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February 5, 2012 – Joshua 5:13-6:7
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I have a little experiment to propose to you: the next time you’re thinking about buying a new home, don’t go to a realtor. Don’t even go to the bank to find out how much you can afford to borrow. Instead, just find a house you’d like to own, march up to the front door, and tell the current residents that God promised this house to your great-great-great-great-great grandfather, and if they’d kindly move out by the end of the week and drop the keys in the mailbox, you’d be very appreciative.
Do that, and you’ll understand the dilemma that the Israelites faced once they entered the promised land. Having escaped from slavery in Egypt, passed through the Red Sea, survived in the wilderness for forty years, and crossed the River Jordan in miraculous fashion, they still had one very big problem: the promised land was occupied. And the current residents weren’t about to give it up easily.
Now, of course, God had warned them about this. The Canaanites, he said, had come under divine judgment because of their sins – in particular, idol worship, sexual immorality, and child sacrifice. The Lord promised that he would drive the Canaanites out before Israel. But when Joshua and his army arrived at the gates of Jericho, the Canaanites were most certainly still there.
Archaeology reveals that Jericho was a pretty well-fortified place throughout most of its history. It had high, stone and mud-brick walls with towers for archers. That might not sound too impressive, but remember that the Israelites were armed with nothing heavier than bows, swords and spears. Attack a brick building with a large stick and see for yourself how well it works.
There were, in the ancient world, a few established ways to take a walled city. The first, and the most common, was a siege. You surrounded the city, cutting off supplies and reinforcements, and essentially starving the locals out. But that often took years. The second method was to somehow tempt the defenders out into the open, and challenge them to battle. If you’ve ever read Homer, in particular, the Iliad, you know how risky that was. You might win. Or you might not. The third method was pure engineering. Either you built a machine to go over the enemy’s walls, or you dug under, or some combination of the two.
Joshua was still pondering his strategy when, according to the end of chapter five here, he looked up to see an imposing figure standing in front of him, brandishing a sword.
“Are you for us,” he asked, “Or for our adversaries?” A fair question, really. But not one to which he would get a straight answer.
“No,” said the mystery man. “But I am the commander of the army of the Lord.”
Now, I’m not sure Joshua knew who he was talking to when the conversation started. But clearly he asked the wrong question. Whether he knew it or not, Joshua was asking an archangel whether the Lord was on his side, or not. And the answer was that the Lord was on no one’s side. The Lord was on the Lord’s side. What was important was whose side Joshua was on.
Joshua, to his credit, responded the right way. He bowed down and asked, “What does the Lord say to his servant?”
The answer he received can only be described as… well, in all honesty, a little strange. Joshua was told first to take off his sandals, because the place where he stood was holy ground. Just like Moses had been. Not only had Joshua taken Moses’ place as the leader of Israel, he had also taken Moses’ place as the Lord’s man, as his agent.
And then the plan was laid out: “See,” said the Lord, “I have given Jericho into your hand.” Now, to this point, Joshua has been talking to an angel of some sort. But suddenly, at the beginning of chapter six, the Lord himself is speaking. What’s going on here?
There are two possibilities. The first is that angels, by their very nature, are perfect spokesmen. That means that what they say, God says, and what God says, they say. A man may speak to an angel as if he were speaking directly to the Almighty.
The second possibility is that the “Angel of the Lord” spoken of in the Old Testament is none other than the pre-incarnate Christ. Remember that John’s Gospel says that he was there in the beginning, and that the book of Hebrews says that he is the perfect likeness of God. To speak to the Son would be to speak to the Lord, and the Son would be able to speak for the Father.
Either way, Joshua is given what can be described only as… well, as an interesting plan:
“You shall march around the city,” Joshua was told, “all the men of war going around the city once. Thus you shall do for six days. Seven priests shall bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark. On the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets. And when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, when you shall hear the sound of the trumpet, then all the people shall shout with a great shout, and the wall of the city will fall down flat…” (Joshua 6:3-5)
Keep in mind that Joshua and his officers had seen battles before. And in no case did victory follow from blowing trumpets and shouting. Any more than the traffic parts in front of you when you blow your horn. This seemed, at best… unlikely.
And yet, Joshua did it. Maybe because he didn’t have a better idea. Maybe because he believed the Lord. Who knows? Either way, his army circled the city blowing horns once a day for seven days. And on the seventh day, the seventh time around the city, the walls fell. And so Joshua and his army took the mighty city of Jericho.
Humanly speaking, it shouldn’t have happened. But that’s the way God works. He’s not bound by human expectations. Sometimes he simply flattens the walls in front of us.
If you remember last week, I told you to look here in these Old Testament stories for patterns, as much as for prophecies. And the battle of Jericho is a perfect example.
A lot of life is a struggle between our own plans and ideas and ambitions, and those of the Lord. Joshua knew how battles were usually fought in his day. We know how battles are usually fought in our own. They involve weapons, and strategy, and tactics. Only the Lord’s tactics and strategies – not to mention his weapons – are often very, very different from our own.
We look at the world and see what you might call tactical problems. This person doesn’t have enough to eat. That person is being abused. This other person is sitting around in despair. That person is drinking way too much.
We assume that tactical problems have tactical answers. Feed the hungry. Protect the abused. Encourage the despairing. Help the addicts. And those are all good things. But there’s an underlying, strategic problem: people need Jesus. They need forgiveness. They need grace.
Jesus’ own answers aren’t exactly what you’d call commonsense. When someone strikes you on one cheek, he says, turn the other. When someone asks you to carry a burden for a mile, carry it for two. When someone hates you, love him back. When someone declares you to be his enemy, love him, and pray for him.
“If your enemy is hungry,” Jesus said, “feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. For in so doing, you will heap burning coals upon his head.” (Romans 12:20)
The people of God, according to the New Testament, are an odd bunch. At least as odd as the Israelites must have seemed to the Canaanites of Jericho. Their weapons – prayer and service and mercy and truth – are as foreign to our society as marching and shouting and horns were to Joshua’s. And they seem just as unlikely to succeed.
But this is our command. To seek the kingdom of God according to his wisdom, not because it seems right to us, but simply because he’s the Lord, and his ways are higher than our ways, his thoughts higher than ours.
The world says that there’s no substitute for power, that politics is everything, that we have to win what’s ours, or it’ll be gone forever. The Lord says to love and serve the least of his people, and promises that the last will be first, and the first last. In all honesty, it’s hard to believe that sometimes. But that’s the Gospel. That’s his way. Praise be to God. Amen.
January 8, 2012 – Genesis 3:1-15
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My kindergarten classroom was the old high school metal shop. To brighten it up and make it look cheerful, somebody covered every exposed surface with purple shag carpeting, including the two-foot deep, rectangular concrete pit toward the back of the room. And just because it looked like fun, they hung a rope over the shaggy pit so we could swing from one side to the other.
I’ll let you decide whether that was a good idea or not.
It’s hard for a lot of people to avoid the same sort of doubts about this garden in Genesis 2 and 3. For the most part, it looks so well thought out. There’s an orchard, watered by mists that go up from the ground. A river flows through it. There are all kinds of plants and animals. There’s a man, and a woman, and everything they could possible need right at their fingertips.
And then there’s the tree. The beautiful one with the cool name – the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil – smack in the middle of the garden, the tree that God warned “when you eat of it, you shall surely die.”
In purely human terms, that seems like a disaster waiting to happen, doesn’t it? So why put it there? For that matter, why would God make human beings capable of disobedience, if disobedience brings death? And why, oh why, would God make this serpent?
Of course there’s really no answer. The Bible just tells the story. Oh, there are hints. The 12th chapter of Revelation says pretty explicitly that the serpent is Satan, motivated by pride and jealousy. As for why God created Satan in the first place, the Bible hints repeatedly that he was created as an angel of light, as a servant of God, but that he wasn’t content to serve. Ironically, according to the 15th chapter of Isaiah, what he wanted was the same thing he offered the woman: to be “like the Most High.”
The Bible has less to say about the tree, but I’m not sure we should be surprised by it. The fact that we are surprised has a lot to do with the fact that we’ve forgotten the difference between freedom and chaos. True freedom always exists within boundaries. If that sounds paradoxical, think about marriage. Marriage is a covenant, which is really another way of saying an agreed-upon set of rules: for better and worse, richer or poorer, forsaking all others, until death do you part. Break those rules, and your love doesn’t become more loving. It dies. Likewise with freedom.
The man and the woman in the garden were created in the image and likeness of God, for relationship with him, to live with him and to love him and to be loved by him. In order for that love to be genuine, they had to be free to return it, or not. And in order for them to be truly free, their freedom had to exercised within the boundaries of obedience. In this case, one forbidden tree, smack in the middle of the garden.
The serpent, who couldn’t bear the thought of the man and woman enjoying the love of God that he himself had rejected, was determined to use that single restriction to his advantage. What follows, in this story, is a dismally familiar pattern.
It begins in verse one with the serpent injecting just a hint of doubt. He plays the old lawyer’s game of asking the woman a seemingly innocent question about what precisely God had commanded, as if he weren’t quite clear about it and needed some help:
“Did God actually say that you may not eat of any tree in the garden?”
One of the more alarming bits of this story is that the woman doesn’t seem the least bit alarmed by that a snake should want to have what amounted to an afternoon Bible Study. Then again, she was in the garden of the Lord. There was nothing there to harm her. Or so she thought.
She may not have been frightened, but the woman – she’s not named Eve until later, in verse 20 – does seem to have been flustered by the question. Because in verse two she makes what turns out to be a deadly mistake. As she tries to explain what God actually said, she gets the command wrong. She adds one provision that God never actually made, saying that if they even touched the tree they would die.
That was the opening the serpent needed. The woman had been wrong about touching the tree, and knew it the minute she said it. Maybe she was wrong about eating the fruit, too. It was all a little confusing. Now that the woman was questioning what God had said, the serpent moved on in verse four to the next step: challenging his motives.
“But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” It’s literally the oldest line in existence, but it still works on us. God doesn’t want you to have any fun. He wants to keep you in the dark, to manipulate you. He lied.
In verse six it says that “the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise.” At least, that’s what the serpent had told her. The truth is that she had nothing to gain from eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil except evil. She already knew good, as did her husband, because they knew God. If indeed the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, as it says in Proverbs, then there was no wisdom to be gained. The only thing that fruit held for her was evil, and as God had warned, death.
And yet she ate. And her husband ate. And having broken the one commandment that God had laid down, the relationship of love and obedience with God that they had enjoyed from the moment of their creation was broken, shattered. They were cast out of the garden forever.
It’s a dismal story, really. Heck of a way to start your reading. And yet it explains the basic dilemma of human existence: this sense that we have that the world is not the way it’s supposed to be. I’m always surprised when things like death and disease and the general nastiness of human beings toward one another is held up as evidence against the Gospel. Because if the secular materialists were right, and existence is just the product of random collisions between particles, then we’d have no grounds to complain. The death of a child? Well, it’s all part of the circle of life. The holocaust? Ditto. Slavery? Who am I to say that it’s wrong?
But that doesn’t ring true to us. We know we were made for something better. We were not made to die. And the message of the Bible, here in Genesis, is that we’re right about that. We were made in the likeness and the image of God, to live forever with him in a relationship of love and obedience. But that relationship is destroyed by sin. That was true for Adam and Eve there in the garden. And it’s true for us, all of us, now. Sin doesn’t deliver the freedom that it promises. Instead it separates us from God and brings us under his judgment.
If we left it there… well, we can’t leave it there. Nor does the Bible let us. Yes, it’s true that we’re all sinners. Yes, it’s true that the result of sin is death. And the penalty of sin is hell. But God doesn’t let his people go easily. The remainder of this book is the story of God’s solution to our sin, culminating in the gift of his Son, Jesus Christ, who took on himself the pain of death, so that those who give their lives to him might live.
“Therefore,” says the apostle Paul in the fifth chapter of Romans, “just as sin came into the world through one man” – he’s talking about Adam – “and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned… But the free gift is not like the trespass… for if because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.”
Praise God. Amen.
January 1, 2012 – Amos 8:11-12
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Amos was not, to put it mildly, a cheerful prophet. Not many of them are. But Amos’s prophecy tended to be especially bleak. He talked a lot about war and pestilence and locusts and invasions. Which must have struck his listeners as particularly strange, since they were living at the tail end of what, by human standards, was the kingdom of Israel’s golden age
Oh, sure, there were problems. Everybody knew that. Morality, especially sexual morality, had slipped pretty far. Greed and corruption were endemic in the government and in business. And the poor, as usual, had gotten the short end of the stick. But despite it all, in eighth century B.C. Israel, times were good. The economy was booming. There were plenty of jobs. The markets were full of Greek wine and Egyptian grain and Babylonian linen and even Chinese silk, carried thousands of miles by camel. And Israel still thought of itself as a religious, even godly nation. They were the chosen people, right? Church attendance, so to speak, was still pretty high, although in chapter two Amos points out that the people wouldn’t put up with long sermons. In any case, the people of Israel had every reason to tell themselves not to worry: God was on their side, and their freedom and prosperity proved it.
Amos was sent to stick a pin in the balloon of Israel’s pretention. The Lord, he insisted, was about to judge his people. The drought and earthquake they were about to experience was just the beginning. If they didn’t repent and turn back to the Lord, as a nation, far worse lay in store. Wars. Plagues. Pestilence.
But the most dramatic threat was here in chapter eight: “‘Behold, the days are coming,’ says the Lord God, ‘when I will send a famine on the land – not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro and seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.’”
To understand that threat, keep in mind that for six hundred years, since the days of Moses, the Lord had sent Israel guidance whenever it was needed. When the people were wandering in the wilderness, the Lord directed them. When they went off track, he sent prophets to nudge them back. Other nations consulted astrologers, or oracles, or tried to contact the dead for guidance. Israel had the Word of God. If things got bad enough, he’d send a prophet like Moses or Elijah to straighten them out.
Except that he wouldn’t. Not any more. Not if they refused to listen to what he had already said. They wanted to be left alone, to run their own lives. Fine. The Lord would leave them alone. Even if they changed their minds, Amos said, and trekked across vast deserts or over snow-capped mountains to seek a word from him, they wouldn’t find it.
Sound familiar?
I think it should. Because it applies about as well to us as it does to Israel in Amos’s day. At the bare minimum, his description of spiritual starvation describes pretty well the experience of a large part of the church today, especially in the so-called Western World. And it has, for at least fifty, and maybe a hundred, years.
The church isn’t well. I don’t mean this congregation in particular, or any one denomination, though some, including ours, are sicker than others. I mean that the American church, as a whole, as the body of Christ, is spiritually malnourished.
You see evidence of this famine of the Word all over. Christians seem confused about what to believe, and what to do. Now, overconfidence is no virtue, and by all means we should have a healthy skepticism about our own motives and actions. The Bible insists as much. What I mean is that as a whole, Christians seem uncertain and hesitant about fundamental aspects of the Gospel – things like the exclusivity of Christ, the truth and authority and reliability of Scripture, basic morality, and so on. We’re told by sophisticated types that this is okay, even that it’s a sign of maturity, that we’re growing out of an antiquated faith and into something different. But most people don’t actually believe that. And for good reason – their eyes, their ears, their hearts tell them differently. The church, especially in its less certain manifestations, doesn’t look more mature. It looks hesitant and defensive and lost.
I probably don’t have to tell you this, but it isn’t supposed to be this way. The church that we run into in the book of Acts isn’t hesitant and humble. It’s joyful and confident. It went out into the world proclaiming at the risk of death the very things of which the church today seems embarrassed – that there is such a thing as sin; that there is forgiveness in Christ, and in no one else; and that the whole world needs to hear about him, as soon as possible. That confidence didn’t take the place of things like feeding the hungry and helping the sick and taking in orphans and widows. It drove the church’s mission.
That confidence carried right through the third and fourth centuries, when the church peacefully, but quite literally, conquered the Roman Empire. It drove the missions of Patrick and Basil and Methodius and Boniface and David Brainerd and William Carey and David Livingstone as they carried the Gospel of Jesus through Europe and the Americas and into Asia and Africa. That confidence continues to drive the incredible expansion of the church today in China and in India and sub-Saharan Africa. But for whatever reason, it seems to be in short supply here, and our mission has suffered for it.
It would be easy to say that our famine of the word is just a natural side-effect of secular modernity. Rudolf Bultmann famously – and in my opinion, stupidly – said that in an age when a man can flip a switch and turn on a light, it’s impossible to believe the supernatural bits of the Gospel. My response would be to tell that to the Chinese. Pull the battery cover off of your cell phone and look to see where it’s made. These folks aren’t ignorant, and the suggestion that they are is more than a little racist. The problem isn’t that we know more. The problem is that as a society, and even as a church, we trust less.
I’d submit to you – and this is my opinion, but it’s not only mine (Anglican theologian J.I. Packer wrote an entire book dedicated to the idea) – that our malady may very well be that we, as the church of Jesus Christ in the Western World, find ourselves under the judgment of God. We have the Word. Not in the way Israel had it, through the prophets, but the written Word in Holy Scripture. In fact we have it in more translations, available in more ways, with better study resources, than any generation in the history of mankind. And yet American Christians today are ignorant of the Word of God to a degree that would shock Christians of any other age or nation. We’re malnourished, and it shows.
The logical solution to malnutrition is to eat. It’s logical, but it’s not necessarily right. When aid workers show up in places where people are starving, they can’t just open the bags of corn or rice and let people at it. Starving bellies can’t process food like that. Ironically, it’ll kill them. First they need vitamins and minerals. And then they need a little food at a time. In the case of a famine of the Word, something similar applies. Simply supplying Scripture isn’t enough. People have to be prepared to receive it.
Which is why I mention any of this in the first place. Beginning tomorrow, we’re going to embark on a Bible reading plan together. For some of you, this is going to be simplistic, even slow. For some of you, it’ll be a real challenge. In either case, we’re not just trying to consume a large book, or learn some fun trivia. We have plenty of people who do that. We call them Biblical scholars and give them interviews on television and magazine articles. An alarming number of them know this book in great detail, but can’t hear it as the Word of God. That’s our task. That’s our goal – to hear the Scriptures as the Word of God, in the conviction that every syllable points to Christ, and that, as James wrote, when planted in us, that Word is able to save.
What all of that means in practical terms is that the first step in hearing the Word of God together isn’t to open our Bibles to the first chapter of Genesis and start reading. It’s prayer. Specifically, prayers of repentance, confessing with humble hearts our own pride and disobedience, asking the Lord to open our hearts to his Word. Because unless he does that, nothing we read will do us any good.
A second step follows the first. The book of Hebrews says that the Word of God is living and active (4:12). In 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul insists that the Holy Spirit not only gives the Word power, but allows us to understand it (2:11-13). And Jesus himself insists that every syllable of it bears witness to him, and to the salvation that he accomplished (Luke 24:37). All of which is to say that we don’t approach Scripture like we would any other book. We approach the Bible expecting it to challenge us, to make us uncomfortable, to change us, and in absolutely everything, even the details of creation, or the intricacies of the Law, to point us to Jesus, its fulfillment.
If we want to grow, we have to eat. If we want to be healthy, we need proper nutrition. And for the Christian the source, ultimately, is Christ himself, speaking through his Word. So go, and be fed, and find the confidence of his presence to do great things for him. Amen.
December 25, 2011 – Isaiah 9:1-7
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Some of the best gifts require a little explanation. You can’t just yank them out from under the Christmas tree and rip into them. They have to be opened in a certain order to make sense.
That’s no less true of the greatest gift, the reason for all the other gifts, the gift of Christ himself. In fact, the first two-thirds of the Bible consists of God preparing his people to receive his Son – showing us who God is, what he’s like, what holiness is, what’s expected from us, why we need a Savior, and what kind of Savior we have. It’s vital stuff.
That’s what this prophecy here in the ninth chapter of Isaiah is about. He’s explaining the gift, so that we can appreciate the incredible depth of the God’s love for us in Jesus Christ, so that we understand our need for him, and most importantly, how to respond to him.
Isaiah begins in verse one with the first thing we need to know about any gift: what it’s for.
“But there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish,” it says in verse one. “In the former time, [the Lord] brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, the Galilee of the nations. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined…”
If you had asked the people of Jerusalem in Isaiah’s day about the darkness in which they were living, they’d probably have rattled off a list of complaints that included everything from the economy – which was a wreck – to drought to sickness to the Assyrian army that was camped on the border of the northern kingdom of Israel, just waiting to invade. And they would have had a point. Things were kind of terrible. A little earlier in Isaiah, in chapter eight, the prophet was commanded to name his newborn son Maher-Shalal-Hashbaz (possibly my favorite name in the Bible, by the way) which means something like “the spoil speeds; the prey hastens.” Cheerful. What’s more, Isaiah was warned that before the boy is able to say “mommy” or “daddy,” the Assyrians will have swept through the northern kingdom, destroying the capital city, Samaria, and carting off everyone and everything in sight.
That was bad. And it was okay for the people to be worried and even to call out to God for help. But what Isaiah wanted them to understand was that the darkness in Israel that the Lord was going to go to this incredible length to save them from wasn’t really the darkness of their economic or political problems. It was the darkness of their sins. It was the darkness, as he pointed out earlier in his prophecy, of a people who worshipped the Lord with their hands and with their voices and with their offerings, but not with their hearts. A people who didn’t really know the God they claimed to serve. Not only were they ignorant of God, they were ignorant of their own ignorance. This was the darkness into which Christ would come, like a beam of light. They had to understand that.
Put it this way: if you’re given a treadmill for Christmas, and instead of running on it, you use it as a rack to dry your shirts – I speaking from experience – you may be getting something out of it, but it’s not going to accomplish what it was intended to. Likewise with Jesus. It may be that you appreciate him in a kind of casual way. It may be that you like some of his teachings, or you admire the way he helped the poor and the sick. It may be that you’re grateful for him simply because you love Christmas – you love the decorations, and the pageants, and the lights, and the music, and so forth. That’s what the rest of the world likes, anyway. And you know what? For the world he may be a nice prop, the occasion for a fun holiday or two. But that’s not what he came for. He was given, as Isaiah says, to be a light in the darkness. And until we recognize the darkness in our own hearts, until we see our separation from God, until we know the weight of our sins, until we see just how desperately pitiful our own attempts at getting right with God are – until we know the darkness in which we live, we won’t receive the light. We won’t receive Christ, as he means us to.
In verses three through five, Isaiah explains what this gift of Christ is going to accomplish for God’s people:
“You have multiplied the nation,” he says, “you have increased its joy; they rejoice before you as with joy at the harvest, as they are glad when they divide the spoil. For the yoke of his burden and the staff for his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian…”
Again, had you asked the people listening to Isaiah who their “oppressors” were, you might have heard something about the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the abusive rich. And you know what? It would have been true. They were being abused and threatened by those people. And God promised that he would deal with all of them, in due time. The Assyrian Empire that was hovering over them like a vulture? It would be gone within a century, never to rise again. The Babylonians? Gone, fifty years later. The arrogant, wealthy aristocrats of Jerusalem? By the time the invaders were done, they’d have nothing left. And just as importantly, all of them – rich and poor, foreign or Israelite – would have to face God in the end and answer for their actions.
But again, ultimately speaking, those outside powers weren’t the problem. The real slavery wasn’t to the rich, or to the Assyrians. It was to sin. That doesn’t make outward slavery and oppression okay. Far from it. The Gospel forbids Christians to take part in that kind of thing, and commands them to work against it whenever and wherever they can. The history of the abolition of literal, flesh-and-blood slavery is driven by Christians who were simply trying to do the right thing for the sake of those for whom Christ died. But the gift of salvation that’s given to us in Jesus Christ goes far, far beyond that limited sort of outward freedom. By his blood Jesus frees us from the most basic, most oppressive kind of oppression: slavery to our own sin. The oppression of our own guilt before God. The accusation of Satan. The fires of hell and judgment.
The yoke of the burden that he takes away, as Isaiah puts it, is the yoke of slavery to our own selfish desires, our own foolishness, our own disobedience to God. It’s the burden of trying to do it ourselves, again and again and again, to fill that hole in our own soulds, only to fail every single time, because the gap can only be filled by him. Jesus takes that away. He takes away the fear. He frees us from ourselves, so that we can live freely for him.
And how does he do it? How does this incredible gift come to us? Isaiah answers that question in verse 8: “For to us, a child is born, to us a son is given…” If we really appreciated it, that might be the most unexpected answer ever. These people were praying for God to reach down in his power and fix things. And they’re told – we’re told – that what he offers us is a child. A baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, as the angel said. A son. His Son.
Who will this child be? How will he accomplish all of this? “The government shall be upon his shoulder,” Isaiah says in the second half of verse eight, “and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace, there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and uphold it with justice and with righteousness, from this time forth and forevermore.”
Look at the names there. Wonderful Counselor. In English we use the word “wonderful” pretty casually – hey, that’s a wonderful idea – but in Hebrew it’s the kind of adjective that’s almost always and exclusively applied to God. It means something, or someone, so unfathomably great that you can’t comprehend it, only stare in amazement. This is the kind of counsel he gives. This is the way he guides his people. This is the change that he makes in their lives. It can only be wondered at.
How about the second name? Mighty God. Try to bend your mind around that sometime. This child – the word is the usual one for a human baby – will also, somehow, at the same time, be Almighty God. And when you get right down to it, it couldn’t be any other way. In order for him to know us, really and truly, he has to be one of us. In order for him to save us, to restore us to the kind of relationship that we were made for, he has to be nothing less than fully God.
The third title, “Everlasting Father,” isn’t technical Trinitarian language. Isaiah is simply saying that Jesus cares for and watches over his people the way a father would – or at least, the way a father should.
And finally, Isaiah calls Jesus, “the Prince of Peace.” Which is not to say that his people are instantly and automatically exempted from conflict. Not yet, anyway. The most important peace that he makes is peace between us, and the Father. And he does that, in the end, the only way possible: by his own blood. “For in him,” it says in Colossians 1:20, “the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”
I hope you got what you wanted this Christmas. But most of all, I hope you get what you need, more than anything else, the one great gift of God’s love, available to everyone who asks for it: the gift of his Son, Jesus Christ. Merry Christmas, and God bless you. Amen.
December 24, 2011 – Matthew 1:18-25
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Every time I read the story of Jesus’ birth – no matter how many times – I’m struck by the same thought: that this is not the way I would have done it.
It wouldn’t have been in a manger. Not a good place for a newborn. There wouldn’t have been any farm animals hanging around. Unsanitary. There wouldn’t have been any visits by Iranian astrologers. That’s just weird. Come to think of it, if it had been up to me, this story wouldn’t have involved a baby at all.
Babies are fragile things. Helpless. They can’t feed themselves. They can’t defend themselves. They can’t tell anybody what they want – I mean, not in detail, anyway. They can’t even change their own diapers. They’re totally, utterly, dependent. At the time Jesus was born, it was even worse. The odds of any one child surviving to adulthood were probably less than 50 percent. A baby? No. From a human point of view, as plans for the salvation of the world go, this is all wrong.
And yet this is the way it happened. With a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, surrounded by cattle and sheep and watched over by a teenage girl and a small-town carpenter. The Word of God made helpless, ordinary, vulnerable human flesh. Immanuel. God with us. God made one of us.
I suspect that to a lot of people the words are so familiar they don’t stop to think what a miracle that is, and what an honor. The Lord who speaks to us in the Gospels, who calls us to follow him, who promises that his yoke is easy and his burden is light, isn’t some distant celestial monarch, booming out his commands from afar, in splendid isolation. He bears our flesh. He knows our weaknesses and our trials and our temptations first-hand, because he’s experienced them (though, unlike us, he didn’t fall to temptation, but was sinless).
Jesus knows our hardships and our happiness. He knows what it is to work and play, to be hot and cold, to be hungry and thirsty. He’s been the guest at wedding receptions. He’s wept at funerals. He lost a foster father. He’s gone fishing with his friends. He’s had sore feet and an aching back. He knows the sting of betrayal.
This is the message of Christmas, the news that we’ll shout to anyone who will listen, the reason we rejoice: that the child in that manger in Bethlehem is none other than Immanuel, God with us, the Lord of heaven and earth, the author of creation, who out of sheer love chose, willingly, incredibly, to become one of us. Not just to descend from the clouds in human form. But to be conceived by the Holy Spirit, carried for nine months in his mother’s womb, and born as we are, as a helpless child.
If we even begin to understand what that means, the sheer thought should drive us to our knees in worship. This is a distinction that no other creature in all creation enjoys. The angels, in their luminous perfection, were never granted such an honor. Nor was any bird or beast. Only human beings. Which is all the more amazing, since we had the least right to expect it. The angels are perfect in their obedience. The animals – well, they’re neither good nor evil. They just are. But human beings! Created in the likeness and the image of God, to live in a loving relationship with him, and we squandered it all. We wound up poor, weak, foolish, sinful things, proud, selfish, rebels against our maker. Of all creation we have the least claim to his love. And yet, of all creation, he paid us the highest honor: he gave us his Son.
Like I said, the thought should drive us to our knees. It should also put a few things into perspective. If indeed the Son of God was willing to humble himself, to set aside his power and his majesty to take on our flesh, what right do we have to lord it over one another? If the Son of God was content to lie naked and helpless in a feed trough, how is it that we whine endlessly when we’re asked to undergo a little bit of discomfort? If the Son of God was willing to endure the indignities of this life, if he was willing to undergo suffering and even death, not for his sake, but because of your sins and mine, how is it that we grumble and moan about going a little out of our way to serve him? If, as it says in Romans, God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, how is it that we feel so entitled to judge who is, and who isn’t, worthy of our love? If we learn nothing else from the miracle of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, it should be a little humility of our own, and a willingness to honor in one another the flesh and blood of the Son of God.
“All this,” says Matthew, “took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel,’ which means, ‘God with us.’” Praise God. Amen.
December 11, 2011 – Luke 1:39-56
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I’m not a fan of musical theater. I’m not knocking it, or anyone who is a fan. I’m just saying that it’s not really my thing. A world in which people burst into tightly choreographed song-and-dance numbers at the slightest provocation seems somehow… disturbing. Did the neighbor boy just join the Army? Are you a simple country girl who dreams of life in the big city? Are you a farmer whose daughter has fallen in love with a cowboy? Lace up your tap shoes and sing about it! We’ll all join in!
Like I said, not my thing. I am willing to concede, however, that there are moments in life – they’re not common, but they do happen – so extraordinary that mere words are insufficient. You may not be able to spontaneously pour out the contents of your heart in song, but you understand the urge.
It’s not that hard to understand why Mary felt that urge when she met her cousin Elizabeth. When the angel Gabriel told Mary that she would conceive and bear a child, who would be the Son of God, Mary asked a reasonable question: “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel replied to her that it would be by the power of the Holy Spirit, “therefore,” he said, “the child to be born will be called holy – the Son of God.” And then, by way of encouragement, the angel offered her this bit of news: “Behold,” he said, “your relative Elizabeth in her old age has conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.”
More or less the minute the angel left, Luke says, Mary jumped up and began packing. It was a 70-mile trip, but that didn’t faze her. She wanted to see for herself. Luke tells us about their reunion beginning in verse 41:
“And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.”
If any doubt remained in Mary’s heart – and I don’t know that it did – it was gone the moment Elizabeth opened her mouth. Not only was it true that Elizabeth was pregnant, but Elizabeth knew that Mary was pregnant. Keep in mind that she wasn’t very far along. It almost certainly wasn’t obvious. And I can almost guarantee that this is not the kind of thing that Mary would have announced out loud, or written on the back of a postcard. This was not a society that looked fondly on unmarried mothers. I’m not sure whether Mary planned on telling Elizabeth at all. But it didn’t matter – she knew. There was only one was she could have known. And that’s if God told her.
Not only had the Lord given Elizabeth the news, but he had also given her a blessing for her teenaged cousin: “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”
To her credit, Mary understood the importance of what was happening. God was about to do something absolutely amazing, that would change the world forever. She carried in her womb the Son of God, the savior of the world. And to whom had God entrusted the news? To a small-town carpenter, an old lady, and a pregnant teenager. The thought of it all was overwhelming.
And at that point, Luke says, Mary burst into song. It’s hard to say from Luke’s account whether it came all at once, or a little at a time over the span of a few days. The longer, drawn-out version might seem a little more likely, but keep in mind that these are extraordinary circumstances. Scripture is very explicit here that Elizabeth spoke under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And I think it’s reasonable to assume that Mary did too. Your average person may not be able to compose metrical poetry on the fly, but remember what the angel told Mary: “nothing will be impossible with God.”
The song that Mary sang is traditionally known as the Magnificat, from the first word in the Latin version. (I suppose that’s better than calling it the “Megalune,” which is how it begins in Luke’s Greek version.) In English it begins: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”
I should point out here that Mary’s song isn’t completely original. It’s very similar to a song by Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, in 1 Samuel chapter 2, when she found out that she was pregnant. Hannah’s song begins, “My heart exults in the Lord, my strength is exalted in the Lord.” The words aren’t identical, but they’re close. And the theme of the two songs are identical. Both women sing about how their hearts or souls rejoice in God, because of what he’s done. And principally, because of what he’s done for lowly and unlikely people like them:
“For he has looked on the humble estate of his servant,” sings Mary in verse 48. She goes on in verse 51 and 52 to sing about how “he has scattered the thoughts of the proud in their hearts, he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate: he has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty.”
There aren’t many genuine heroes in the gospels, other than Jesus. Among them, though, for Luke, at least, are Elizabeth and Mary. And what particularly stands out about them is precisely their humble trust in God. Elizabeth asks “why is it granted that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” And Mary replies to the angel, on hearing the news of her pregnancy, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word.” Her chief distinction in Luke’s eyes – with apologies to my Roman Catholic friends – isn’t that she’s somehow morally more upstanding than other women. It’s that Mary, like her cousin Elizabeth, is lowly before the Lord. And the righteousness and holiness of God, according to her song, is exalted in his love for the lowly.
This is hard for Americans to understand. We’ve been raised on Benjamin Franklin’s adage that “God helps those who help themselves.” As it happens, about three-quarters of us think that’s from the Bible. It isn’t. In fact, the Biblical truth, which Mary recognizes, is almost exactly the opposite – that the glory of God is manifest in his love for those who can’t help themselves. For the widows. And the orphans. And the poor. And the meek. And those who mourn. And so on.
The converse of that truth, of course, is, as Mary says, that God “has brought down the mighty from their thrones.” He’s not partial to the rich and powerful. And there’s a reason. Riches and power are so often substitutes for God. The road to hell is quite literally paved with such things, because they distract us from our need for him. So Mary’s song is a word of warning to us, as much as a word of praise. God exalts the lowly and humble, yes. He lifts up those who know that they can’t stand on their own. By his grace he saves those who know their own weakness and sin. But he casts down the proud. He lays low those who think that their wealth and material comfort will somehow insulate them from the guilt of their sins. He kicks the feet out from under those who think they’re good enough, who are righteous in their own eyes. He’s not impressed by those things, because he knows they’re false. He has mercy on those who fear him, who deny themselves, who turn to him with nothing in their hands. This, Mary says, is his glory and his righteousness.
And yet, she sings, in their lowliness of heart, the humble rejoice. Because they know the grace of God. “For he has looked on the humble estate of his servant,” she says in verse 49. “Behold, from now on, all generations will call me blessed, for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.”
You see, the joy that the humble of heart take in the Lord isn’t abstract. It’s never a case of “wow, look at how great God is, that he doesn’t pay attention to the things that we do.” It’s always personal: “look what the Lord has done for me, a poor sinner.” Again, I beg the pardon of my Roman Catholic friends. The notion that Mary lived a perfectly sinless life, or for that matter the doctrine of her perpetual virginity and her assumption into heaven – they simply have no grounding in the New Testament. But that doesn’t mean Mary doesn’t have an exalted place there. She does, as the very first of Jesus’ disciples. And it’s precisely because of her example of humble repentance, her joy and amazement that the God of all creation would take notice of her. In that, we should absolutely try to follow her example.
There aren’t many occasions in this life that call for song. The grace of God toward the lowly and the humble is definitely one of them. He intends for us to rejoice in him. It’s what we were made for. But that rejoicing will only come for those who lay down their pride, who recognize their own weakness, and come to him with empty hands, trusting in his mercy. Amen.
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