Father who loves us most. Sit and eat, Christian friends. Learn firsthand what this book can do in you. And so, by patience, and comfort of His holy Word, may you embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life. Amen.

______________________________
1. Allen, Michael: "Getting Inspiration from Inspiration," Modern Reformation, Vol. 19, No. 2, March/April 2010, p.19

Distances Spanned, Walls Broken Down

Texts: Matthew 2:1-11; Ephesians 2:11-22

YOU’RE PROBABLY FAMILIAR WITH the Motown song, "Ain’t No Mountain High Enough." How does it go?

Ain’t no mountain high enough,
Ain’t no valley low enough,
Ain’t no river wide enough
To keep me from gettin’ to you, babe.

Maybe you’ve also heard the joke where the lover who’s sworn all this winds up by saying, "And I’ll be over tonight, baby, if there’s no game on TV."

You certainly can’t charge the Wise Men in our Matthew passage with insincerity. They didn’t let any mountain, valley, river, or desert keep them from getting to Bethlehem to worship at the feet of Jesus, the infant King of the Jews. Over a thousand miles over rough terrain they travelled, from the land of Persia which was outside the bounds of the Roman empire. Think of the trials and hardships of such a journey! Even if we assume that the Magi were pretty well off, there would have been great heat by day and frigid cold by night, with road conditions bad or uncertain. They would have been in constant danger from accidents or bandits. Then once they got to Judea, they had to trust themselves to the wicked King Herod to find out where the Christ Child could be found. Their pilgrimage to Bethlehem was no Caribbean cruise, but the Wise Men let nothing stop them from making it.

And think of the psychological barriers! There you are, one of the Magi of the East. You may not be a king yourself, but you certainly are the advisor to royalty. You’re most likely a follower of Zoroaster, you worship Ahura Mazda, the Uncreated Wisdom, and you search the stars for signs of your god’s working in the cosmos. You devote your life to wisdom and scholarship. And life is good. You’re respected, you’re honored, the people look up to you and kings compensate you well. It would take a lot for you to entertain the idea that the Divine Wisdom would speak in the sacred writings of a despised, broken, and exiled people like the Jews. It would be even more of a stretch to believe that the Uncreated One would send a special emissary from heaven to be born as one of that despised, broken, and occupied people and to understand that the new star you’ve seen heralds this very child. And how much bigger a barrier would it be for you to accept that you, yes, you, one of the noble Magi, should and must get together with some of your fellow-Magi friends and travel all those hundreds of miles to kneel and do homage before that newborn King of the Jews.

But the Wise Men did it, even though their god Ahura Mazda was only a smeared and indistinct picture of the God of Israel who alone made heaven and earth. They went, and we see that they were not only willing to go, they were eager to overcome the obstacles and make that journey. When they saw that the star had stopped over the place where Jesus was, Matthew tells us, they were overjoyed!

What the Wise Men accomplished is certainly impressive. They didn’t let anything keep them from getting to Jesus; and as a sign I pass on Route 68 on the way to Industry puts it, "Wise men still seek Him." It’d make sense for me to say, Be like the Wise Men and don’t let anything in this world get in the way of your coming to Jesus Christ and devoting your life to Him forever!

It would make sense, but I’m not going to do that. At least, not yet. I’m not going to cheerlead you into imitating the Wise Men, because it puts the picture totally the wrong way around. Yes, Someone did come a long way when the Wise Men brought their devotion and gifts to the infant Lord of lords, but He came an infinitely longer way and overcame unthinkably more barriers than the Magi did.

That Someone is Jesus Christ Himself, the Son of God. You think the Wise Men came a long distance? Jesus Christ came all the way from the bosom of God the Father Almighty! He was the eternal Son of God! He was the uncreated Word of infinite Wisdom! As the Apostle John writes, "The Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning." As we read in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, "By him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him." Think of how far He had to go, consider everything He had to give up to become flesh for our sakes, what it meant for Him to confine Himself in a human body that got cold and hungry and thirsty, to make Himself become a kicking, mewling, helpless infant totally dependent for His welfare on an inexperienced teenaged mother and a righteous but equally inexperienced young carpenter!

Then, consider the journey of our Lord’s life and ministry. Think of the inconceivable distance He spanned when He died on the Cross to reconcile sinners like you and me to His Father God! Would you make such a journey? Would I? Left to ourselves, we wouldn’t want to. And even if we could want to do it, we couldn’t. Only Jesus Christ the Son of God and Son of Man could span that terrible distance between sinful, rebellious humanity and the holy heart of God. Only He who came down from heaven and became incarnate of the Virgin Mary could overcome the barriers between us and our righteous Creator. And only He who was born to be the King of the Jews could break down the walls between us who were born Gentiles and His chosen people Israel.

And that’s what our Lord did. For long ages of history we non-Jews were, as the Apostle puts it in our Ephesians reading, "separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world." No purely human determination could overcome that hopeless gap. "But now--" says St. Paul-- "But now, in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ." Brought near! The far distance spanned! Not by human effort or good intentions or "following Jesus as my Good Example," but, "by the blood of Christ"!

And notice that verb "brought." We’d like to think we could get to God ourselves if only someone would show us the way. But no. God Himself had to come to us in Jesus Christ and bring us.

And when He did, He became our Peace.

To make war you need at least two sides coming against each other, and here in Ephesians 2 those two sides are the Jews vs. everyone else. Israel was chosen by God for a special relationship with Him; everyone else was not. Israel had received God’s covenant promises of a victorious redeeming Messiah; everyone else had not. Israel had been privileged to hear the sure word of the Lord in Moses and the Prophets; everyone else had not. No wonder the Jews became proud and hostile against "those Gentile nations." No wonder they put up barriers against Gentile inclusion.

And let’s face it: We read in the Scriptures that sometimes it was God’s own will that the Jews should keep themselves walled off, as it were, from the Gentiles. In fact, when Israel and Judah got too friendly with the nations, that was when the Lord had to punish them with famine, sword, and exile. There certainly was a wall of separation between Jew and Gentile and for a long time it was entirely necessary. The wall that God erected was the Law, by which we mean the Ten Commandments and all the rules and ordinances given to show God’s people how to obey them and what sacrifices to offer when they could not obey. The sign of circumcision was given to the Jews to show that they possessed this great gift and responsibility, that they were distinct from all the other nations who hadn’t received their covenant and their call.

But then Jesus Christ came all that way from heaven and was born as a human being, like one of us yet without sin. Verse 5 says He abolished in His flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. Not by throwing the law out and declaring that God doesn’t care what we do or what sort of beings we are. No, Jesus abolished the barrier of the law by keeping it perfectly Himself, in unbroken obedience to God. In His supreme act of obedience, our Saviour died on the cross to bridge the gulf of separation between God and man. And when He did, the barrier came down! The Jews had the Law, but couldn’t keep it. We Gentiles didn’t have the Law of Moses, we didn’t have the covenant relationship with God that came with it, but we couldn’t even keep the law God wrote on our hearts as human beings made in His image. But now in Christ God is satisfied, the barrier is down and both groups, Jew and Gentile, are reconciled to God through the cross. Peace, Christ preaches: "Peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near." Peace with one another, yes, but primarily, peace with our formerly-distant God. "For through [Christ]," Paul writes, "we both have access to the Father by one Spirit."

In other words, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit we can come to the One who has first come to us. The Wise Men who traversed field and fountain, moor and mountain could come worship the infant Lord because God Almighty first approached them and brought them to acknowledge the kingship of His Son. They are a kind of first fruits of the Gentiles. They showed the people of their day that the blessings of God were not restricted to Israel, and those blessings aren’t restricted today.

The irony, of course, is that it’s now the Jews who are alienated and outside. Now it’s we Gentile believers who are tempted to be proud and think there’s something special about us that caused God to come to us in Jesus Christ and make us His own. If that’s what we believe, we’re still far off indeed. We are brought near not by anything we merited, but by the blood of Christ alone. Tragically, it is that very blood of His death that builds a wall our Jewish neighbors can’t get over and spread a gap they can’t transcend. It is offensive to them that the Messiah should die.

But remember, until God Almighty spans the distance and tears down the wall, none of us want a suffering Savior. None of us want to accept that it took the blood of the sinless Son of God to pay the terrible debt for our sin and turn aside the wrath of God that we deserved. But in His love and mercy, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ sends His grace to open the way for us to come to Him. He came in His grace to you, Christian man, Christian woman, to shine the light of the Gospel in your heart and bring you the joy of your salvation. He continues to come to you, overcoming your fears, reassuring you of His love, and bringing you more and more to be like His beloved Son Jesus.

This good news is for everyone, Jew and Gentile alike. Let us plead the Holy Spirit to come upon all who don’t yet believe, that He might bring them to Jesus Christ. Let us serve Him as ministers of reconciliation, speaking gladly of our Lord who has put to death the hostility between Jew and Gentile and between all of us and God.

On the high mountain of Calvary Jesus demonstrated His love for us; through the lowness of the valley of the shadow of death He passed for our sakes; in the wide river of His blood He plunges us in baptism so we can live. Nothing can keep Christ the Word made flesh from getting to us whom He has chosen. The Wise Men are proof of His power, and here, set before us on this Table, is proof that is more powerful still. By the signs and under the seals of bread and wine, Jesus gives us His body and blood. His holy sacrifice broke down the barriers, bridged the gulp between us and God, and purchased our peace. Come near in faith; take, eat, and receive His blessings, for by His Spirit in this Supper, Jesus Christ has already come near to you.