Something Old, Something New

Matthew 13:44-52
In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus tells us that life with God is built on two strong legs: The old and the new.

In the final verse of our lesson, Jesus says: “Therefore every teacher [or, every scribe] of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” (Matthew 13:52)

What does Jesus mean?

When Jesus began teaching, preaching, and healing, He crashed into the staid orthodoxies of first century Judea like a nuclear hand grenade.

People didn’t know what to make of Him. He threatened the iron-fisted rule over people’s lives with God exerted by the scribes, the teachers, of what we know as the Old Testament.

These scribes were experts on what God’s Word said in the Old Testament, but unlike the people of faith in the Old Testament to whom that Word was first revealed--people like Abraham, Sarah, Moses, David, Ruth, Isaiah, and Rahab--they didn’t know God.

They had boiled God down to an implacable philosophical proposition, a grim judge who dispensed blessings only to those who kept His Law.

Now comes Jesus saying things like, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” (Matthew 5:17) Jesus is saying, in effect, “You can’t keep the Law fully. You’re incapable of it. The old law was meant to point you to that fact and to your need of Me. And that’s why I’m here: To obey the Law perfectly for you so that, if you will trust in and follow Me, My obedience will cover your sins and change your relationship with God. And it won’t make you feel that it’s OK to indiscriminately violate the old law. It will make you seek My help each day to be obedient, just because our relationship has been made new.”

But for all that was new about Jesus, those who really listened to and followed Him heard the echoes of the old.

The God Who, through Jesus, breathes His Holy Spirit on His Church to give it life is the same God Whose breath first gave life to Adam and Whose Spirit moved over the waters and made creation happen! In Jesus, the Word becomes flesh, God takes on our humanity, enters our lives.

The person who follows Jesus can come to know God as Father, just as Jesus did.

Because of what Jesus has done for us, we have a new respect for the old law, not because we think that if we obey it, we’ll be saved from sin, death, darkness, and futile living...but because of our thankfulness that Jesus shed His blood for us on the cross, we see that God’s Law, as reflected in the Ten Commandments, the way Jesus lived is how we aspire to live.

I took my dad to lunch the other day. I’m 63. Nonetheless, I find myself wanting to please my dad now more than ever, not because I think that he’ll withhold his love from me if I don’t, but because I know how much he loves me already.

This is like the new reality that Jesus came into this world to proclaim and to die and rise to bring into being. He moves me from feeling I have to obey God, to wanting to obey God (even though I often resist Him) because I know that He loved and died and rose for me despite the death punishment I deserve.

“God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

The scribes of the old religion were shaken by Jesus. They were afraid of what might happen if people became Jesus’ disciples and actually believed that they could speak and live intimately with God, read and know His Word, pray in Jesus’ name, teach others how to have life with God.

They wouldn’t be in control; God would be.

The Holy Spirit would be unleashed in believers’ lives, freeing them to live without fear of death, empowering them to love God and to love neighbor, confident, as our second lesson for today puts it, that nothing could separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus. (By the way, the fear of letting God take control of our thoughts didn't go out with the first century scribes. There may be nothing that terrifies any of us more than just letting go and letting God take control of our lives. "Mark," a wise older pastor told me once, "the biggest problem in the Church is that we're afraid of the Holy Spirit?")

So what difference does this all make to you and me?

Just this: The Word of God, Old and New Testaments, is the Word of God for one reason, it points us to Jesus as the way, and the truth, and the life. The Bible, this perfect and authoritative witness of God by God is a treasure chest and when we read it through the prism of Christ’s death and resurrection, it brims over with the life and love of God for us. (As someone has said, “The Bible isn’t humanity’s word about God, it’s God’s Word to humanity!”) 

To spend time in God’s Word--reading it, praying about it, reflecting on it, soaking it up not as stagnant print on a page but for what it is--an urgent love letter from God--is to know God and it is to know life. 

Old and new, it points us to the truth we read in 2 John 5:11-12: “And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” The Bible is a living storeroom and powerhouse filled with the infinite treasures of God.

The Word reveals the Gospel to us. Romans 1:16 say: “...I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.”

It is this powerful gospel that Christ detonates repeatedly when we dare, by faith, to take in God’s Word, old and new. 

In those who believe the Bible’s message, crafted by the Holy Spirit, written in the blood of Jesus, life abounds.

It ushers us into God’s Kingdom.

And just how valuable this kingdom Word is, Jesus shows in a string of parables in today’s Gospel lesson.

Jesus says the kingdom witnessed by His Word is like a treasure so valuable that when a man finds it in a field, he spends everything to have it.

It’s like pearls so amazing that when someone encounters them, they sacrifice all to have them.

It’s like a net laid down by God, a net in which you want to be caught so that you can be part of the gospel kingdom, so that you will never be separated from God.

And it is by taking from this treasury, old and new, that we who are believers in Jesus can face each day, help others to do the same, and let others know the good news of new life that they they too can have with Jesus.

Years ago, the US government worked to allow Christians who had been imprisoned for their faith in the old Soviet Union to come to this country. I remember reading in a news magazine about one of these Russian Christians who emigrated to America. In the Soviet Union, it was difficult for him to get or keep a Bible. It was forbidden to own one. But in the United States, he met people who had as many as six Bibles in their homes...many of them left unopened.

Fellow disciples of Jesus, Jesus did not spend centuries giving us His Word just so that we can ignore it.

He didn’t give us the gospel of new life through faith in Jesus so that we could blend in with the rest of the roiling, selfish, dying world.

He didn’t open the way to the Kingdom of God so that we could treat our faith like an occasional trip to McDonald’s.

We’re to be scribes of the new kingdom, steeped in God’s Word, filled with the power of the Gospel, so that we can live in the confidence of God's grace and share Christ and His Gospel with others. 

If you’re not spending time with God each day, you’re missing out on a treasury of intimacy, grace, love, and guidance.

So, please consider taking up the practice of daily quiet time. I aim to do this five days a week.

In quiet time, you read a bit of Scripture each day, ask God to show you the truth He wants you to see for that day, and ask God to help you to live that truth. Then, pray for the chance to share your faith so that you can share the kingdom of God with others.

Our Navigators’ life and learning discipleship team is now beginning to pray about who God wants to participate in the next wave of discipleship small groups. (Our goal is that one day, every member of Living Water, plus many of our friends and neighbors, will be involved with these groups.) Be open to their invitations.

But you don’t need to wait for an invitation: Seek out others with whom you can study and pray and grow together. (I or other of our Navigators team will be happy to help you get started, just as a new group of men recently has.) God’s Kingdom is available to any who willing to receive Jesus and take in His Word, old and new.

Listen: I don’t need to tell you how difficult life can sometimes get. In any given week, I speak with any number of people who feel discouraged, even hopeless.

But neither they nor we need to be kept down. The devil wants to keep us down; but Jesus wants to lift us up! Even in the midst of life’s difficulties, we can have the very power and the kingdom of God filling our lives.

The treasury of God, old and new, is open to any willing to receive it. And it should be available through any disciple willing to share it.

Today, I ask you, be that open and available disciple.

Make it your daily aim to live in and spread God’s life and love and kingdom wherever you are.

Here’s a simple plan for being a disciple: Meet God through His Word daily. Soak it up. Spill it out. Repeat each day.

Meet, soak, spill, repeat.

Meet, soak, spill, repeat.

This is the life of a disciple, a scribe of God’s Kingdom. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is the text for the worship message yesterday morning.]

Is the Biblical view of homosexuality unloving?

Genesis 1:27
Matthew 19:4-6
1 John 4:8
In thirty-two years of ministry, I have counseled with one person who confessed to being gay to me. It happened many years ago. For this person to do so took great courage; they knew my Christian convictions about the practice of homosexuality. But the reason for their telling me was clear enough: They wanted some Christian they trusted to listen to them speak of their struggles with their sexual orientation.

And so the person told me simply, “I’m gay, pastor.” I responded in the only way I knew how to as a Christian and a pastor. I put my hand on that person’s hand and told them, “I understand and I want you to know that I love you and that God loves you too.”

In telling that person that God loved them, I wasn’t encouraging them to give into their own personal impulse to engage in homosexual relationships. But just as I would use God’s love as the starting point in conversations with any person struggling with temptation, I began with God’s love.

Love is always the place God starts in helping us to deal with temptation or sin in our lives.

As Luther points out in The Small Catechism, even God’s moral law, as summarized in the Ten Commandments, begins with the words, “I am the Lord your God, Who brought you out of Egypt…”

God and His Word always begin in love. We see this in Jesus: God sent His Son Jesus into this world to save sinners; and if we are willing to turn from sin (and to keep turning from sin) and to believe in Him (and to keep believing in Him), God will save us for life with Him that lasts for all eternity.

But, as we deal with tonight’s question, “Is the Biblical view of homosexuality unloving?” we need to briefly mention a few facts we know about God through His Word and through Jesus, God’s Word made flesh.

Fact one: To suffer temptation is no sin. Every human being who has ever walked this planet, even Jesus, Who was both true God and true man, gets tempted to sin.

The orientation to homosexual behavior is no worse than the orientation to sin which is universal to human experience and no different from the particular sins that might have special appeal to us. (I often joke that we all have our own favored personal sins of specialization, along with all the other sins to which everyone else is drawn.)

Had I told the counselee who confessed to being gay that they were damned for their sexual orientation, I not only would have been unloving, I would have been lying.

Fact two: No sin is worse than any other sin. James 2:10 says: “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.”

All sin is a violation of God’s holiness and will. To judge the gay person involved with one or more people sexually to be worse than the heterosexual person involved with others sexually or than the person who routinely takes God’s name in vain, is wrong.

Sin is sin. And the wages of sin is death. But all who own their sin at the cross, trusting in what Christ accomplished there, has forgiveness and life with God.

Fact three: Love is not approval. When Jesus prevented a judgmental mob from stoning a woman caught in adultery, He didn’t tell her, “Go back and keep doing what you were doing.” He told her, "Go now and leave your life of sin." (John 8:11)

Fact four: We in the Church hold what Jesus calls “the keys to the kingdom.” That means that we have the delegated responsibility to proclaim God’s forgiveness to the repentant and His condemnation to the unrepentant.

We are to speak God’s truth, even God’s uncomfortable truth, in love (Ephesians 4:15).

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re standing in front of the church building and you see two young people go out to play in the middle of Miamsiburg-Centerville Road.

Would you say to yourself, “That must be what they like to do”?

Or would you, instead, say something to warn them of the dangers in doing what they’re doing?

Love would compel you to warn them, I think.

Just so, the loving exercise of “the keys of the kingdom” should call us to tell anyone who asks what God has to say about the unrepentant practice of homosexuality: it places those who engage in it in a state of separation from God, no matter how much we love them.

So, what exactly does God’s Word say about homosexuality?

Exodus 20:14 tells us, “You shall not commit adultery.” This is the sixth commandment, which The Small Catechism explains: “We should fear and love God so that in matters of sex we are chaste and disciplined in our words and actions, and that husband and wife love and honor each other.”

The covenant of marriage between a man and a woman is meant by God to be the exclusive place in which sexual intimacy happens.

Now, let’s be honest: Jesus says that even when a husband looks lustfully on another woman, he violates this command. So, the chances are that no human being is guiltless when it comes to the sixth commandment. Not one. (If you think you are guiltless of violating this command, see me after worship. We'll talk. But you'll have a lot of convincing to do!)

But, whatever our sexual orientation, our call remains the same, to repent and believe in the gospel, the good news of new life through Jesus (Mark 1:15).

A section of Leviticus is known as the holiness code. Unlike other parts of Leviticus, which contains ritual/sacrificial law no longer valid because Jesus has become the once-and-for-all definitive sacrifice for our sins and civil laws meant to govern a theocratic nation that no longer exists (ancient Israel), the holiness code is an elaboration by God of the ten commandments. It's part of what the theologians call God’s moral law. One elaboration of the sixth commandment is in Leviticus 18:22. God says: “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.”

Of course, some people who think that there’s a divide between the God of the Old Testament and the God revealed in Jesus will object to our even mentioning passages from the Old Testament.

Such people haven’t paid attention to either Old or New Testament.

Jesus says of the Old Testament’s moral law: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).

Yes, some may say, but Jesus never condemned homosexual intimacy as a sin.

That’s not entirely true.

Every time Jesus spoke of sexuality, He spoke of it as something that happens exclusively within a marriage between a woman and a man. He quoted Genesis: “For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will live with his wife. The two will become one” (Matthew 19:5).

Homosexual practice was far more prevalent in first century Rome than it is today; yet Jesus always puts sexual intimacy within the bounds of a heterosexual marriage with three partners: God, a woman, and a man.

So, is God’s will about sexuality and homosexuality as expressed by Jesus and in various places in Scripture unloving?

For me, this boils down to one simple question: What is God’s reason for making us sexual beings? I think that the Bible identifies three reasons.

First, God intends to acclimate us to what a relationship with God is like.

God is eternal; we are mortal.

God is spirit; we are physical.

And yet, in Jesus, God reaches out to us and calls us to be in relationship with One Who is totally different from us, totally other.

Ephesians 5 and other passages of Scripture imply that marriage is a metaphor for our relationship with God in Christ. We marry the opposite and in that relationship, God intends for us to be made as complete as it's possible to be in an earthly relationship (despite all of the ways married people have created to get in the way of that happening), just as we are made eternally complete through our relationship with Christ.

Man and woman complement each other. They are the same but different.

In Genesis 2:23 [ESV], we’re told that Adam looked on the woman God made to be his wife and declared that she was the same, but different: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”

People may experience a kind of love and sexual excitement in homosexual relationships, but they won’t be all that God intends for us.

We are most challenged to be our best selves, our fullest selves, in relationships with the other, not in those with the same.

Ephesians 5 says that husbands and wives are both to submit to each other in the same way that we are to submit to Christ. It's in the surrender to “the other” that God liberates us to be who God made us to be.

There are two other reasons that God made sexuality for married couples, I think: to provide pleasurable intimacy to one another and, when it is God’s will, to share their love with children.

In the Old Testament, Sarah gave expression to both of these purposes when she asked God about His improbable promise that she, in her nineties, would, for the first time, become the mother of a child: "After I am worn out and my lord [my husband] is old, will I now have this pleasure?" (Genesis 18:12) God’s answer was, “Yes!”

The gift of sexuality comes from God. God thought it up. He created it.

And it is a gift of love that He intends to protect from any adulteration of these three purposes.

God doesn’t say no to sexual intimacy outside of marriage because He hates us, but because He loves us and wants us to use His gift as it was (and) is intended.

In this, as in so many other aspects of our lives, even when we don't think it's true, God is love.

[You might also be interested in my take on the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. In a nutshell, as a civil matter of law for our pluralistic society, it didn't really bother me that much. Read the whole thing.]

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This was the final installment of our midweek Lenten series, Tough Questions.]

Being Shrewd Managers of God's Graces

Luke 16:1-15
[Audio of this message can be found here.]

Let’s get one thing off the table immediately as we look at the strange parable Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 16:1-15. The God we know in Jesus Christ does not commend thievery or dishonesty.

The seventh commandment still says, “You shall not steal.”

The eighth commandment still tells us: “You shall not bear false witness.”

The Savior Jesus, the foundational Truth of the universe, Who came into our world not to abolish God’s Law, but to fulfill it, would never compliment dishonesty in financial dealings. Nor would He compliment cheating. But Jesus does commend the manager’s shrewdness. And He commends the shrewd use of all that has come under His disciples’ control in this life. It remains commendable for you and me. Let's find out why.

This parable is, above all, about stewardship. Not just the stewardship of our money, but the stewardship of our whole lives.

Each of us has been given the gift of life. Stewardship is about what we do with this gift.

James 1:17 reminds us: “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” We tend to forget this and the moment we take something in hand--be it a job, a house, a car, a career, whatever--we think of it as being intrinsically, by right, ours. In perpetuity...or, until we decide to get rid of it or trade up or sell it or will it to our kids.

But that’s not what God’s Word tells us. Psalm 24:1 says: “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.”

Whatever we have, not just property and goods, but also our minds, our bodies, our health, our friends and family and spouses, aren’t ours. We only have them on loan from God. So, how will we use this life that God has given to us? That is the question Jesus challenges us to answer in this parable.

Let’s look at verse 1: “Jesus told his disciples: There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. So he called him in and asked him, “What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.”’”

The rich man isn’t quite ready to give his manager a pink slip. Maybe he’ll give the guy another--less cushy--assignment. But the rich man has heard that the manager is wasting his money.

This is curious! The manager is on the brink of getting fired or demoted because the rich man has heard rumors from gossips. He tells the manager, in effect, “I find you guilty. Now give me the evidence.”

Now, in your experiences, what sort of person is quickest to believe that someone else is cheating them, that someone else has lied to them? It’s usually someone who’s an accomplished cheat and liar themselves. They figure that everyone is as bad as untrustworthy as they are. So, when the rich man hears rumors about his manager, he believes them. We’ll get confirmation of this later in the parable.

Read on, please. “‘The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg—I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.” [The manager’s career options are dwindling.] So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, “How much do you owe my master?” “Nine hundred gallons of olive oil,” he replied. The manager told him, “Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.” “Then he asked the second, “And how much do you owe?” “A thousand bushels of wheat,” he replied. He told him, “Take your bill and make it eight hundred.”’”

Let's be clear: the manager is being completely self-serving. That's not the thing Jesus is commending.

But Jesus says that the manager is using the money owed to his master--or more accurately, forgiven portions of money owed to his master--to create a soft landing for himself--a golden parachute--after he gets fired. The manager figures that each of those whose debts were forgiven will be grateful to him and welcome them into their own households. We still have no idea from what Jesus tells us whether the manager actually had, as the gossips had reported, wasted the rich man’s possessions. But we do know this: That the IOUs the rich man was waiting to come due were now worth a lot less than they had been before.

And there’s something else we know now for sure: This rich man himself isn’t such an upright character. Old Testament law was clear in condemning usury, which it defined as loaning fellow Jews money with interest. Deuteronomy 23:19 says: “Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest.”

Yet, here was the fictional rich man in Jesus’ parable likely making loans to other Jews with interest. Why do I say that was likely? Stick with me. But I will tell you now that I believe that the rich man violated God’s law and the law of his country to make money. He was a crook. No wonder he was suspicious of the manager without a shred of evidence.

And here’s the deal. There’s a good chance that the manager reduced what the rich man’s debtors actually owed him, without interest added, under the laws of Israel. It’s likely that one guy really only owed the rich man 450 gallons of olive oil and the other really only had borrowed 800 bushels of wheat. Either way you slice it, the manager was being shrewd. The debtors would appreciate his action. And the rich man would be more likely to get a 450 gallon payback of olive oil than 900 or 800 bushel payback of wheat than 1000...just as today, lenders will pay collection agencies to get at least something out of overdue loans, pennies on the dollar.

This may explain the next verse: “[Jesus says:] The master [didn’t fire the manager, but] commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For [Jesus goes on to explain] the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light [‘People of the light’ being disciples of Jesus]. I tell you [Jesus continues], use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”

Now, don’t miss Jesus’ point. Jesus is talking about how we are to manage every blessing that comes to us in this world and whether we will be prepared for what happens beyond death. Hebrews 9:27 reminds us that “people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.”

Death, for we fallen descendants of Adam and Eve, is inevitable. It hangs over each of us, just as the loss of his way of life hung over the manager in Jesus’ parable. The question for us, as it was for the manager, is this: Will we prepare for the life to come by being good stewards--good managers--of the lives we’re living right now? Will we share the riches of God's grace with others so that, by our sharing of the Gospel and of our lives with them, they too will become Christ's disciples and be there to welcome us gratefully in eternity? This is an enormous question!

One scholar says, rightly, I think, that there are three ways we can “manage” this life that God gives to us.

One way is to be like the rich fool of Jesus’ parable in Luke 12. Jesus tells about a man who acquired so much that he decided to build bigger barns to hold all his stuff. Then, he told himself, he would relax, eat, drink, and be merry. But Jesus says: “...God said to [this rich man], ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” [Luke 12:20-21] Watch out, Jesus says, that whenever you come to life’s end, you haven’t been spending all of God’s gifts on this life. That’s short-sighted: There will be no soft landing in eternity for people like this.

Another way we can “manage” the gifts of this life--and this life itself--is to, understanding that this life will pass from our hands one day and so, ignore taking care of God's gifts to us in this life. This what fifty years ago, the hippies in communes tried to do. They weren’t going to own anything. Or take care of anything. They were just passing through, man.

Through the centuries, there have been Christian movements that have adopted this line of thinking. These folks can be, as the saying puts it, so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly good. Short as this life may be though, the gifts that come to us from God are to be taken care of, even our bodies. (By the way, have you had a physical lately?)

By His death on the cross, Jesus paid the ransom to buy us out of captivity to sin and death; even as we look forward to eternity, we owe it to Him to take care of this life and this world.

That entails being faithful to the promises we made to God and the Church when we were confirmed:

...to live among God’s faithful people, to hear His Word and share in His supper, to proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed, to serve all people, following the example of our Lord Jesus, and to strive for justice and peace in all the earth.

That’s how we’re to use the gifts God has given to us. That's how we're to live and celebrate the free gift of grace given in Christ. That’s how we’re to manage our lives while on this planet!

This leads us to the third way we can live our lives. It’s the way of the manager in Jesus’ parable. It’s the way of shrewdness. One scholar has written that the manager uses “the authority he still has in the present [world] to feather his bed for the future [world].”

Every bit of this life God has given to us is meant to be invested in eternity, in the things of Christ’s eternal kingdom. Invest your life, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, in glorifying the God Who has saved you through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

We all will get pink slips someday, our time and work on earth will be through.

But when it happens, may we stand before our Lord, gloriously spent, good managers who gave this life our all for Christ’s glory, people who, by the way we have entrusted all that we have and all the we are to Christ, have lived faithfully and wisely in response to God's goodness to us.

It will be the ultimate soft landing, right into the hand of God.

And Christ will tell us: “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.” [Matthew 25:34] It’s then that all will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that those who have managed their lives with gratitude for all that God has done for them are the shrewdest people of all. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message was shared during worship on September 18.]

Pentecost: Out of the Ditches, Into God's Kingdom

[This was shared during worship this past Sunday, Pentecost Day, with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]

Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost already was an important day on the Jewish calendar when the day we Christians often call the first Pentecost happened. For Jews, Pentecost was the fiftieth day after Passover. While Passover celebrated ancient Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt, Pentecost celebrated the giving of the law, the ten commandments, by God through Moses to Israel (and, through him, to all the world) at Mount Sinai. 

That may seem weird to us. We don’t like laws. They hem us in, keep us from doing what we want to do, control us. 

And some human laws can be unjust and oppressive, obviously.

But ancient Israel saw God’s Law, the ten commandments and the moral laws that stem from them, as good things, as blessings that marked out the boundaries of what they called shalom, a place of peace with God and neighbor and self. 

The Israelites even sang about God’s Law in their hymnal, which we know as the Psalms. “Oh, how I love Your law!” Psalm 119:97 says, for example, “I meditate on it all day long..”

God's people had a problem though: They loved God’s law. They couldn’t keep it. 

If following God’s law was like staying on a paved road marked out for driving, disobeying it was like falling into a ditch of mud. 

And like kids who have just taken a bath, Israel loved heading for the ditches of sin: the ditch of idolatry, the ditch of materialism, the ditch of wanting to fit in with others and ignore the will of God, the ditch of adultery and fornication, the ditch of false witness and character assassination, the ditch of self will, the ditch of thievery and false business and political dealings. 

Through the centuries though, even after God sent prophets to remind His people to obey His laws, as human beings they were incapable of keeping themselves out of the ditches of sin and death.

Life in the ditches leads inevitably to separation from God. And to be separated from God, the Maker of life, is to be separated from life. 

Yet, like the ancient Israelites, we can’t help ourselves. We’re born ditch-seekers. 

Some of us like some ditches better than others. But from the moment we’re born, we’re like lemmings programmed by the sin we inherit from our parents to head for the mud, to do the very sin we hate! 

We can hear and know God’s law and even delight in it. We may even spend some shameful time in condemning others who don't keep God's law in the way we think they should.

But we cannot, through the force of our own characters or wills, keep God's law.

Our only hope is the Gospel, the good news. 

The Gospel isn't some abstract story about love. 

The Gospel springs from a particular true story. 

It’s the true story of how God took on flesh in a particular human life. 

It’s the true story of Jesus, conceived by the Holy Spirit so that He would not inherit the sin that the rest of the human family inherits from our parents. 

Jesus was the perfect once-and-for-all sacrifice for the sins of the world. 

Jesus rose from the dead and offers the benefits of His sacrifice--new life--to all who believe in Him as their God and Savior. 

And Jesus came to replace the evil kingdom of sin and the dying kingdoms of this world with the kingdom of God for all who repent and believe in Him.

The new kingdom that Jesus died and rose to bring into being isn’t opposed to the law God gave through Moses. Some people have the erroneous idea that Jesus abolished God's law and has given us all a free pass to eternity.

In fact, in some ways, Jesus makes God’s Law even more demanding than it is in the Old Testament. 

In Matthew 5:21-22, for example, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said...‘‘You shall not murder’...But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister [by which Jesus, Who got angry, clearly means here sustained, vengeful, unforgiving anger] will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ [raca was a term of derision that said a person was empty-headed] is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.”

So, Jesus says to anyone who thinks that His death and resurrection are a free pass, a letter of indulgence, allowing believers to heedlessly and unrepentantly do whatever we want or believe whatever we want, no matter how disobedient or contemptuous of the will of God it may be, they’re wrong. 

“Do not think,” Jesus says in Matthew 5:17, “that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets…” 

Then He says in Matthew 5:20: “...unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Our situation would be hopeless were it not for the fact that Jesus Christ, the One Who delivers this stern message, has done for us what we can’t do for ourselves. 

He has obeyed the law. 

Perfectly. 

Jesus has kept the law and so, by His innocent death for us, has conquered the law and its stern verdict against every one of us! 

So Romans 8:1-2 tells us this: “...there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.” 

Think of that: No condemnation for those who live in the sheltering, saving, forgiving love of Christ!

Those who are saved by God’s grace through their faith in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ are pulled out of the ditch of sin and death and set on the narrow path that Jesus speaks of in Matthew 7:13-14. “Enter through the narrow gate” Jesus says. “For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” 

Jesus is the narrow path and there is life to be found nowhere else. In no legalistic religious system. In no psychobabbling fad. In nothing that this world has to offer. All of those wide and inviting paths lead to condemnation because, as they're all built around the idea that I can be good enough to warrant a pass from God, they leave us naked in our sin, worthy only of condemnation. When we follow Jesus, He clothes us in His righteousness.

All of which brings us back to Pentecost. The first chapter of Acts shows us that the first Christians experienced how Jesus’ grace can change people’s relationships with God and with each other. Jesus forgave them for abandoning Him and denying Him on the night of His betrayal. Through the crucified and risen Jesus and their faith in Him, God pulled them from the ditches of shame and guilt. They were set right with God and learning what it meant to live in the kingdom of heaven. 

But their minds, like ours, were still fogged by sin. So they ask, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” [Acts 1:6] 

Jesus tells them they need to pray, to quit striving and start surrendering. 

Then, the power of God’s Holy Spirit, the power that created the universe, would come to them. 

That’s exactly what happened on the Pentecost of our second lesson.

Like the first disciples, all who today believe in Jesus and are baptized receive the Holy Spirit. 

But, you may have noticed something: The world is a ditch and it’s so easy to wallow in its sins, to wallow in our own sins. 

This side of our own resurrections, we will never be completely free of sin. 

And, acting in our own strength, even when we think we're doing good things, we can only make things worse. 

That’s why Jesus has sent the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit gives birth to faith. 

The Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin and drives us to the cross. 

The Holy Spirit assures the repentant of forgiveness through faith in Christ. 

The Holy Spirit enables to be used by God to pull others out of their ditches.

As we submit our lives to the control and grace of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit can empower us to live differently. We begin to exhibit what Galatians 5:22-23 calls “the fruit of the Spirit,” things like “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” 

This is the life of the kingdom of heaven, the life of shalom, of peace with God, peace with others, peace with others.

The Pentecost crowd must have wondered how this kind of peace could come to them. So do we. 

How can we know peace in the midst of chaos? 

How can we have serenity in the midst of this world’s uncertainties? 

Peter knew the answer to those questions, not because he was perfect or arrogant or intelligent. Peter knew the way to peace because like the other first followers of Jesus, he had...

...seen it revealed, 

...heard its voice, 

...received bread and wine from its hand, 

...touched the hem of its garment, 

...saw it crucified and resurrected. 

Peter knew the one way to the peace for which we long. 

Peter knew the way to life with God personally because that way of life had been revealed to him, sometimes painfully, by God. 

In Acts 2:21, the last verse in our lesson, Peter shares God’s peace with the crowd. Quoting from an Old Testament passage that used the word Yawheh, I AM, God’s Name revealed to Moses the lawgiver and which we translate in our Bibles simply as LORD, Peter commended to the crowd the One he and his fellow disciples had come to call, “Lord." He commended the Lord Jesus to them. 

Peter told the crowd, “...whoever calls on the Name of the Lord shall be saved.”

Today, this week, the Holy Spirit can empower you to live each day in the assurance that, no matter how crazy, conflicted, marked by futility, sad, or even horrible and tragic the world may be, as you submit your sins, your hopes, your decisions, your family, your whole life to Jesus Christ, you are saved, again and again...from the law condemns us for our sin even as it shows us the will of God, from death, and from the devil. 

You are saved from the gossip that tears you down, from the fears that haunt you, from the temptations that allure you, from the sadness that dogs you, from sin, from death. 

To have Jesus is truly to have God’s peace.

Jesus Christ is in heaven at the Father’s right hand. But if you believe in Him and call His Name, you are not and you never will be alone. 

The Holy Spirit has come to let you know that whoever calls on the Name of the Lord Jesus--when you call  on the Name of the Lord Jesus--you are saved, safe forever in the arms of God, empowered forever to leave the ditch behind and walk as freed, redeemed, and forever loved children of God. Amen!

Why Did God Order People Destroyed in Old Testament Times?

Any time Christians start to delve into the Old Testament, the questions are bound to come up:

• Why does God call for the extermination of the disobedient of His people?
• Why does God command the extermination of other peoples?
• Is this the same God we meet in Jesus and the New Testament? (A corollary to which might be, "How is the God of the Old Testament different from the deity claimed by terrorists who associate themselves with Islam?")

Good questions.

They came up again today during the noon Journey Through the Bible discussion of Deuteronomy, chapters 1 to 21, at Living Water Lutheran Church.

What I can offer is not so much answers as approximations, guesses of a believer and a student of Scripture.

The first thing to be said is that the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament, revealed in Jesus Christ. "I and the Father are one," Jesus says in John 10:30. 

Jesus never once repudiated any action of God in the Old Testament. In fact, He upheld them and all of God's commands, even those we deem problematic. 

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets..." Jesus says in Matthew 5:17. 

So, if there are things about God in the Old Testament that don't seem to comport with our picture of what God should be like, clearly we need to be willing to have our picture amended or expanded.

This wouldn't be a first, of course, for believers. In last Sunday's Gospel lesson, Mark 8:27-38, Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, God's anointed redeemer king. But when Jesus explains that in His role as Messiah (or Christ), He would have to be rejected, suffer, and die, Peter flinched. He rebuked Jesus for misunderstanding what it meant to be Messiah. Jesus forcefully disabused Peter of his point of view. As Messiah and God-in-the-flesh, He told Peter that He would have to change His definition of Christ's role. We must do the same when we encounter Biblical portrayals of God that jar our preconceived notions of what God should be like.

The second thing to be said is that God doesn't desire the destruction of any human being. In Ezekiel 18:23, God says: "Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?" 

And in the New Testament, the apostle Peter writes: "The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." (2 Peter 3:9).

God wants all people to turn from sin (for more on the two ways in which the Bible uses the term sin, see here) and trust in Him so that have life with Him. But God doesn't force repentance on people. 

The third thing is that the peoples outside of Israel whom God ordered destroyed had lived in open and long-term rebellion to God and utterly refused to repent. In Old Testament times, when people refused to repent, it led to disastrous consequences. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. Once God had called His people, Israel, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, into being, they were often used as instruments of His justice against unrepentant peoples.

Throughout the first 21 chapters of Deuteronomy, for example, God sends His people with orders to utterly destroy nations who engaged in idolatry--worshiping things other than God as God--and, as a result, engaged in injustice. Failure to worship God as God always results in injustices. When God is supplanted as God in people's minds, they feel they have license to play god with anyone they wish.

On the other hand, cities and kingdoms that repented in Old Testament times were spared, their cultures revived. Think of Nineveh after hearing the reluctant Jonah preach.

The Old Testament pattern is that God allowed peoples to engage in rebellion for long stretches, often sending emissaries to them to call for repentance, desiring that they turn to Him and live. But there would come a point of no return, when the rebellion, idolatry, injustice, barbarism, and hedonism reached such a point that God would stand for no more. Then the orders for destruction would come. (I believe that this still happens today.)

God would also order Israel to engage in the annihilation of others peoples lest, on conquering a land, His people adopt the idolatries of the conquered peoples. 

The fourth thing to mention has to do with why God called for the deaths of people within Israel for their rebellion. Israel was called together by God to be holy, a people set apart by Him not because of their inherent virtue or intrinsic strength. In fact, God's people are nothing without God making something of them. But God called Israel into existence in order to be "a light to the nations." 

Israel thus had an important role to play in the salvation of the world. It was to Israel that God revealed that God cares about relationships--our relationship with Him, our relationship with each other. 

To Israel, God revealed the nature of sin and that salvation comes not through works, but by faith in the God Who cares about us despite our unworthiness (check out Deuteronomy 19:1-12 and Ephesians 2:8-10, for example). 

And God set aside Israel to be the people that would become the nursery and the home of God in the flesh, Jesus Christ, Whose death and resurrection would make it possible for all people--Jews and Gentiles--to repent and believe in Him and live eternally with God. 

In a sense, the life of ancient Israel was like Lent on the modern Christian calendar. God formed and disciplined a people of His own making so that some--the early Christians, all of whom were from God's people Israel--would be ready to receive redemption. 

In Old Testament times, God purged His people of idolatry and sin and the resultant injustice so that at least some who paid heed to Him would know the Savior when He arrived in our world. 

God refused to risk having His truth utterly adulterated by countenancing false faith among His chosen people. This was the historic burden of God's people. 

Tevye, the lead character of Fiddler on the Roof, might well have spoken for God's Old Testament people when he said to God: "I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can't You choose someone else?"

There are several things that distinguish all of this from the justifications of contemporary terrorist groups for their activities. The most important reason though is that in Jesus Christ, God has taken all the destruction for sin, idolatry, and injustice upon Himself. He stands in our place on the cross so that, when He rises all who surrender to Him may rise with Him.

Christ then, has ushered in a new covenant. the fulfillment of the old covenant initiated with the likes of Abraham and Moses.

In Christ, God has destroyed the power of sin and death and their earthly manifestations (like injustice) over the lives of those who repent and believe in God revealed in Jesus. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says: "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

The call of God's people today, the Church, is to proclaim and live the good news of new life through faith in Jesus Christ. This is how God conquers today. This is how God displaces evil. 

But all that God ordained in Old Testament times was a necessary prerequisite for the coming of Jesus and for the Church's proclamation about Him. May we be faithful in our call to proclaim Jesusl!