Chrisitanity 101 - But God, ... Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 14^th, Year of Our + Lord 2021

Our Redeemer and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches

Custer and Hill City, South Dakota

Christianity 101 - But God, ...  (Numbers 21, Ephesians 2 and John 3)

    Did you get all that?  Our readings today are amazing, and fundamentally important to the Christian faith.  They are also hard to understand, especially at first glance, after just hearing them one time.  With the help of Rev. Deacon and Pastor Emeritus Bob Bohlmann, I have dared to adjust the epistle reading from Ephesians 2, shortening up the sentences of the ESV translation, trying to make it easier to follow.  And yet we still have to wrestle with phrases like “sons of disobedience,” “the prince of the power of the air,” and “by nature children of wrath.” Unpleasant words, and confusing.  And of course, we have these two sentences: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,  not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”  There is not a more beautiful and important passage in the Bible, but it’s a mouthful. 

    And then of course, from the Old Testament, Numbers 21, we heard the episode of the
fiery serpents, a terrible judgment on God’s people that was resolved by, wait for it, another fiery serpent, made of bronze, and mounted on a pole for all to see.  To which Jesus makes reference in John 3, just before He utters that most well-known verse, the Gospel in a Nutshell, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”  We are very familiar with this verse, and that’s great.  But how well do we understand it? 

    Well, we have a few minutes this morning, so let’s try to make some progress.  Because I want to fully understand these texts, and I want you to understand them as well.  Reaching the end of this Biblical walk may take us a lifetime; but with the Holy Spirit’s help, we’ll make it a ways down the road today.

    Let’s start in the middle, with Paul’s famous passage from Ephesians 2.  The first thing we must learn about is death, the true meaning of death.  Paul smacks us in the face with death, right at the start.  And you were dead in the trespasses and sins  in which you once walked, following the course of this world.  You and I, like everyone else, used to be the walking dead.  Yes, kind of like zombies, only backwards, and worse.  T.V and movie zombies start out good people, who get infected by a zombie bite, to become one of those horrible, braindead cannibals that we call zombies. 

    That’s entertainment.  Being what Paul describes, a dead man walking, or a dead woman or dead child walking, that is much worse.  The death we first think of when we hear the word, that tragic moment when the bodily functions shut down, we stop breathing and our heart stops beating, that death is bad, an enemy to be sure. And physical death is related to real death; it is an inevitable side effect and warning about real death.  Paul is talking about this worse death, spiritual death, which threatens us both before and after our physical death. 

    The first key to understanding Paul today is to know that the end of this earthly life, while bad, is not the worst thing.  Far worse is the spiritual death caused by our sin, because sin separates us from God, both during this earthly life, and after.  Forever and ever after.  Sons of disobedience, children of wrath, these are what we are naturally, since our conception, because we are trapped under the cruel rule of the prince of the power of the air, that is to say, Satan, the Devil.  The Devil enslaved us all, through our first parents, putting up a wall of separation between us and God, a wall that is our sin.  Our natural path travels in and through death.  What’s worse, Satan is so cunning, and we are so blind to reality, that we can even be convinced that the deadly path of disobedience is the good life.  “If it feels good, do it.”  That’s the slogan of this age.  And if what feels good in the moment turns out badly, as it so often does, well, let’s just seek out another passion of the flesh.  Satan offers us another distraction, one after the other, fleeting pleasures which end up hurting us and the people around us.  Satan distracts us to keep us from realizing how bad off we really are, the walking dead. 

    You see, the bad news is terrible, much worse than we could have imagined.  We naturally walk the path towards misery and eternal death, like zombies.  Without some hero to come and rescue us, our future is utterly dark. 

    But.  But God.  After such a bleak beginning, some of the starkest law in all of the Bible, Paul needed a big old Gospel “but.”   We need a radical change of direction, a new way forward.  But God.  But God, who is rich in mercy, loved us with a great love,  even when we were dead in our trespasses, our sin, even when we were happily walking the path of death, God loved us.  Because that’s how He is.       

    In love, God made us alive together with Christ.  As strange and horrible as our natural condition is, physically alive but spiritually dead, walking toward an eternity of death and sorrow,

yet even more mysterious and wonderful is our rescue, our salvation.

    The same Lord God who got down into the dirt to form our first father, breathing life into Adam, and who did the first surgery to take Adam’s rib and then used it to create Adam’s one-flesh wife, Eve, this same Lord God involved Himself even more intimately in our rescue, the re-creation of humanity.  What the Lord did with His hands and breath in the beginning, He now has done within Himself, in the person of Christ Jesus.  God made us alive together with Christ.  His new life is our new life.  In Christ we are a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come.     

    God made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved.  This means we neither deserved, nor earned, nor contributed in any positive way to the miraculous rescue that God has achieved for us.  Grace is the outpouring of God’s love, His favor revealed in His work of mercy, by which He snatched us off the pathway of death that we were walking, and placed us into the way of life that Christ Jesus has already walked for us.  Your rescue from Satan, and from yourself, is pure gift.  It had to be.  Because you were dead.  What do physically dead people do?  Nothing.  Dead bodies don’t do anything.  But God, in love, made you alive together with Christ, even when you were dead in your sins.  That’s what “by grace you have been saved” means.  You were made alive in Jesus, and even now, because your life is “in Him,” even now you are with Him, seated with Him in glory, in heaven.  Wow, what great news.   

    Satan is defeated, his plan is undone.  Now He can only try to keep this Good News from reaching the walking dead.  Oh, and he also is always trying to trip us up on our way, with a sneaky lie.  Even as the evil one distracts unbelievers with the pleasures and passions of the flesh, he also whispers to the Christian, “Oh yes, God is your Savior, but you still have to do your part.”  “A small part,” hisses the Evil One, “but important.”  “You must really believe, you must really commit, you must prove your faith and do many good works, in order to be sure you are saved.”  This is a lie.  But Satan knows this lie is appealing, because it seems logical to us.  We want salvation to fit our logic, and we want to feel like we’ve contributed.  I mean, who wants to be totally dependent on God, like a little child? 

 

   But God.  It should be enough that we understand we were walking dead in our trespasses and sins.  But we struggle to remember, and God wants to have you as His beloved child, totally dependent on Him.  So the Holy Spirit led Paul to break it down, even further.  For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,  not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 

    Humility is the baseline characteristic of the Christian.  Boasting, thinking too highly of ourselves, is how we got into trouble in the first place.  In foolish pride, we imagined we could somehow live independently from the God who alone creates and sustains life.  We didn’t trust and believe that God’s way was the good way, and so we chose the way of death.  

But God, ... 

    But God loved us and saved us, by grace, and He delivers this new life to each sinner through faith.  That is, all that God has done in Christ, His new life, our salvation, all this is received when we stop believing the lies of Satan, and instead believe the truth, that the Father has re-created us, given us new life, in Christ Jesus.  And even this faith, this childlike trust of the heart, is a gift, created in us by the Holy Spirit, who uses the telling of this Good News to create faith in us.  The preaching of the Gospel is the power of God for salvation. 

    Satan’s lie that you can and must contribute something to be saved is just that, a lie.  It’s a lie whether it comes from the mouth of a famous and impressive preacher, or whether it rises up from your own confused heart.  When you hear someone or something that makes you feel like you must do something to earn your salvation or make it secure, you should shout out, “Get behind me Satan,” and then turn and run to the Gospel.  For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 

   Now, you do have things to do, a new path to walk.  Good works are an important part of Christianity, but each part needs to be in its proper place.  So Paul closes this passage by teaching us where good works fit in.  For we are God´s workmanship, God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.  Adam and Eve were given good work to do in the Garden, before they rebelled, and so also, re-created in Christ Jesus, we have good works to do, to walk in, in the pathway of true life.  We were walking in the way of sin, like zombies, but now in Christ we walk in the living way of good works.  These are not good works to gain or guarantee our salvation.  That can’t be, because your salvation, your rescue, is 100% complete, finished once and for all in Christ Jesus.  But God has prepared a path of good works for you to walk in, ways for you to serve your neighbors and bring glory to God, by being who you are in Christ Jesus, an obedient and beloved child of God, who finds joy in doing what the Father has given you to do. 

   Did you get all that?  Some days, it’s almost perfectly clear for me.  And then other days, not so much.  This Law and Gospel is truly hard to keep straight, and also truly and eternally important.  So what say we keep reviewing it, as we walk together, in the months and years to come? 

   Maybe there’s still something confusing you.  How was this achieved?  Our Ephesians 2 passage lays out a systematic and detailed explanation of our natural state, our natural way of walking as sons of disobedience, and then reveals God’s new way of life that He gives us freely, received through faith, when we trust His promises.  Through faith we are washed clean and born again to the new way of life as sons and daughters of God, walking in His grace and love.  But there’s a lot of sin and death and disobedience in the world, and in me.  Did God just let that go, like it didn’t matter?  Did God just forget and ignore all the sins we’ve done, and how utterly sinful we are? 

   No, He didn’t.  God didn’t overlook and let our sin go, as if it didn’t matter.  Our Old Testament and Gospel readings fill in the blank between the way of death and God’s new way of life.  The “But God” that Paul used to make the radical change of direction from death to life contains a lot.  Within that “But God” is the lifting up of the Son of Man, like the bronze serpent Moses lifted up on a pole to save Israel from the fiery serpents of death that were biting them in their disobedience.  The phrase “God made us alive together with Christ” contains the whole story of the life, suffering, death and resurrection of God’s Son become man, Jesus Christ.  The serpent Moses lifted up in the wilderness was a foreshadowing of God’s gracious act of salvation.  But instead of an inanimate bronze sculpture, Jesus was lifted up in His own body, to take responsibility for all the evil and sin that the ancient serpent Satan unleashed in the world.  By looking to the bronze snake on a pole, God protected the Israelites from the physical death the fiery serpents inflicted.  By causing us to look in faith to the Son of Man, lifted up on a pole with a crossbar, dying for the sins of the whole world, God rescues all people from the death that never ends, eternal separation from the Lord of life.   

   For by grace you have been saved through faith, not by your works, but by believing in Son of God, given to be lifted up on the Cross, given by His Father to this great work of self-sacrifice, a work done freely, for you.  This is how God has loved you.  And the whole world.  This is Christianity 101, a class that we all must return to, again and again, the Gospel which sets you free from the fear of death, free to walk in good works, and free to rejoice.   Because you have been and you are loved, in Christ Jesus your Savior, Amen.