A Great God Saves Sinners

Isaiah 1:1-9

God sends us prophets so we can see things from his point of view.  This is more important than we might realize as we tend to get wrapped up in the ways we view things.  It is easy for us to understand our times through what is trendy to believe, what our favorite columnists or political pundits believe, or what the wind blows in under the guise of conventional wisdom.  In short, we tend not to see things through God’s eyes.  So he sends us prophets.  Their words are God’s words to us in our times so we can have our eyes opened to the way things really are.  And the view from there is not always pretty.

Isaiah begins with a lament.  “Ah,” he says, “sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity.” It is true that prophets were not always the most popular of people.  They were curmudgeons.  You typically did not want to hear what they had to say, but the more we hear the words of the prophets, the more we hear the sound of weeping.  The rebellion of God’s people broke their hearts.  They said the things they said, not because they were spiteful nags, but because they were compelled by the word of God and their love for their people.  I have no doubt that Isaiah would have said something different if the truth about God’s people was different.  But as it as it stood, they needed to hear some difficult things.

They were like a body broken out with disease from head to toe.  The boils were obvious, their heart was weak, and the wounds were raw.  Their sins were no longer hidden or hideable – they were out there for everyone to see.  A disease under the skin might be masked for a while, but once the boils begin to grow and the wounds begin to fester, the problem becomes clear to anyone who has eyes.  Except, it seems, to the diseased.

God’s people have not bandaged their wounds, lanced the boils or applied ointment: “they are not pressed out or bound up or softened with oil” (vs. 6).  In short, they are riddled with disease and have refused the treatment – they are full of sin but have forsaken the God who heals them.  They are a beaten and bruised boxer who thinks he is victorious.  They are covered with festering boils and believe they are healthy.  Their lives have become ugly and they believe they are beautiful.

This is the most powerful deception of sin.  We begin to consider sin itself to be righteousness, we take disease to be health, we begin to believe that wrong is actually right.  And in the end, we will begin to refuse the category or sin altogether.  Sin’s greatest magic trick is its disappearing act.  It does its damage; it ravages the soul, and convinces us that it was never really here.

The people of God need to see these things.  We cannot progress into a meaningful understanding of God or relationship with him until we understand what sin does to our souls.  Once we grasp this reality, we have the option of leaving the wounds open and festering, or turning to a great and gracious God.  Isaiah tells us that God has left us a remnant; fur us, it is an opportunity.  God’s grace has left a way of forgiveness and healing where we deserved to be destroyed.  We deserve what Sodom and Gomorrah got.  Their sin and rebellion led to utter destruction.  Will ours?

God decided to save sinners, so he has extended his healing grace.  May we see what God sees, and may we have the wisdom and humility to let him bandage the wounds of our sins and bring the healing only he can give.

Mom and Dad Wisdom

Proverbs 1:8-19

One of the first steps in wisdom is learning who to listen to.  Whose voice will I accept as wise and virtuous?  Which opinions will I learn to take with a grain of salt?  How will I learn to filter the bombardment of information and pressure in this life?  Solomon’s first answer at these questions comes quickly in Proverbs.  Mom and dad should be voices of wisdom into their children’s lives, and youth should learn to listen to what they have to say.

As voices of wisdom, parents are supposed to prepare their children for what is coming their way and offer commentary.  It does no good for a parent to allow a child to raise themselves, or sift through competing voices themselves.  Parents are designed by God to warn children and provide clear input on the ways that are foolish and the ways of God’s wisdom.  So we see in this passage that parents encourage their children to listen to them and then spell out how sin and foolishness will entice their children.  As a result, we see what kinds of arguments foolishness will use to look like wisdom and be appealing in its ugliness.  The enticement is powerful.

Foolishness tells the young man that they will lie in wait for blood.  They will take the first unsuspecting pedestrian, trap and beat them, and take their goods.  This is violence both for the sake of it (“ambush the innocent without reason”) and for the sake of unjust gain (“fill our houses with plunder”).  This is both the allure of violence, possibly especially for young men, and the promise of gain without work.  And though we are not all allured by a life of random violence, how many of us are tempted by gain without work?  If I can simply take it from another – no matter how violent or legal the means – and not have to work for it, isn’t that an easier way of life?  Why wait to have what I can have now?

The fool continues to draw in his bait.  The young man is promised community when the sinner says, “throw in your lot among us; we will all have one purse” (vs 14).  The promise of a group of people who will take care of your needs, provide protection and a sense of belonging touches a deep need within every human.  What family and the family of God is intended to provide, the fool promises to give.  And though fools and thieves are liars, their false promise is nonetheless a temptation for many.  God built us to desire community, and he built the family and the Body of Christ to meet that need.

Don’t listen to them.  Don’t walk down that path.  The advice is straightforward, and it is the voice of reason and wisdom in our lives if we listen to it.  And it isn’t just about joining gangs or throwing in our lot with violent thugs.  The voice of wisdom reveals what is being manipulated in every human heart with this appeal of the fool: “Such are the ways of everyone who is greedy for unjust gain” (vs. 19).  All of us need to watch our step.  I need to be aware of those ways in which I am tempted by greed and the collection of things in this life that cause me to step on other people.  Have I walked over someone at work?  Have I short-changed someone in a business deal?  Have I harmed a neighbor just to make my lot bigger or better?  Have I hurt a family member just to get my way?  Any way in which I am tempted to enlarge myself and my fiefdom at the expense of my neighbor is greed, and it will end up costing me my own life.

Begin listening to the voice of wisdom.  You may think you have a better plan or that you are too smart by half for the fool.  But you are wrong.  They end up setting a trap for their own lives and doing themselves in.  The path of the fool leads to your own destruction no matter how hard you try to manage it.  Listen to Mom and Dad Wisdom, and you will avoid the path of the fool.

Love and Blisters

1 John 4:20-21

The love of God has dirt under its fingernails.  Contrary to popular opinion, love, properly understood, is not an ephemeral emotion floating in the atmosphere just above treeline.  Christian love builds callouses on its fingers and feet.  Love does things.  It motivates us, teaches us what is good and what is destructive for the the human life.  It is - or it becomes - the love of God among us.

John is thoroughly earthy in his commands to love.  Though he talks about love a lot he is far from what we would call a romantic.  Christian love is intensely practical, intentional, and often difficult.  If we say we love God and hate a neighbor we are lying about loving God.  It doesn't matter how often we say we love God, how sincerely we mean it when we say it, or how many people believe us when we say it, if we hate a single human soul we are lying about our love for God.  It is a high bar, but the love of God is utterly incompatible with hatred for people.  In fact, the more we grow in the love of God the clearer love and hate become to us: we love people and hate the junk that destroys their souls.  We learn to hate sin just as God does.  In fact, God loves every soul so much, he deeply hates the sin that separates them from him and destroys their lives.

Every human deserves to know the love of God and Christians need to do the loving.  This world with all its promises of liberty and tolerance will never reproduce the power of the love of God, so it needs to be the people of God who show it.  People need to be loved.

These people we live with, get to know, build relationships with, all need to be loved.  The people we create families and communities with, the people who become our life-long friends need to be loved.  Even those who take more from us that they give need God's love.  The people we find difficult, annoying, arrogant, simple-minded, myopic, dangerous, or plain-old cruel need to be loved.

After all, this is how God did it.

Instead of loving us from afar and casting his affections our way hoping we might feel some of it or comprehend some fraction of it, he came here.  He became flesh and the life and love of God was manifest in our midst in a man who got dirt under his fingernails and blisters on his feet.  He walked the dusty roads of Galilee, feasted with friends and laughed in the company of people who befriended him.  He wept at the death of a friend.  He endured the fickle crowds who followed him as long as he had bread to give them at the end of the sermon.  He endured the years-long persecution of the religious leadership of his people.  His friends ran from his aid, denied, and betrayed him.  In this flesh he felt every ounce of pain in the flogging and the hammering of the nails.  In this flesh, the love of God died to save difficult, rebellious, stiff-necked, dangerous, and plain-old evil people.

We need to love people.  God did.

Believing and Behaving Disciples

1 John 4:15-16

John is known as 'the apostle of love' and for good reason.  In his first epistle his concentration on the love of God is obvious if not overwhelming.  But what can be lost in this love language is his concern that believers also confess the truth about Jesus Christ. There were false teachers coming through the church who were teaching new things about Christ, which, if believed, would separate disciples from the truth and the fellowship of the body of Christ.  John desperately wanted his congregation to hold to the truth in Jesus Christ and to love as he did with a unique and unquenchable fervor.  Both are needed for our faith, but we are often tempted to take up either one and drop the other.

One common mistake in the Christian faith is to hold to the truths of Christ without their implications reaching our behavior.  We believe; we don't behave.  There are times when this is a cold faith.  What we believe is reduced to formulae, to precisely worded statements of doctrine that must be adhered to under threat of inquisition.  We come to Christ as a set of doctrines to be held to (and to hold others to) instead as coming to a Person - the Person who lived, died and rose again.  Things like 'grace' become just terms and ideas instead of lifestyles and gifts of relationship.  And as such, we lose too much.

Sometimes this is a fiery and fervent mistake.  When Christ is reduced to statements of belief it becomes easy to recognize the impostors.  It becomes easy to vet the undesirables, throw out a pastor, split a church, or leave the fold altogether.  All because we had Christ down pat and they did not agree.  Zeal without knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The other mistake may be a reaction to the first, but is just as wrong-headed.  Down this path we take a journey of deeds, intentions, and emotions.  The faith becomes a matter of what we do, how often we do it, how well-intentioned we are when we do it, and how fervently we reject the other mistake.  Who needs doctrines and creeds that do nothing but divide? Here, we do not play those power games or exclude other deed-doers over minutiae.  We want people who will live lives of love to their fellow human beings, nothing more, and certainly nothing less.

With all its good intentions this temptation leaves the front door open to any and every definition of "love" and eventually of Christ himself.  After all, we are not going to divide and conquer over those kinds of things.  In this way, though the deed is done (or at least is intended to be done), the truth of the person of Christ gets left by the roadside like the spare luggage we should not have packed in the first place.

John, however, shows us the better way.  Christians confess and love.  Disciples of Jesus Christ know and believe in the true Christ and love their brothers and sisters as Christ loved them.  The believer with the robust and meaningful faith believes and behaves.  It turns out that whoever confesses that Jesus is the Christ, came in the flesh, and died as the propitiation for our sins abides in him.  And, not surprisingly, whoever loves as he loves abides in him and he abides in them.  This is the better way.

A God Greater Than Sin

1 John 3:4-5

Like all the early Christians, John’s first readers were facing false teaching that threatened to separate them from their relationship with each other and with Christ.  While there are times when John tells us exactly what the false teachers were saying, there are times when we are required to infer the false teaching from the correction John gives.  We learn the disease by reading the prescription labels.  It seems to be the case that John’s congregation was being tempted to take sin too lightly, to view it with a frightening level of indifference, to see sin as inconsequential to their lives with Christ.

To be sure, this is one way of dealing with the unremitting reality of our own brokenness.  If we are able to deny sin itself, justify any behavior we want, or even claim a certain kind of perfection, we are able (we think) to side-step the problem sin presents.  But this is not John’s solution.  His is radically different from the temptation to suppress the sinfulness of sin.  Instead, the closer we look at the depth and power of sin and all of its consequences in our lives the more we learn that God as greater than all of that.  The God who forgives does not forgive small and inconsequential things, He forgives the very thing that becomes our ruination.  Disciples of Jesus Christ do not live forgiven lives because they have diminished sin, but because God has done something about all their sin.

To remedy the false teaching John tells his readers that all “sin is lawlessness.”  Everything that is contrary to the will and character of God is a breaking of His law.  John does not make distinctions between the large, visible sins and the small or private sins implying that only the ‘big’ acts of rebellion are lawless while the others are not.  All that goes against God’s law is sin and all sin is lawlessness – every inclination, every action.

John, however, does not leave us there.  Christ “appeared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin.”  John knows our lives are riddled with brokenness and that Christ came to fix that problem.  In fact, knowing the extent of sin is our doorway into understanding why Christ came.  If John’ s readers were denying their sinfulness, were they changing the reason why Christ came?  If I have decided that I no longer suffer the ravages of sin, who then does Christ become?  It is a short path from the softening of sin to Christ being reduced from a Savior to a moral example or a great human teacher.  Changing my need changes my savior.

But, if John’s congregation holds to the teaching they have heard from the beginning about their need and their true Savior, then both the problem is rightly understood and the remedy is rightly accepted.  Jesus Christ came to take away sins, not to be listed among some of the greatest philosophers or teachers in history.  And the only way to get to that saving God is to take sin seriously.

The lighter we take sin the smaller and more unnecessary God becomes to us.  But if we look unflinchingly at the power and ubiquity of sin and turn to the only One who can cure us, God becomes Lord and Savior of our lives.

The Blessings and Curses

Deuteronomy 27

Though famous for the severity of the blessings and curses, this passage of Scripture deserves to be seen both for its dramatic flair and its take on fundamental moral realities.  As Moses sets the stage for the events described in this chapter, he fills two facing hillsides with the tribes of Israel, places the Arc of the Covenant and the priests in the valley below, and proclaims the terms of their covenant with God.  At each declaration of consequence, the people reply in unison, “Amen,” declaring that they agree to the terms, to include the blessings and the curses.  Imagine the volume of the scene – thousands of people crying, “Amen!” Imagine the liability of the people of God publicly proclaiming that because they belong to God they are subject to the terms of that covenant.

Before the details of the blessings and the curses are understood, the place to begin is with a fundamental understanding of what it entails to be the people of God.  Though God called Abram from Ur generations ago, and though God rescued them from Egypt one generation ago, Moses makes a point of saying, “this day you have become the people of God” (vs. 9).  This is not the literal day in which God makes them his people.  This is the day the terms of the covenant are brought to bear in a unique way.  This is the day of reckoning.  This is the day of consequence.  This is the day of blessing and curses.

Being the people of God, both then and now, comes with a set of terms regarding reality.  Though God’s laws stand as immutable no matter who believes them, this is a unique conversation God has with his people about their lives as humans who both belong to him and represent him on this earth.

God’s people cannot live in relationship with him and act however they please.  Relationship with a loving and holy God is not a moral free-for-all.  God is not loving in a way that allows us to follow our own hearts and create our own paths in life.  God is our Creator; he created us to flourish as humans who live according to his will and his ways.  And God is so loving that he reveals those ways as clearly and as often as possible.  And as people who say, “Amen,” we are responsible to those ways.

God’s people cannot break the terms of the covenant and expect God’s blessing to continue to flow.  It is utterly human to expect good things to come if we act as though we mean well, no matter what we actually do.  It is utterly divine to act in accordance with the Word of God, knowing that it means our peace, salvation, and well-being.

God’s people need to grow comfortable with a moral standard other than their own wishes to which they are responsible.  If I had my way, I would set the standards by which I will be judged.  But reality doesn’t work that way.  Even the people who love me the most don’t let me get away with that kind of narcissism.  The Lord of heaven and earth has already set the moral terms of human behavior and when I say, “Amen,” I explicitly agree to his terms.

God’s people need to understand there really are consequences for behavior, both good and bad.  The blessings and curses are both natural and divine consequences.  Our actions have inevitable, natural consequences, and God is involved in enforcing the terms of the covenant.  We do not live in moral and spiritual silly-putty.

Am I ready to say, “Amen”?  Have I already said it and yet continue to live as if I haven’t?  The final call and response of chapter 27 is the call to live what we affirm.  “Cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them” (vs. 26).  And shall all the people say, “Amen”?

The Day After the Locust

Joel 1:1-4

A good Old Testament prophet is able to take the circumstances of the day and help us understand them through the will and word of God.  Whatever is pervasive in culture, whatever crisis is impending, the prophet helps the people of God understand God’s view on things.  Isaiah helps Israel hear God through the death of a king and the threat of Assyrians.  Jeremiah tries to get Judah to repent and avoid the invasion of the Babylonians.  Daniel lives as a faithful child of God in a pagan land and sees the power of the kingdom of God.

Joel gets bugs.  To be a little more specific, the crisis Joel’s generation faces, and the issue God wants them to understand, is a plague of locust.  It may not be glamorous, but through the faithfulness of Joel we end up learning a lot about God’s people and the power of a restoring God.

To begin with, the spiritual leaders of Israel are called on the carpet.  There is no evidence in Joel that they are responsible for Israel’s sins, but they are responsible to fulfill their role in a day of crisis.  They are spiritual leaders, and God’s people need to be lead back to him.  God’s appointed spiritual leaders are exactly that – they are not primarily business men, politicians, lawyers, or managers – they are leaders in things spiritual.  If the congregation of God is to come back to their senses and a right relationship with God, they will need to be lead by the priests and elders.

But the rest of the population is not let off the hook.  They are called to see what has gone on around them and learn how to respond faithfully.  They are not allowed to sit on the sidelines and watch as the priests and elders put things right with God, they are expected to be fully engaged in the process of repentance and restoration.

And then Joel tells the story of the locust.  A devastating plague has swept through their countryside and left nothing to them.  A plague of locust comes in waves, day after day.  Joel describes just that when he tells us that what the first wave didn’t eat, the second wave ate, and what they left the third wave ate, and so on.  From eyewitness account after account we can be sure of what happened to their countryside.  Nothing was left.  Crops, grass, seeds, heaps of stored grain, the bark on the trees – all gone.  Their consumption was complete. 

When the locusts come through, nothing edible is left.  Nothing promising any future value remains.  Joel and his people face a few pressing questions.  What can be done in the face of such destruction?  How can the people of God be faithful on a day like this?  Is there anyone who is great enough to restore all that was lost?

As it turns out, there is a God who is both powerful enough and faithful enough to restore what was lost.  And there is a way for God’s people – even people who have rebelled against God – to be faithful in a time like this.

To believe in a God of restoration is to understand the depth of the destruction.  And then we begin to understand how much greater this God we worship really is.  All is gone.  Everything we thought would take care of us tomorrow has been taken away from us.  So it is to you, O Lord, that we turn.