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August 27, 2006
Our Final Destiny
Isaiah 26: 19-21 / John 5: 25-29
August 27th, 2006
This morning I would like to remind us all what Jesus says about our final destiny. Jesus addresses the subject of our final destiny after making clear His unity with the Father. What He taught was the will of the Father and completely His will too. Though it is said of Jesus in John 3: 17 that He did not come to condemn the world, here we see it is His task to judge people whether they have spent their lives in good or in evil. He did not come to condemn, but He will judge. Though Jesus died for our sins we are accountable for them and there is a reward that comes from doing good—resurrection to life.
Often when we think of the resurrection we wonder about the state of those who have died as babies or as old people. What will be their resurrected form? But this presumes they will be judged good rather than evil so that they rise to life rather than to condemnation.
To us it seems strange to speak in these terms because we Reformed Christians gratefully emphasize that we are justified freely by God’s grace. It is not by works that we are saved. So what do we make of this teaching of Jesus, echoed by the Apostle Paul in Romans 2: 5-6--“. . . when God’s righteousness is revealed He will render to every man according to his works.”
At no point do we reflect the nature of God more than in our claiming His prerogative to judge. It is not our right, but we judge. Why? Because imbedded in us is an awareness of the difference between right and wrong. But it is the blight of our humanity that we persistently act as jury and judge without the benefit of knowing the facts. We assume we know even the motives of one another, and our judgment is sometimes harsh when what we see collides with our standard of what ought to be.
Our “justice” is distributed sometimes ruthlessly. We speak of one another in ways that show little mercy. Thus with a word we may destroy the perception of a person’s character. We break friendships—both our own, and as a consequence of what we said the friendships of others. This despite saying we believe we should follow Jesus who taught us not to judge one another—in the way we do, and that we would be judged by the judgment we extend. This despite how we pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” How we should hope and pray God turns a deaf ear to that prayer!
It was in response to this bizarre moral flaw that Jesus told the little story about the man with a log in his eye hot and bothered by someone with a splinter in his eye? We should laugh nervously at this story, we who are irate at the fragments of wood we see in others’ eyes.
We are a society fixated with judgment. The TV programs having to do with courts and crime and prisons suggest there is a great market for this. Indeed, I am puzzled that in a country that may nearly claim “Amazing Grace” as a second national anthem, we are graceless toward those who offend. Our system is pitiless towards the poor. Once accused the poor are with little hope to escape punishments that crush them. There are several hundred thousand more people in our prisons than in China’s prisons, though their land is much larger than ours and we do not think of China as a model of justice. I grieve when I think of stories I know that are part of this sad part of American life.
The justice of God in the Old Testament was severe, but it was accurate. When we read the sanctions of the covenant God made with Israel in the Book of Deuteronomy there are severe curses for offending God’s law and blessings for keeping it. We hear often the stereotype of a harsh God in the Old Testament who contrasts with a mild Jesus in the New testament. But as severe as the Old Testament could often be, its penalties did not reach beyond death. And the economic factor was intentionally kept out of the justice system. A poor person was not more liable to be punished than a rich person. A rich person could not escape justice by having a clever attorney.
Jesus’ judgment, by contrast with the justice of God displayed in the Old Testament affects the soul. Remember that we just read Jesus’ words about resurrection of life for those who do good, but resurrection of judgment for those who have done evil. This is justice meted out after death for everyone, because everyone will be raised after death. Elsewhere Jesus spoke of the condemned going “into eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
Nor was this only one-time that Jesus spoke of condemnation. Jesus told enough parables of judgment to let us know that judgment was much on His mind. Remember the parable of the farmer (sower) who, on the way to the field had seed drop on various kinds of ground. The various kinds of ground represent the various kinds of people who hear the Gospel. All get the same Gospel seed but only those in whom the Gospel seed finds root is there any benefit. We who have placed such importance on hearing the Gospel and on noticing the immediate response to hearing the Gospel need to remember the warning Jesus gave in this story. Has the Gospel taken root in your life?
How do we know if the Gospel has taken root? Not by all the ideas that we think are important but by the life that proceeds from our belief. As Bonhoeffer told us, echoing the Apostle Paul, “To believe is to obey; to obey is to believe.” But we have commonly separated belief from obedience, so afraid are we of suggesting that we are saved by what we do rather than by grace. We have virtually answered Paul’s question, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” not by saying yes. But we have a meager idea of sin so that we may sin with self-approval.
I hear Jesus’ stunning words so often as I think of these things, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day [the day of the great harvest] many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, I never knew you go away from me, you evildoers.’”
Remember Jesus taught that the world was like a field in which weeds and good grain grew together. At the great harvest Jesus said in a parable, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” In this parable the weeds imagine that because they are in the same field with the wheat that they are wheat, and will be one day nestled with the wheat in barns. Jesus said it is otherwise for them.
This is in the Bible that we profess to believe, that we claim has authority over us. Thus teaches the Jesus in whom we say we trust.
What is it to do the good? Remember that goodness has to do not only with specific deeds that we may call good, but with the intentions of the heart. Jesus said, “Don’t do your good deeds so as to be noticed by others.” Perhaps there are those who would point to “good” that they do that God does not see as good at all, but more like showing off. If you and I are capable of doing great good and we do only a small good, is this goodness?
And what about evil? What you and I may judge as evil may have no regard to the circumstances in which the “evil” was done by someone. In our courts of law there are mitigating factors that are taken into consideration. Years ago I was subpoenaed to come to a trial in St. Petersburg to give testimony of mitigating factors in considering again whether a condemned man, Amos King, should be executed. In fact, he was executed, I regret to say, when he was unfairly tried. Though the courts admitted he didn’t get good representation at the sentencing phase of his trial, they wouldn’t admit that the same lawyer represented him in the trial itself. This lawyer was ill and would shortly die of his illness. Meanwhile he was emotionally involved in another trial so that he had not much interest in representing Mr. King.
We trust that our sense of justice is a fraction of God’s sense of justice. So that God looks for mitigating factors where we do not. “To whom much is given much is required,” the Bible teaches. To whom much less is given less is required.” Jesus said this. Jesus said, “The slave who knew what his master wanted, but . . . did not do what was wanted will receive a severe beating. But the one who did not know and did what deserved a beating will receive a light beating.” How much do we know? How much ought we to know who have these multiple translations of the Bible before us? Jesus prayed on the cross, “God forgive them for they know not what they do.” Here is an exhibit of God’s fairness in Jesus’ prayer.
How unlike our justice this is. How unlike the justice we administer to one another. We get it in our minds to condemn someone without asking questions of mitigating factors, or even if we understand what the person did. Yet we feel ill-used if we are treated in this way.
So what hope have we? I am comforted by the development in Jesus’ teaching that we start to see in John 6, the chapter after this present one. There Jesus gives this remarkable teaching that many of his followers found offensive, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.” Jesus was not teaching cannibalism, as these words suggest. Instead He said this after making clear that He was the bread of life. He became as explicit as human language can allow in teaching that His body, indeed His flesh, was more life-giving than the manna the Israelites ate in the wilderness years. Without it they would have starved. But that manna meant more than they knew.
That manna, a direct gift of God that fell new each morning, was a foretaste of the gift of God in sending His Son, our Lord Jesus. And we must as surely take Him into us as the Israelites had to eat the manna for it to do them any good. How do we do this since we cannot actually eat Jesus and drink His blood? How bizarre the very idea seems!
Jesus pointed toward the cross when He would sacrifice Himself willingly for the sins of the world. By trusting in Jesus, that is not only believing that He died for our sins, but by entering fully into following Him in whom we say we trust, we are eating His flesh and drinking His blood. When we eat something it comes into us and is transformed into healthy bodies. When Jesus enters into us by faith an analogous transformation takes place in us. As Paul put it, “The old passes away; the new has come.” Actually Paul says this of those who are “in Christ,” which is the mirror image of Jesus being in us.
So we who know we do evil and who merit the wrath of God for doing evil, come to Jesus and discover two things:
First, we discover that He makes us want to do good. He makes us want to follow Him, denying ourselves, taking up our crosses and following Him. That’s hard work. That’s a totally demanding way of life. But since Christianity is not a matter of mere words but of a life, if we have trusted in Jesus this becomes our way of life.
Second, we realize that as hard as we try, we cannot be perfect so as to deserve God’s good gift of eternal life. Even if we start being perfect after trusting in Jesus, there is the residue of the past that we must account for, when we did not do the good we knew to do, but chose to do evil instead. So the free gift of God engulfs our sinful selves, giving us what we cannot earn, eternal life. We discover that it is all of grace, all of God’s generous heart, that we are forgiven and accepted in His beloved embrace. It is gratitude for what we have been forgiven that adds fuel to the flame of our desire to live as though we have one agenda in life, to follow Jesus.
Thus we hear Jesus’ summary of God’s intention for us and it becomes our great desire in life. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.”
Is it evident you love God this way? Is it evident that you love your neighbor as yourself? Do you wish you did, if you do not? Do you wish it so much that you are obviously trying—which is an indicator of those who really believe? If not, listen again to what Jesus said about the two-fold resurrection that awaits all people. For some, those who do good, it will be a resurrection to life and for others, those who do evil, it will be a resurrection to condemnation. What resurrection awaits you?
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.
Let us pray: O Heavenly Father, we are grateful that you have created us in your image and likeness, and have equipped us to do your will and to follow Jesus who loved us as you do so that He died for our sins.” Grant to us the desire to trust in Jesus, to follow Him in gratitude, and to come to the end of our days where we may enjoy the resurrection to life that comes to those who do your will as Jesus did. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
August 13, 2006
The Badge of Jesus?
Joshua 5: 10-15
John 5: 19-24
August 13th, 2006
One week ago yesterday Bonnie and I drove to the gate of the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. There an envelope awaited us that had a parking pass for the week. Not cheap! Inside at the “Will Call” booth was another envelope that contained our tickets to many events and a week’s free lodging at Presbyterian House, one of the most hospitable guesthouses I’ve ever encountered. But what awaited me at the desk at Presbyterian House I found down right intriguing as I pondered its effect over the course of the week. I was given a badge to wear on my shirt that said, “Chaplain, Presbyterian House.”
This elegant place is right beside the amphitheater where large musical events and lectures take place. It is also the place where many people come for coffee after the regular morning religious service. It was my duty to stand on the porch wearing my badge and welcoming the folk who streamed onto the porch for cocoa-laced coffee and conversation. People saw my badge and many gravitated over to speak with me. People I met in the morning coffee hours had read about me in the Chautauqua paper, which wrote about me squeezing the last drop of audacious praise that might be found in my resume.
I was, I read in the paper, a distinguished authority on Josephus, the Jewish historian. That accolade, questionable though it might be, drew me into conversations with many folk who’d heard of Josephus and took opportunity to know more of him. I could go on and on giving anecdotes of how that badge that said, “Chaplain, Presbyterian House” paved the way for my exposure to very many people last week.
As the week wore on and this impression sunk in I lay on my bed one night pondering this morning’s Scripture texts. I wondered how things might have been different for Jesus if he’d worn a badge that identified him alluringly as the Presbyterian House Chaplain badge opened doors for me. What could the badge of said? Maybe, “Incarnate Son of God?” Nobody would know what that meant, and many would accuse Jesus of either insanity or blasphemy. What kind of badge could Jesus have worn that would have opened for Him the avenues to peoples’ hearts that my badge afforded me?
Jesus wasn’t into wearing badges. Indeed, it has always been God’s way to go the opposite route with His agents of redeeming the human heart. Moses had a speech impediment that the Hebrew Bible describes grotesquely: “a man with uncircumcised lips.” He was meek in disposition, hardly an asset when trying to claim the interest of people who are more drawn to extroverts.
I think of Abraham who at seventy-five years of age was told to leave everyone he knew and go where nobody knew him and in unknown places be faithful to follow God’s next direction. He had to trust that this God who was newly revealed to him was not a figment of his imagination. And thus Abraham privately obeyed the voice of command that nobody could hear except him.
In the Book of Joshua this morning we read of this unidentified warrior that appeared before Joshua. Joshua, the under-study of Moses in the late wilderness years no doubt had all the self-confidence of most second-string players. He challenges this numinous figure, “Are you friend or foe?” And in a very brief moment he discovers he’s in the presence of a messenger of God. In the Old Testament sometimes the messenger of God turns out to be an appearance of God. But these appearances never came with the One appearing wearing a badge, an identification. It was their inward identity, who they were in their solitary character that was the medium God used.
And so it was when Jesus came. We who now read the New Testament have in mind all the things that have been said about Jesus long after he walked the dusty roads of Palestine. We have in mind the Nicene Creed’s description of Him: “God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made.” It is a badge of honor we assume is attached to His clothing from the moment of His birth. When shepherds and wise men came to Him in His infancy, they saw not a mere human baby, nursing His mother, or a lad helping His father in the carpenter shop of Nazareth later on; we imagine they saw God incarnate and knew it.
But they didn’t. Mary kept things in her heart and pondered them, but very few others had any inkling that they should ponder anything more about Jesus than they pondered about any other young man on the street. Jesus’ “badge” was entirely self-contained. It was hidden in His heart.
I read the words Jesus said of Himself in the section of John’s Gospel this morning and realize nobody then would have read them as we do. All of this about His close relationship to His heavenly Father seems to us very wonderful. Here Jesus lets us into His great secret. Here Jesus finally exposes how His Incarnate Deity works; His will and the will of the Father are in perfect synch, as we would expect the will of Persons of the Holy Trinity to be. But we think this because we’ve seen Jesus’ badge. We believe about Him already such amazing things.
After all, Isaiah foretold He would be “mighty God, the everlasting Father;” we remember this every Christmas when we hear those words of prophecy again. It makes no difference to us that Jesus didn’t look at all mighty as He endured the hate and rejection that led Him to the cross. It doesn’t matter to us that He was Son and not the Father, as we think of the Trinity. We see the badge of Deity fastened on Jesus and it is because we see this badge that we take in stride all the grand things said of Him in the New Testament.
But when we do this, do we not put Jesus up on a pedestal where we venerate Him out of any real usefulness to us as a guide to the kind of life that is God’s intention for us? We have created our elaborate doctrines of Christ that put our stamp of worship on Him, while the Jesus that really walked this earth depended completely on what was within Him, that surging faithfulness to the will of the Father that made Him go from Bethlehem’s manger to Golgotha’s cross.
And since we’re so fascinated with the badge of Deity that Jesus wears we have spent a lot of energy defining what it says and defending its truthfulness. But as we’ve done what God never did in sending His Son to redeem this world, we’ve laid aside what we should really see, what faithfulness looks like, the kind of faithfulness to the will of God that results in a life that brings all of God’s intentions for us to full flower. We’re much bigger into doctrines than we are in to developing character. In fact, we’ve got a doctrine that puts a big question mark over the need to develop Christ-like character. The doctrine of justification by grace through faith has rendered unnecessary the real blooming of sanctification.
Sanctification, the process where the Holy Spirit makes us look like we say we believe is the way to follow Jesus, walks far behind the doctrine of justification. Because it’s so much more comforting to believe that out of sheer grace God looks at us as though we’d never committed a single sin or ever been sinful, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it. Even though I may obviously be a sinner, a gloomy, vengeful, petty, self-centered parody of the Christian life, God sees me as though I were Jesus, “clad in His righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne.” What a comforting doctrine!
It is a badge we urge people to put on once they’ve prayed the prayer that asks Jesus into their hearts—a term we should think about a bit more. From there we’ve gone on to pin other badges on our chests, identifying ourselves as conservatives or whatever are the approved terms in the societies we’ve created in this prosperous land.
But I look at the Bible and at Jesus in particular and see no hint that we’re to wear badges that get us pre-approved. The Bible leads us to seek an inward identity, a heart that wants to beat according to the will of God. All that John’s Gospel told us this morning of Jesus describes inward stuff. His relationship with the Father was not visible on His sleeve. It could only be seen as someone watched the tenor of His life. His disciples watched this unfolding definition of who Jesus was as they saw Him rise from His bed long before they did in order to pray—alone. They watched His responses to people, His total acceptance of people others rejected. They heard Him called “Friend of sinners,” a term that we’ve made to seem good, but was intended as an accusation of low character. After all, are we not known by the company we keep?
But tax collectors, prostitutes, and other unclean folk found in Jesus a friend who drew them up out of their dreary lives. And when Jesus drew them up He gently set their feet on a Rock and established their goings, as the Psalm puts it.
I thought a lot this week as we were at Chautauqua about the confusion that now grips our denomination and that grips all Christendom, for that matter. I thought of what I read recently in a book describing the religious world in the time of Christ, that it was in confusion. Judaism itself emerged from the confusion in the Jewish world after the dismemberment and exile of the Israelite people. Jews identified themselves as Pharisees—careful to keep the finest intentions of the Law of Moses, or as Sadducees—strict constructionists who didn’t go along with the Pharisees’ imaginative expositions of the Law of Moses.
The most pious of all perhaps were the Essenes who separated from the rest of the Jews, interpreting the Hebrew Bible in their special way that saw the fulfillment of prophecy where other Jews did not. And then there were the Zealots who just knew that God’s call to them was to throw off the yolk of Rome by force. Jesus stepped into this chaotic, seething mix of Jewishnesses and refused to be identified with any one of them as a means of getting approval and access to peoples’ hearts.
In ways He was like the Pharisees—as, for example when He interpreted the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” to mean, “Thou shalt not hate or belittle someone;” or in explaining that “Thou shalt not commit adultery” means, “Don’t look lustfully on a woman.” In other ways he was like the Sadducees in His allegiance to the Law that rejected picayune interpretations advanced by the Pharisees. In still other ways He seemed like an Essene, or a Zealot.
But the only badge He wore was on His heart. His will was to do the will of the Father who sent Him. In the confusion of His day does Jesus not offer the guide we need to follow in our confused day?
Just now we’re torn as Presbyterians, with conservatives up in arms over the liberals, the progressives, who seem to us to push at the boundaries set for us by the Bible. Protectively we think of separating from them, pinning our conservative badges on our chests as we know would please God best. Because God wants to know that we identify ourselves as faithful conservatives. Meanwhile, privately, in our homes, in our moments unknown to others, known only to ourselves and, we forget, to God, we are whatever we are. Our badges mean very little. Wearing a badge that wins the approval of other people wearing their badges of self-approval probably means far more to us than it does to God.
I would like to take the cue from Jesus about how to go about the business of life. I mentioned to our children in the children’s sermon that a Christian doesn’t wear a special kind of hat. You may get the idea that a man is a soldier when he wears a soldier’s hat, or a Scot when he wears a tam, or an Arab when he wears that distinctive wrap over his head held down by those circles of black rope. But there is nothing to identify us outwardly as a Christian.
Our identity is inward, where in our hearts we have accepted Jesus’ forgiveness of our sin and determined to make Him Lord of our lives. Our identity is outward in so far as it is evident we love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind—and our neighbor as ourselves. Our identity is evident, Jesus said, if we love one another. If Jesus is not really our Lord, except in a phrase we’ll say; and if our love for God is really only a cultural artifact in an outwardly religious society; and if it is obvious we love ourselves far more than we love any neighbor; and if clearly we don’t love others at church—then, no matter what outward badge we wear, in our hearts we’re hardly Christian at all. And it is what’s going on in the heart that God sees.
And, for that matter, people too pick up on this. Anyone who watches us carefully can tell if our faith is a matter of appearances, of the badge we wear, or whether our identity emerges out of the many facets of our faithfulness to God, to others, to one another.
It is this I long for at Faith Church. Here let your faithfulness be what is obvious about you. Here let your love of God and your neighbor not be suggested as you quote these words of Scripture, but as, from the heart, day after day, you put your heart on autopilot to find and do the will of God. Here let our love for each other be so conspicuous that no one can doubt that we love God—because of how we love each other.
How superfluous a badge becomes once you recognize the character of a person. I pray you and I may wear the identity being forged in our hearts, visible not in external badges that may tell a lie about us, but visible in the texture of our lives—lived as Jesus’ life was lived, in conscious, deliberate submission to the will of God the Father. How beautiful is such a life; how winsome; how satisfying to be lived; how healing in this war-torn, despair-ridden world. Let this be our badge.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we come to you who sees into our depths to know what we are. Grant us so to live that whatever is outward about us will be informed by what you have re-created in us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM