The Lamb - Part 1

(With thanks to http://www.foxfirefiber.com/newsletter.html - accessed 17.03.13)

Sermon for Kew Baptist, 17 March 2013 (with a grateful nod to Glen Scrivener!)

Steve Levy, of Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Swansea, recently preached a sermon …on preaching! … In which he emphasised how the words of a good sermon will certainly sound foolish, as it is the power of God that saves, not the power of the preacher ... so I would like to start by praying!

[Pray]

I’d like to read what I think is an excellent example of words that sound foolish to us, but that come in the power of God!

Revelation 6:15-17 says:

Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?”

… So, the kings of the earth, great leaders, war heroes, the rich, the famous, the powerful, the influential - everyone, in fact – will, it is prophesied, resort to talking to inanimate mountains and rocks (who, it must be remembered, don't have a long history of engaging Man in conversation!) in a desperate attempt to find protection from the terrible wrath of ... a small, bleating, wobbly-legged, bundle of wool!

If that didn't sound foolish enough, Revelation 5:13 adds:

...every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them (say) “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honour and glory and might for ever and ever!”

Again, I get the 'him who sits on the throne' bit – getting honour and glory ‘n’ all - but ... the LAMB?  What is this fixation with the young and ovine all about?

John the Baptist gives us the short answer in John 1:29-34:

...he saw Jesus ... and said, “Behold, the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!  This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.’ … I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him … I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

The slightly longer answer will take us through some of the history of God's interaction with his people.  We're going to follow this little study on the lamb, stopping off very briefly in Genesis 22, Exodus 11-12, Isaiah 53, and Mark 14-15, but focussing mainly on The Passover and The Cross.

So, first of all Genesis 22:1-8:

... God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!”

And he said, “Here am I.”

He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”

So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac.  And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him.  On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar.  Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.”  And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son.  And he took in his hand the fire and the knife.  So they went, both of them, together.

And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!”

And he said, “Here am I, my son.”

He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”

Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together.

So, here, we have a father and his son; the son is called his 'only son' whom the father loves; it's early in the morning when the son is led out with two other men, the wood upon which the son is to be sacrificed placed on his own back; and, on the third day, the father confidently reports that his son will return after the sacrifice.

Sound familiar?!  If we needed any more help as to what this event was prophesying, Solomon provides it, in 2 Chronicles 3:1, as he starts "to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem (which is) on Mount Moriah"

Interestingly, here, Abraham prophesies that The Lord himself will provide a lamb for the sacrifice ... yet THIS time, in verse 13, a ram is provided.

But let's get back to lambs!

Next we're into Exodus 11-12 and The Passover.  To preserve you from my voice for the next quarter-hour, Katy’s going to read a slightly abridged version, just leaving out repetitions or points not related to the lamb specifically:

The Lord said to Moses, “Yet one plague more I will bring upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt ... About midnight I will go out in the midst of Egypt, and every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl who is behind the handmill, and all the firstborn of the cattle.  There shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there has never been, nor ever will be again.

But not a dog shall growl against any of the people of Israel, either man or beast, that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel.

This month shall be for you the beginning of months … the first month of the year for you ... on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb according to their fathers' houses, a lamb for a household ... according to what each can eat ... Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old ... and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight.  Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it.  They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs ... you shall eat it with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand and you shall eat it in haste.

For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgements: I am the Lord.  The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are ... when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.

Moses expands on the instructions a little:

Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood … and touch the lintel and the two doorposts.

None of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning.  For the Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians, and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you.

Then, it happened:

At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock.  And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians. And there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead.

So, again, as with Abraham’s story, it’s Firstborn Son vs. Lamb!

The gods of Egypt, representing all gods that are not the one, true, living God, are about to be judged by the one, true, living God, and every household who align themselves to, or worship, these false gods will live only at the cost of their firstborn son.

But the one, true, living God - being the God of love as he is - has offered an alternative: a lamb.  “There was not a house where someone was not dead” after The Lord had passed through … the question was, would that dead ‘someone’ be a son or a lamb?

As it represented Jesus, this lamb had to be without blemish (representing Jesus’ being without evil); it had to be male (representing Jesus being the self-sacrificing Bridegroom to his Bride); and it had to be a year old (representing Jesus’ having completed his appointed time of ministry before his own sacrificial death).

On the tenth day of the first month, the lamb was taken into the household for whose salvation it was to be sacrificed, and kept there, inside, until the fourteenth day of this month.  For five days, then, this farm animal lived in the house as ‘one of the family’.  This represents how Jesus came in our flesh to make his home amongst us (and, for those who like numerology, perhaps the five days represents Jesus’ showing, during that time, that he fulfilled The Law?)

The whole assembly of the congregation of Israel then kill their lambs “at twilight”, or – as an alternative translation puts it - “between the two evenings”, which is an odd phrase that possibly refers to the two evenings that occurred on the day Jesus died, as reported in Matthew 27, Mark 15, and Luke 23.  Here, night-time fell at around noon, and the light only reappeared at 3pm, at which time Jesus gave up his spirit.  The Israelites then eat the flesh of the lamb, personally identifying with the saving work achieved by the sacrifice.

This offer of a lamb was a true gift from God - a “Get out of jail free” card, for those familiar with the board game ‘Monopoly’ - and, if a household heard God’s call, through Moses, to take this gift he offers, trusted that he is as good as his word, and showed their trust on their lintels and their doorposts, their own firstborn son would be spared.

Individual status would not be taken into account: “every firstborn … from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne … to the firstborn of the slave … the firstborn of the captive … in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock” would die.  No, this is all about faith – do you trust God or not?  It’s black or white; there is no grey area here – it’s a simple yes or no.  And the Lord makes a very clear distinction between those who do trust him and those who do not.

But what does trusting him actually look like in this situation?

I want to introduce you to three hypothetical Israelite households living in Goshen that night…

Meet the Cohens: they are very religious – they’re always inviting Moses over to have him share the words of God; they’re always praying and talking to each other about Father Abraham and singing spiritual songs; and they’re always doing good deeds around the neighbourhood for the widows and orphans.  On one level, they’re quite disappointed about The Passover: they don’t want God to pass over them, they’d like him to come in, examine their lives, and they’d like to hear the words “well done, good and faithful servant!”  On the other hand, a command is a command, and they follow obediently, carefully putting down two coats of lamb’s blood around their door.

Not like the Fagins: they weren’t going to be going anywhere that night anyway because their whole family had been served ASBOs.  They are commonly known as being drunkards, gluttons, liars, gamblers, swindlers, benefits cheats, notoriously promiscuous … they avoid Moses like the plague (if you’ll pardon the pun) so it’s only by fortune that they’ve heard what he said about the lamb’s blood anyway, and they really don’t think it will do any good because they’re sure that the Angel of Death has had their card marked from a long time ago.  But, equally, they’ve nothing to lose by doing it, and there is the possibility that God will be merciful if they obey this once, so they splash the basin of blood on the lintel and doorposts.

Then there’s the Leaveys: they’re not as wicked as the Fagins, but then they’re nothing like as good as the Cohens either.  They keep phoning up the Cohens saying “ok, we’ve killed the lamb and we think we’ve applied the blood the way we’re supposed to, but we’re not sure – could you spy through your window over the street and say what you think? … And do we really think it will make the difference?  What if the Angel of Death doesn’t see it, I mean it will be dark out there!...” … they pace up and down all night wondering if they’ve done enough and done it right enough …but, nonetheless, the blood is around the door.

… So, which of these families will end up with the dead son in the morning?

None of them!  If the blood was on the door, God wouldn’t look in to check on any further details, he would stay the destroyer’s hand and move on to the next house.  It had nothing to do with the moral character, standing in society, or even the state of heart or mind of the people inside the house, and everything to do with the presence of the blood on the door.  It was the fact that the blood was there that gave full protection from any further scrutiny.

It wasn’t even about how much faith they had in the blood – he never mentioned doubts, fears, worries, and concerns – he didn’t discuss how the people were to feel about it at all!  He simply asks to be trusted to know what he is doing.  You could have been as doubt-filled and concerned as you like but if the blood was on the door, no-one was coming in.

In stark contrast to what we normally hear from the pulpit (or, frankly, from any other would-be teacher), it wasn’t about what was on the inside that counted, but what was on the outside!

This resonates with the idea of Christ’s righteousness cloaking our nakedness as we stand before the judgement seat, such that the Judge looks at us and, only seeing Jesus, pronounces us innocent.

Salvation is nothing to do with your own performance and everything to do with Jesus’.  Christ saves you by His blood – not by anything in you.  It’s not about the quality of your living, speaking, acting, praying.  It’s not even about the quality of your own faith.  It’s only about the blood.  It’s the quality of His death, not the quality of your life.  1 John 1:7 says “the blood of Jesus, God’s Son, purifies us from EVERY sin” – no sin can get past this purification.

We just need to remember to hold up this gift of the blood (alone) in our defence in the face of the judgement.

But, therein, lies a huge problem: we, as human beings, are invariably forgetful!  This is why the Bible and creation are littered with reminders – in fact, the Bible is not a book about doing so much as remembering.

And so, in this case, God calls for a regular reminder (Exodus 12:14-20):

This day shall be for you a memorial day and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord … you shall observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought your hosts out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day, throughout your generations, as a statute for ever.

Interestingly, it is not called the Feast of The Lamb, or even the Feast of The Lamb and Unleavened Bread, as you might expect from the prominent place lamb has on the Passover menu.  It’s just the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

For those who are saved, Jesus was The Lamb who was sacrificed once for all so that no further sacrifice is required.

On the night that he was betrayed (the day he was to become The Passover Lamb), Jesus appears to change the Passover meal for all future years, from the eating of the lamb, proclaiming his sacrifice that buys freedom, to the breaking and eating of bread in remembrance that he had given his body to be broken in our place, and to the drinking of wine, in remembrance that his life was poured out in our place.

I said I’d go through Genesis 22, Exodus 11-12, Isaiah 53, and Mark 14-15, focussing mainly on The Passover and The Cross.  I’ve done half of this – if you’ll allow me, I’ll go through the second half next week.

In the meantime, if you have tasted of Jesus and seen that he is good, please take and eat communion with us this morning in remembrance that he died and was raised to eternal life so that we might live with him for eternity.

Before we do, let me thank God as we pray together: Father, thank you for your son, who - doing only as he saw you do – sacrificed himself in order that we might be with you forevermore.  Help us always to remember, to remind others, and to be reminded by others about your love for us, your wisdom for us, and your power for us.  Help us to be content in all things, living life to the full, knowing and enjoying you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

God's Spirit and ours

www.brainpickings.org

I've frequently wondered how it all works with us having a spirit, and God having a spirit, and then us having God's spirit!

Just come across this in 1 Corinthians 6:16b-17 ... 

"For two, saith he, shall be one flesh.  But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit."

So, as in marriage when two (man and wife) become one, and as, therefore, in salvation redemption when two (Jesus and church) become one ... so, in the individual, in personal salvation, two (man's spirit and God's spirit) become one?

www.brainpickings.org

... No wonder God doesn't want us to marry non-Christians!  What would that proclaim to creation?  That God ultimately will be united with those who have not been saved through faith by grace ... so, a lie ... which God hates.  So let's not marry non-Christians.

That's that sorted then!

Sermon for Kew Baptist Church

Last Sunday, I visited Kew Baptist Church for the first time and received a very warm welcome – thank you all very much!

There were many things I enjoyed about my visit – a couple of the most striking were here at the front: the massive sign behind the preacher saying “We preach Christ crucified”, and the table upon which the communion bread and wine were laid, which was decked out in a beautiful piece of crimson material that seemed to be folded quite chaotically on the top of this ‘altar’ but then, as it flowed over the edge - carefully parted to show the name of a token saint (printed on white) - the chaotic material itself seemed to disappear, revealing a beautiful and orderly vine-like pattern on its surface.  Interestingly, too, there remained, after the wine had been distributed and the tray returned to the table, a solitary cup of the wine and a solitary cup of water.

For me, this was an assault of wonderful symbolisms of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, and what God achieved through it.

So I resolved to make sure I preach Christ crucified today, and I pray I do!

Coincidentally, my mother and I were talking recently and realised that we don’t fully ‘get’ the whole ‘Jesus died for my sins’ bit!  How does that work?  How can the death of An Innocent satisfy God’s need to deal with the evil in me?  Have you ever thought about that?

I would like to talk about this today, partly at least as I believe it may help in our daily spiritual battle to hold on to our 'certain hope' of God's goodness to, and love for, us.

So, my thinking goes like this …

I have evil tendencies: I do self-centred things that trample others down in order to put myself first; I seek to gratify perceived needs or desires in myself no matter the cost to anyone else; and this may happen entirely intentionally, or without really thinking about it (which I think really shows the depth of evil in me!) - this is the general human condition.

God, on the other hand, is pure goodness … righteousness … love.  It is this pure goodness and love that gave birth to us – the creation: in order for love to be love - an expanding, growing, building, including, joyful thing - it needs evermore receivers and enjoyers of love.

Evil, on the other hand, is not a thing in itself but merely an absence of God’s love – rather like ‘dark’ is merely an absence of ‘light’.  So evil results in a self-centred, self-absorbed, self-absorbing, self-serving hatred of everyone else, insofar as anyone else gets in the way of my own pleasure.

Clearly, evil and love cannot co-exist.  And so, clearly, evil is excluded from God, because God is love.

And yet, last Sunday, Pavlos spoke on the fact of evil in the world, and I wanted to pick up on a quote of his from Isaiah that I found fascinating - Isaiah 45:7 says:

"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I, the Lord, do all these things." (KJV)

The idea that God - who is called ‘good’ and ‘love’ - would create evil is one that doesn’t feel right, and doesn’t sit well with:

Psalm 97:10 "Let those who love the LORD hate evil..."

Proverbs 8:13 "To fear the LORD is to hate evil..."

Amos 5:15 "Hate evil, love good..."

Zechariah 8:17 "do not plot evil against your neighbor, and do not love to swear falsely. I hate all this,” declares the LORD."

John 3:20 "Everyone who does evil hates the light..."

… and Romans 12:9 "Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good."

There are many passages like these that don’t make sense in the light of 1 John 4:8: "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love" … but a little exploration of the phrase “create evil”, may reveal something more profound about evil,  its supposed ‘creation’, and its alleged Creator.

For this exploration, I turn to Strong’s Concordance, a comprehensive cross-reference of every single word in the KJV back to the word in the original text, in the original languages of the Bible.  It was compiled by a team of more than a hundred researchers from Drew Theological Seminary and first published in 1890.

This tool shows us that ‘create’ is the Hebrew word ‘bara’ and ‘evil’ is the Hebrew word ‘ra’.

The first word – ‘bara’ – is also the first verb in the entire Bible: “In the beginning, God created…” – it is used in a number of places and seems to have a sense of “clearing a space” – the picture being one of clearing a space in a wooded area or an overgrown meadow before building a home or a farmhouse or some abode there.

If we think on the original creation story a little, it is clear that, if there was truly nothing apart from God – Father, Son, and Spirit – prior to the creation, then God would have had to have cleared a space in which his new creation could be located.

I think the story of the creation of Adam’s bride-to-be, Eve, is told to let us in on how he created his creation – the Son of God's bride-to-be.

If this is true, then the entire fabric of the cosmos came out of the side of the bridegroom-to-be, the Son of God: The Spirit, filling the Son of God, withdrew from this ‘rib’ of Jesus, rendering it dark, chaotic, and void.  He - The Spirit of Light and Life - then re-entered this darkness as God set about his work of creating and life-giving.  This creation was to be reunited with the Son of God like Eve was reunited with Adam: in marriage and sexual union ... or what marriage and sexual union symbolise in ‘The Big Picture of God’s story of everything' - that is, in truly … knowing God.

One of the more literal translations out there seems to lend some support to this, rendering Isaiah 45:7: “I am Jehovah, and there is none else, forming light, and preparing darkness, making peace, and preparing evil, I am Jehovah, doing all these things” (YLT).

So let’s look at that second word: ‘ra’.

‘Ra’, according to Strong’s Concordance, comes from a primitive root-word meaning ‘spoil’.  What was there, in the beginning, that could be spoiled?  Only God’s initially “very good” creation.

That begs the question: why would God prepare a very good creation ... to be spoiled?

To answer this, we need to remember 1 John 4:8 again: "... God is love".

It strikes me that, in order for there to be true love between two people (rather than just one party being robotically programmed to ‘love’ the other), there needs to be a genuine choice to love.  In order for there to be a genuine choice, there needs to be both freedom to choose and a selection of at least two options.

So, in his grace and his desire for a genuinely loving relationship with us, perhaps God allowed for something to spoil his ‘very good’ creation so that we could have a genuine choice: to be in a loving relationship with him, or a non-relationship with Not-Him ... a.k.a. ‘evil’.

The sad and all-too-familiar next bit of the story is that we chose evil.

The choice facing Adam and Eve in Eden was not really a choice to know good and evil, because they already knew good.  Because they already knew good, they were really choosing to know evil – and that is the choice we all took, in Adam.

But that sounds really weird, doesn’t it?  The idea that we - you and I - made a choice to turn from God in order to know evil ... in Adam!  But I think that understanding this will really help us to understand why the death of An Innocent deals with the evil in me, so I’m going to try to unpack it a little bit.

Genesis 2:3 says, of the seventh day: "God rested from all his work that he had done in creation".

So, once he created Adam and Eve, he did not go on to then create Cain, Abel, Seth, and all the others – they simply proceeded from Adam and Eve.  They – and we – were created in, and came out from, Adam and Eve.

Hebrews 7:9-10 alludes to this, too, when it says that: "one might even say that Levi himself (who receives tithes) paid tithes through Abraham, for he was still in the loins of his ancestor, when Melchizedek met him."

So it would seem that each and every one of us has an unbroken, literal link – through our flesh - all the way back to Adam: we, all, were in Adam when God created him (… us!)

So, again, it was in Adam, that we all – too – chose to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which brought death in to spoil creation.

This is why God is entirely just in seeing that the death that came through that choice is still meted out on us today.

Just ... but not happy!

2 Peter 3:9 describes God as: "not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" ... Acts 17:26-27 says: "he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us."

God takes no pleasure from the nonetheless just situation that all of us should be eternally separated from him, through death, because of our choice to know self-centred, self-absorbed, self-absorbing, self-serving evil.

We knew good … but then, even as we knew good, we chose to know evil.  It was the great adultery: married and united to God, we then chose to also marry and be united with Not-God.  God and Not-God will not live alongside one another, so we effectively chose the ultimate divorce - complete separation from God forevermore.

Thankfully, our hatred of him ... did not stop him loving us!

But what was he to do?

There was only one thing for it: the Bridegroom would have to go to that place of ultimate divorce and show his bride his love for her.  If she then chose to receive that love (and so 'die' to her 'marriage' to Not-God) and trust him to carry her back home to be with him forevermore... he would, then, carry her home - protected - to his Father's house.

This 'place of ultimate divorce' is in the spiritually dead flesh we took on from Adam as we were born out of him ... or our nearest relative above us in his line!

So Jesus, too, had to first be born into Adam's flesh*, ... then inhabit that flesh without succumbing to its self-centred, self-absorbed, self-absorbing, self-serving, evil desires and temptations, ... and then allow this flesh of his to be beaten, broken, and sent to the grave, ... before finally returning from the grave with a body that would never again be anything but filled with the Spirit of God … never again to be separated from God … never again to be dead.

So this is why Jesus’ death can atone for my sin.

It is not so much that there is a contract against which I created a debt that Jesus paid from his riches.  It is, rather, that, by carrying his portion of Adam's flesh to death, he reached me in my portion of that dead flesh*.  Then he gained my trust, showing me his love for me - a love that sustained him through the utter brutality by which his flesh was put to death.  And then he guaranteed to carry me out of my dead flesh, by sealing me with the Spirit that will fill my ‘resurrection body’-to-come forevermore.

And so he can do for everyone born into Adam’s flesh.

If you have not died and been raised with him through your trusting in his love for you (as shown through everything he has ever done for you, climaxing at the cross), then you are still dead and divorced from God forever.

But what he has done for you still stands – and while you are still in this flesh**, you still have the opportunity to accept what he has done for you and to trust him to carry you – his beloved – back home.

I leave you with two passages, linked by a common thread.  Perhaps the first is for those who still steadfastly refuse the advances of love from the Bridegroom, the Son of God, Jesus Christ; the second for those who have been rescued, and are now just waiting for Jesus to return, to take them home:

The first was written by James: "You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God?  Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.  Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely?"

The second was written by John: "Do not love the world or anything in the world.  If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.  The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever."


May I end with a prayer?

Father, open our eyes and hearts to know your love, and the love of your Son and Spirit.  Help us to know how to surrender our resistance to your loving approaches and enjoy being carried by you in your eternal embrace.  Help us, in our unbelief, to trust and hope only in you.  And may your love and goodness flow through us to our family and friends and neighbours and colleagues, to the glory of your name ... amen.



Footnotes:

* Hebrews 2:14  "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil"

** 2 Corinthians 5:10, which says that: "we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil."

Controversial: God is love.

Image found at http://darrellcreswell.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/god-loves-you-this-much/ on 1Nov2012 via Google search

From a sermon I gave to my church October 21st:

I’d like to talk about reading the Bible, but this will not a “You should be reading your Bible more!” thing, and it’s certainly not a dry lecture about different genres or anything like that!  Last week Sid spoke about prayer, which is us approaching God with our thoughts and feelings, so this week I’m going to speak about the Bible, which is God approaching us with his thoughts and feelings.

I’ll talk briefly about why read the Bible and then spend more time on how to read the Bible, but my main thing today will be that horrible contradiction of the loving God … who seems to behave in an unloving way.

But, first, let’s look at some of God’s promises regarding the Bible to briefly address why we should bother reading it at all.  (… If there’s anyone here who is not a Christian, thank you for coming – we are truly delighted that you’re here and would love to help you feel at home!  The passages we’re about to hear may help you to understand why the Bible – often called his Word - is so important to Christians.)

I don’t want to add anything to these passages because, as it says in Romans 10:17, “faith comes by hearing the word of God” - not the word of God as filtered through me or anyone else.

Ok: “why read the Bible?”

Proverbs 30:5-6 … Deuteronomy 8:3 … Luke 8:11,15 … Luke 11:28 … Revelation 19:12-13

There are many others - one that hits the nail right on the head, for me, is John 6: when many turn away from Jesus, he asks his closest twelve: ‘You do not want to leave too, do you?’ … Peter answers him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life!’

Another term for this Word of God is “The Law”.  Many of the concepts we’ve looked at are brought together in the Psalms, such as:

Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers.  But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.  He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.  Whatever he does prospers.

But I don’t read the Bible every day.  I do think of the tree, though, planted by an abundant stream of fresh water, sucking up the goodness in order to be refreshed, and grow, and bear fruit … and I wonder: Why don’t we read the Bible every day, especially if all these benefits are true?

One reason is because we just don’t ‘get’ passages in which the God we have come to trust as loving behaves in a way that does not seem loving at all!

The God we have come to trust as loving is the God who loved us to death … his own painful, humiliating death on the cross.

He is the God who showed us that his love for us was so great that it even eclipsed his love for himself, as he endured physical and psychological abuse, poured on him by creatures he could have snuffed out with a word.

He is the God who showed us his power to do all the good he has promised us, when he put death in its rightful place under his command, humiliating Satan, and when he rose from death to life forevermore.

And he is the same God who, time and again, has shown me his wisdom as he has dealt with each and every turn of my life from as long as I can remember.

This is the God that defines love!

… And then we read about the God who sentenced Adam and Eve to death for eating from the wrong tree;

… who cursed them when they were deceived by the guardian he appointed;

… who ‘loved Jacob but hated Esau’;

… who ordered the destruction of entire nations just because they weren’t Hebrews;

… who wrote laws that involved the murder of, literally, millions of innocent animal sacrifices;

… the list goes on.

So there’s a problem: God is love … but we don’t always see him acting like it when we read his own account of how he interacts with his creation.

I’ve purposely dressed up this list in a provocative way, and I know the problem lies within me, not in God or his word.  But it does leave the question:

… how do we read the Bible?

I’ll not spend any time on that all-too-common way of just dutifully reading the words on the page without actually engaging with what is being read - that really highlights the phrase “you get out what you put in”.

But what about when we read to know God better or to hear from him?  This may involve having to really grapple with what we’re reading, wrestling with concepts until they make sense in the context of the rest of the Bible, and it won’t always be easy, or immediately conclusive.  Then, when we do read ‘thinkingly’, there’s the issue of interpreting what we’ve read.

For example, when we read ‘God is love’ and then we read a passage that looks like God is not love, do we…

1. … simply throw out one or the other as a mistake that should never have made it to the final cut of the Bible?

2. … note the disagreement, resign ourselves to thinking “God is mysterious and we’re frail, fallible humans who’ll never understand God”, and move on to read something else?

3. … note the disagreement and try to devise a new definition for the word ‘love’ that allows for the occasional unloving act?

… OR:

4. … note the disagreement and try to find a different way of interpreting the stories such that they show God, in fact, being loving?

Let’s just quickly take a look at the natural outcomes of each of these …

The first – editing the Bible myself - is a non-starter: if I can decide what should be in the Bible and what should not, I am no longer seeking to know God, but to invent a god of my own.  Paul wrote, in 2 Timothy 3:16, that “All Scripture is God-breathed” - editing the Bible is not an option.

The second option, however, does seem to have an apparent humility that makes it quite appealing to many Christians: surely being humble is a valid argument for not delving deeper into the things of God?

The problem is: being humble without knowing God is nothing on knowing God!

In fact, true humility is only possible when we know his humility … and how can we, until we know him?!  God wants to be fully known by his children, with an intimate knowledge.

Sure, we are finite, mortal, and small-minded, and can’t cope with the infinite-ness of God, and there are things we are not supposed to concern ourselves with in this lifetime, but what we’re not supposed to concern ourselves with is clear from its omission from the Bible.

… So, how – then - do we interpret passages that seem to suggest that questioning God is wrong?  For example …

·     “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.  “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts"

Well, this is preceded by verse 7: “Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts.  Let him turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.” … so, putting verses 8 and 9 in context, God is specifically explaining why he will freely pardon the wicked, even after all their wickedness, just for turning to him … even though this flies in the face of … the ‘thoughts and ways’ of human justice.

… Or what about this one …

·     But who are you, O man, to talk back to God?

Again, in the context of the rest of the passage, this is talking specifically about questioning God’s wisdom concerning the gifts and purposes he has given each of us, in order to best communicate his love to - and through - us.

… Ok, so what about …

·     Job chapters 38-41 … I won’t read them all(!) … but God doesn’t seem too happy about Job’s questioning of him!?

Here, God says why he is not happy about being questioned: it is not that he is being questioned, but that the way Job has gone about this questioning has resulted in him discrediting God’s justice and condemning God, in order to justify himself.

So even passages in the Bible that seem to put us off getting to know God better aren’t actually designed to do that at all.  God’s being too mysterious for us to understand is not an option.

The third option - redefining ‘love’ - is more understandable: so many stories that make God look unloving, and only two occurrences of the expression ‘God is love’!

The Bible was written in unfamiliar languages, by unfamiliar people, from unfamiliar cultures, in unfamiliar times … and I know that, in Greek for example, they had five different words covering what we call ‘love’!  Maybe we’ve just misunderstood what “God is love” means?

But, God established the Bible for all people, in all places, throughout all time: if cultural differences might mislead us, he provides help in his word.

And he gives example after example of what ‘love’ means, both in his Word and in Creation: think of marriage, parenthood, friendship, or any relationship where, to ‘love’, you have to give your time, money, thought and consideration, sleep and strength and energy, care and protection, and more besides … to someone with an unquenchable appetite for all this and more … even when you have nothing left to give.

Think of how God has given us breath, water, food, clothing, shelter, family, friends, joy, comfort, and everything we need, throughout our lives, unfailingly, … even before we ever even knew him.

… Think of the Cross …

God knows what love is, and he has given it to us to know what love is too.  Redefining ‘love’ is not an option.

That only leaves the fourth option.  What about holding on to the understanding that God is love, and seeking to understand the stories in which he appears spiteful or discriminatory or aloof in a different light?

A legitimate fear, here, is that a pick-and-mix God is no God at all: believing the bits we like and rejecting the bits we don’t?  Not an option.

But that’s not what I am talking about.  I am talking about clinging to the God whom I know through his Spirit in me and through all the time I’ve spent - with his Spirit - in his word and in his church … I am talking about looking for a more real sense of what is going on in each event … I am talking about looking around the Bible for help in understanding…:

·     … what’s the back-story?

·     … where else has something similar happened with the same or a different outcome?

·     … what were the similar or different factors involved?

… In short, using the Bible to understand the Bible.

Sounds like detective work!  But getting to know anyone involves time spent with them … looking into who they are and what makes them tick, and struggling with things that make them different to us until we accept or understand them.

It was never intended for us to do this alone, however.  God sends his Holy Spirit to anyone who truly seeks him, and the Holy Spirit lives forevermore in all who put their trust in him.  So, whether I am a Christian or not, if I am honestly seeking the one true living God, then the very author of the Bible is ready to enter into discussion with me about what I am reading.

Luke 11 reads: “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.  Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead?  Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?  If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Some Christians say: “I believe in a God of love, but I also believe in a God of justice.”

They mean, they believe in the God that - A.D. - walked around the eastern Mediterranean, healing and forgiving and performing miracles… and the God that - B.C. - looked down from on high and ordered the slaughter of entire people groups … it’s just that they’re not sure if these were the same person or not!

This is a real problem:

… does the God who is both of these … really want no-one to perish?

I want to try to show how the God of love is the God of justice … and how this loving God is the Father as much as the Son and the Spirit.

An Old Testament story that seems to show God with a split personality (in this case, the God of love to Israel, but the God of justice to Egypt) is the story of Moses and The Pharaoh.

In brief:

·     the Israelites are enslaved in Egypt

·     they cry out to God for rescue

·     God sends Moses to The Pharaoh to command him to free them … but he also hardens The Pharaoh’s heart to resist this command

·     He then shows The Pharaoh a sequence of miracles, which, had he sought God, he would have understood to be showing that his sin could be forgiven through the death of God’s innocent one

·     The Pharaoh, instead, hardens his own heart

·     The Pharaoh is forced to let the slaves go … but he chases after them and, along with all who follow him, is killed in the sight of the freed slaves

The Bible says that God raised The Pharaoh up for this very purpose: “that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth”.  So, did God set this man aside, from birth, and raise him up to be forever separated from him – in hell, eventually – with no chance for him to change God’s mind?

… Is this love?

… Alarm bells are ringing!  Let’s look at the back-story:

The ‘raising up’ referred to the way God made him into someone the whole world would hear about: God made Egypt the richest nation on the face of the planet through Joseph, an Israelite.  This made the position of Pharaoh the most powerful in the world: what The Pharaoh said and did, and what happened to him and his people, would be proclaimed throughout the world.  God then put this hard-hearted young man in that position, and the Israelites became this Pharaoh’s slaves.

With this world stage, and the characters in place, God could ensure that all would hear about his love for the world, in the hope that they would reconsider their current dead relationship with him, and enter into the marriage-like love with him that he had always wanted for them.

… So the question is: does God show his love by raising up men to die for the sake of his name and fame?  … Or does he show his love by offering himself to death in place of man?

"This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him … For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God”

Let’s check Romans 9 again – surely that was where it said that God raised him up to send him to hell, right? … verse 17: “I raised you up for this very purpose: … that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.”

This remit doesn’t seem to mention anything about The Pharaoh’s salvation.  As it happened, The Pharaoh did not make peace with God and surrender his own pride to trust in God’s love … and God’s power and name were proclaimed throughout all the earth!  (In Joshua 2, Rahab, a citizen of faraway Jericho, confessed: “I know that the Lord has given you this land and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you.  We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt”) …

… But what would have happened if The Pharaoh had surrendered his resistance against God?  Surely, this act, alone, of The Pharaoh turning to God – quite apart from all the miracles that helped him reach that faith – would ensure God’s power and name were proclaimed throughout the earth?!

God’s plan that did not preclude The Pharaoh’s own salvation - Christ’s death on the cross provided for The Pharaoh too, if he would only accept it.  The choice to surrender his resistance to God’s love lay with The Pharaoh until his death. … Sadly, The Pharaoh continued to reject God and to grasp at his people - attacking the children of The Father … the Bride of the Bridegroom - until God stopped him permanently.

… A bridegroom or a father will go to great lengths to protect his bride or child from someone who would enslave or kill them.  If the would-be abuser, kidnapper, enslaver, or murderer refused to stop their attacks no matter what, the most peace-loving bridegroom or father in the world would do whatever they could to stop them once and for all.

Violence - even resulting in death - inflicted on someone unrepentantly hell-bent on enslaving or killing your beloved is not a lack, or a compromise, of love.  On the contrary, it would be very unloving if the bridegroom or father didn’t take whatever action was in his power to stop the attacker.

… So does God love us any less than this?

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me ...But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."

God loves his church – his bride, his children - SO much that he protects us from any and all that is truly harmful, even to the death.  This is not unloving, but deeply loving.

In fact, ‘hell’ is the result of deep, deep love!  Hell will be the unbreakable holding cell for those who, despite God’s greatest efforts throughout history and throughout their lives to win them with his love, continue to hate and wish harm to God and his church.  There, there will be gnashing of teeth, which is a term used in the Bible for hateful anger, not regretful repentance. There, their worm (their hatred towards God) will not die – they never stop hating God.  God reached out to them in their lives to offer his love, which was not accepted.  Now his love for we who did accept this same offer will cause him to protect us from them.

This understanding of how a wrathful God and a loving God are one and the same – the fact that God can get wrathful because he is loving – helps with so many stories, particularly from the Old Testament, where, initially, it feels like we’re reading about a completely different God to the God who is love, who we’ve come to know from the New Testament.

There are other, more subtle places where we can find ourselves thinking of a God different to our God of love, but the same advice still applies: use the Bible to understand the Bible, and ask God for his Holy Spirit to come and chat it through with you.

Another example is when God forbade Moses from entering The Promised Land because he disobeyed an instruction.  This seems both harsh … and quite bizarre, given the bigger picture of the whole story of the exodus, given how intimate he had become with God, …

… and given Moses’ own desire to enter The Promised Land.  Yet, at one point, God seems to snap at him: “Do not speak to me any more about this matter!”

Again, the back story helps: Moses had, at a crucial point in their travels, demonstrated a pride in his position as intercessor between God and his people – a pride that, as Ezekiel tells us, was the root cause of Satan’s fall at the first; a fall which brought death into the world.

We know that God is love, and that he loved Moses intimately, and that he forgives sin after sin after sin – it makes no sense whatsoever that he would punish this man that he loved for a solitary slip-up.  It makes a lot more sense that he wanted to protect Moses from his own pride.  This pride would have only been fed if he were to be the one man who led God’s people both out of slavery and into The Promised Land (and, inevitably, continued to rule until his death).  God, in his deep love for Moses, did not want him to go the way of Satan, so he forbade this for Moses’ sake.

Just one last thing I want to address, and this, whilst tremendously important, will be brief.

Another problem with seeing the God of wrath being different to the God of love is that we tend to see Jesus as the God of love and the Father as the God of wrath – have you ever thought that?

There are many significant problems with this, including the break-up of the trinity and the preservation of the idea that we’ve been fighting today: that of God (i.e. the Father) as NOT loving.

It is useful, at these times, to remember that Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God, so it was he who we see acting, both lovingly and wrathfully, in the Old Testament, before he was born as man.

AND, he himself said he did nothing without seeing it first in his Father.

So, as Jesus cries from the cross: “why have you forsaken me?” … he must be doing only what he sees the Father doing: … so, the suffering of the cross, rather than being about the lashings of a wrathful Father against his loving Son, must instead be about the removal of sin as far from God as the east is from the west, to use a Biblical phrase.  Both Father and Son suffered this forsakenness … this separation from each other … this horror of a perfect relationship broken … so that we may enter into a loving relationship with them.

As I finish, may I plead with you to know and remember that God – Spirit, Son, and Father – is love, and that this love is constantly poured out into you and me.  Whether you are a Christian or not, please – in the privacy of your own heart and mind - ask God to open your eyes to his love for you today; seek to really know that love, with his Holy Spirit and his Word; and knock on the door of the home of that love – I promise you, it will be opened to you.

Who forgives your sins and heals your diseases?  Who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion?  Who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s?  The Lord made known his ways to Moses, his deeds to the people of Israel.  The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.  He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities.  As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions.  (Psalm 103)