The moral law of God is, you know, summarized in the Ten Commandments. In the first commandment, God tells us, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” The Small Catechism’s explanation of the commandment tells us, “We should fear, love, and trust in God above all things.” Clarifying things more, The Large Catechism says, “…to have a god is nothing other than trusting and believing Him with the heart…whatever you set your heart on and put your trust in is truly your god.”
We have a lot of gods in our world, don't we? That's because we tend to set our hearts on things other than God. As we begin a new year, we need to ask ourselves: Who is our God? Or, who is our King? This is important because the thing we want most in life is to be our own gods. I bring all of this up for two reasons. First, because whenever we violate any of God’s commandments–and we inevitably do violate His commandments, whether by thought, word, or deed all the time, we also violate the first commandment. When we lie or steal, covet, murder, gossip, take God’s name in vain, or dishonor our parents, we violate the first commandment. That’s true because with every sin, we either worship the sin itself, or worship ourselves by holding our judgments about right and wrong to be superior to God’s judgments, or we do both. The second reason I bring it up is that the question of who your god is, who is the ultimate authority over your life, is the central question of today’s gospel lesson. You know the story well. About two years after Jesus’ birth, Magi from the East visit Him. After they leave the house where the infant Jesus is living with Joseph and Mary, Joseph is warned in a dream to take Jesus to Egypt until God says otherwise. King Herod wants to kill Jesus. Herod is so intent on being god and king of Judea--being the boss of everyone--that, unlike the Magi, he not only refuses to worship the newborn King, he wants Him dead. Herod deserves to be compared to other murderous despots in history, like Adolf Hitler or Vladimir Putin. But let’s not sidestep the truth. We’re in no more of a hurry to worship God than Herod was. We are sinners and we would prefer to reign over our own lives or give our worship to the gifts of God–things like health, wealth, authority, sex, luxury–rather than worshiping God. We are born that way. But being born with an orientation to sin doesn’t make our sinning right. As Paul says in Romans, the human race falls prey to worshiping the creatures rather than the Creator. We had a video call the other night with our son and our nearly two-year-old granddaughter. She is, in my unbiased view, completely sweet and adorable. But our son tells us that she has a new favorite word: No. We all want to be our own bosses, our own ultimate authorities. So, one thing we all have in common with Herod is that we are sinners bent on self-worship. Because Herod has learned of the location where prophecy said the Messiah was to be born but didn’t know the child’s identity, he orders that every male child under the age of two be murdered. This is a disturbing tale. Years ago, after reading a sermon I had preached on these verses from Matthew and posted on my blog, a man in Northumberland in England wrote to me angrily, “The Christmas story tells us that if your son is threatened, then you save him and let the others take their chances.” The man’s anger was maybe understandable but, I think, misdirected for two reasons. First, He seemed to think that God had willed the deaths of these babies. If there’s anything I’m sure of about our God, it’s that He Who formed us and loves us, never would will the murder of any other parents’ children. This is the God Who told Isaac and the people of Israel not to sacrifice their children.
Even our lesson for today shows that God didn't will the murder of the innocents. There are three places in the lesson that note the fulfillment of prophecy. Two of them indicated by the prepositions used in the original Greek that the fulfillment of prophecies cited was what God desired. But in verse 17, where we're told of Herod's murderous act, the citation says that the weeping of Rachel for her children would happen because of the sinfulness of human beings, not because God desires it to happen. But second and more importantly, that angry man forgot that God used Joseph to save Jesus from Herod’s armed troops so that Jesus, God the Son, could later go to the cross. There, Jesus bore the sins of us all, setting us free from the damnation and eternal separation from God we all deserve. Jesus wasn’t spared execution when Joseph whisked Him off to Egypt, any more than you and I are spared the horrors of a universe drowning in sin and death. Instead, Jesus was the last of the Bethlehem innocents to die. Jesus would also be executed by a human race, Jew and Gentile, bent on having and being its own gods and kings. The difference between His death and the deaths of the other babies in Bethlehem and the deaths of us all is that His life and His life alone offered on a cross paid the eternal debt we all owe God for our sin.
Jesus fulfilled the prophecy given to Isaiah: “...he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5)
Despite what my angry commentator said, God didn’t spare Jesus on that horrible day in Bethlehem and let everyone else “take their chances.” Jesus was born so that He could die for us. Jesus knew this. Referring to His death on the cross as His baptism, Jesus once said: “I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!” (Luke 12:50) The death of the sinless Christmas Child on the cross at Calvary was the perfect act of obedience to God that you nor I neither desire nor are able to perform. It was for His submission to death on the cross that, “God [the Father] exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name…” (Philippians 2:9) Jesus was sent to Egypt not to be spared the hardships, adversities, and death of this world, but so He enter into those hardships, adversities, and death and redeem them by winning an eternity of peace, rest, and salvation for all who believe in Him.
Herod was a king who wanted power for himself. Jesus is the King Who surrendered the advantages of His deity in order to make it possible for each of us to be justified by God’s grace through faith in Him alone.
Jesus freely gives blessings none of us deserve: forgiveness, God’s presence with us through the joys and sorrows of this life, and life with God that never ends.
Because Jesus went to the cross, we can say with the apostle Paul: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32)
Jesus is no haughty, distant despot. Although our sin put Him on His cross, He makes us His friends.
Paul also writes elsewhere in the Bible: “For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” (Romans 5:10)
This King wants to give us everlasting life with God, a life that begins now as, by the power of His Word and the Sacraments, we can say, “Jesus is my God and my King!” Friends, Jesus is our only hope and sure foundation today, in this new year, and always. He’s now accomplished all that He came to do for us, which is why the last of the Bethlehem innocents would declare with His dying breath on the cross, “It is finished!” This year, you can trust in Jesus and what He has done for you. You can claim Him as your gracious, loving King! Amen
[This message was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, yesterday morning, September 22.] Deuteronomy 6:4-9 Colossians 2:11-12 One thing that people taking lifesaving training are taught is that if a person you’re trying to save from drowning fights against you by thrashing and flailing to save themselves, you must not allow two people to drown. Sometimes, no matter how perfectly a lifesaver does her or his job, drowning people, by their actions, will choose not to be saved.
As we come to part three of our series, Living Out Our Baptism, I offer this as an incomplete illustration of Holy Baptism.
God is our Lifesaver. He has sent His Son into this world to die and to rise so that we can be saved from sin, death, darkness, and separation from God. The Holy Spirit gives us an undeserved share in Christ’s victory over these things, accomplished on the cross and confirmed by the empty tomb when the Word about Christ meets water. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God claims us as His own.
But just as the drowning person must stop thrashing and trust the lifesaver, we too must trust the One Who has claimed us as His own.
We need to trust in the One Who died and rose for us.
Jesus puts it succinctly: “Whoever believes and is baptized,” Jesus says, “will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:16)
In Holy Baptism, God saves us; but unless we trust in the Savior, if we insist on thrashing around, intent on being gods unto ourselves who try to save ourselves, we will be condemned.
“The work of God is this,” Jesus says elsewhere, “to believe in the one he has sent.” (John 6:29)
Faith is jettisoning all attempts to save ourselves--through good deeds, high achievements, sterling relationships--and clinging only to the God we know in Christ. Holy Baptism is usually the beginning of our lives with God. Whether we’re baptized as infants or adults, our call will be the same: to live out our baptisms by doing the work of God, believing in Jesus.
Baptism plays the same role today in the lives of all believers in Jesus as circumcision once played in the lives of male believers in Yahweh in Old Testament times.
In circumcision, God called Israel to faith in Him, not to thrash around, seeking after other gods or going their own ways. And every circumcised boy was called, usually at about fourteen years of age, to make a confession of their own faith in God.
Today, a person is baptized, then called to confirm their faith at a point when they’ve been instructed and are able to confess for themselves their belief that, “Jesus us Lord.” We call the rite in which a person confesses Christ as their Lord for their own lives, Affirmation of Baptism or Confirmation.
The apostle Paul shows us how Baptism has replaced circumcision and brings even greater blessings in Colossians 2:11-12: “In [Christ] you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.” Last Sunday, we talked about the importance of the Church in helping the baptized to believe in Jesus. But for children, especially, there’s a more intimate community that God has given to help the baptized to trust their lives to Jesus. It’s the family. Martin Luther called the family the little Church.
Through the years, I’ve asked Christians who most influenced them to believe in Jesus. Sometimes, but rarely, they tell me it was a pastor. Far more often they say things like “my father,” “my mother,” “my grandmother,” “my grandfather,” “my brother.” “my sister,” "my husband," "my wife." Families can be places where the baptized are instructed or catechized in the faith. To catechize someone is, according to the dictionary, to “instruct…[them] in the principles of Christian religion…” People who are catechized are people who learn the basics of Christian faith. And no matter how advanced any Christian disciple may appear, no Christian disciple ever advances so far as to not need daily refamiliarization with the basics of our faith, things like salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed (which faithfully summarizes the Bible's teaching about Who God is), the Lord's Prayer, Holy Baptism, and Holy Communion. Luther spoke of the importance of Christians reconnecting to the Catechism, by which he didn't mean the Small and Large Catechisms that he wrote, but the basic truths of Christian faith.
But Luther did write his Catechisms to help Christians do this. In fact, he wrote them in response to what he saw as an urgent need. Not long after those who adhered to the principles of the Reformation were excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church, it was decided that in Saxony, where Luther lived, theologians would be sent out into the congregations to determine how well the Reformation was being instituted. Luther himself visited some churches and was appalled by what he saw.
In the preface to The Small Catechism, written for use by families in their homes, Luther minced no words:
The deplorable, miserable conditions which I recently observed when visiting the parishes have constrained and pressed me to put this catechism of Christian doctrine into this brief, plain, and simple form. How pitiable, so help me God, were the things I saw: the common man, especially in the villages, knows practically nothing of Christian doctrine, and many of the pastors are almost entirely incompetent and unable to teach. Yet all the people are supposed to be Christians, have been baptized, and receive the Holy Sacrament even though they do not know the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, or the Ten Commandments and live like poor animals of the barnyard and pigpen. What these people have mastered, however, is the fine art of tearing all Christian liberty to shreds.
In our baptismal liturgy, there’s a point in which parents bringing their children to the font are asked to make certain commitments. The pastor tells them:
In Christian love you have presented this child for Holy Baptism. You should, therefore, faithfully bring her to the services of God’s house, and teach her the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments. As she grows in years, you should place in her hands the Holy Scriptures and provide for her instruction in the Christian faith, that, living in the covenant of her Baptism and communion with the Church, she may lead a godly life until the day of Jesus.
The pastor then asks,
Do you promise to fulfill these obligations?
And the parents are called to respond,
I do.
The parents are asked to make these commitments for their baptized child so that, when she or he has received some basic instruction in the faith, they will be able to say, for themselves, “I believe!” God has always intended for children to receive their most influential instruction in discipleship in the home.
This pattern--God claiming children as His own and calling their families to teach them the faith so that, like their parents, the children can believe in God and be saved from sin and death--goes all the way back to the Old Testament. Take a look with me, please, at Deuteronomy 6:4-9. Deuteronomy is an address by Moses given to the people of Israel just before their entrance into the land God had promised them. In this passage, Moses begins,
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.
Now, the word translated here as commandments is, in the Hebrew in which the Old Testament was written, haddebarim, from the root word, dabar. That literally means not so much commandments, as words.
Moses is telling Israel to remember the words of God, God’s commands and promises, Law and Gospel. Israel was to keep at the center of their beings the Word of God, which is filled with God’s life. (As Hebrews 4:12 reminds us, "...the word of God is living and active...") Moses goes on:
Impress [God’s words] on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
God’s Word needs to be at the center of not only our own lives, but of the lives of our families.
Without attending to God’s Word, without commending this saving Word that points us to repentance and faith in Jesus, it’s too easy for us and our loved ones to thrash around without hope or peace in the dark waters of a world fallen into sin and death. Some of you have heard me speak of the time when, after a spring rain, my great-grandmother and I walked out into her front yard. I was about six years old. In the sky to the southeast, there was a rainbow. My great-grandmother told me that because of God’s love for us, He made rainbows a sign of His promise to never destroy the human race in waters and to save all who believe in Him. She catechized me and obviously, her words had an impact because I still remember them some fifty-nine years later! Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other family members: You have an important role in ensuring that the other baptized people in your families know to take hold of the lifesaving Jesus.
He has done everything needed to save us.
But unless we impress God’s Word on our families, talking about it when we travel, when we lie down at night, when we rise in the mornings, those precious baptized people in our lives may not remember that Christ’s outstretched hands are there to be grasped, that Christ’s gospel, His promise to never leave us, and His promise to give us eternal life with God can be trusted, are free to all who will let go of saving themselves and trust in Him to save them.
Jesus gives us a great commission to make disciples around the world. That disciple-making starts in our own families, in our own homes, among the baptized people under our own roofs.
May we fulfill this part of Christ’s great commission.
This past Sunday, we began an adult class on the Lutheran catechisms. We've established a web site where we'll park audio of the classes. The first class audio has been posted. Here's the link to the site. And here is a link to audio of the first session. Hope that you find it helpful.
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is a recording of the first session of an adult Sunday School class on the Lutheran Catechisms. We're using this study resource from Sola Publishing and using the texts of the catechisms from Concordia, the collected basic faith statements of the Lutheran movement rooted in Scripture and Jesus Christ.]
Mark 16:16 John 3:1-10
Today, as we continue looking at what it means to be a Lutheran Christian, we consider Holy Baptism.
Baptism was a subject about which Martin Luther, the monk and priest who accidentally started the Reformation and the Lutheran movement, preached and wrote a lot. From 1528 until his death on February 18, 1546, for example, Luther preached 28 sermons on baptism! For several years in a row, he did sermon series on the subject. And that's on top of all that he wrote about Baptism in documents like The Small Catechismand The Large Catechism.
Luther said in a 1519 sermon, “There is no greater comfort on earth than baptism.” He felt that it was essential for Christians to appreciate the power of this sacrament, even if none of us this side of our own deaths and resurrections, will be able to fully understand it.
Let’s take a look at Article 9 of The Augsburg Confession, which talks about Baptism. (It’s on page 14 of the buff and brown books in the pew racks.) It says:
Concerning Baptism, our [Lutheran] churches teach that Baptism is necessary for salvation...and that God’s grace is offered through Baptism...They teach that children are to be baptized...Being offered to God through Baptism, they are received into God’s grace.
Our churches reject the Anabaptists [the Anabaptists were the forerunners of all modern churches that teach what is known as “believer’s baptism”], who reject the Baptism of children, and say that children are saved without Baptism.
There are three main points the Confession makes here about Holy Baptism. The first is that Baptism is necessary for salvation. It mentions Mark 16:16 as evidence. Take a look at that passage, please. Just before it, the risen Jesus tells the disciples to go into the world and preach the good news that there is eternal life with God for all who repent and believe in Him. Then Jesus says, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved...”
Baptism, according to Jesus, is an essential part of being saved from sin and death. Jesus answers that question in another famous passage, John 3:5. Jesus tells a Jewish teacher named Nicodemus: “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit [in other words, without Baptism], he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”
Baptism is the port of entry, the birthplace for Christians, the occasion when helpless human beings are claimed by God as His children.
This picture of the sacrament doesn’t square with self-sufficient brands of Christianity that tell us that coming to faith is a matter of human beings exercising their free will, that people can decide to become Christians. But the Bible teaches that we’re born with original sin: We don’t have free wills. We are, as we confess each Sunday, “in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”
If you and I had to make a choice between following Jesus or not, we could never make the choice to follow Jesus stick.
We’re not born equipped with the ability to trust in God or in anyone else, for that matter.
Now, when God’s grace confronts us--when we catch a glimpse of the fact that God so loved the world, He gave His only Son so that all who believe in Him will not perish, but live with God eternally--we can give up our rebellion and let Him love us. We can pull down our defenses and let His grace break through to us. But faith in Christ is not our doing. Our faith is God’s work in us. God does everything needed for us to be saved from sin and death. We have nothing we can do to make that happen.
Jesus explains this a bit more in John 3:7-8: “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
This past summer, a fierce gust of wind swept across our state, knocking out power for days. None of us, including AEP, really knew what hit us! It was an event over which we had no control. It would have been silly for any of us to have said “I have decided to allow my power to be put out.” If anyone had said that, we would have said that person was living in denial, overstating their own strength.
Similarly, when the Christian says, “I have decided to follow Jesus,” what they really should say is, “I am bowing to a power, love, and grace bigger than me. I won’t deny that any more. I put down my dukes and surrender.” Holy Baptism is a blast of God’s life-giving Holy Spirit over which we have no control. God’s grace and Holy Spirit, given through Jesus Christ, comes to us. And in Baptism, the apostle Peter says, we are saved (1 Peter 3:21).
Baptism then is not the symbolic gesture of commitment to Christ by someone who’s had an emotional or spiritual experience of God.
Baptism is an act of God in which His Word of promise meets the water of Holy Baptism and the baptized person is claimed by God as His own child, sealed by the Holy Spirit, and marked with the cross of Christ forever.
This is the second thing that Article 9 teaches us about Baptism: In Holy Baptism, God’s grace is actually offered to the baptized. Baptism is more than an external ceremony. God makes His covenant with the baptized and makes it possible for them to live with God for eternity.
Notice: This doesn’t mean that if a person is baptized, but doesn’t believe in Jesus Christ, they’re saved from sin and death. Holy Baptism isn’t fire insurance or an eternal “Do Not Go to Jail” card!
Go back, please, to Mark 16:16. Look again at Jesus’ words: “He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe is condemned.”
Baptism is the means by which God gives the gift of eternal life with Him. But it’s a gift that can only be be opened by faith in Christ.
People who are baptized but don’t have faith in Jesus Christ condemn themselves eternally, Jesus says in Mark 16:16.
He says the same thing later in His conversation with Nicodemus: “Those who believe in Him are not condemned; but those who do not believe in Him are condemned already, because they have not believed in the Name of the only Son of God” (John 3:18).
This then, is the third thing Article 9 teaches: The grace of God must be apprehended, taken hold of, by faith in Jesus Christ.
In Holy Baptism, God makes us spiritually “pure, without sin, and wholly guiltless,” Luther wrote, but that doesn’t mean that sin still isn’t present in the baptized. It is and will be until the day each of us dies.
But if we respond with surrender when the Holy Spirit moves us to repentance and to having faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, we’re joined by God in battling to kill off our sins and letting God’s forgiveness and life in.
And this really is central to what Holy Baptism is about.
Baptism is, first, a drowning of our inborn sinful selves.
And Baptism is, secondly, the rising of a new self, born of water and the Spirit.
Yet, no matter how close we grow to Christ, the “old Adam” or the “old Eve” will keep rearing its ugly head, threatening to suck us into hell, as long as we’re living.
This is what Paul was wrestling with in Romans 7, where he writes: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want [sinful, wholesome, holy things], but I do the very thing I hate.” Paul wonders at this and concludes: “Now if I do what I do not want...it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.”
And it’s because sin still tempts us and sometimes causes us to fall, that no Baptism is complete unless we who are baptized respond with repentance and belief in Jesus Christ.
Listen: I was baptized as an infant. God claimed me. He never gave up on me. When I look back on my life, I can see that God never failed to keep His part of the Baptismal bargain, His covenant to be my saving God. Repeatedly, He orchestrated events to reach out to me and reclaim me in His grace, even when I had turned my back on Him and claimed He didn't exist. Had I died in my atheist years, having chosen to go it alone without Christ, I would have stood before Christ at Judgment Day naked in my own sins, not covered by the grace and forgiveness that Christ bled, died, and rose again to give to sinners like me.
I'm grateful, eternally grateful, that, in remembrance of my Baptism, God kept sending what someone has called "the hounds of heaven" to shepherd me back into His kingdom!
I'm glad that He was so consistent, insistent, and loving that He brought me to a moment of surrender when I laid aside my rebellion and let Him love me and let Jesus Christ be my Lord!
In Baptism, God gives us life.
In Baptism, God gives us the power to resist temptation.
And in Baptism, God gives us the assurance that, as we repent and trust in Christ and struggle to live in accordance with His will, we are forgiven.
That’s why Luther called Holy Baptism a comfort.
When we receive the gifts of Holy Baptism by faith, Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection are duplicated in our lives. Each time we truly repent for sin, God gives forgiveness; the old self dies and the new self rises. We live in peace with God. This is the daily life of a baptized Christian who welcomes Christ and the salvation given in Baptism.
Paul speaks of Baptism and the life with God it makes possible in Romans 6:4-5, where he says: “...we were buried with [Christ] through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection.”
In Baptism, God promises to erase the power of sin and death over our lives if, in faith, we will submit to the crucifixion of our old selves, allowing our new selves to rise with Christ.
People with faith in Christ needn’t be guilt-ridden when we feel the allure of sinful inclinations within us.
We don’t need to despair even when we fall into sin.
We don’t wall ourselves off from Christ, convinced that He couldn’t love or forgive us anymore.
Instead, we remember our Baptism.
We honestly own our sorrow for our sin and we confess it to God.
We allow our temptations and our sins to drive us back to Christ and the promise to be our God that makes to us at Baptism.
We live the truth of Psalm 32:1-2: “Happy are those whose sins are forgiven, whose wrongs are pardoned. Happy is the one whom the Lord does not accuse of doing wrong and who is free from all deceit.”
I don’t know how Holy Baptism works. I don’t need to.
But from God’s Word and promises, I am sure of the three things the Confession teaches:
that Baptism is necessary for our salvation;
that in Baptism, God offers us grace; and
that the grace God offers in Baptism, no matter the age at which we’re baptized, can only be received by faith in Jesus Christ.
“This,” as a famous Lutheran often wrote, “is most certainly true.”
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]
Isaiah 2:1-5
Advent, which begins today, is a time for getting ready. Just as many are working themselves into frenzies preparing for Christmas, Advent asks us, “Are we ready, not for Christmas Day, but for the advent of Jesus, for the appearing of Jesus?”
Are we ready for Jesus to show up to bring an end to this world of sin and death and establish a new heaven and a new earth free of sin and death and grief?
Are we ready to meet Jesus face to face should our lives end before Jesus returns?
The last thing that any human being should want is to be ready for Christmas or for things like tomorrow’s special project, school assignment, or big game, yet not be ready to meet Jesus.
So, are you ready?
Each of our appointed lessons for this first day of the new Church Year can help us to be ready for Jesus’ return or, should we die before His return, for the moments we first see Jesus face to face. (1)
Please pull out the Celebrate inserts for this morning. Our first lesson is Isaiah 2:1-5. Verse 4 is probably the most famous passage here. It's a verse that promises that, beyond these days when sin drives human beings to warfare and factionalism, there will be a day when God will destroy war itself and turn our weapons into implements put to better and more productive use. That will happen on the day of the risen, ascended Jesus' return to this world!
This vision of a new creation at peace is one that would have especially appealed to Isaiah’s likely first listeners and readers.
Isaiah started his work as a prophet of God in about 740BC. At that moment, the Assyrian Empire threatened the destruction of first-century Judah.
(Judah, you’ll remember, was the southern portion of what had once been a larger nation, Israel. After King Solomon’s death, Israel split into two kingdoms, the northern one with its worship and national life centered in Samaria, the south remaining focused in Jerusalem. Seven-and-a-half centuries after Isaiah began prophesying, Jesus was born and raised in Judah, also called Judea.)
In Isaiah’s day, the people of Judah were terrified of the strong, menacing Assyrians. And their fear proved well founded: In 722BC, Israel would fall to the Assyrians, just as God had revealed through Isaiah would happen. God used the Assyrian army to chasten His people, calling them to repent for sin, especially their dalliances with false gods, and to trust, have faith, only in Him.
In our lesson, God declares a moment when people from around the world would acknowledge the God of the Jews as the one true God of the universe. They would stream to worship Him along with the Jews, He says. According to God’s words here, Mount Zion, the humble hill in Jerusalem where the Temple then stood, would be acknowledged as “the highest of mountains.” People would turn to the God Whose presence once lived in the Temple’s “Holy of Holies,” saying (look at their words in Isaiah 2:3 in our first lesson):
Come, let us go to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that He may teach us His ways and that we may walk in His paths. For out of Zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”
The lesson ends at verse 5, with these words:
O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
In these words, God wasn’t just telling the descendants of Jacob how to get ready for the restoration He wanted to bring to them once the Assyrians had conquered their land and, as a result, became desperate enough to once more realize their need of God.
God also is telling us how to prepare for the final scenes in human history, when, as Jesus puts it in our Gospel lesson, at a moment known only by the Father, the risen and ascended Jesus will return. It's then, that Jesus will, as we confess each week during worship, “judge the living and the dead.”
God's words here also tell us how to be prepared for the final scenes in our own lives, whether they come years from now or they happen this very day.
Now, it’s important to understand that what God says in Isaiah is, in a way, metaphorical. Let me explain.
Yesterday, as I was about to eat breakfast, already dressed in some of my Buckeye gear, I found Ann reading the newspaper, and said to her, like any good Ohio State alum anticipating the afternoon game must have said when first facing the day: “We must annihilate them!”
Now, I didn’t literally mean that. To annihilate something is to reduce it to nothing. If the team from up north were annihilated, who would the Buckeyes beat on certain Saturdays in November each year? I meant simply that I wanted the Buckeyes to soundly thump the Wolverines. I spoke metaphorically.
Some eight-hundred years after Isaiah shared the words of our first lesson with the people of Judah, Jesus sat by a well in the Samaritan village of Sychar. His disciples, in spite of their shared distaste for the citizens of the breakaway northern kingdom of Samaria, had gone into the village to get some food.
A Samaritan woman shows up at the well and among the things that Jesus tells her is this: “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain (Mount Gerizim in Samaria) nor in Jerusalem (on Mount Zion). You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews (more accurately translated, “the Judeans”). But the hour is coming and is now here, when we true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship Him.”
Our lesson from Isaiah then, foretells a time when people throughout the world won’t necessarily book flights on El Al Airlines in order to stream to Jerusalem, but a time when people from throughout the world will turn to the God first revealed to the Jews and then definitively, to everybody, through Jesus Christ. “For God so loved the world,” Jesus famously told Nicodemus. People from throughout the world today stream to Mount Zion every time they...
confess their sins in Jesus’ Name,
confess their faith in Jesus, and
strive, by the power of God's Holy Spirit living within them, to live as His redeemed and saved people in their every day moments.
So, how do we prepare for Jesus’ Advent, for His appearing?
First: We turn to the God made known in Christ. “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,” our lesson says.
To repent and to believe (or trust) in Christ is nothing other than agreeing with God about our sin, on the one hand, and agreeing with God about His grace and forgiveness, on the other.
To be ready to meet Jesus, we can repent, that is, turn back to God, and trust in the grace of God to grant us forgiveness and the powerful Holy Spirit to help us live differently from day to day.
Second: We place ourselves under the authority of God’s Word. Out of Zion, where God revealed Himself to Israel and then to the world in Jesus, our lesson from Isaiah says, comes God’s “instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” Through His Word, the lesson says in verse 3, God will teach us His ways.
God’s Word is the truth against which everything we do, say, and are is to be measured. (2) To build our lives on anything else, whether it’s our own experiences or the latest scientific research, is to build on quicksand.
The Lutheran Confessions says that the Word of God in the Bible is to be treasured as a precious jewel. (3)
And in today’s lesson from Isaiah, God invites us to walk in that light.
In God’s Word, we are enlightened to see God’s passionate love for each of us, God’s desire to set us free from our bondage to sin and death, and the lengths to which He goes—even to a cross—in order to make it possible for us to return to Him.
To take hold of the life that only comes through Jesus Christ, we must stand under the authority of Scripture even when we don't and never will fully understand it.
My two heroes of the faith are Martin Luther and Billy Graham. Early in his career, Billy Graham was an evangelist with an organization called Youth for Christ. He often traveled and became pals with another Youth for Christ evangelist, Chuck Templeton. Graham says that Templeton remains the best preacher he ever heard.
Templeton, a learned man, underwent a crisis of faith in the late 1940s. He came to reject the Bible's teachings about miracles, the virgin birth of Jesus, the resurrection, and so on. (Ultimately, he became an atheist.) Because he had been so close to Graham and because Graham was impressed by Templeton's mind, personality, and preaching, Billy Graham was shaken by Templeton's rejection of the authority of the Bible. As a consequence, Graham himself began to question the reliability of the Bible. Templeton's challenge to Billy Graham--"People no longer accept the Bible as being inspired the way you do"--taunted Graham.
One evening, during a retreat in southern California, Graham took a walk into a nearby woods. He dropped to his knees by a tree stump, where he set his Bible. In the gathering darkness, he couldn't read his Bible, but he could cry out to God. Though he can't recall the exact words he used as he prayed that night, Graham does say he told God honestly that the Bible was filled with many things he couldn't comprehend or explain. But he told God, "I am going to accept this as Thy Word--by faith! I'm going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word."
As Graham explains in his autobiography, not all his questions were answered, but "a major bridge had been crossed." He knew that a great spiritual battle in his heart and mind had been fought and won. It is the same battle you and I need to fight, and, by the power of God's Spirit, can win, when we place ourselves under the authority of God's Word.
This past week, I had an appointment with the cardiologist who performed my heart stent procedure five months ago. He checked me over and asked lots of questions. "I feel optimistic about your recovery," he told me. Then, he fell into a long silence as he clicked through and considered my case history on his laptop computer. I wondered what he was thinking. Finally, he broke his silence: "I still don't know why you had a heart attack."
Folks, everyone in this sanctuary knows that, as happened to me five months ago, inexplicable things happen in life. And they can happen in a hurry. You have to be ready for anything!
But above all, you have to be ready for the advent of Jesus, for the moment when you come into His presence. If you will turn to God in repentance and faith in Jesus and if you will stand under the authority of God's Word, you will be ready for Christ's return. You will be ready for anything!
(2) The Formula of Concord, a basic confessional statement promulgated by Lutherans in 1577, expresses a Lutheran understanding of the Bible and its authority:
We believe, teach, and confess that the prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments are the only rule and norm according to which all doctrines and teachers alike must be appraised and judged, as it is written in Psalm 119:105, "Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." And Saint Paul says in Galatians 1:8: "Even if an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed." Other writings of ancient and modern teachers, whatever their names, should not be put on a par with Holy Scripture. Every single one of them should be subordinated to the Scriptures and should be received in no other way and no further than as witnesses to the fashion in which the doctrine of the prophets and apostles was preserved in post-apostolic times...
...the Holy Scripture remains as the only judge, rule, and norm according to which as the only touchstone of all doctrines should and must be understood and judged as good or evil, right or wrong...
(3) Martin Luther writes this in The Large Catechism, another of the core confessional documents which every Lutheran congregation and pastor claims as true confessions of faith:
The Word of God is the true holy thing above all holy things. Indeed, it is the only one we Christians acknowledge and have. Though we had the bones of all the saints or all the holy and consecrated vestments together in one heap, they could not help us in the slightest degree, for they are all dead things that can sanctify no one. But God's Word is the treasure that sanctifies all things. By it all the saints themselves have been sanctified. At whatever time God's Word is taught, preached, heard, read, or pondered, there the person, the day, and the work are sanctified by it...Accordingly, I constantly repeat that all our life and work must be guided by God's Word if they are to be God-pleasing or holy...
Conversely, any conduct or work done apart from God's Word is unholy in the sight of God, no matter how splendid and brilliant it may appear...
