Ruth and Jonah (Midweek Lenten Worship, Part 3)

[Here, you'll find the video of the live stream of tonight's Midweek Lenten devotional worship service with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, and the text of the message shared.]



Jonah 1:1-17

The first thing to be said about the Old Testament book of Jonah is that it’s not a fish story. Only three of its 42 verses deal with the great fish we immediately think of when we think of Jonah. The fish is only one of His creatures that God sends to rescue Jonah throughout the four short chapters of this book. 

It should be said though, that we may be tempted to wonder why God even bothers with rescuing Jonah. He’s rebellious, selfish, even hateful. 

But then, when others observe us, people who are, by baptism and belief in Jesus, simultaneously saints and sinners, the same question may arise: Why is it that God bothers with people who can, at times, be so fervent in confessing their faith and also be so rebellious, selfish, and hateful?

As we began this series two Wednesdays ago, we said that the Old Testament books of Ruth and Jonah compel us to ask some big questions. And we’ve begun to answer them. 

In Ruth, we saw that God’s care for His own people–represented by Naomi, Elimelech, and their two sons–didn’t stop at the border between Israel and Moab, where they went as hungry refugees; God, Yahweh, was still their God and with them outside the promised land. 

We've learned that God was equally concerned about people outside His Old Testament covenant. Through His Word, shared by Naomi and her family, Ruth, a Moabite foreigner, came to believe in God, even becoming the great-grandmother of David, Israel’s second king and the ancestor of the family into which Jesus, the Savior of the world was to be born. 

In turning tonight to Jonah, we see our questions more fully answered by God’s Word. The God we know in Jesus isn’t confined to particular places. He’s got the whole world, actually the whole universe, in His hands.

Jonah lived more than two hundred years after the time of Ruth. By his time, Israel had torn into two: a kingdom to the south, often called Judah, with worship centered in Jerusalem, and a kingdom to the north, called Israel, whose worship life would eventually settle in Samaria. 

Both kingdoms rebelled against God. But Israel, the northern kingdom, was the most notorious in its idolatries and mixing of other religions with the worship of Yahweh. Nonetheless, the north produced great people of God, including the prophet, Elijah. The ancient rabbis believed that Jonah was the son of the widow of Zarephath who God raised from the dead through Elijah. That may or may not be true, but we do know that Jonah was one of the prophets at the king’s court in 2 Kings.

Jonah is the fifth of the twelve minor prophets whose books are bundled together in the Old Testament. Unlike the books of the other prophets, which are mainly composed of the oracles God gave them to speak, the book of Jonah is a historic narrative that tells us about what happened when God commissioned Jonah to speak God’s Word to the Ninevites, when Jonah refused to do so, when God again called Jonah to go to Nineveh, and when Jonah finally delivered God’s Word to the Ninevites. 

But what is a prophet? Above all, God called prophets to deliver God’s call to people to turn to God in repentance and faith. That's important to keep it in mind.

Now, to our text for tonight, Jonah 1:1-17. It begins, as we see in other prophets’ stories, with the Word of God coming to Jonah. He’s to go to Nineveh to preach against the Ninevites and their wickedness which, God says, “has come up before Me.” (Jonah 1:2) 

Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria, a nation that had treated God’s people harshly. The archeological remains of Nineveh exist today not far from the Iraqi city of Mosul, about 250 miles from Baghdad. 

There would have been great dangers for Jonah in going into enemy territory. But that, as we’ll see, isn’t why Jonah didn’t want to preach to the Ninevites. He was concerned that the Ninevites might repent, trust in God, and be welcomed into relationship with God. But Jonah hated the Ninevites and didn’t want them to walk with God.

So, instead of going to Nineveh, Jonah books passage on a ship in the Mediterranean to someplace called Tarshish. Jonah thinks that he can “flee from the Lord.” (Jonah 1:3) In his anger with God, Jonah seems to have momentarily forgotten that the presence of the Creator of the universe can’t confined to his homeland. King David, who lived several centuries earlier knew better than that. “If I go up to the heavens, you are there;  if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me…” David writes in Psalm 139:8-10. God is with us even when we don’t want Him to be!

As you know, a huge storm erupts. Each of the sailors and passengers prays to their own gods and toss cargo overboard to lighten the weight of the ship. But nothing stops the storm or settles the ship. The other passengers cast lots to determine who’s at fault for this life-threatening storm. The lot falls to Jonah. Although running from God, Jonah, a saint by God’s grace and a sinner by birth, confesses his faith to Gentiles. Now, this is ironic. In confessing his faith in God to Gentiles on that ship, Jonah is doing the very thing God wanted to send him to Nineveh to do. (Another case of, “Either God gets His way or God gets His way.) Jonah tells his shipmates: “I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” (Jonah 1:9) He explains that he has displeased God by running from the mission God has given to him and that to save themselves, the passengers and crew must throw him into the sea. 

Not wanting to be responsible for Jonah’s death, the Gentile crew try to row toward land, but to no avail. Then they do what Jonah won’t get around to doing until chapter 2: They pray to Yahweh, the God we know in Jesus, the great I AM! Jonah is evangelizing Gentiles despite himself! 

Finally, Jonah is thrown overboard and a dead calm descends on the sea. Then we’re told, “At this the men greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord [that is, in the original Hebrew, Yahweh] and made vows to him.” (Jonah 1:16) 

This is not the last time that Jonah, perhaps the original Lutheran–a reluctant evangelist–is used to convince others to trust in God even as he, listening to his sinful nature, refuses to trust in God himself. Jonah is like you and me, maybe, and definitely like the apostle Paul who confessed that his sinful nature often got in the way of his faith in God: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” (Romans 7:15)

Thoughts like these may have been going through Jonah’s mind as he floundered in the sea. But, God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” (Exodus 34:6) 

God was faithful to Jonah even when Jonah was faithless to God. He sent a great fish to swallow Jonah and save him from death. 

The grace of God which He extends to us now in Jesus Christ isn’t a license for us to commit sin, of course. 

But God’s grace, His charitable love for sinners, even sinners who believe in Him, is tough and resilient. God is unwilling to quickly give up on anyone. 

That’s why eight-hundred years after Jonah, God would take on human flesh in Jesus Christ to die on a cross for our sins and rise from the dead to offer life with God to all who repent and believe in Him. 

God doesn’t give up on Ninevites, Jonahs, or us…or that neighbor somewhere in your life or in your world you don’t like, the way Jonah didn’t like the Ninevites. 

In Jesus Christ, we know that God never tires of calling out to us as Jesus did at the beginning of his earthly ministry: “The time has come…The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15) 

More about the reluctant Jonah and the good news God has for us all next week.

How God Makes Marriages Possible

[This message was prepared for a wedding that took place on Saturday.]

1 Corinthians 13:4-5
Emma and Kyle, I like the words from the Bible that you chose to have read here today. Well, mostly I like them. They are from the Word of God, after all. But I have to confess to finding them a little frightening too.

Just to remind you and everyone else what the words are, I’ll read them again. This is 1 Corinthians 13:4-5: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

That description of love was written by Saint Paul, the apostle, back in about 55 AD. It’s part of what’s often called the love chapter of the Bible, chapter 13 of Paul’s letter to the Christian church in the Greek city of Corinth. Words from this chapter are often read at weddings. That’s good because Paul’s picture of love is one to which anyone with a sound mind and a beating heart can agree. You can do so whether you have deep faith or no religion at all.

Paul originally wrote these words though, to a church that was torn with conflict. He wanted to remind its members of what love is: patient, kind, not envious, not boastful, nor proud, nor hurtful of others, unwilling to keep a record of the wrongs done to us by others. If your church relationships are going to be all that they need to be, Paul was saying, you need to live with this kind of love for each other.

But guess what? For any relationship to be everything we want it to be, there must be this kind of love. That includes marriage. I’m getting to the frightening part. The kind of love Paul is talking about has only ever been purely displayed on this earth by one person. That person is the One revealed to be truly God and truly human, Jesus. Jesus displayed this kind of love when He died on a cross as punishment for our sins and faults, not His; our failure to love, not His. Jesus was and is sinless and perfect. I’m not. He always loves. I don’t.

And that’s what I find so frightening. I know what love is. I know that I need to live with this kind of love toward others to make my relationships work, including my marriage relationship. But I was born in sin, a condition I inherited just by being a member of the human race, born out of sync with God. Because of this, my tendency is always to look out for number one. The love that all good relationships need is foreign to my nature. I feel like Paul who confesses in another place, the good “I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15).

Fortunately, for me..and for you, Emma and Kyle, our relationships do not have to fall prey to our imperfect capacity to love. It’s possible, through faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, to be filled with the love that sustains marriages, helps our marriages and helps us as human beings to become all that we want to be, all that I know the two of you aspire to be as you begin your married life together. It’s a matter of daily turning to Christ and daily putting on Christ.

To turn to Christ is to turn to God, the only true source of love. It’s also to turn away from sin, darkness, and death. The Bible says that when we turn to Christ, we “are being transformed into his image (2 Corinthians 3:18).” As I turn to God in the name of Jesus, because of Jesus, God fills me with a renewed life. He corrects my wrongs and empowers me to live differently toward my spouse today than I did yesterday. Speaking for myself, I can say that when I repent daily, receiving forgiveness for my sins and new power for living, God renews my commitment to being a better husband today than I was yesterday. As we turn to Jesus, with honesty and trust, we become more like Jesus: more able to love as we have been loved, to forgive as we’ve been forgiven, to understand others as God understands us, to live in relationships of mutual sacrifice and commitment.

To put on Christ is to let Him live in and through us. The Bible speaks of clothing “yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 13:14).” For me, this means when my energy is low, my frustration high, and my capacity for empathy is bottomed out, Christ blankets me with Himself and I live, love, and react to others, including my wife Ann, with love and grace. We still will disagree sometimes. After all, as someone has said, if two people agree on everything, at least one of them is irrelevant. But when we put on Christ, He makes it possible for us to speak the truth to one another in love, to resolve our conflicts before the sun goes down, to do for others as we want them to do for us, including the “others” with whom we share the marital bed.

Kyle and Emma, today you embark on what would be an impossible task if you thought you could have a solid marriage built solely on your human capacity to love each other. That tank can run dry in the face of financial difficulties, disagreements, family responsibilities, and setbacks. Jesus means it when He says, “Apart from me, you can do nothing.” That matches my experience in life: I can do nothing without the inspiration, the permission, and the power of God that’s ours through Jesus. But if you will root your lives and your marriage in Christ, you will find that whatever the joys and sorrows, victories and defeats, advances or disappointments, your love will grow stronger. Your marriage will grow stronger. You will find that you can do all things through the crucified and risen Jesus who fills His people with strength, especially the strength to love. That’s what I pray for the two of you today and always. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Radical Makeover

[This was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio during both this morning's traditional and contemporary worship celebrations.]

Mark 8:27-38
Imagine a scene with me. You're in your doctor's office for a consultation. You’ve had some tests and now you're back to see the doc to learn the results. She enters the office and says, "It’'s serious and the prognosis is not good." Your heart sinks.

Then, she says, "But I have a treatment that's going to make everything OK...I'm going to give you a facelift."

You know that can't be right: When you're up against a major illness, a superficial remedy won't do. In the face of radical maladies, only radical therapies stand a chance.

We human beings are confronted with a major malady.

It's called death and it's the result of sin.

You and I were created in the image of God, the pinnacle of God's creation. But sin has distorted our natures. In fact, one Biblical word for sin is taken from the experience a person has looking at their reflection in a pool of water, then having that reflection distorted when a stone is thrown into the water. The image gets distorted.

Because the human race is the pinnacle of the creation, the Bible says that all creation groans under the weight of our sin, the distortion of God's image in each of us.

The Bible uses the word, sin, in two different ways.

One way the Bible talks about sin is as a condition of our birth, original sin. This is what David is talking about in Psalm 51:5: "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me." If you had human parents, you were born sinful, too. Sin is a debt we owe to God. You and I are born with a debt so crippling we could never possibly pay it off.

But if that sounds bad, it gets worse. Being born in sin means that we have an inborn inclination to add to our debts by committing sins. This is what the Lutheran confessions call concupiscence. This is the other way the Bible speaks of sin: a particular violation of the will of God as expressed in the Ten Commandments: murder, taking God's Name in vain, failing to help our neighbor in need.

Because of the condition of original sin, our sinfulness is stubbornly evidenced in all our thinking, speaking, and living. Because we are born sinners, we sin naturally.

In Romans 7:15, the apostle Paul writes: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do [obey God’s commands] I do not do, but what I hate I do."

We are born in sin and we find ourselves incapable of refraining from sin.

And the Bible doesn’t soft pedal what that means: "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23).

"Wait," we might say. "I'm not perfect. But I've never committed any of the really big sins. I've never murdered. I've never committed adultery. I've never stolen."

James 2:10 says: "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it."

So, in sin, we have a major illness and the prognosis is death. Superficial therapies won’t do. That's what Jesus is talking about in today's Gospel lesson.

Turn to Mark 8:27-38 (page 705), please. Near the beginning of a conversation with the disciples, Jesus asks them, "Who do you say I am?” In Mark 8:29, Peter says, "You are the Messiah [or, the Christ]."

The title, Christ (from Christos as it appears in the New Testament, which was written in Greek) or Messiah (from the Hebrew in which the Old Testament was written), means Anointed One. The kings of God's people were always anointed with oil on being enthroned. The Old Testament had repeatedly foretold of an ultimate Messiah who would bring God’s rule to earth.

Through the centuries, certain popular expectations developed about the coming Christ or Messiah. The people of first-century Judea, the place to which Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, came to live, die, and rise, thought that the Messiah would make what would amount to cosmetic changes, the moral equivalent of a facelift as a cure for cancer.

To them, the problems they faced had nothing to do with themselves or their own deficiencies. (This is a common theme in human history. The late Karl Menninger once quoted a folk song that said, "Everything I do that's wrong is someone else's fault.")

Jesus' fellow Judeans wanted a king who would toss the Romans out of their land. They wanted an end to oppressive government regulations. They wanted the rich to pay their fair share in taxes and they wanted to the Romans to ease up on the poor. They wanted a king who would do their bidding. Their idea of what God should do in their lives was very different from what God had in mind.

That's why Peter's declaration of faith in Jesus as the Messiah was dangerous. Jesus had to instruct the disciples on what it means to confess Jesus as the Christ. He didn't want to feed their false expectations. Jesus had come to do more than offer facelifts on dying people!

Look at Mark 8:31: "He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again."

The therapy for our sin, Jesus is saying, begins with Him.

He, Who never once sinned, would undergo the death we deserve for our sin so that the debt can be paid for all who repent and believe in Jesus.

But when Peter heard Jesus predict that He would suffer, be rejected, and be killed, he couldn’t take it. It certainly did sound like a very compelling campaign platform!

Look at Mark 8:32: "Peter took him [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke him." The word rebuke, epitimao in the Greek in which Mark originally wrote, means to warn, upbraid, condemn, set straight.

Imagine this: Peter has just declared Jesus to be God's Anointed King and now he has the audacity to tell Jesus how to do His job!

Verse 33: "But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ he said. ‘You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.’"

When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, you'll remember, he tried to lure Jesus away from suffering, rejection, and the cross. He did so because if Jesus was faithful in taking these agonies onto Himself, He would pay our debt in full and thereby empower all who turn from sin and trust in Him as their God to be raised just as God the Father raised Jesus on the first Easter.

Jesus knew that He needed to fulfill His purpose for coming to earth, whatever pain He caused Himself. He couldn't let Satan stand in His way.

Now Jesus applies the name of Satan to Peter!

Peter may have thought that He was doing a nice thing, like the church member who says, "Pastor, I know that the Bible says that Jesus is the only way to eternity with God, but you make people feel uncomfortable when you tell the truth like that."

"Niceness" of the kind Peter exhibits here leads people away from God.

"Niceness" like this suits Satan's purposes just fine. Jesus, in essence, is telling Peter,

In fact one of the great afflictions of the Christian churches in North America and Europe today is that too often, we've become the Church of Nice rather than the Church of Christ.

Jesus was telling Peter, in essence: "I am the great Physician and My suffering, rejection by others, and death on a cross are the first part of the cure. So, Peter, get out of My way!"

Then, Jesus gives the second part of His radical therapy for our sin and death.

Look at verses 34 and 35: "...he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it."

Here we see that to believe that Jesus is the Christ--the King, the Lord of all--is more than just saying the right words on Sunday mornings.

To believe that Jesus is the Messiah is, first of all, to surrender ourselves, even to the point of discomfort and death, to God's only aim for our lives, our sole aim in life.

God's sole aim for our lives is articulated in 2 Corinthians 3:18, which says: "But we all [all of us who trust in Christ as God and Savior], with uncovered face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."

If sin has distorted the image of God within us, it's God's aim to infuse us with the image of God the Son so that we can begin to experience human life as God intended for it to be lived.

God aims to make us over into the very image of Jesus!

As we trust in Jesus each day, the Holy Spirit works a miracle: We who have been distorted by sin are made over in the image of Christ!

It doesn't happen fully within our time on this earth.

And on the way to our resurrection from the dead, we won't avoid suffering, rejection, or death any more than Jesus did.

But we will become more and more like Jesus.

1 John 3:2 says, "Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."

So, to believe in Jesus means, first of all, to surrender to Him even to the point of discomfort and death.

To believe that Jesus is the Messiah is, secondly, to embrace the life style of Jesus.

When, through Jesus' death and resurrection, you understand that you are number one in God's eyes, you’re freed from “looking out for number one."

Philippians 2:3-4 says: "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others."

John Stott tells the story of a college classroom in India. The professor, a Hindu, realized that one of his students was a Christian. "If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ," the professor told the student, "India would be at your feet tomorrow." That professor could as easily say that to any Christian in this country: "If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ, America would be at your feet."

No Christian wants to have others at their feet, of course. Like our Lord, we come to serve, not to be served.

But our joy as Christians is only made complete when we share Christ with others and they too, come to believe in Jesus as the Christ.

Sin and death threaten to separate us from God for eternity. God's cure is radical, but sure. It begins with the Christ, God the Son, suffering, dying, and rising for us. And it's fulfilled when, after confessing Jesus with our lips, we confess Him with our lives, taking up our crosses and following Him: submitting ourselves to the death of our old sinful selves, committing ourselves to letting God make us over in the image of Jesus Himself, and embracing the very life of self-sacrifice and unstinting love that Jesus lived.

May God give us the power to have a faith that's more than words, a faith that shows in our whole lives.

May we submit to the radical cure that gives us life with God forever!

Amen

The Christian Creed v. the American Creed

Among the reasons that, for all the lip service given to faith in our public life, Christianity isn't entirely at home in the United States is that the value most highly prized by Americans isn't the highest value commended by God.

If you ask the average American what the ultimate value is, the one thing for which they would be likeliest to fight to the death, I think the answer would be freedom.

On the other hand, though the Christian gospel--the good news of forgiveness and new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ--brings the ultimate freedom to people, setting them free to be the people God made them to be and not what sin, their own or others', dictates, freedom is not the ultimate value of Christian faith.

The ultimate value of Christian faith is love.

Christian love is self-giving love. It willingly divests itself of what the world knows as freedom in order to love others.

This is the love that Jesus gives.

The Christian gospel tells us that Jesus divested Himself of the freedom of being God in order to take on humanity and undertake love's greatest deed: God, unblemished by sin, submitting to death without resistance for His beloved, the human race, then rising to take an eternal kingdom, not for Himself, but for the benefit of all who believe in Him.

Christians are then called to live out the same sort of self-giving love. Paul writes in the New Testament book of Philippians:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:4-11)

Jesus has the Name above all names not because He lived and died for freedom, but because He lived and died and rose for love.

And He calls us to give His kind of love the ultimate place in our lives. 1 Corinthians 13:13 says: "And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."

When freedom is your ultimate value, you can become a monster: self-centered, ego-driven, materialistic. Make freedom your ultimate value and you will ultimately be enslaved by the things you chase as an expression of your freedom. You will be separated by a self-constructed wall from God, grace, and other people.

If freedom is your ultimate value, you might love, after a fashion.

But if God's love is your ultimate value, you also will be truly free.

And this brings up another reason Christianity doesn't entirely fit with our American culture. Americans are taught to believe in self-sufficiency, the notion that we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and that, if we decide to be loving, or free, or decisive, or whatever, we can make it happen.

But no Christian is taught to believe that she or he can resolve to be loving or anything else. Christians know that resolutions and good intentions won't change us. Only Christ can do that. That's why the apostle Paul writes in Romans: "I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate" (Romans 7:15). And later, "Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:24-25) Only the love of God, given in Christ, can set us free to be our best selves.

This applies especially to the ultimate value of love. We may learn over time to be loving by letting ourselves be loved by the God we see in Jesus, by submitting ourselves to no master but Jesus.

We open our wills to Jesus and let Him make us over into His image, including taking His love as the ultimate good in this life and the next. We cling to the words of John:

In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 1:10)

There have been Christians imprisoned for their faith in Christ who were infinitely more free than the jailers who held them and had the freedom to go wherever they wanted. That's because freedom is, in the end, not about getting to do what you want to do, it's about getting to be the person the God of love sets you free to be through Jesus.

I love my country. But I'll take "faith, hope, and love" over "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." That's because in Christ, happiness has already pursued me. So has love. I don't have to go looking for it. I simply let Jesus Christ in. And that, by the by, brings freedom!

Prayer (Part 3 of a 4-Part Series)

[This was shared during the 10:15 worship service with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

Genesis 3:1-7, 22-24
Over the past several weeks, we’ve been looking at the Lord’s Prayer as a model for all our praying. Today, we’re going to look at the sixth petition of the prayer: “And lead us not into temptation.” (Or, "Lord, don't allow us to be led into temptation.)

The earlier petitions of the Lord’s Prayer may find us wanting to raise objections. But this petition causes us to raise lots questions, like:

• What exactly is temptation and why should I resist it? 
• If God wants me to not sin, why does He allow temptation to sin happen? 

Questions like these are almost accusatory in tone, indicting God for perceived unfairness. But are they fair to God?

For some answers, let’s go back to the garden of Eden, where the first human beings were subjected to the first temptation to sin.

Please turn to our first lesson for today, Genesis 3:1-7, 22-24.

Before delving into that passage, let your eyes go up to Genesis 2:24-25 for a moment. In verse 24, where we’re told that, “...a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” One man, one woman, one flesh united under the blessing and guidance of God: This is God’s definition of marriage and it’s one that, according to both Matthew 19:5 and Mark 10:8, Jesus, God in the flesh, would underscore thousands of years later.

The first human beings were naive and guileless, without sin, and totally in sync with God and each other.

In Genesis 2:25, we’re told: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” Mark Twain once said, “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” As created, Adam and Eve had no need to blush. They had desires, of course: to please God, to love and please one another, to do the work God had given them to do. But they knew nothing about sin, which is desiring otherwise good things at the wrong times, or in the wrong ways, or for the wrong reasons. Soon though, the desires of Adam and Eve are going to be altered in destructive and death-dealing ways because of their unwillingness to resist the temptation to sin.

The agent who brought temptations to them was the serpent, who we can take as a stand-in for Satan.

The serpent asks the woman in Genesis 3:1, “Has God told you that you can’t eat of any of the trees in the garden.” The woman, whose husband we’re told in Genesis 3:6, was right there with her, answers truthfully in verses 2-3: “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’”

So far, so good. The woman is doing well in this interchange with temptation. Like Jesus, who would be tempted in the wilderness many thousands of years later, Eve is able to resist the serpent because she knows and remembers the Word of God.

If you and I are serious about resisting temptation and living lives that express our thanks to God for the gift of new life that belongs to all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ, we will take the time to read the Word of God and so know the mind and the will of God. We’ll also pray and ask God to help us resist all temptations to sin.

But, unless we keep in prayerful contact with God, temptation can make our brains go fuzzy. We become susceptible having God’s Word twisted and turning us inside out. We find it easy to rationalize away the seriousness of the sins to which we’re being tempted.

Look at verse 4. “Then the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” Notice what the serpent is doing here.

First: He’s trying to drive a wedge between God and the woman. In effect, he’s asking, “Why is God such a spoilsport? What pleasure is he trying to deny you? What right does God have to hold anything back from you?”

When you and I are tempted to sin, we might be hounded by similar thoughts:

“It’s just a little thing. The company (or the government, or the school, or the church) will never miss it.”

Or, “I think I’m entitled to a little pleasure after all these years of living with such an uncaring husband (or wife).”

Or, “This isn’t really gossip. I’m just passing on information so that my friend will be better informed and know what to pray about.”

Rationalizations like these drive wedges between God and us.

The second thing the serpent is doing with the woman is telling the truth in a lying way. The woman wouldn’t die...right away...for her sin. Eve and Adam, who had heretofore, known only good would, to their regret and shame, know about evil after biting into the fruit and it would, eventually, bring their deaths.

But the serpent didn't tell the whole truth. He left parts of the truth out of the telling. When the sin to which we're tempted offers momentary thrills or pleasures or when it makes us feel powerful or exceptional, we become susceptible to listening to such lies. When we're hell-bent on sin, we don't care about the fine print. We develop spiritual amnesia, forgetting that all unrepented, unforgiven sin will always leave us dead and separated from God, from others, from our best selves, from life.

Third: The serpent is effectively telling the woman that she has a right to be just like god. Listen: Human beings are the pinnacle of creation, the only of God’s species made “in the image of God.” It was for us that God took on flesh, died on a cross to take our punishment for sin, and rose from the dead to open up eternity to all who believe in God the Son, Jesus Christ. But we are not God and, contrary to the teachings of some religions like Mormonism, according to the Word of God, we never will be. But all temptation, in a way, tries to feed us this lie.

We see what happens when we forget the Word of God and allow temptation to get in the way of our relationship with God in verse 6: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.”

Adam and Eve rebelled against God and through the inheritance we all receive from them, ensured that, at birth, each of us is a sinner with an inborn love for doing what we want to do.

We’re born knowing all about evil, which is why maybe the first concept every one of us understands as babes in the cribs is: “I, me, mine!”

Self-centeredness is our default mode and we’re born with a love for ourselves that has to be taught by the grace given in Christ to make room for God and others. That’s why we need the Savior Jesus to bridge the gap between us and make it possible for our fellowship with God and with others to be restored through a bond of love borne of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Now, it would be easy for us to say that since we’re born as sinners who want to sin and God loves us so much, it must mean that God approves of our sin.

Pastor Erwin Lutzer  once knew a kleptomaniac, a person with a compulsion to steal. He told Lutzer, “I’ve always wanted to steal as far back as I can remember. There’s no question in my mind that it’s genetic.” He may have been right; he may have been genetically disposed to kleptomania.

But just because he was genetically predisposed to theft--just because he was “born that way”--didn’t mean that God gave him the green light to steal.

Everyone of us is genetically predisposed to sin and we all like some sins more than we like others. Yet every one of is told to obey the ten commandments and to repent when we violate them. And all of us are commanded by Jesus to pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” And we’re all told to turn from sin and to trust in Christ alone for all that we need, now and in eternity.

And if we want to resist the temptations we feel ourselves subjected, the God we know in Christ can help us resist temptation. In James 4:7-8, we’re told: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.” When tempted by sin, move closer to God and further from the sin.

But, if God wants us to stay away from sin, why did God allow temptation to come to Eve and Adam...and to us?

Think of things in this way: God intended for you and me to have a special relationship with Him. As some of you have heard me say before, God could have created robots who, as He loved them, had no choice but to love God back. But God wanted (and wants) a true relationship of love with us. God wants us to choose to love Him. And the only way we can choose to love Him is if we have the choice not to love Him, not to obey His will for our lives. Without our having the option to not have faith in the God we know in Christ, our confessions of faith are meaningless. That’s why God allowed (and allows) temptation in this world.

Now here’s the scary thing: Because of the genetic predisposition to sin you and I have inherited from Adam and Eve, we do not have free will. “We are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves,” we say. Martin Luther called this “the bondage of the will.” Turn to Romans 7:15, please. Paul writes about his own bondage to sin: “...what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate [sin], that I do...” A few verses later he confesses that it’s sin that dwells within him. Paul would throw up his hands in despair, knowing that he would be forever separated from God, consigned to hell for eternity, except for one thing.

Look at verse 24: “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God--through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Whenever we repent for sin--turn away from it, renounce it--and trust in the crucified and risen Jesus as our God, God forgives our sins and gives us the power to resist temptation today and to look forward to eternity with God!

James 1:13 says: “No one, when tempted, should say, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil and He Himself tempts no one.”

We are tempted instead by the desires that come to us from the devil, from a sinful, fallen world, and from our own corrupted DNA.

But, when facing temptation, we have a great promise from God. Turn please to 1 Corinthians 10:13. “No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to [all people]; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.”

What temptation are you facing today? It could be the temptation to fudge on your taxes or Medicare forms, to lie about the work you did on the 4H project, or something else. We can be infinitely creative in finding ways to violate God’s moral law, the ten commandments. Whatever temptation you face, if you’re intent on living a life that thanks God for the cross and empty tomb of Jesus, God will give you a way of escape from both temptation and sin.

Pray, “Lead me not into temptation, Lord. In Jesus’ Name and by the Holy Spirit’s power, help me to resist this temptation.”

If you’re like me, you probably have to pray that prayer hundreds of times every day in the face of multiple temptations.

But, I promise that when you pray that prayer sincerely, with a heartfelt desire for God above all else, God will lead you in the right direction.

Your relationship with God, the most important relationship you can have, will grow stronger, your character will grow stronger, and you will move closer to being the person God made you to be in eternity.

And, as we learn to live more as the people God made us to be, we know more of the true joy that Adam and Eve experienced before giving into temptation.

“Lord, lead us not into temptation.” Amen

"People Get Ready": A Look at This Sunday's Gospel Lesson (December 7, 2008)

[This week, to help people prepare for worship at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, the congregation I serve as pastor, and at other churches that use the lectionary associated with the Church Year, I'm not going to discuss all the appointed lessons. You might want to read all of them, linked below. But my focus here will be on the Gospel lesson only. I hope that you find it helpful.]

Bible Lessons for the First Sunday in Advent (Year B):
Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8

The Prayer of the Day:
Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare the way of your only Son. By his coming strengthen us to serve you with purified lives; through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen

A Few Comments:
1. For background on the Gospel of Mark, go here. For background on the Season of Advent, go here.

2. The first lesson, from Isaiah, was likely written by the person scholars refer to as "Second Isaiah" (or "Deutero-Isaiah), a prophet schooled in the teachings of the original Isaiah. Second Isaiah, the scholars tell us, began committing his prophecies to paper just before Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon. The Babylonian empire had earlier conquered God's people, taking many of them into slavery. For more, go here, looking under the section dealing with last Sunday's lesson from Isaiah.

3. Advent is not just a season anticipating Christmas, of course. In fact, it originally had nothing to do with Christmas. The season mainly anticipates that the God Who entered our world in Jesus Christ has said that He will come back. The question is, "How do we wait?"

Last Sunday's lessons dealt with one aspect of how we should wait for Christ's return. The lessons for this week further address that question, pointing to repentance.

The earliest Christians, as evidenced by the writings of Paul and Peter in the New Testament letters, had expected Jesus' quick return. In last Sunday's Gospel lesson, Jesus said that all of the world conditions requisite for His return already existed during His earthly ministry. We need look for no further signs for the Second Coming. The perception of a delayed parousia was a source of consternation to the first Christians. It broke the faith of some. Others saw it as license to commit sin. Still others either claimed that Jesus wasn't returning or that His return would be symbolic rather than actual.

In our second lesson, Peter says that the perception of delay was based on impatient human measurement, not the timetable of God. He says, in fact, that God's supposed slowness gives more people time to repent, that is, turn from sin and turn to God. (By the way, it also affords Christians more opportunity to spread the Good News about Jesus.)

This all dovetails nicely with this Sunday's Gospel lesson.

Verse-by-Verse Comments on Mark 1:1-8
v.1: "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God": Mark's Gospel begins with a sentence fragment, which I believe, serves as a title for the entire book. The account of Jesus' life, death, and the report of His resurrection--more on that phrasing in a moment--which Mark presents is just "the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ." This is so in two ways.

First: Mark, and the other Gospel writers, Matthew, Luke, and John, aren't just telling a story. They're telling the true story of what happened when God came to the earth in Jesus Christ. (By the way, contrary to one of the popular urban legends going around today, Jesus' life is more well attested by more disparate sources than were the lives of many ancient figures whose existences are not questioned. The assertion that Jesus never existed may be around because Jesus is a greater threat to our self-driven life styles, including my own, than someone like Alexander the Great. We can look at someone like Alexander and keep him safely in the vaults of history. But Jesus, the Savior Who wouldn't stay dead, will change us from the inside out if we give Him access to our lives, psyches, and thinking.)

The story of Jesus will, if we let it, change our lives for eternity. His time on earth is only the beginning of Jesus' story. It can continue in us and can continue forever.

Second: Many modern scholars believe that Mark originally ended his Gospel account of Jesus with Mark 16:8. There, we're told simply that on the first Easter, the women to whom Jesus' resurrection was announced fled from the tomb in terror and amazement, saying nothing to anybody because fear overcame them.

That would seem, from Mark's vantage point, to be a good coda for his writing. Mark's first readers, like you and me, were people who hadn't seen a dead man rise to life. Their call, like ours, was to step into this mystery, letting it take hold of them while the Holy Spirit built faith in them.

The sentence fragment in verse 1 immerses us in the mystery of Jesus. Mark doesn't try to win you over with factoids. Instead, in rapid succession, he gives you vignettes from Jesus' earthly ministry and the report of His resurrection to nudge you toward faith, rather than bludgeoning you to it.*

"good news": The word is a Greek compound, euaggelion (pronounced you-ahn-gay-lee-own). The eu- prefix means good. Aggelion means message. (It's related to the Greek word for messenger, angelos, in English rendered as angel.)

In ordinary Greek usage, the singular form of this word, as it shows up in our lesson, never appeared. It was always used in a way that seems awkward in the English language, a plural that, if translated literally, would mean "good newses."

It was a term used of the victories achieved by great kings. The Romans, who it should be pointed out, regarded their emperors as gods or sons of gods, hailed the good newses of their victorious god-kings.

You can see how, first of all, Mark's use of the singular of this word would have been jarring to those who hadn't really heard the word in that way before. More than that, it would have been a gauntlet thrown down at the worship of emperors, military heroes, or little deities. There is really only one thing that we can speak of as good news, of true victory, Mark was saying, and that's the story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

"Son of God": This also would have been a provocative designation. The emperors were called "sons of gods." Mark is saying that Jesus is the Son of the God.

In using these terms for Jesus though, Mark was, in essence, setting his audience up. Jesus wouldn't be a king who conquered through military, economic, or political muscle, but as a suffering servant who dealt with the real problems of the human race, sin and death, by sharing our deaths and rising to give new lives to those who surrender to Him.

vv.2-3: Mark wastes no time in telling his story. He dives in.

He also claims that the whole of what he cites from the Old Testament comes from Isaiah. Actually, only v. 3 does, specifically Isaiah 40:3. V. 2 actually references Exodus 23:20 and the similar Malachi 3:1. The Exodus passage, from the Old Testament account of the Hebrews' journey from Egypt, where they had been slaves, to their promised land, finds God promising "an angel," a messenger, would guard them on their way in order to take them to the place God had prepared for them.

Malachi may have been a title, rather than the name of the writer of the Old Testament book that bears that name. It's the Hebrew word for messenger. Malachi says that a messenger is coming from God and it has been seen by some to refer to both John the Baptizer and Jesus.

Mark's use of the Exodus passage is particularly interesting. John's ministry happened at the Jordan River, which the Exodus people crossed to get to the promised land. Without a relationship with God, without forgiveness of sin, we wander in the wilderness, far from God.

"the wilderness": Interestingly, as pointed out by Pastor Ed Markquart, wilderness was always a place of promise, a place through which God's people travel to be shaped by God and ushered into his presence. John the Baptizer's place of ministry was fraught with promise.

v.4: "John the Baptizer": It's better to refer to John in this way. "Baptist" as in "John the Baptist" creates confusion. John the Baptizer had nothing to do with the Baptist movement within Christianity, which started in the 16th.-century.

"a baptism of repentance": This contrasts with the baptism instituted by Jesus. John's baptism was a rite of commitment to repentance on the part of the person who came forward to be baptized. In the baptism of Jesus, a sacrament, God acts; the baptized is the passive recipient of God's act of grace and salvation in Christ.

The word in the New Testament Greek for repentance is metanoia, meaning change of mind. Repentance, turning away from sin, is an essential response to the grace God offers in Christ. God will not force Himself on us. God will act when we turn to Him, willing to be changed from an enemy to a friend of God.

The Biblical teaching on repentance flies in the face of the pop psychology of our day that claims that people can't change, that they're the hapless victims of genes and experience, nature and nurture. The Bible says that in fact, people can change, and a rich history of thousands of years' worth of changed lives supports the teaching.

In Christ, God calls us to live in what Martin Luther called, "daily repentance and renewal," daily submission to God's power to change us. If we're willing to change for the better, away from self-centered and destructive behaviors toward lives of love for God and neighbor, we can become what Luther also called, "the Holy Spirit's workshop."

This process of gratifying change, which the New Testament calls sanctification, isn't easy and none of us will be fully reformed this side of the grave. But repentant people can be changed by the grace of God.

"sins": The word is the plural form of the Greek word, 'amartia. It has the idea of "missing the mark," of failing to be what God has made us to be and which, when we are honest, we want to be. This is what Paul spoke about in Romans 7:15.

"forgiveness": The word in Greek is a form of the verb, aphiemi, meaning release. When we repent, turning to the God we know in Christ, He lifts the oppressing load of sin off of our shoulders. We're freed to be God's people again, entering "the promised land" of God's eternal reign.

v.5: "confessing their sins": This is how we prepare for Christ coming into our lives, not just at the end of history, but every day we confess our sins to God.

"baptized": There were baptisms practiced as religious rites of purification by some Jews and by people of other faiths. But those rites were self-administered, particularly among the Qumran community who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. John's baptism was unique in that it was administered by someone else and was a public act of repentance and commitment.

v.6: "Now John was clothed...he ate locusts and wild honey": God often uses people the world considers weird and marginal to proclaim His message. Maybe weird and marginal people are the best candidates for this because they're not concerned about what the neighbors think. They only care about what God thinks.

John's attire was similar to that of the Old Testament prophet, Elijah, who it was thought, might come back to be the forerunning announcer of the Messiah.

v.7: "more power than I...I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thongs of his sandals": John emphasizes the surpassing greatness of the one "coming after" him.

v.8: "I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit": John again underscores the contrast between his baptism and the one to be instituted by Christ. John's baptism is water only, a symbol of repentance. Jesus' baptism brings the Holy Spirit's power into the life of the baptized. Just as Jesus came into the world at Bethlehem, in Holy Baptism, the Holy Spirit comes into our lives. Every time Holy Baptism happens, another advent, a coming of God into our world, happens.

[For more, see here. You might also like N.T. Wright's readable, insightful, and fun commentary.]

*Most scholars today believe that the accounts of Jesus' resurrection appearances that make up the rest of Mark 16, were added later. That doesn't mean that they're inauthentic though.

[Background on the Church Year and the three years of the lectionary cycle can be found here.]