Can A Christian Be Angry With God? - Psalm 142

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text is the Psalm, Psalm 142.

It’s worth remembering that the Psalms were prayers or songs, offered for specific situations, in specific times, in specific needs. Many people contributed to the book of Psalms. Many were written by David, but not all. In other words, they were spoken or sung by people very much like you and me. That’s why the Psalter is often called “The Prayerbook of the Bible,” and very useful as a devotional book or source for prayers.

Many of the Psalms we are familiar with paint a comforting, steadying picture of God. Think of the 23^rd Psalm, for example, with the shepherd imagery, especially when facing our own death or the death of a loved one. Psalm 46, with its rock and refuge image, is comforting when we are facing difficulties. Psalm 103, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name,” lifts our prayers and praises to God for the goodness He showers upon us every day.

But there are some Psalms that leave us a little uncomfortable. Some are uncomfortable because they leave the prayer unanswered, or at least, not answered in a way we would prefer. Sometimes, it’s because we’re not used to praying this way – for example, the psalms (see 7:1, 35 as examples) that call on God to strike down enemies and avenge His name and the names of His people. I submit that Psalm 142 is one such uncomfortable Psalm. This Psalm of David is uncomfortable because we are sitting with a man who is calling out to God doesn’t seem to be answering. In fact, if you want to be blunt and use plain language, David is mad – he’s mad at God.

A moment ago, I said some Psalms leave us uncomfortable. I say that of this Psalm because it begs the question: can a Christian be mad at God? Can a person express that toward God and remain a child of God?

The heading of Psalm 142 gives us a clue: “in the cave.” If you do some Biblical Columbo work to find out what “the cave” is referring to, you’ll arrive at 1 Samuel 24. Briefly, David was on the run from the angry, bitter King Saul who pledged to hunt and kill David on the drummed-up charges of rebellion and insurrection. In truth, Saul was jealous that the people loved and admired David, and those feelings were then magnified when God rejected Saul because of his idolatry. On the run for his life, and refusing to kill Saul whom he still saw as God’s servant, David was angry. He implored God’s help only to be cornered, trapped in a cave. David was at the crux of either being murdered under the pretense of leading a rebellious mutiny, or having to take Saul’s life to save his own. It’s as if David is saying, God, this seems to be at your hand. I’m upset, angry even, because I keep making my case to you. Why aren’t you doing something?

We often think of prayer as clean and neat – “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest,” or “Now the light has gone away; Father listen while I pray,” or even the Our Father. That’s not always the case. There are times in the life of the Christian when prayers are muttered through tear-drenched and clenched eyelids and folded, pious hands are replaced with balled-up fists pounding, pounding, pounding in anger and frustration. Have you ever sat with a person whose prayer is raw and ugly, a verbal and physical, yet still faithful catharsis of pain and hurt, all poured out to God and, seemingly, against God?  That is what David is doing here, dumping it all in prayer to God, before God, against God. It’s real, it’s raw, it’s ugly, and honest.

Full of Eyes Ministry
Used with permission

But, such a prayer is also grounded in faith. David isn’t just complaining – an empty venting of frustration. With a fainting spirit, David still clings to God and His promises: I know this about You; but my situation doesn’t seem to fit that truth. The rawness and the open hurt are dumped out at the foot of the One who promises to hear our prayers. More than that, they are dumped out at the foot of the One who promises to act upon them.

A moment ago, I asked if a Christian can be mad at God and reflect that anger in prayer. I hope you have realized by now that the answer is, “yes.” Among other things, the fact that David prays this way, and the Holy Spirit saw fit to include it in the Scriptures, gives us not only credence but permission to do so. You can be mad at God and confront Him in prayer, but you do it humbly and with faith.

In the introduction to his little prayer book on the Psalms, Dietrich Bonhoeffer categorizes the Psalms based on their use. Psalm 142 fits in the category of “Suffering.” Bonhoeffer writes of these Psalms of suffering:

The psalter instructs us how to come before God in the proper way; all conceivable perils are known by the psalms. They do not deny it; they allow it to stand as a severe attack on faith. There is no quick and easy resignation to suffering; there is always struggle, anxiety, doubt. If I am guilty, why does God not forgive me? If I am not, why does he not bring my suffering to an end? There are no trite, easy answers in the psalms to these questions.

If there are no answers, why do we pray them other than as a cathartic exercise? Again, Bonhoeffer helps us turn our eyes from our own situation, struggles, and sufferings, and instead, to lift our eyes to look to Jesus.

[These] psalms have to do with complete fellowship with God; Jesus accompanies us in our prayer, for he has suffered every want and brought it before God. There is no suffering on earth in which he will not be with us; and on this basis the psalms of trust develop.  

In other words, as you pray these words, you aren’t standing alone, as if yelling into the wind. Jesus prays this Psalm with us and for us. When Jesus took upon Himself the sins for the world, He also took upon Himself the very wrath of God. Although the Scriptures do not record Him saying it, these verses very well could have been prayed by Jesus at any moment in His life and in His ministry, but especially during Holy Week as the Jewish leaders’ conspiracy against Jesus came to its climactic head:

³ When my spirit faints within me, you know my way! In the path where I walk, they have hidden a trap for me. ⁴ Look to the right and see: there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me; no one cares for my soul.

Because Jesus has taken our place, and He knows our hurts, struggles, and weaknesses, He prays honestly for us. Therefore, we can pray honestly to Him. He knows our complaints; He endured them for us. The challenge for us, then, is not to let our prayers turn from lament and suffering to ingratitude, where we demand answers – more than that, we demand the answers we expect, we think we deserve.

With humility, but with faith, we pour our hearts and hurts to God for the sake of Christ, who bore our hurts for us.

There is a wonderful Robert Redford film called Brubaker. Redford plays a prison warden, name Brubaker, who goes undercover into the prison that he is to lead and fix. He sees how awful the prison really is, from the conditions, to the food, to the brutality delivered to inmates via the guards and staff. The beginning of the movie is dark – literally and metaphorically. After fifteen or twenty minutes, you want to go take a shower with every light turned on in the bathroom in the middle of the day.

David’s imagery is very much like the beginning of that film, even using the language of a prison. Driven into the cave, it is at best a prison; worse, if Saul, et.al, find him in there. David, with the might of King Saul chasing after him, feels the weight of being the hunted and then being trapped. God, where are you! Hope runs thin; joy is absent. He prays:

⁶ Attend to my cry, for I am brought very low! Deliver me from my persecutors, for they are too strong for me!   ⁷Bring me out of prison…

I’ve visited and corresponded with people in prison, and what I witnessed is that very quickly, hope fades and the seriousness of the situation takes its toll, emotionally, physically, spiritually. If you pardon the mixed imagery, it’s like the machine in the Pit of Despair in Princess Bride, sucking the very life from you. It would have been easy for David to have left the sufferings and laments in such a pit.

In the movie, while he is undercover, Brubaker sees that a prisoner’s life is literally at risk, so he reveals his true identity. As he begins to institute his reforms – and it takes a little bit for you, the viewer to realize this – the darkness gives way to brighter and brighter scenes. Brubaker’s changes give the inmates hope, life, and light. He is, in effect, their savior – even while remaining incarcerated.

David does such a thing with his Psalm, allowing light to shine into the darkness by bracketing his sufferings between words of hope and promise:

⁵ I cry to you, O Lord; I say, “You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living.”

Then, after his cry of despair which we spoke to above, David adds

 “…that I may give thanks to your name! The righteous will surround me, for you will deal bountifully with me.

David’s hope remains in the promises and mercies of God. Although David may feel as if in prison, God remains his refuge. Although the persecutors are arguing their case, David is surrounded by the righteousness of God.

These words give us great comfort when facing the many troubles and difficulties in this life. The list of such things is long. Your list is different than your neighbor next to you, but equally as heavy and burdensome. This Psalm could certainly be prayed under such circumstances.

The deepest, darkest dungeon, though, is when satan tries to convince us that our sins toss us into a pit from which there is no escape. Worst of all, he tries to convince us that we are in solitary confinement, alone with our sins and no one to help, just waiting to die.  The wages of sin is death, after all.

“The righteous will surround me,” David prayed. Allow me to turn that slightly: “The righteousness of Jesus will surround me.” Surrounded in His love, in His righteousness, in His holiness, we are never cast off, cast away, cast down, down, down to the depths of spiritual prison. He has rescued us from the pits of despair by entering into it, suffering in our place, dying on the cross, and lifting us up, restoring life in its fulness to us.

If today, Psalm 130 with its high praise is where your life and prayers rest, thanks be to God. Sing it, pray it loud, But if you are suffering, if you are frustrated, even angry at God, don’t let satan tell you that you shouldn’t feel that way. Instead, pray this Psalm of David. Pray it through Christ Jesus, who hears our prayers, suffered with us, died for us, and rose with the pledge to never leave us nor forsake you in your sufferings.

Hope With Christ, Hope In Christ, Hope Through Christ. Hope is Christ! Romans 5: 1-8

Grace to you and peace…

Peace. Doesn't that sound good this morning? Probably, like me, you’ve been watching the news about what continues to happen in the Middle East, especially with Iran. Perhaps, like us, you have family that is either in that region or will soon be in that region of heightened hostility. Regardless, we pray that the war – that’s what it is – that the war comes to a rapid end, lives and property are spared, and people might live in harmony with each other.

But it’s not just “over there.” The absence of peace is lacking here, in our nation, our state, our community, and even from our homes as well. Politically, socially, economically, the lack of peace is taking a toll on us mentally, emotionally, physically. Fifty-some years ago, Dr. Thomas Harris wrote a book titled, I’m OK, You’re OK. I wonder if editors would allow a book to be so titled if written today. Google searches for “how to deal with anxiety” or “how to deal with worry” are at an all time high. Anxiety fuels fear and fear fuels anxiety. I’m OK, you’re OK, really? Is anyone OK? Peace…something so simple, now so taken for granted.

Unfortunately, the likelihood of peace in the middle east is, at least for now, very low. I don’t think we’ll see peace in the nation’s capitol, or the state capitol, or city hall anytime in the near future, either. And, unfortunately, I am not able to deliver peace to broken relationships and broken hearts, or any other temporal peace to people, no matter how much I wish I could.

But, what I can do, what I am called to do, is deliver the peace of Christ, peace with the world does not give, peace that passes all understanding, and deliver that peace to you. In other words, set not your hearts and minds on things below, but towards things that are above, moving from our horizontal relationships to the vertical relationship with God.

I want you to know this morning, every morning, noon and night, you have peace with God inspite – despite! – what the world, your mind, and even Satan Himself tries to tell you. But to understand this, I need you to rethink peace. Peace, by definition, is not absence of war. It isn’t absence of conflict or lack of fear. Peace means unity, harmony, wholeness through restoration. A result of that restoration, then, is that wars and conflict cease, and fear is replaced with joy and hope. In Christ, you do have peace, beyond worldly understanding. In Christ, God has been pacified and you have been restored in Christ's death and resurrection. You are justified – declared holy – by God’s merciful gift of Jesus and this is delivered to you by the Holy Spirit from faith.

Faith. That is always an important word, but it will be particularly important in these difficult days. Again, we look to the cross. The book of Hebrews defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen,” Heb 11:1. Your faith is from God. You do not trust your faith itself; that ebbs and flows. Your faith rests in Christ Jesus, your Lord and Savior.

Through Christ, Paul says you have access by faith into the grace of God. Let me explain this. I want you to have a picture here of a room, a large room, that is warm and inviting. "Access" means entrance. By faith we have access, entrance, into this room. By faith, I am invited and welcomed into that room and the name of the room is grace. The ceiling, walls, floor—all grace. You live inside God’s grace, his love, his forgiveness, completely surrounded by it. That means you’re always forgiven. You must not think of forgiveness as something that takes place in your life every once in awhile, that you pile up sins for a time and then you get forgiven when you come to church on Sunday, to the Lord’s Table, to hear the words of absolution, only to start restacking sins again when you leave. That’s not true at all. A baptized child of God, you’re forgiven all the time.

People say, "I hope I don’t die while I’m sinning." People like that don’t know what sin is. Of course you’re going to die while you’re sinning. You sin because you’re a sinner; you aren’t a sinner because you sin. All of us are far short of what we ought to be all the time (Romans 3, 23). See, the law tells us how we are to be and not to be, and what we ought to do and not to do. Not being what we ought to be is also a sin. The Law demands perfection (Lev. 19,2). If you’re not perfect you’ve living in sin. But, again, returning to your baptism, even so, you’re forgiven all the time. You’re living inside the room of grace, remember, surrounded by the forgiveness of sin. If you die when you’re not thinking about Jesus, you still die as a believer.

People say, "I hope that I have a chance to repent before I die." That’s not right. The whole life of a believer ought to be one of repentance. See, believing doesn’t mean that you feel good all the time, and repenting doesn’t mean that you feel bad all the time. Repenting just means knowing that you’re a sinner who deserves to go to hell. Being scared to die without Jesus, that’s contrition. And faith is knowing that Jesus forgives you all the time, every minute of the day you are forgiven. When you die without having a chance to repent consciously, you still die as a person who knows that he’s a sinner and that Jesus died for him. How many times during the day do you think of the fact that 2 + 2 = 4? Did you know that last night when you were sound asleep? You sure did. Did you know that this morning? Certainly. And so I know that all the time that Jesus is my Savior, whatever happens to me.

Living in Christ’s forgiveness, "we rejoice in hope of the glory of God" (Rom. 5,2). Here "the glory of God" is the praise that God gives us. Someday when we stand before God, what’s He going to say? "Well done, thou good and faithful servant" (Matt. 5,21). You will say, "But when did I ever do anything good?” He will say, "That’s alright, Jesus did it all for you. Well done, by faith in Christ through the faithfulness of Christ, you kept all my commandments." So we look forward to Judgment Day when God will say, "You’re not guilty." We "rejoice in hope" – and, remember, hope is certain, confident, absolute – in HOPE that that’s the way it’s going to be. Why? Because God promised it. This is the source of the hope we have in God: the grace given you by Jesus. I’ve said it before, it begs to be said again. Christian hope is certain, not maybe; it is confident, not wishy-washy; it is definite, not a mere possibility. Hope is in Christ. Christ does not change, He does not schwaffle. Therefore your hope does not change, either.

We know it’s true now, by faith. Then we’ll hear it with our own ears from the mouth of God Himself. Now we hear it from human preachers, but then Jesus Himself will say it. "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world" (Matt. 25, 34).

Because of that, you are able to rejoice today, even in the midst of the chaos that is swirling around us. You don’t rejoice because of it, but in it. Our translation says “we rejoice in our sufferings.” I want to be careful, here. We often think of the temporal sufferings that we face: concerns about the economy, your job, your blood pressure, your weight, your loved ones, what to do with the grandkids during spring break, trying afford groceries – I could go on. These are present-tense struggles and pressures. Yet, in the midst of them, we as children of God have hope. Hope that enables us to speak and act in love in the midst of this; hope that looks forward in faith; hope that God desires to move us ahead in His grace.

Pressure is accompanied by patient endurance. Ever notice how when things get tough, someone – well intended, of course – will tell you to “hang on”? How do you hang on when the last thread is fraying fast? What happens when you’re losing your grip? Know this: This isn’t you “hanging on.” This is God standing us up in His grace. It’s His gift and He grants it in just the right amount that you need. In fact, it might be helpful to think of endurance less in terms of quantity than quality. That room of grace? He holds us in His perfect grace and keeps us standing firm. Where God sustains faith, He also uses pressure to produce endurance of faith.

Patient endurance is accomplished by tested character. Here is a good picture of how this works. Do you know how gold and silver is made pure? By melting it down. It’s put into high heat and melted into a pool of metal. But, what is remarkable is that because these metals are so dense, the garbage – the dirt and undesired other metals – float to the surface where it is skimmed off. That’s called the dross; it’s garbage. This happens many times, as heat continues to be applied and the gunk skimmed away. When the gold and silver is finally taken off the heat, it is left pure – just gold, just silver, nothing else. In the midst of patient endurance in the crucible, God is defining and refining our character. He is stripping away from us in these days anything that we have made as a god, something other than Him that we fear love and trust. What we are left with is Jesus. Life is hard right now, and our Lord strips away layer after layer away that would want to compete with faith in Him. Life narrows down and crisis comes. Suddenly, there is only one thing that matters. And, there in the narrow place, stands Jesus.

And in Jesus is our hope. You have hope because while we were yet sinners – talk about a hopeless situation!!! – Christ died for you. If God was willing to surrender His holy and only-begotten Son for the likes of you and me, to rescue us from the eternal separation that our sins deserve but that God’s love would not allow; if God kept His promises, all of them, to send a Savior, a Redeemer, a Messiah, a Christ, to be the once-for-all-sacrifice; if Christ died and rose from the dead, completing those promises; then there is truly hope. It is the faith-filled, endurance-driven, character-building hope in the promises of God which are always yes and amen in Christ Jesus.

This is a process that Paul describes. It’s a process of maturing, growing in faith. But the faith in the love of God poured into our hearts – that faith does not change. This is God’s intention: to accomplish patient endurance, which leads to approved character, which returns to hope that trusts in the mercy of God in Christ from faith.

 
As you leave here today, you get to live in that faith-filled hope. Live – that’s the key word. We’re in a world of hand-wringers and chin rubbers. I know – I am one of them. So live and speak in hope. Luther was once asked what he would do if he knew the end of the world was tomorrow. He simply answered, "Plant a tree." In other words, live today in the sure and certain hope of tomorrow as a child of God. Instead of hand-wringing, fold them in faithful prayer. Instead of frowning in worry, laugh at your dog’s goofiness. Instead of throwing up your hands in surrender, cling to the promises of God. Smile. Give thanks for God's goodness.

And others around you will see it. They will ask you about it – how can you rejoice in times like this? How can you be so hopeful? Be prepared to give an answer. Tell them about the hope (!) that is yours in Christ. Amen.  

A Nighttime Visitor Seeks Jesus: John 3: 1-17

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text is the Gospel reading, from John 3.

Nighttime visits…not always the most pleasant of things, are they? If you’ve ever had a prank knock at midnight, you know what I mean. My Dad used to say nothing good happens after the sun goes down. In John’s Gospel, darkness is a clue: something nefarious is brewing. Nicodemus isn’t the one plotting evil, but satan is definitely trying to confuse his inquiry, trying to turn Nicodemus away from the One who shines light into the darkness.

Nicodemus was a pharisee, one of the major religious groups of the Jews. While we often give the pharisees a great deal of grief for their overly pietistic way of life, they really were seeking to do God’s will – albeit in a misguided sort of way. Nevertheless, I take his conversation with Jesus to be sincere, wanting to understand what it was He was teaching and doing.

Jesus and Nicodemus
Crijin Hendricksz Volmarjin

The pharisees were the Bob the Builders of the time, taking Bob’s approach to their own salvation: Can we do it? Yes, we can! That is why Nicodemus has such a struggle with Jesus’ comments: how can a man be born again? How can a man enter his mother’s womb? How can these things be? Can we do it? Ummmm……Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard on good ol’ Nick. After all, how often to we try to Americanize our theology, determined to pull our sinful selves up by our own bootstraps to make ourselves worthy of God’s great mercy and grace. If I do X, then God will do Y; if I don’t do A, God will do B.

So, Jesus turns Nicodemus away from himself and away from the darkness of evil, turning him towards the Light. Consider “born,” for example. A baby has no part in birth except to be the recipient of it. A mother’s body does it all. When it comes to faith and salvation, the sinner has no part in it. It is all done by God’s grace, specifically by the Spirit of God that gives life. Or, for that matter, the wind – it blows by itself, without influence of man and without man’s knowledge.

Nicodemus doesn’t quite get it. Not yet. The understanding, the faith, will come, building slowly like the wind.

As a pharisee, Nicodemus would have been well-schooled in the history, the story, of God’s people. Jesus reference to the serpent being lifted up would have immediately brought that whole story to light. We have the account written in Numbers 21: 4-9 where the people grumbled against Moses and, by extension, God. “You brought us out to the wilderness to die. There isn’t food or water, and the food you are providing, we don’t like.” God is incredibly patient with His people, but this time, His patience tired out. He sent some kind of venomous serpent, a viper of some sort whose bite was like fire, to bite and kill. The people, whose mouths had only recently dripped with the toxic complaints against God, now fill their mouths with pleas for God’s help, mercy, and compassion. “We have sinned,” they confess, and beg Moses to intercede on their behalf to God. God instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent, place it on a pole, and then tell the people that those who are bitten can look up to the serpent and live.

Go back to the Bob the Builder mentality. Can we do it? Yes we can! Imagine you were bitten by one of those snakes, the toxin burning like fire through your body. You are dying, slowly and painfully. How can you save yourself? Can we do it? Impossible. You will die. God strips Israel of their selfishness. All they are, all they have, is by God’s grace. The exodus is God’s grace in action. The daily manna, the evening quail and signs of His grace. Their grumbles are not mere words; they are rejections of His gifts. So, with the snakes, God strips them of their self-merit. Their fear, their need, causes them to return to God and His compassionate acts. “Lord, have mercy on us.”

The bronze serpent, too, is unable to save. After all, it’s just bronze. Bronze doesn’t give life. God gives life. But, when God attaches His promise to the serpent on the pole, and when the people trust that promise and look to the object to which the promise is attached, there is mercy. There is life. The problem was that the bronze serpent was a temporary, temporal savior. It saved Israelites from the toxic bite. It restored life. But the serpent could not save eternally. Something, Someone else would have to do that. The serpent-on-a-pole is, of course, an allusion, a type, of what Jesus will do. He will be suspended on the cross, so that all who look to Him in faith will live and not die.

I wonder if there would also have been remembrance of what another serpent did – the serpent in the Garden that tempted Eve and Adam into taking the forbidden bite. Would Nicodemus have remembered what that serpent did, that through it’s venomous temptation, death entered the world? Would he have recalled the curse placed against that serpent and also the promise that Eve’s Seed would crush satan’s head? Could Nicodemus have had an inkling that the One whom He visits at night is the One who would destroy sin, and death, and the devil forever? Would he have understood what was all about to be fulfilled in Jesus’ life, ministry, death and resurrection?

I suspect not. Not yet, at least. The Spirit will continue blowing through Nicodemus as he continues to listen and follow Jesus from afar. Faith continues to be incubated, slowly growing.

Jesus speaks the words of John 3:16. For most of us, we can automatically recite those 25 words from the King James Version of the Bible without even having to think about it. I bet I could wake you at 2am and, after you got over the shock of me being in your bedroom at 2am, you could say it without missing a word. That’s part of the issue, isn’t it? John 3:16 is memorized, minimized, commercialized, and economized down to simply “The Gospel in a nutshell.”

I want you to listen as I read that verse again, deliberately and slowly. In fact, look at the back of your bulletin and read along. I do this because we are so used to reading and hearing these well-known words that our brains kind of go on autopilot and fill in the blanks. As a result, we miss the words and their meaning. We do this with the Lord’s Prayer, with the corporate absolution, with the 23^rd Psalm. So, let’s slow down and read it again, more time. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

I remember my Grandma – my Mom’s mom - playing a game with babies. She would hold their hands down low and then lift their arms high while saying, “Sooooooo big!” She would do it over and over again, often to the delight of the kid. I think we sometimes read these words, “For God so loved the world…”, in the same way: God loves us sooooooo much, as if the “so” is a measure of volume. That’s not it at all. A better way to understand “For God so loved the world,” is to exchange “so” for “in this way”: For God loved the world in this way.  Now, I agree that sounds unwieldly and awkward – especially since we are used to hearing it a certain way. But when you do that, it gets the emphasis where it needs to be. Let me show you:

For God loved the world in this way: that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Where does the focus then fall? That God gave His Son as a demonstration of His love. Love, without an object, is only a word. But love, with an object, suddenly becomes an action. God’s love is demonstrated in His gift of Jesus. In other words, it’s not that God’s love is soooooooo big; it’s that God’s love caused Him to sacrifice His Son for you. (For the record, this isn’t mere creative license of a Biblical text. That is quite literally the way the original text is to be understood.)

With this, the fulfillment of the serpent-on-the-pole comes to fruition. As the Israelites looked to the bronze serpent to live, those who believe in the sacrifice of Jesus for their sins will live – not just for another day, or week, or month, or year, but eternally.

Our sins do burn. They burn our conscience as we sin against God and against our neighbor. Just like that burning, venomous bite of the serpent, our sins kill. Had not Christ taken that venom into Himself, we would die eternally. Thanks be to God, He sent Jesus so that all who believe – all who look to Him – will nor perish but have eternal life.

This isn’t just wordplay. These words have an eternal consequence.

On February 10, just a few minutes after 3pm, my Mom died suddenly.  She was a baptized child of God who believed Jesus died for her sins. She trusted those promises of God. She lived that faith; she taught that faith to us, her kids, and to the students in her classrooms. At her inurnment, the pastor read those solemn words from St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” ⁵⁵ “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15: 54-55). That morning, at the grave side, we felt that venomous sting in our mother’s death. But, we believe that is not the end because Mom looked to the cross. She looked to Jesus. Because of that, we have the promise and the hope – HOPE! – of a resurrection reunion. Paul agrees:

⁵⁶ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. ⁵⁷ But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

This Thursday, March 5, would have been Mom’s 79^th birthday. She missed it by just a few weeks. I thank God for her faithfulness as a mom, as a teacher, as a child of God. The victory is already hers, even as we await a resurrection reunion when Jesus returns.

Nicodemus didn’t understand this “new birth.” Not yet. In some ways, we don’t fully understand or comprehend it either. That’s OK. It’s not about understanding. It’s about believing – and, thanks be to God, He even gives us the faith that clings to His promises! In the resurrection, that will be the greatest new birth of all.