Genesis 1:1 Job 33:4 Romans 3:22-24 John 14:25-26 1 Corinthians 12:3 Last week, as we began this series, Back to the Basics: Revisiting the Catechism, we took a 30,000-foot view of the Ten Commandments through the prism of Martin Luther’s Small Catechism. Tonight, we move into the Catechism’s second part, the Apostles’ Creed. In The Large Catechism, which he wrote for adult disciples and pastors, Luther explained the rationale for starting with the commandments, then moving to the Creed: “So far we have heard the first part of Christian doctrine. We have seen all that God wants us to do or not to do. Now there properly follows the Creed, which sets forth to us everything that we must expect and receive from God...the Creed teaches us to know [God] fully…” He then writes: “...the Ten Commandments are set so high that all human ability is far too feeble and weak to keep them…” In other words, when the proud delusion of our goodness, righteousness, and worthiness of life with God, of life beyond the grave, is punctured by God’s Law, then we are ready to meet the God Whose fondest hope is to give new and righteous lives to the dead and dying sinners the commandments show us to be. If the Ten Commandments show us the chasm between the pure and omnipotent God of the universe and us unrighteous and powerless human beings, the Creed shows us that this same God cares about us so much that He creates (and re-creates) us, redeems us (or buys us back from sin and death) through Christ, and sanctifies us (makes us holy, set apart, fit for everlasting life with Him). The Apostles’ Creed, of course, can’t be found in the Bible and wasn’t written by the apostles themselves. But it does summarize what the apostles, Jesus’ designated first teachers of His gospel word, taught, and is accepted by every major Christian tradition in the world. In the Creed, we see that God bridges the chasm between God and us, allowing us to know Him personally and eternally. So, let’s come into God’s presence again tonight through the doorway of the Creed. The Creed is divided into three parts, each corresponding to the three Persons of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The first article is almost deceptively simple: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” It goes by so quickly that we may miss something. The Old Testament rarely referred to the Creator of the universe as Father. It’s Jesus Who teaches those who have been saved by God’s grace through faith in Him to address God as, “our Father.” “This, then, is how you should pray,” Jesus tells His Church, “‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name’” (Matthew 6:9) In the first words of the Creed then--I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, we see that God is both infinite, eternal, and almighty on the one hand, and loving, accessible, and our Father on the other. The catechism emphasizes that God didn’t just create the universe with its stars and planets, suns and black holes. He also made us and He’s still in the creating business: “I believe that God has created me and all that exists [isn’t it interesting that Luther starts by talking about how God created me and then mentions “all that exists”?], that He has given me and still preserves my body and soul, eyes and ears,” etc. And then, Luther explains, “He does this purely out of fatherly and divine goodness and mercy, though I do not deserve it.” And then Luther says in a burst of joyful worship, “Therefore I ought to thank, praise, serve, and obey Him. This is most certainly true!” The Creed then shifts to the second article, dealing with the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, Jesus the Christ (or, Jesus the Messiah, the Anointed King). It summarizes the basics about Jesus:
that He was born of a virgin, not because the normal way of human conception and birth are wrong, but because if God was going to create a new human race, He couldn’t do so through an ordinary human being inheriting the sins of his or her parents;
that He suffered, died, was buried;
that He rose again from the dead;
that He is now on the right hand of the Father in heaven, interceding for those who dare to believe in Him; and
that He will come back to this world to finally and fully, make all things right, ushering those who have believed in Him into eternity with God and consigning all who have rejected Him to the condemnation in hell they have chosen.
In the Small Catechism, Luther talks about how Jesus offered His own innocent life on the cross in order to free us “from sin, death, and the power of the devil.” And then, Luther tells us the reason that God the Son did these things is the same one for which the Father created us and all that exists: His absolute goodness. “He has done all this,” Luther writes, “in order that I might be His own, live under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness, even as He is risen from the dead and lives and reigns for all eternity. This is most certainly true!” There were some in the early centuries of the Church who misunderstood the nature of the Trinity, the Biblical teaching that we worship one God Who is in three Persons. But the Creed, Luther says, summarizes what we see in the gospels, that Jesus is “true God, begotten of the Father from eternity and also true man, [was] born of the virgin Mary--is [just like the Father] my Lord.” The Gospel of John tells us that Jesus is the Word of God Who was with God the Father and was one with God before the creation. The New Testament book of Colossians tells us that everything created by God is created through God the Son and for Him. Jesus says of Himself, “I and the Father are one.’ (John 10:30) And, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) Jesus has revealed the Father’s heart for the fallen human race and from this great love, gives Himself on the cross for us so that all who believe in Him everlasting life with God. But how can people born in sin, inclined to worship ourselves, or other people, or the things of this world we see rather than the God Who, right now, we can’t see? How can people for whom the basic psychological developmental conflict from birth is trust versus mistrust, trust in Who God is and what He has done for us in Christ? This is where God the Holy Spirit, subject of the Third Article of the Creed, comes in. He is the One Who makes it possible for us to believe. In the Small Catechism, Luther writes of Him: “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, and sanctified me [that is, set me apart for God] and preserved me in the true faith.” The apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:3: “...no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit.” It’s the Holy Spirit speaking the Word of the Gospel to us through the pages of Scripture, the proclamation of the Gospel, the witness of other Christians, and the Sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, Who makes it possible for us to have saving faith in Jesus Christ. The Creed reminds us that God, perfect in righteousness, hates the rift between Himself and the children He creates, redeems, and to whom He seeks to give ever-new life. He hates all the death and suffering that our sin condition unleashes on us in this life. And He seeks to give us new life. This is the gracious God we know in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Next week, we begin a discussion of three ways that this perfect God strengthens His relationship with us, as well as our faith in Him. [I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
I like this two-and-a-half minute explanation of what we Lutheran Christians mean when we say that we believe in "God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth."
"I believe that we will win." By now, many will have heard that simple, infectious chant at sporting events.
Evidently, it was taken up by fans of the United States soccer team during its recent World Cup matches.
Youtube shows a lot of college basketball and football fans using it, especially out in Utah, as early as 2010.
But wherever the chant came from, it's cool, especially when it's not part of the official program, simply arising spontaneously from the stands.
The whole phenomenon set me to thinking, though. Every Sunday at our church and, I know, at most churches, there's a time set aside for people to confess their belief in the triune God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Some do it with altar calls. My tradition does it with the historic creeds of the Church--the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and sometimes the Athanasian Creed.
But what if, at the point in our services usually designated for us to confess our faith, someone took up a simple chant, believers bobbing up and down in celebration and belief? It might be kind of cool. Can you hear it?
I believe in Father God
I believe in God the Son
I believe in God the Spirit
I believe the Three-in-One!
I believe in Father God
I believe in God the Son
I believe in God the Spirit
I believe the Three-in-One!
I believe in Father God
I believe in God the Son
I believe in God the Spirit
I believe the Three-in-One!
Go ahead, you know you're chanting it silently at your computer right now. Stand up! Do a little aerobic praise. Bob up and down and chant away what you believe! Feel free to post videos of you, your family, your youth group, your basketball team, or whatever on Facebook or Youtube. A lot of people might be encouraged by the sight of Christians showing as much enthusiasm in cheering for God as all of us often do at ball games.
Oh, if you're not sure how the chant should go, here's one example from Utah State four years ago:
Luke 24:36-49
To begin this morning, let’s look at two great verses about the greatest promise God gives to all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ.
First, Romans 10:9: “...if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Now, turn to one of my favorite passages, John 11:25-26. Jesus spoke these words to His friend, Martha, grieving over the loss of her brother, Lazarus: “I am the resurrection and the life. [All] who [believe] in Me, though [they] die, they shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.”
Both of these passages--and many more--tell us that Christ shares His Easter resurrection with all who entrust their lives to Him. They bring God's comfort and power into our lives!
Ask the average Christian what happens to believers after they die and they may say something like: “Well, I guess that our immortal spirits go to live with God.” This is the kind of thing that the ancient Greeks and Romans said happened to people when they died. It’s not what the Bible teaches.
First of all, the Bible doesn’t say that we have immortal spirits. It says that we are mortal beings, completely dependent on the breath or the Spirit of God to live. Genesis says that when God created the first man, He did so by scooping dirt from the earth He had just created and exhaling life into it. We have no immortal spirit; either we have the breath or spirit of God within us and live or we don't have God's life within us and die. This is why we often say at grave sites, "Ashes to ashes; dust to dust."
And, according to the Bible, as believers in Christ, you and I are not destined to be airy murky ghosts.
When you and I, as believers in the promises of God recorded in both the Old and New Testaments, confess a belief in “the resurrection of the dead,” we’re saying something different from what any other religion or popular belief system has asserted.
Take a look at 1 Corinthians 15, starting at verse 51. These words written by the apostle Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit in the first century and are addressed to believers in Christ: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed--in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible [this not only means they can no longer sin, but also that their bodies will no longer deteriorate, age, or decay], and we shall all be changed. For this corruptible [nature] must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality...”
When believers in Christ are resurrected, it will be the result of God making a brand new creation. It’ll be a new Genesis.
We will, in some sense, look the same as we do here and now and we will have the benefit of all the lessons this life has taught us, but we who were once simply people of earth will become people of both earth and heaven.
On a day known only to God the Father, Jesus will show up on this earth and bring His new, eternal creation to supplant the old, tottering, death- and sin-infested creation in which you and I now live and we will rise, not as wispy spirits, but as new human beings.
It may happen long centuries after we have died, our skin and bones already reduced to dust or ashes, but God can bring new life from ashes. And God will not forget us! He will raise up all who have believed in His Son.
This is not a new teaching. Job is probably the oldest book in the Old Testament. Yet Job expressed belief in the resurrection that would come to all who believed in the God Who would, in the fullness of time, come into the world to die and rise again. Look at what Job says in Job 19:25-26: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He shall stand on the earth; and after my skin is destroyed, this I know: That in my flesh I shall see God.” In my flesh I will see God; not from the perspective of some ghostly phantom!
But how do we know that it’s true? In 1 Corinthians, Paul calls Jesus Christ “the firstfruits of the dead.” The resurrected Jesus is God’s prototype of what we will be like when those who follow Jesus are resurrected. 1 John 3:2 speaks to believers, “...it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when [Jesus] is revealed [at His return to this world], we shall be like Him...” The risen Jesus is the new Adam and those who believe in Him are destined by God to be like Him!
Turn to our gospel lesson, Luke 24:36-49 to see what we will be like.
After Jesus disappeared, they tore back to Jerusalem to tell other followers of Jesus that the crazy story brought from the tomb by some of the women disciples was true. Jesus was risen from the dead. They had seen Him too! When they got back to Jerusalem, they were told that Peter too, had seen the risen Jesus.
While they were talking about all of this, Jesus suddenly appeared among them. Verse 37 says that all of the disciples--the eleven apostles plus other believers in Jesus--”were terrified and frightened, and supposed they had seen a spirit.” Other translations say they thought they were seeing a ghost.
Why would they have thought that? After all, they had it from multiple witnesses by then that Jesus was raised from the dead.
The answer is simple: People with physical bodies don’t just show up in the midst of a crowd of people. They walk through open doors or, at least, slink in through open windows. But there had been no walking or slinking. Jesus had just appeared. Clearly, the resurrected Jesus isn’t constrained by the things that ordinarily constrain us.
In the face of their doubts, Jesus issues a challenge to the disciples in verse 39: “Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.” Then, to underscore that He is no ghost, but a body of flesh and bone, in verse 41, Jesus looks around like a teenager at the end of a school day (or at the end of the 30 Hour Famine) and asks, “Got anything to eat?” (Actually, “Have you any food here?”) The disciples give Jesus boiled fish. Spirits don’t have bodies that can be touched. Ghosts don’t eat. Living bodies do.
So, what does all of this have to do with you and me?
First of all, it means that our bodies are important. As C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity: "God likes matter. He invented it."
The fact is that Jesus died and rose not to bring us to some murky, spiritual half-life. Jesus died and rose so that God can recreate us as physical beings, just as He originally intended when He made Adam and Eve.
Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:19, that the physical body of each believer in Jesus Christ is "a temple of the Holy Spirit." God cares about what we do to and how we care for our bodies.
Second, we can live each day in the confidence that whatever comes our ways in this life, we belong to a risen Lord Who has big plans for us. Romans 14:8-9 says: “For if we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and rose and lived again that He might be Lord of both the living and the dead.” The risen Jesus can be with us, filling us with His life, all the time.
Third, we know that repentance and belief are more than nice ideas. In verse 47 of our lesson, Jesus says that the reason He calls the Church into existence is to tell the world about His suffering and resurrection and so that “repentance and remission [or forgiveness] of sins should be preached in [Jesus’] Name to all nations...” It’s those who repent and believe who will share in Jesus’ resurrection. That needs to be lived out in our daily lives...and shared with others!
Finally, we should know this: While all the mysteries about what will happen the moment after we breathe our last in this world haven’t disappeared, we can be certain that those who have died before Jesus’ returns are with Him. The New Testament does say that those who have died believing in Jesus have gone to sleep and from the perspective of this world made imperfect and time-bound by human sin, that’s true. But the Bible teaches that there are two dimensions of reality. On the one hand, there is the earthly. In this dimension, we’re constrained by things like time and space and sin. The other dimension of reality is the heavenly. It’s the place where God reigns.
The heavenly dimension has invaded the earthly reality through Jesus and is being invaded still every time we read God’s Word, receive Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, or pray and serve in Jesus’ Name. We pray for the fullest possible invasion of the heavenly dimension into our lives and the life of the world every time we pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
One day, when Jesus returns to the world, that invasion will be complete. The old will pass away and the new will take control forever.
And what happens in the meantime? Look at Luke 23:42. Jesus is dying on the cross between two criminals. One joins the crowd in excoriating Jesus. The other though says to Jesus: “Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.” Then Jesus makes a promise: “Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in paradise.”
Right now, this very moment, if you trust your past sins along with your present and future life to the control of Jesus, you are in His kingdom, though we do, in the Biblical phrase, see through a glass darkly.
And right now, those who have died believing in Jesus are with Him in paradise. We can’t see them now in their resurrected bodies and, from the perspective of this time-bound world, their resurrection has yet to happen. But in that other dimension--the heavenly dimension--they are with Jesus now in strong, youthful bodies.
They’re eating and drinking at the table of the Lord.
They’re laughing and rejoicing in a kingdom in which every tear has been wiped away, every physical ailment is banished, and sin is a forgotten affliction.
If, in the power of God, we will spend our lives turning from sin and entrusting our every moment to the risen Christ, the kingdom in which they live right now--the kingdom of Jesus--will be ours forever. The resurrection of Jesus shows us that it’s so.
In the Apostles' Creed, we Christians confess that after dying on the cross, Jesus "descended into hell." This, of course, is the logical conclusion of Jesus' self-sacrifice. He was paying the full price for human sin, bearing in Himself the full punishment our sins deserve in spite of His complete sinlessness. This necessarily meant that after Jesus died, He had to go to hell.
When people die naked in their sin, without the protective armor of God's grace given to all with faith in Christ, hell, separation from God, is their destination. Jesus warned of this when He told Nicodemus, "Those who believe in [Jesus] are not condemned; but those who do not believe in Him are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God" (John 3:18).
Jesus made His atoning sacrifice complete by sharing not only in death, but also in the experience of hell itself. 1 Peter 3:18-20 says:
For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, 19in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, 20who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water.
(Peter goes on, by the way, to speak of baptism as the means by which the old self is drowned and God's Holy Spirit brings new life in Christ.)
We remember Maundy Thursday as the day on which Jesus, with His face set toward dying for us, instituted the Sacrament of His Body and Blood (Holy Communion, The Lord's Supper, The Eucharist) and gave a new command to His Church: that believers love one another as Christ loved us, sacrificially.
We remember Good Friday as the day on which sinless God-enfleshed died in our places on the cross, so that all who believe in Him will find their sins covered by His life-giving blood and grace, His undeserved favor.
We remember Easter Sunday, of course, as the day when Jesus rose from the dead, claiming eternal life with God for all who believe in (that is, entrust their lives to) Jesus Christ.
We should also remember Holy Saturday, the day on which Jesus bore the full punishment our sins merit, descending into hell, but at the same time, proclaiming that God's plan had been fulfilled; the perfect sacrifice had been offered; the powers of the devil, evil, and hell had been crushed for all eternity. The devil, evil, and hell still wreak havoc in this world. They will until the day when Christ returns to fully establish His kingdom. But they are in their death throes. Christ has conquered!
[I originally wrote and posted this in 2008. But it seems worth repeating on this Good Friday.]
"Why do we call this 'Good' Friday?"
That's what an inquisitive second-grader asked me once.
It's a sensible question. The day we commemorate as Good Friday, after all, brought multiple tragedies.
Good Friday, which this year falls on April 22, is when Christians all over the world remember the day when Jesus of Nazareth, the One we believe was the Messiah (that is, the Christ, God's Anointed King of kings) was crucified.
The Bible says that Jesus' death on a cross resulted from the rejection of the entire world, at least the entire world as known by Jesus' first-century followers: the people of God (the Judeans) and everybody else (the Gentiles), represented by the preeminent power of the day, the Roman Empire.
The prologue to the Gospel of John reminds us that Jesus was more than a human being. He was God enfleshed. Yet the whole world rejected Jesus. "He was in the world," John writes, "and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own [the world He made], and his own people [Jews and Gentiles] did not accept him." (John 1:10-11)
The day we call Good Friday then, wasn't only tragic because the sinless God and Savior of the world died a horrible death. It was also tragic because a human race in need of salvation rejected God's outstretched hand, spurned the love of God, turned away from God Himself.
But there is an even deeper layer of tragedy to the day. God the Father, the first Person of the Trinity, perfect and sinless, was separated from Jesus in those horrible hours when Jesus hung on the cross.
Why? Paul writes in the New Testament, "For our sake he [God the Father] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin..." (Second Corinthians 5:21). Jesus, in spite of His sinlessness, bore the weight of our sin. He embodied the sins of us all, taking our rightful punishment for sin. (Romans 6:23 tells us that "the wages of sin is death.")
God, in His holiness, cannot abide the mere sight of sin and on the cross, Jesus bore the total weight of all human alienation from God, all human distrust of God, and every misdeed, small and large, that's ever been committed or ever will be committed by the whole human race. God the Father simply couldn't look at Jesus on the cross because, utterly sinless though Jesus was, He voluntarily embodied our sin and took our punishment for it there.
There is a reason that Jesus did all this, which I'll address momentarily. But that reality can't in any way erase the awful agony Jesus endured, feeling utterly abandoned by the Father as He died on the cross. No more poignant words have ever been uttered on this planet than those Jesus cried out near the end of His earthly life, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matthew 27:46)
So, if Good Friday remembers that Jesus was rejected by the whole world and abandoned by God the Father, what could possibly be good about it?
That goes back to the reason that Jesus had for going to the cross. You see, the world thought in killing off Jesus, it was done with Him. Some of the more perceptive people who wanted Jesus dead understood that He was God and so thought that in killing Him, they were getting rid of God and God's rightful authority over their lives (our lives, too). (Jesus told a parable showing that this was the motive of many who sought His death, here.)
In short, they thought that Good Friday was all about what they did to Jesus. The subject of their sentences about Jesus' crucifixion would have been themselves. "We crucified Jesus," they would claim. Herod, the puppet king of Judea, known to have been a particularly violent, sadistic, and loathsome character, might have said, "I ordered Jesus' abuse. He was under my control." Pilate, the Roman governor, would have told anyone who would listen, "I exercised my power and had Jesus crucified."
But, in fact, the events of Good Friday unfolded precisely as God wanted them to happen. Jesus came into the world to die for us. That was always the plan.
This is something that the wise men from the East seemed to know even when Jesus was a baby. Among the gifts they brought was myrrh, an aromatic resin used to anoint the dead, hardly a fitting present for a baby when you think about it, a bit like giving a gift certificate from a casket factory at a baby shower.
After He began His ministry, Jesus made it clear that He was intent on going to a cross to His disciples. You may remember what happened the first time Jesus talked about this:
...Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Matthew 16:21-23)
In the night before His crucifixion, Jesus was brought to Pilate for questioning. But Jesus refused to answer. That resulted in this exchange between the two of them:
Pilate therefore said to him, “Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above... (John 19:10-11)
Jesus says of His life:
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. (John 10:18)
We call this day Good Friday because on the first one some two-thousand years ago, Jesus fulfilled God's plan. He took our punishment for sin and later, rose from death so that all who repent of sin and entrust their lives to Him will live forever.
So, the wages of sin is death, "but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 6:23)
Good Friday is good because, just as it was the route through which Jesus moved to Easter, it's also the route through which all who believe in Him share in His Easter victory! It's because of what Jesus did on Good Friday for us, followed by God the Father raising Him from the dead, that you and I can confess our belief in the "forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." Amen!
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]
Isaiah 2:1-5
Advent, which begins today, is a time for getting ready. Just as many are working themselves into frenzies preparing for Christmas, Advent asks us, “Are we ready, not for Christmas Day, but for the advent of Jesus, for the appearing of Jesus?”
Are we ready for Jesus to show up to bring an end to this world of sin and death and establish a new heaven and a new earth free of sin and death and grief?
Are we ready to meet Jesus face to face should our lives end before Jesus returns?
The last thing that any human being should want is to be ready for Christmas or for things like tomorrow’s special project, school assignment, or big game, yet not be ready to meet Jesus.
So, are you ready?
Each of our appointed lessons for this first day of the new Church Year can help us to be ready for Jesus’ return or, should we die before His return, for the moments we first see Jesus face to face. (1)
Please pull out the Celebrate inserts for this morning. Our first lesson is Isaiah 2:1-5. Verse 4 is probably the most famous passage here. It's a verse that promises that, beyond these days when sin drives human beings to warfare and factionalism, there will be a day when God will destroy war itself and turn our weapons into implements put to better and more productive use. That will happen on the day of the risen, ascended Jesus' return to this world!
This vision of a new creation at peace is one that would have especially appealed to Isaiah’s likely first listeners and readers.
Isaiah started his work as a prophet of God in about 740BC. At that moment, the Assyrian Empire threatened the destruction of first-century Judah.
(Judah, you’ll remember, was the southern portion of what had once been a larger nation, Israel. After King Solomon’s death, Israel split into two kingdoms, the northern one with its worship and national life centered in Samaria, the south remaining focused in Jerusalem. Seven-and-a-half centuries after Isaiah began prophesying, Jesus was born and raised in Judah, also called Judea.)
In Isaiah’s day, the people of Judah were terrified of the strong, menacing Assyrians. And their fear proved well founded: In 722BC, Israel would fall to the Assyrians, just as God had revealed through Isaiah would happen. God used the Assyrian army to chasten His people, calling them to repent for sin, especially their dalliances with false gods, and to trust, have faith, only in Him.
In our lesson, God declares a moment when people from around the world would acknowledge the God of the Jews as the one true God of the universe. They would stream to worship Him along with the Jews, He says. According to God’s words here, Mount Zion, the humble hill in Jerusalem where the Temple then stood, would be acknowledged as “the highest of mountains.” People would turn to the God Whose presence once lived in the Temple’s “Holy of Holies,” saying (look at their words in Isaiah 2:3 in our first lesson):
Come, let us go to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that He may teach us His ways and that we may walk in His paths. For out of Zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”
The lesson ends at verse 5, with these words:
O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
In these words, God wasn’t just telling the descendants of Jacob how to get ready for the restoration He wanted to bring to them once the Assyrians had conquered their land and, as a result, became desperate enough to once more realize their need of God.
God also is telling us how to prepare for the final scenes in human history, when, as Jesus puts it in our Gospel lesson, at a moment known only by the Father, the risen and ascended Jesus will return. It's then, that Jesus will, as we confess each week during worship, “judge the living and the dead.”
God's words here also tell us how to be prepared for the final scenes in our own lives, whether they come years from now or they happen this very day.
Now, it’s important to understand that what God says in Isaiah is, in a way, metaphorical. Let me explain.
Yesterday, as I was about to eat breakfast, already dressed in some of my Buckeye gear, I found Ann reading the newspaper, and said to her, like any good Ohio State alum anticipating the afternoon game must have said when first facing the day: “We must annihilate them!”
Now, I didn’t literally mean that. To annihilate something is to reduce it to nothing. If the team from up north were annihilated, who would the Buckeyes beat on certain Saturdays in November each year? I meant simply that I wanted the Buckeyes to soundly thump the Wolverines. I spoke metaphorically.
Some eight-hundred years after Isaiah shared the words of our first lesson with the people of Judah, Jesus sat by a well in the Samaritan village of Sychar. His disciples, in spite of their shared distaste for the citizens of the breakaway northern kingdom of Samaria, had gone into the village to get some food.
A Samaritan woman shows up at the well and among the things that Jesus tells her is this: “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain (Mount Gerizim in Samaria) nor in Jerusalem (on Mount Zion). You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews (more accurately translated, “the Judeans”). But the hour is coming and is now here, when we true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship Him.”
Our lesson from Isaiah then, foretells a time when people throughout the world won’t necessarily book flights on El Al Airlines in order to stream to Jerusalem, but a time when people from throughout the world will turn to the God first revealed to the Jews and then definitively, to everybody, through Jesus Christ. “For God so loved the world,” Jesus famously told Nicodemus. People from throughout the world today stream to Mount Zion every time they...
confess their sins in Jesus’ Name,
confess their faith in Jesus, and
strive, by the power of God's Holy Spirit living within them, to live as His redeemed and saved people in their every day moments.
So, how do we prepare for Jesus’ Advent, for His appearing?
First: We turn to the God made known in Christ. “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,” our lesson says.
To repent and to believe (or trust) in Christ is nothing other than agreeing with God about our sin, on the one hand, and agreeing with God about His grace and forgiveness, on the other.
To be ready to meet Jesus, we can repent, that is, turn back to God, and trust in the grace of God to grant us forgiveness and the powerful Holy Spirit to help us live differently from day to day.
Second: We place ourselves under the authority of God’s Word. Out of Zion, where God revealed Himself to Israel and then to the world in Jesus, our lesson from Isaiah says, comes God’s “instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” Through His Word, the lesson says in verse 3, God will teach us His ways.
God’s Word is the truth against which everything we do, say, and are is to be measured. (2) To build our lives on anything else, whether it’s our own experiences or the latest scientific research, is to build on quicksand.
The Lutheran Confessions says that the Word of God in the Bible is to be treasured as a precious jewel. (3)
And in today’s lesson from Isaiah, God invites us to walk in that light.
In God’s Word, we are enlightened to see God’s passionate love for each of us, God’s desire to set us free from our bondage to sin and death, and the lengths to which He goes—even to a cross—in order to make it possible for us to return to Him.
To take hold of the life that only comes through Jesus Christ, we must stand under the authority of Scripture even when we don't and never will fully understand it.
My two heroes of the faith are Martin Luther and Billy Graham. Early in his career, Billy Graham was an evangelist with an organization called Youth for Christ. He often traveled and became pals with another Youth for Christ evangelist, Chuck Templeton. Graham says that Templeton remains the best preacher he ever heard.
Templeton, a learned man, underwent a crisis of faith in the late 1940s. He came to reject the Bible's teachings about miracles, the virgin birth of Jesus, the resurrection, and so on. (Ultimately, he became an atheist.) Because he had been so close to Graham and because Graham was impressed by Templeton's mind, personality, and preaching, Billy Graham was shaken by Templeton's rejection of the authority of the Bible. As a consequence, Graham himself began to question the reliability of the Bible. Templeton's challenge to Billy Graham--"People no longer accept the Bible as being inspired the way you do"--taunted Graham.
One evening, during a retreat in southern California, Graham took a walk into a nearby woods. He dropped to his knees by a tree stump, where he set his Bible. In the gathering darkness, he couldn't read his Bible, but he could cry out to God. Though he can't recall the exact words he used as he prayed that night, Graham does say he told God honestly that the Bible was filled with many things he couldn't comprehend or explain. But he told God, "I am going to accept this as Thy Word--by faith! I'm going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word."
As Graham explains in his autobiography, not all his questions were answered, but "a major bridge had been crossed." He knew that a great spiritual battle in his heart and mind had been fought and won. It is the same battle you and I need to fight, and, by the power of God's Spirit, can win, when we place ourselves under the authority of God's Word.
This past week, I had an appointment with the cardiologist who performed my heart stent procedure five months ago. He checked me over and asked lots of questions. "I feel optimistic about your recovery," he told me. Then, he fell into a long silence as he clicked through and considered my case history on his laptop computer. I wondered what he was thinking. Finally, he broke his silence: "I still don't know why you had a heart attack."
Folks, everyone in this sanctuary knows that, as happened to me five months ago, inexplicable things happen in life. And they can happen in a hurry. You have to be ready for anything!
But above all, you have to be ready for the advent of Jesus, for the moment when you come into His presence. If you will turn to God in repentance and faith in Jesus and if you will stand under the authority of God's Word, you will be ready for Christ's return. You will be ready for anything!
(2) The Formula of Concord, a basic confessional statement promulgated by Lutherans in 1577, expresses a Lutheran understanding of the Bible and its authority:
We believe, teach, and confess that the prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments are the only rule and norm according to which all doctrines and teachers alike must be appraised and judged, as it is written in Psalm 119:105, "Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." And Saint Paul says in Galatians 1:8: "Even if an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed." Other writings of ancient and modern teachers, whatever their names, should not be put on a par with Holy Scripture. Every single one of them should be subordinated to the Scriptures and should be received in no other way and no further than as witnesses to the fashion in which the doctrine of the prophets and apostles was preserved in post-apostolic times...
...the Holy Scripture remains as the only judge, rule, and norm according to which as the only touchstone of all doctrines should and must be understood and judged as good or evil, right or wrong...
(3) Martin Luther writes this in The Large Catechism, another of the core confessional documents which every Lutheran congregation and pastor claims as true confessions of faith:
The Word of God is the true holy thing above all holy things. Indeed, it is the only one we Christians acknowledge and have. Though we had the bones of all the saints or all the holy and consecrated vestments together in one heap, they could not help us in the slightest degree, for they are all dead things that can sanctify no one. But God's Word is the treasure that sanctifies all things. By it all the saints themselves have been sanctified. At whatever time God's Word is taught, preached, heard, read, or pondered, there the person, the day, and the work are sanctified by it...Accordingly, I constantly repeat that all our life and work must be guided by God's Word if they are to be God-pleasing or holy...
Conversely, any conduct or work done apart from God's Word is unholy in the sight of God, no matter how splendid and brilliant it may appear...
Any reason you chose this creed instead of the Nicene Creed? I think the latter probably describes the Holy Spirit a little more. (I tend to prefer the Nicene Creed, but that is indeed a personal preference.) Thanks for the thoughts on interpretation.
I love the Nicene Creed and, in fact, we use it as opposed to the Apostles' Creed when we celebrate Holy Communion at Saint Matthew. (We regularly celebrate Communion on the first and third Sundays of every month and on festival days of the Church Year. Many Lutheran congregations now have Holy Communion every Sunday as well as on festival days.)
Elizabeth Mahlou is right in saying that the Nicene Creed is more extensive in its description of the work of the Holy Spirit. All three of its articles, each, like the Apostles' Creed, dealing with a Person of the Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are lengthier than the articles of the Apostles' Creed.
But there are several reasons I'm using the Apostles' Creed as a framework for exploring what the Bible teaches and the Church confesses when it comes to understanding the three Persons of God.
First: The Apostles' Creed is probably more widely known than the other Christian creeds. One day about thirty years ago, I was channel-surfing when I ran across Pat Robertson, a person for whose theology I have no particular liking, talking about the Apostles' Creed. That struck me as interesting because as a sort of charismatic Baptist, Robertson doesn't come from the historic mainstream Christian tradition where, for centuries, the Apostles' Creed has functioned as a kind of altar call, inviting new believers and old believers to confess their faith in the God ultimately revealed to the world in Jesus Christ.
Robertson, as I recall, portrayed the Apostles' Creed as a normative statement of Christian faith, something to which every Christian could easily subscribe. I think that he was right. (By the way, you may want to make note of the date because this may be the only time I have ever said that Robertson was right about something. See here and here.)
Robertson's use of the Apostles' Creed is testimony to how well known it is.
(It should be said though, that while the Apostles' Creed is probably the most widely known of the creeds, the Nicene is the one more widely accepted by more different Christian faith traditions.)
Second: The Apostles' Creed is the oldest of the three ecumenical creeds of the Church. (The verbose Athanasian Creed is rarely used, except when pastors want to torture their congregants or sometimes, as Holy Trinity Sunday tradition.)
Unlike most other creeds or the confessions of faith from different Christian bodies, the Apostles' Creed wasn't composed by a council brought together to resolve some theological dispute. It's a simple statement of faith rooted in the teachings of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. (The Athanasian Creed, dating back to the fifth or sixth century AD, was not evidently spawned by a controversy. But its length keeps it from widespread use, I think.) Most confessional documents in my Lutheran tradition were composed for the purpose of resolving differences of opinion, including The Augsburg Confession, The Apology to the Augsburg Confession, The Smalcald Articles, and the Formula of Concord. More recently, the Barmen Declaration, composed by the eminent theologian Karl Barth, was a statement of Christian faith in opposition to the perversion of Biblical faith advanced by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi movement.
Although called the Apostles' Creed, the idea, first committed to paper by Rufinus in the fourth-century, that it was composed by the apostles of Jesus on the first Pentecost, is fanciful.
But the Creed is clearly rooted in the teachings of the apostles, all of it traceable to the Gospels and parts of which were already being used by second- and third-century Christians.
Third: The biggest reason for using the Apostles' Creed as the framework here is that I began this series using Martin Luther's Small Catechism as the roadmap. (A catechism is a short document, written in question-and-asnwer form, explaining the Christian faith or a particular tradition's understanding of the Christian faith. Luther, who lived from 1483 to 1546, wrote two catechisms. The Small Catechism, first published in 1529, was designed to help families review the basics of faith at the dinner table. Generations of Lutherans have used it as a framework for preparing young people to affirm their Baptism and publicly declare their intention to live for Jesus Christ in their adult lives. The Large Catechism, which Luther wrote shortly after the smaller document, was presented for the instruction of priests, who Luther found alarmingly ignorant of the Bible's revelation of God.)
The Small Catechism has six principle parts and a discussion of the Apostles' Creed is one of them.
While Luther and the Lutheran movement see the other two creeds among the foundational confessional documents that faithfully present the truths of the Bible, the simplicity and directness of the Apostles' Creed and its freedom from concern with specific theological controversies, making it very different from the Nicene Creed, probably explain why it has played so important a role in our confession of faith and in explanations of our faith.
Back to looking at the Holy Spirit tomorrow, I hope.
By the way, here is what we ELCA Lutherans claim to believe about the faith. This confession of faith appears in the Constitution of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
