« Thomas’ Quite Reasonable Doubt | Main | Why That Same Benediction all these Years? »
April 22, 2007
The Hope of the Gospel
Jeremiah 31: 31-36/John 20: 16-31
April 22, 2007
This past week we were again appalled at how humanity can erupt in violence. This time it was a young man on a university campus. In 1999 we learned to think of a beautiful flower called Columbine as a word suggesting violence. Six years ago we learned: 911. 911 used to mean instant rescue. We have added another term: Virginia Tech, a great university now a name that will be associated with violence.
I listened to a TV interview with an elegant and thoughtful Iraqi diplomat shortly after this happened. He was so gracious. He commiserated with the sudden grief America feels as it shares the loss of thirty-three families—including the innocent family whose son and brother was the murderer. Then he quietly reminded the one who interviewed him that every day in Iraq families have to contend with this kind of thing. Every day is interrupted by a suicide bomber somewhere suddenly imposing violently a warped idealism on others, plunging more families into grief, destroying market places and restaurants and play grounds at the same time.
We tend to typecast Iraq as a place where suicide bombers are as Iraqi as apple pie. Not so. No more than we are a country where 911, Columbine, and last week’s Virginia Tech are typical of America.
It was for the immediate benefit of a world such as this that the two passages of Scripture we read this morning were written. Jeremiah wrote for the benefit of a nation just taken into exile. John wrote for a new community of people, without an identity yet who lived in material insecurity and often persecution. What word for our day can we find here?
The people who first heard Jeremiah’s words had heard the sound of chariot wheels and the footsteps of soldiers on their streets in Jerusalem and all the surrounding towns. Picture columns of tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbling down Rt. 26, fanning out into our neighborhoods. Those who heard Jeremiah knew what it was like to have their front doors suddenly broken down, wives and daughters ravished, fathers and dads taken prisoner or killed, their property stolen or destroyed. The cream of the crop of the land was marched off in chains to a far away place where they spoke a different language. Their sacred Place, the Temple, a symbol of all they stood for, was destroyed.
Everything precious to them was gone.
It was for their benefit that the prophet wrote words I’ve often quoted here at the start of a worship service: “I know the plans that I have for you, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the Lord.”
It was to comfort such as these that another prophet wrote, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, says your God. Speak comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low . . . and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.”
At first these words must have sounded like hollow promises. But those words came to mind again and again as the years rolled on, and forged hope in the hearts of God’s chosen people. They were the means to the blessing of the world, a promise that must have sounded hollow to them at the moment. Little did they know that just seventy years later a Persian king who had recently conquered the empire that sacked Jerusalem, would send many Jews packing for Jerusalem with the means to rebuild their Temple and the city.
In later times people would see how on target Jeremiah was in tying in their spiritual situation with their need for a material security. Just after the words I quoted above we read of God’s promise to restore their land. He will bring them back home. Indeed, God would bring them back in more than one way: back to their homeland but also back to Him. Because face it, what good is it to be in the right place if it is with a bad frame of heart and mind?
It was a gracious promise that when God’s people—then as now—seek Him with all their hearts they will find Him. We read these words as though they were meant for us. Because the heart of everyone needs most of all to be at peace with its Creator. We can be in the most painful situation outwardly speaking, and yet have perfect peace of mind, if we are squared away inwardly with our Creator. We can enjoy every material blessing and live in distress if our hearts are askew with one another and with God. If our hearts are square with God and with one another, virtually any situation can be more than endured. We can be happy.
That great old hymn that we love to sing in hard times, “It is well with my soul” many of you know was written by a husband and father after learning of the death at sea of his wife and daughters. “When peace like a river attendeth my ways and sorrow like sea-billows roll, whatever my lot Thou hast taught me to say, ‘It is well, it is well with my soul’.”
Elaine read for us what Jeremiah told his people as they struggled to make a go of it in Babylon. They probably didn’t know how to take his promise of returning to Jerusalem in seventy years. They knew even less how to take this second promise: “The days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah . . . I will write my law on their hearts; and I will be their God and they will be my people.”
Up until now the covenant as far as the people were concerned was a symbol of their failure. The covenant with its laws was a check list of how they had failed to live with integrity before God and one another. What could Jeremiah mean that God would write this law on their hearts?
They didn’t know about computers then, but had they known of computers it would nearly seem God was promising to put a computer chip into them that would re-program their hearts to live well. But this was not how it would be. God does not compel anyone to trust in Him or to obey Him. We who believe that Jeremiah’s echo of God’s promise has been fulfilled in the coming of the Lord Jesus and in the gift of the Holy Spirit do not always act as though God has written on our hearts His laws. It is not always obvious that we enjoy an inward principle that overcomes the natural defects of our humanity.
John hints to us at least how this writing of God’s law on the heart would come about. We read this morning why he wrote this Gospel. He did not write it in order to tell everything Jesus did. He couldn’t fit into one document a record of everything Jesus said and did. But he wrote what we find here “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.” Belief is God’s stylus to mark grooves into the clay tablets of our hearts. Or so it seems. But believing is not a fool-proof means to a Christian’s re-creation as a reflection of Jesus’ character. This is no doubt why the same author stresses that belief and behavior must be in tandem.
As Bonhoeffer put it, to believe is to obey.
You do not actually believe the Gospel if you live in disobedience to it. The groove of God’s stylus of belief has not been scratched onto the tablet of the heart if there is not the evidence of changed behavior.
We have a caused a lot of harm in all our theological quizzes, suggesting that God is pleased when we hold all the right ideas--as we have constructed them from our assessment of the pertinence of the Bible’s words. It is true Jesus said, “You will know the truth and the truth will make you free,” but to quote this out of context is a crime. Here is what Jesus said, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Continuing in His word refers to a way of life rather than to a way of thought. If you are living as Jesus taught then you’ll know the truth that will make you free. It begins with a way of life and not with ideas held in the mind.
What is this way of life? John’s entire Gospel is written to explain this way of life--in order that you and I may know the truth that will make us free.
While I believe we ought to honestly assess what the Bible teaches, and stick up for this when the Bible is rejected by fellow Christians, we do ill if we defend a way of life lived in violation of Jesus’ teaching and example. We do well to defend the Bible graciously before its cultured despisers when it is confused or attacked. We do well to respond firmly to men like Richard Dawkins who is trying to get all religion outlawed in Great Britain. His diabolical and quixotic campaign will surely fail, but he is doing considerable harm. But the principal business of being a Christian is living out a way of life. It is hard to refute a good life.
When Jeremiah wrote people still thought in terms of sacrifices to offer as the means of taking care of problems of behavior. Sin is bad behavior that often leads to bad thoughts. We think the direction is from bad thoughts to bad behavior, and I suppose it sometimes works this way. But it works the other way too: bad behavior fixes in our minds the welcome of bad thoughts.
Maybe John knew about the grace of God in a way Jeremiah did not yet understand. John understood that even though Jesus said “you are my friends if you do what I command you,” his Lord would do something very different from what God demanded in the Old Testament times when these commands were disobeyed.
Instead of an animal dying because of my sin, Jesus died because of my sin. When Jesus died it was as though you and I who are parents should punish ourselves when our children do badly. It was as though if my son wastes his life in self-destructive behavior, I bear the consequences in my body while my son enjoys good health and happiness.
As Paul put it, “He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.”
John wrote this Gospel for us who have the best of both worlds. We can read it and know what is the true way to live, and thus come to know the truth that frees us. And if we don’t, instead of being punished, Jesus takes the rap. And somehow, in a way I don’t understand, if we will take the helpless first step of trusting that this is true, a first step that we call “believing in Him,” then God forgives us and treats us as though we’ve never sinned at all. But surely we were not given this promise so as to presume on God’s mercy. What a waste of life to continue as though God had never offered to us a way of life that is good, that brings God joy, and offers an antidote to the miseries of this world. I often pray, “Lord, help me to make some difference for good.” It is a reminder that should surge in our hearts that God has given us all this for a purpose far richer than our own eternal security.
The hope of the Gospel is this that we can continue in God’s word if we wish. And if we do, we’ll know the truth. And if we do not continue in God’s word, then “where sin abounds grace does much more abound.” Somehow God will get to you and me even if we continue to resist Him. Even if we cling to our little self-justifications, our self-approval with unexamined lives, He loves us still. God will win in the end over the most stubborn of us. This is the hope of the Gospel.
But how much better it is if we choose to follow Jesus. How much better if we read the Scriptures with humility and hunger, and then, asking God to give us His Holy Spirit in as much quantity as we need, strive to do as Jesus taught us. Trying goes a long way. It’s when we substitute ideas about God for trying to obey Jesus that we cause heartache to ourselves, to others, and to God.
Once again, and for the final time in my life with you as pastor, we baptize a little one into the family of God. Let us teach him by precept and example what it is to be a Christian.
Let us pray: O Lord, grant that we may live as you have taught us to believe, rather than believe as we live. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at April 22, 2007 09:00 AM