Corey J. Mahler – Confident.Faith

I do not make a habit of bringing other work I have done into these homilies, but I also make zero effort to hide such other work (it is all readily discoverable if anyone searches my name); however, I will make an exception for this Sunday, which is, at least to my mind Stone Choir Sunday. Before we had recorded a single episode, even before (if memory serves me) we had acquired all the necessary audio hardware and software, I brought a very basic website online as a sort of placeholder, and it included in the footer Ezekiel 33:1–9 (an expanded version of our Old Testament reading for today):

And a word of the Lord came to me, saying: Son of man, speak to the sons of your people, and you shall say to them, A land—if I bring a sword upon it and if the people of the land take one person from them and give him to themselves as a sentinel and if he sees the sword coming against the land and if he trumpets with the trumpet and if he signals to the people and if the one who hears the sound of the trumpet and does not take heed and if the sword arrives and overtakes him, his blood shall be on his head! For after hearing the sound of the trumpet, he did not take heed, his blood shall be on him, and he, because he took heed, delivered his soul. And the sentinel, if he sees the sword coming and does not signal with the trumpet and the people do not take heed and the sword comes and takes from them a soul, this one was taken on account of its own lawlessness, and I will seek the blood from the hand of the sentinel. And you, son of man, I have given you as a sentinel to the house of Israel, and you shall hear a word from my mouth. When I say to the sinner, “By death you shall be put to death,” and should you not speak so that the impious might take heed from his way, the lawless one himself shall die by his lawlessness, but his blood I will seek from your hand. But you, if you announce to the impious his way, to turn back from it, and he does not turn back from his way, he shall die by his lawlessness, and you have delivered your own soul.

Perhaps more than any other Scripture passage (yes, even more so than the one found on the challenge coin), it was and is this passage from Ezekiel that guided our mindset regarding and even our purpose with the Stone Choir podcast. With some men in the pages of Scripture, God placed them into the office of watchman in no uncertain terms, and employing means that left no room for doubt (one suspects that Ezekiel had a pretty clear picture of matters); other men, God calls to such offices more subtly (e.g., by equipping them for it and then inclining them toward it), and this is certainly far more common than the other method. And yet many men (and, yes, even women, in a much more limited way) are clearly and unambiguously called to offices that have a watchman component. Are you a husband? You are a watchman over your wife. Are you a father? You are a watchman over your children. And, yes, you mothers are watchwomen over your children. God will require from your hands the things He has entrusted to them.

And yet your duties are not unlimited and your responsibility is not unbounded. What does God command in Ezekiel? We are to issue the warning, but we cannot always turn the foolish and the perishing from their chosen path. The wise will seek the protection of the stronghold when the horn is sounded, but the foolish will ignore the warning or even seek to go see the danger for themselves. We are certainly commanded to seek and to guide the lost, but it is just as certain that some have seared their consciences and hardened their hearts.

What does Christ Himself say of the wicked Jews in the pages of Matthew?

“Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says:

“You will indeed hear but never understand,

— Matthew 13:14–15 (ESV)

If you do not warn those entrusted to your care, then they will not hear and God will require them from your hand, but not all those whom you warn and therefore and thereby hear will understand, for some have closed eyes, deaf ears, and dull hearts. I can tell you that I saw a bear on the trail, but I cannot reasonably stop you from ignoring me — or even trying to pet or feed the bear.

It is not wrong to lament the impenitence of those who refuse to heed words of wise counsel — certainly many (most) of the prophets lamented over Israel and her kings, as they were nearly all and nearly always wicked and seldom listened to the words of God spoken by those prophets —, but there is a limit: Samuel was not wrong to lament Saul, but God made it very clear such mourning should not exceed a threshold of reasonableness:

And the Lord said to Samouel, “How long are you grieving over Saoul? And it is I that have set him at naught not to be king over Israel. Fill your horn with oil, and come, let me send you to Iessai as far as to Bethleem, for I have observed among his sons one to be king for me.”

— 1 Kingdoms 16:1 (NETS)

A man God has sent to rebuke another may be an agent of deliverance or an agent of judgement, and the man himself will not necessarily know which one. A message that is received as wisdom and comfort by one man may be seen as foolishness and rejected by another. If you have been tasked with doing so, then you must deliver the words, but God alone may infallibly see into and change the hearts of men.

But let us talk about government for a while, for our Epistle surely demands it. Some read Romans 13 and take from it a blanket requirement that Christians submit to whatever entity claims to be the ‘rightful’ governing authority of the place where they live. Well, let us examine that claim. Under the various Soviet regimes before, during, and after World War II (which the United States helped the anti-Christ Communists win), many thousands (in fact, tens of millions) of Christians were murdered, and many were tortured in ways it would be inappropriate merely to repeat here. If you were living under one of those evil regimes and an official, even say Joseph Stalin himself, commanded you to torture and murder Christians, would you have been required to do so as a Christian? Of course not. We all know the correct answer, here, and so we all recognize that there is more to Romans 13 than the bare, literalistic surface reading. If your initial instinct was ‘We must obey God rather than men.’, then that was certainly correct, as that is part of the equation or answer, but it is not all of it, for Romans 13 itself gives us another piece:

For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.

— Romans 13:3–4 (ESV)

Most miss what Paul is doing here, so we must be sure to read and listen carefully:

For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.

— Romans 13:3–4 (ESV)

Paul is not merely saying (in Romans 13) that we must submit to the governing authorities, he is also defining rightful authority and engaging in a polemic against wrongful authority. Look carefully at the logic of what Paul is saying: The one who rightfully wields authority is the one who carries out God’s good ordering of this world; the man who punishes the good and rewards the wicked is, therefore, not a rightful authority. In fact, you must not only not obey Stalin as a Christian, but you have an affirmative duty to God (and to your fellow man) to resist such a wicked usurper.

Paul further teaches (verse 5) that we must be in subjection to 1) avoid God’s wrath and 2) obey our own conscience. I would hope that your conscience would have compelled you to resist, rather than obey, the murderous anti-Christ Communists, and I would hope that your conscience does similarly compel you today to resist their intellectual (and, in some cases, literal) descendants. Of course, there is much that could be said about the Christian duty to resist evil and the contours of that duty, but that will have to wait for another time (and likely another place). The bottom line for the Christian is that there exists a hierarchy of duties with regard to the kingdom of the left hand of Christ — God trumps the king — and there are times when and conditions under which the Christian must be ready not merely to refuse to submit, but to actively resist.

But let us turn back to Ezekiel and then to our Psalm. First, I would highlight that our passage clearly teaches that we should have watchmen — both in the kingdom of the left hand of Christ and in the kingdom of the right, for there are wolves prowling in both. We are, of course, familiar with many sorts of watchmen, in both kingdoms. On the left, we have kings, princes, et al., even if we give them different names today and pretend they are something else; on the right, we have pastors, bishops, and theologians, again, even if we do not always give them those names today. For any of you who now holds or one day will hold any of these offices, this goes without saying, but I will say it anyway: If you are a prince, then you will receive a prince’s judgement, no matter what your resume may say; if you are a bishop, then you will receive a bishop’s judgement, no matter what your letterhead may claim or declaim. God is neither mocked nor deceived. It may feel like we did not actually leave Romans and return to Ezekiel, and that is for good reason: ὑπερεχούσαις ἐξουσίαις — ‘superior authority’ (‘governing authority’, in the words of the ESV) — is that to which we are to be subordinate, and that is far more broad, far more encompassing than our English ears are tuned to hear. We are to be in subjection to all those who are in and who exercise rightful authority over us. You may not initially hear ‘parents’ in that phrase, but Paul ensures that he is clear by including it (in verse 7), that we are to ‘pay’ honor to whom honor is owed. I trust that a particular Commandment comes to mind.

Do those of you in authority understand why God has entrusted such to you? Certainly, you are being tried by fire as gold and silver are tried, but the core purpose of the authority that has been entrusted to you is to pursue the good of others: ‘to fill full the mouth of famine, and bid the sickness cease; to seek another’s profit, and work another’s gain’. Your authority has not been given you that you might be puffed up, prideful, and arrogant, that you might engage in self-dealing and the lining of your own pockets, that you might strut across the world stage like a peacock. If you have been entrusted with high office, great power, great wealth, or any other such things, then you are to use them in service of God and your fellow man. The command of God in Micah 6:8 does not change just because your title, your rank, or your bank account does:

Has it been told to you, O man, what is good

— Micah 6:8 (NETS)

What we seek for others is what we know that God has already secured to us in the promises in His Word and in the waters of Holy Baptism: the forgiveness of our sins and life eternal. In the words of our Psalm:

Blessed are they whose lawless deeds have been let go,

You are a prince, a teacher, a father so that you might employ what God has entrusted to you in this life to correct the erring, to firm up the weak knees, to save the lost, to rescue the drowning. This life is not everything — far from it —, but this life does, in a sense, determine everything: What we believe or reject in this life determines our eternity and what we do in this life shapes our eternity (for God has promised to reward our good works). It is an honor to be given the calling of watchman, but it is also a solemn duty: Your voice may be the one God uses to call His straying sheep back to the narrow path; your governance may be the guardrails God uses to keep the sheep from straying in the first place. Do not be a slothful or wicked servant; do not bury or neglect your talents.

Regardless of your station or stage in life and regardless of your callings and your tasks, you should carefully note the words of David in verses 5 and 6:

My sin I made known, and my lawlessness I did not cover;

We are called to confess our sins to God (private confession and absolution remains acceptable and good, but is not required) and thereby seek His forgiveness, and we are to pay such things to God at an “appropriate time” — in a kairotic moment (yes, that is καιρος there in the Greek) and He, in turn, promises to save us, even from disaster (“a flood of many waters”). There are two kairotic moments in view here:

The right time for each of these is, respectively, immediately and always. Do not ever think that your sins are too great or too grievous to be forgiven, for to do so is to insult Christ by believing His sacrifice insufficient. The life and death of Christ — His perfect sacrifice — was and is just that: perfect, complete, and sufficient to cover all sins, including yours. Do not lose sight of the fact that David was an adulterer and a murderer, and God still forgave his sins. We will all one day meet David in Paradise, because we, like David, are forgiven.

Satan loves few things more than when Christians despair over their sins and run from God. Never run from God; always run to God. Come before God and confess to Him all your sins; He already knows all of them and you are already forgiven in and by the blood of Christ — nothing you confess is going to surprise Him. When you run from God, you only wound your conscience, delay forgiveness, and add sin to sin. Anger Satan and honor God: Run to God and confess your sins and receive forgiveness. Never forget: The only unworthy guest is the one who disbelieves, not the one who has sinned (even egregiously).

Our Lord is One Who seeks and finds the lost. He has sent many undershepherds (n.b., not just pastors) into the world to ensure that all of His sheep are gathered into His fold — not one will be missing. What does the Good Shepherd say in our Gospel reading?

So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.

— Matthew 18:14 (ESV)

The full number of the Elect will, without fail, be found, called, and led home; the full one hundred and forty-four thousand of Revelation (a symbolic number representing the entire Church from Adam forward) will, without even one missing, stand before the Lamb on the last day and enter into the pleasure of their Master, into Paradise.

It may prove easier for us to live alongside our brothers and sisters here in time if we keep a few things in mind: 1) we are all fallen; 2) we are all struggling to navigate and survive this fallen world; 3) we are all destined for greater things, for glory; and 4) our Master desires that His hall be full and that none be lost. So, forgive your brother when he sins against you; seek forgiveness and right the wrong when you sin against your brother. It is not good to have disunity, disharmony, or strife:

Look now, what is good or what is pleasant

— Psalm 132:1 (NETS)

It is not in our readings for today, but we should still heed the words of Paul in Galatians:

But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.

— Galatians 5:15 (ESV)

We should not view our brothers as competitors or look with envious eyes upon that which is not ours. The immediately prior verse in Galatians:

For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

— Galatians 5:14 (ESV)

What God has demanded of us is not easy, but is is also not impossible. Our world is fallen and falling, but we can certainly refrain from accelerating that fall. Again, from Galatians 5:

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.

— Galatians 5:13 (ESV)

It is love expressed in service that is the whole of the Law and obedience to God.

Hark! the voice of Jesus calling,

If you cannot speak like angels,

Let none hear you idly saying,

Our Lord would have none perish and He has tasked us to see it done.

Amen.

Καιρὸς τοῦ φιλῆσαι καὶ καιρὸς τοῦ μισῆσαι· καιρὸς πολέμου καὶ καιρὸς εἰρήνης.

You will usually see this rendered into English as ‘There is a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.’, which is not inaccurate, but it is misleading for the reader who does not know the difference between English “time” and Greek “καιρός” (a term we have actually just imported directly into English). Greek certainly has a word that is truly the equivalent of our time, but it is not καιρός; it is χρόνος, from which we get such words as chronological and chronometer. Καιρός is something more than mere time. And so, permit me to provide a better English translation: ‘There exists a due season for (or to) love and a due season for (or to) hate; a due season for war and a due season for peace.’ I trust we are all familiar enough with English to recognize that “due season” is a set term that may mean anything from a moment up to an era, or even eternity; “due season” is simply our notion of καιρός, and it is, in fact, used to translate καιρός in some translations of Scripture:

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.

(that is, indeed, καιρός there rendered “due season”).

Love and hatred are centrally important concepts in Scripture, and few things are more abused by modern pastors and ‘exegetes’. In the false conception of Christianity that so many advance or defend these days, we have no enemies and we are to love everyone and hate no one. What would these moderns say to Jesus Who called Peter “Satan” in today’s Gospel reading, or to Paul who instructs us in today’s Epistle reading to “abhor what is evil”? You cannot have love without hate (at least not in this world). If you do not hate that which threatens that which and those whom you love, then you do not truly love. The Lord God hates the devil, sin, and sinners. Would these ‘moderns’ accuse God Himself of error? And it is abject nonsense to contend that something that is sin when men do it is not sin simply because God is doing it instead; moral relativism corrupts the soul and the mind.

The truth is far different from what these men would like to get you to believe. In truth, you do have enemies and you are commanded to hate. One of the tricks employed most frequently by the enemy is conflation. If his minions can convince you that two unlike or distinct things are identical or that a term with multiple senses is univocal, then he wins a great victory without having to alter a single letter of the text; equivocation and eisegesis are powerful weapons indeed. Conflation is exactly what we have here with “enemy”. English, for better or worse, does not distinguish (at least not by using a different word) between different kinds of enemies. Latin has inimicus and hostis: I am to forgive inimici mei — my personal enemies. Greek has ἐχθρός and πολέμιος: I am to forgive ἐχθροί μου — my personal enemies. I cannot forgive the hostis, the πολέμιος — the public enemy —, for he is not my enemy in the personal sense. We are commanded to forgive our personal enemies, not public enemies. It takes only one example to both make this obvious and destroy all opposition to such clear truth: ‘Have you forgiven Satan?’ If the opponent says no, then he has agreed that some enemies must not be forgiven (and thereby cedes the entire argument); if your opponent says yes, then you ask him if he believes himself more merciful and loving than God (Who has most certainly not forgiven Satan). Our enemies’ positions are so very easily defeated, and yet many fall for their lies and their tricks.

Ultimately, these enemies are antinomians or even nomoclasts — haters, despisers, and destroyers of God’s perfect Law. If God commands you to hate, then who are you to tell Him that He is wrong? Do you know better than God? Are you more just than He? You may gain the approval of the world if you deny that Christians must hate, but perhaps our Gospel reading has something to say about the man who gains the world by compromising the things of God and a related thing about what that will surely cost him. When the Christ returns in His glory with the angels He will recompense all for their deeds in this life. What do you suppose He will do to those who lied about His Nature and attempted to lead His sheep astray? There exists an outer darkness where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Our Epistle reading for today could not be more clear about this matter:

Let love be genuine: Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.

The Greek, of course, has no punctuation, but, in English, there should surely be a colon after the command “Let love be genuine”, for the balance of the verse is how we are to do this: We must not only “hold fast to what is good”, but we must also “abhor what is evil”. The Greek word there that is translated “abhor” does, much the same as the English, mean hate. This verse does not merely command you to hate; it also tells you that you cannot love if you do not hate. Our English translations rightly employ a semicolon here: These are two parts of, or even two ways to express, the same thought. I personally find it extremely unlikely that Paul was not thinking of Ecclesiastes when he wrote this part of his letter. Our ESV editors added a number of footnotes:

Seek out what is fine and honorable, and not what is base, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God who rules all, shall be with you, even in the manner you yourselves have declared: “We have hated the base things and loved the good.” Restore judgment in the gates, that the Lord, the God who rules all, may show pity to those who remain of Joseph.

I did not set before my eyes a thing beside the law;

those who do transgressions I hated.

A crooked heart did not cling to me;

as the evil one was turning aside from me, I did not know him.

You who love the Lord, hate evil.

The Lord guards the souls of His pious ones;

He will draw them out from the hand of sinners.

and these are good, but they should have also included Ecclesiastes 3:8:

There is a due season to love and a due season to hate;

there is a due season for war and a due season for peace.

If the Ecclesiast can say, in the Spirit, that there is a time for war and hatred, then Christians surely cannot assert in good conscience that we are to love, forgive, and be at peace with all men. What does Paul say in our Epistle reading?

If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

If we were intended to live at peace with all men, then Paul would not have included a caveat; if it is necessary to include “if possible”, then there exists at least the possibility that it will prove impossible to live at peace with some men.

Tell me: Has it proven possible to live at peace with all men? Was peace possible with the Jews that persecuted the Early Church? Was peace possible with Sodom and Gomorrah? Was peace possible with the Mohammedans that invaded Europe and plagued the Medieval Church? Was peace possible for Abraham when barbarians kidnapped Lot? Is peace possible today with the wicked Jews, Muslims, and Hindus? God commanded His people to exterminate His enemies in Canaan. They failed and ceased to be His people. God does not change. Incidentally, when the Ancient Israelites failed to obey God and destroy the peoples He commanded them to destroy, He let their lands be overrun by foreigners, including those they had failed to destroy. Again: God does not change.

And so let us return to Ecclesiastes: There is a time for love and peace, and there is a time for hatred and war. You must ask yourself if you believe you are in the former or in the latter. When you look around, does it seem like we are in a time of love, unity, and peace or does it seem like we are in a time of hate, division, and war? Do you think that if we were to throw down our weapons, our enemies would choose to live with us in peace? Where peace is not possible, you must prepare for war.

To the Greek reader, καιρός did not simply mean ‘a good time’ to do something; rather, it implied something much greater: A kairotic moment was not merely the right time to act; it was a moment that demanded action, and to fail to act was seen as foolish, disastrous, or even wicked. A wise man is one who understands the times, one who neither forces an action out of season nor fails to seize the kairotic moment when it arrives. Speeches, campaigns, battles, and much else are governed by kairotic moments that are seized or missed. In the words of the Psalmist:

Every pious man will offer prayer to You [for this] in a season that is fitting; / yet in a flood of many waters they will not come near him.

The prayers of the pious man shield him from disaster. In the words of Paul (and Isaiah):

“In a kairotic moment, I listened to you,

and in a day of salvation I have helped you.”

God offers to men the free gift of salvation — behold, the kairotic moment! — and He does so according to His good time and plan — behold, the day of salvation! —, and some men seize this lifeline and are drawn into the Ark that is the Church and some men reject Christ’s outstretched hand and are swept away by the floodwaters. Death waits for no man, and men who ‘plan’ to confess on their deathbeds often find God has scheduled their departure earlier than they expected:

Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?

The Lord God is patient, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, but opportunities for mortals to repent are not infinite. Tempt not the Lord; miss not καιρός.

Christianity is a religion of peace: By, through, and for the sake of Christ, we have peace with God and adoption as sons; via the certainty of our Election, confirmed and sealed in the waters of Baptism, we are at peace with our own mortality and the inevitability of death; due to the promises of God, we are at peace in this life, even when matters seem bleak or hopeless. Christianity is a religion of war: From the Garden onward, God and His camp have been at war with Satan and his; every single day, every single Christian wages a personal war against the temptations of the flesh, the world, and the devil; and the children of God here in time, the Church Militant, wage war against the enemies of God. Our forefathers in the faith understood their duties to God and man when they drove the Saracen hordes from Europe and pursued the vile heathens back to their lands across the sea — lands that were once, and will be again, Christian; we find ourselves today in a worse position than they — these are not times for peace. Jehu understood his duties to God and man when he looked upon the wicked practices of Ahab and set about to purge the worship of Baal, Asherah, and other demons from his lands; we find ourselves in a worse position than he, for abortion surely outranks child sacrifice and fornication and pornography surely outrank temple prostitution — it is not a time for peace. Our ancestors from the Roman Empire onward, were surely acting in accord with their duties to both God and man when they suppressed, oppressed, persecuted, expelled, and certainly did not tolerate the wicked Jews; we find ourselves in a worse position today, for, while the Jews continue their wicked opposition to the Christ and their genocidal campaign against all mankind, our institutions (to include our government) are even more thoroughly captured and more deeply corrupt than those of nearly any past era — it is not a time for peace. If the words of the Lord God in Ecclesiastes are true, then there exists a time for hatred and war; if the words of the Lord God spoken by Paul in today’s Epistle reading are true, then we are commanded to hate that which is evil. It is my contention and my firm belief that it requires only the most minimal — even remedial — sort of spiritual discernment, or even merely natural human wisdom according to reason, to recognize that we now live in a time of war.

To live in a time of war and call it a time of peace is to betray both God and man, to participate in the wicked shout of ‘peace, peace’ where there is no peace. To find yourself in a kairotic moment that demands war and to not only fail to seize upon and pursue it but to go so far as to run in the opposite direction and seek after an impossible peace is to commit a sin worse than Jonah’s, to be a fool, a coward, and a traitor.

I want to make absolutely certain that I have been completely clear about the necessary exegesis of the passage from Ecclesiastes: God does not say there ‘may’ be a time for hatred and war; He says in no uncertain terms that there will be times for hatred and war; in fact, this is so certain that He employs the simple present to state it as bare fact: There is a time for hatred and there is a time for war. And of our passage from Romans: You cannot have a genuine love without both holding fast to what is good and hating what is evil. If the Christian life is one that involves love (and it most certainly is), then so, too, must it necessarily involve hatred.

It may help you, in dealing with these matters, to think of yourself as a soldier in God’s army, and so you are, for you are a member of the Church Militant; as a soldier, you are not at liberty to throw down your weapons and declare the enemy forgiven — it is not your place to do so. Your rightful Lord and Commander gets to declare who is a friend and who is a foe. Your duty is to follow orders and hold the line. Whatever calls you have been given and whatever tasks have been set before you, it is your duty to love your own as dearly as God loves us, to forgive your personal enemies because God has forgiven us, to oppose the enemies of God and His children with all you can muster, and to remain loyal with all that you are.

Amen.

I suppose it is about time we deal with Romans 11 — not in the sort of fragmentary way of today’s reading, but in its totality. In fact, as none of you is watching or listening to this live, I highly recommend you pause here and go read Romans 11, or even Romans 9 through 11. I will leave a pause here to make that easier.

…

Now that you have read part of Romans, we will turn to Galatians. Galatians 4, starting with verse 21:

21 Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? 22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. 23 But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. 24 Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. 25 Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. 26 But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. 27 For it is written,

“Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear;

break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor!

28 Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. 29 But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now. 30 But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.” 31 So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.«

Why do we need Galatians to read Romans? In truth, we do not, for Romans is clear on its own to the Christian reader, but this passage from Galatians certainly makes some of the explanation of Romans easier. Also, lest we forget our maxims: Scriptura Scripturam interpretatur — Scripture interprets Scripture. Now, back to Romans.

We will, today, we treating three key verses and three key concepts or terms. The verses are Romans 9:6, 11:20, and 11:26. The concepts are ‘Israel’, ‘nation’, and Election (with, perhaps, a little digression into jealously). We will take these in turn.

Really, Romans 9:6b. Frequently, false interpretations, false doctrines, even entire false theologies are built upon pulling individual verses out of their context and then contorting them to fit some preconceived idea. Among the Judaizers, this often happens with this verse:

For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.

They try to contort this verse to fit into their schema in which all ‘Jews’ are saved, despite the extremely clear Scriptural evidence to the contrary. Worse, the very next verses give the necessary interpretive context:

… and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.

Romans 9:6b is not even a complete thought from Paul, because the thought runs through the end of verse 8, and even the sentence itself (once punctuation is added) runs through the end of verse 7. There are two Israels in our verse, and verse 8 explicitly gives us the two categories Paul had in mind when he dictated verse 6: “children of the flesh” and “children of God”. Before we go deeper into this, let us abstract the logic of the verse:

\neg \forall x\, (I_1(x) \to I_2(x))

‘Not all individuals (x) who are part of Israel 1 (I_1) are necessarily part of Israel 2 (I_2).’

or

\exists x\, (I_1(x) \land \neg I_2(x))

‘There exists (at least in theory) an individual (x) who is not part of both Israel 1 (I_1) and Israel 2 (I_2).’

This is the actual logic of what Paul is saying. A simple application of the law of noncontradiction tells us that an individual cannot both be a thing and not be the same thing simultaneously, so we cannot have an Israelite who does not belong to Israel if being an Israelite is defined as belonging to Israel, for that would be to declare that our individual (x) is both I and ¬I simultaneously. (We could arrive at the same conclusion using the law of the excluded middle, of course.) That being said, the two Israels are ethnic Israel (“all who are descended from Israel [i.e., Jacob]”) and true Israel (i.e., the Church, the Elect). There are (or at least there were) some ethnic Israelites who were also elect, but not all of them are elect. The passage is actually quite easily understood when read in context. Incidentally, Paul’s words apply to every race, not just to the Israelites: There exists a Germany, comprised of those descended from Ashkenaz, and some portion of that Germany is Israel (i.e, Elect members of Christ’s Church).

Really, Romans 11:20b. This verse is the key to the whole of Romans:

They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith.

Set aside, for the moment, all the figures of speech — the allegory, the simile, the metaphor — what does Paul actually say here? Faith is what matters. Faith is what distinguishes the elect members of every nation from the unbelieving members; faith is what makes one a part of the only Israel that matters: the Israel of God, the Church. Did physical descent from Abraham or Jacob save the Israelites? No. And neither will descent from Japheth or Ashkenaz save you. To be a member of the true Israel, you must have faith, for it is faith alone that saves you, declares you righteous for the sake of Christ, and will preserve you from the fiery end of this Creation. If you understand this one verse, you will understand the Book of Romans, a great many passages in the Old Testament, and many core doctrines of the faith — more, you will be preserved from many errors, but we will get to Election soon. You stand in the faith, as did our righteous ancestors, or you depart from the faith and fall, as did the wicked Jews. It is that simple.

Really, Romans 11:26a. The Dispensationalists and other Judaizers love this verse. Well, they think they do. If they could read or if they had the Holy Spirit, then they might reconsider. At any rate, what does our verse actually say?

And in this way all Israel will be saved.

Does this mean, as the heretics claim, that all ‘Jews’ will be saved? Well, it certainly cannot mean so in the sense of all Israelites; read the Old Testament: Most of them were damned. What of all of them going forward in time? Certainly not. Look at Paul’s anguish in the introductory verses of this very chapter:

I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit— that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.

Paul knows full well that most of his brothers were damned. And look at their state today: They still reject the Christ and they are still damned. What then does it mean that “all Israel will be saved”? Well, which Israel is in view here? You all know the answer without my saying it. The only Israel comprised exclusively of the saved (i.e., the Elect) is the Israel of God — the Church. And the immediately prior verse confirms this:

Lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the nations has come in.

There are Elect from every tribe and nation and language, as Revelation clearly teaches. God has used the stubbornness of the Jews to ensure the Gospel spreads to all nations and He inflamed the jealousy and the envy of the Jews to ensure that they were not all damned. He has ensured that all of His Elect will be brought to saving faith by the means (and Means) that He knew would be effective. With Paul, we should most certainly exclaim:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

Now, our three terms or concepts. First, Israel. We have already covered much of this one, and so we can be relatively brief here. There are four ‘Israels’ in Scripture:

(There is also a fifth sense in that the Christ Himself is the true — or even truest — Israel, but we will leave that for another time). The third category can generally be ignored, but the other three must be carefully distinguished. Thankfully, they are easily distinguished. For the first category, seldom will it be difficult to distinguish an individual man from a nation or a conceptual grouping. The second and fourth categories are where problems typically arise, and yet Scripture provides us an easy answer: As already examined, it is faith that defines the Israel of God, the true Israel, so those without faith cannot be found in the fourth category; more, we know that all the promises of God are ‘yes’ and ‘amen’ in Christ. Well, who are those who are in Christ? Only those in the fourth category, so the promises of God pertain only to the Elect.

Second, nation. More accurately, εθνος, for we are dealing with Greek when we are dealing with Scripture. The Greek does not map perfectly onto English nation or race, but that is so only in one specific way (that is relevant for us here): The Koine Greek speaker or reader could use εθνος of bees or similar (as Homer did in Classical Greek in the Iliad); we would not, in English, employ such a phrase as “a nation of bees”, except, perhaps, in some very niche circumstances, and even then more as poetry than as prose. In all other cases, the Greek εθνος and the English nation or race essentially agree (n.b., the modern tendency in sloppy use of the English language to conflate nation and country is incorrect, misleading, and worthy of condemnation). The word ‘εθνος’ appears nearly a thousand times in Scripture; it is not a minor or an unimportant concept. Paul employs the word twenty-nine times in Romans alone. If you are using a Bible that employs the abominable word “Gentiles”, you need to know the actual word there is εθνος, which should generally be translated into English as nation or race.

So, Paul actually speaks of himself as being the Apostle to the nations and of the fullness of the nations being brought in. Some of you are undoubtedly thinking of 1 Peter 2:9:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Indeed, Israel (the true one) is an εθνος in the sense previously discussed (with the bees), but this is more commonly portrayed as οχλος — a multitude — or even a συμμιγης οχλος — a mixed multitude. Think of the mixed multitude that went up with Israel in the Exodus and the mixed multitude that is Israel in Revelation. The Israel of God is, indeed, an εθνος and also a συμμιγης οχλος — both a figurative holy nation and a literal mixed multitude.

And yet we must not ignore the core sense of εθνος: To the Koine Greek speaker, εθνος meant nation and race. When Paul spoke to the Galatians, he used εθνος ten times, and they heard and understood nation and race; they knew that they were of the Celtic Galatian εθνος. The Romans knew they were of the Roman εθνος (Koine Greek being the common language of the empire). The Hebrews knew that they were of the Hebrew εθνος. The men to whom Paul wrote would not have been confused by the terms he employed; he used their language (and one of his) because so God ordained and thus they could understand. The educated among Paul’s audience would have been familiar with works such as those of Herodotus in which εθνος is defined as a matter of common blood, common language, common sanctuaries and sacrifices, and similar customs. Paul himself reinforces this understanding in many places in his letters, not least of all the much abused Galatians 3:28:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

If there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ, then both Jew and Greek must be real categories, or else the verse would be gibberish. Salvation is neither bounded nor scoped (although it is certainly modulated) by race: The free gift of salvation is open to all men and God desires that none should perish. Even the Canaanite woman is praised for her faith.

Soteriology does not destroy ontology. You are who and what God made you. I was raised Christian and so I cannot employ myself as an example here, but if you were converted as an adult, you did not cease to be what you were before you were converted. If you were male and French before you were converted, then you are still male and French, you are simply also Christian now. You did not cease to be anything you were and are essentially. I am male and I am American (of German and Scottish descent) — I will remain those things my entire life and for all eternity, because I am those things essentially. The Church neither ‘overrides’ nor destroys essential realities like biological sex and race; you are saved regardless of such things, but you will remain them forever. To deny the reality of such essentials is to deny the Creator Who made them. You are not a genderless, sexless, raceless amorphous blob; you are either male or female, you are a specific racial composition, and so you will and must remain. Those who think they know better than God and would deny such truths would do well to read Revelation 7:9 a few dozen times:

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.

Third, Election. Many have gone off the rails when it comes to Election. This is not cause for avoiding the doctrine, for it appears frequently in Scripture and is a key part of God’s plan of salvation; rather, it is warrant for deliberate and careful teaching in this area. Election is addressed in an article of the Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord; if you are a teacher, to include fathers, then you should read and understand that article. But before you do so, read and re-read God’s short teaching on the matter contained in Romans 8:

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

Election is not Law. I will say that again: Election is not Law. If you read or conceive of Election as cause for worry or despair then you have read it wrongly or understood it incorrectly. Election is Gospel. Again, I will repeat myself: Election is Gospel. Election is not God’s foreknowledge, for His foreknowledge covers all things — good and bad — and all men — believers and unbelievers. Election applies only to believers and pertains to how God has both ordered and ensured our salvation. You are not elect because of your merit; you are not elect because of your good works; you are not elect because of your righteousness. Your election depend entirely and solely upon the merit of Christ and the gracious will of the Father. This is Gospel precisely because it does not rely upon you. As Luther put it:

I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.

What is the purpose of Scripture? It seems like such a simple question, and yet far too many far too often lose sight of the truth of 2 Timothy 3:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

And, again, this time from Romans 15:

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.

Scripture, correctly read, is never irrelevant; Scripture, correctly understood, will never cause despair. Scripture is God’s revelation — explicit revelation — of Himself and His plans to and for His Elect. God is our loving Father, and His promises pertain to us, to His beloved children. Never let anyone convince you that Scripture belongs to anyone other than the Church (i.e., the sheep who hear the Master’s voice). Never let anyone convince you that the promises of God belong to anyone other than His children (i.e., those who are in Christ). Never let anyone convince you that there is any way to the Father except the Son. The Book of Romans was written for us, just like all Scripture.

The world is full of false teachers who would steal everything from you if only you would let them. They would steal from you your identity by convincing you that gender, sex, race, and other such things are not real. They would steal from you your patrimony by convincing you that borders are not real and your neighbor is every man on Earth. They would steal from you the Word and promises of God by convincing you that they were meant for other men. But false shepherds have no power over the true sheep who hear and heed only the Master’s voice. Wicked TV programming can be turned off; wicked books can be put down (or burned); and false shepherds can be simply ignored. Pray that God will give us faithful magistrates to punish such wicked men, but, personally and for your part, simply do not listen to them.

There is only one Israel that matters, and that is the true Israel, the Israel of God, the Church, and she is comprised of believers from every language, tribe, and nation, which is to say race, and she is not bounded by time, for Adam belongs to her the same as you and I, and she is not bounded by corporate form or human governance, for there is but one Good Shepherd and the sheep are those who heed His voice, and she is both Militant, comprised of us who struggle here in time, and Triumphant, comprised of those who brightly shine in eternity. The men who would advance or advocate for any other ‘Israel’ most certainly have another god, and we would do well to rebuke and shun them, at least until God gives us faithful leaders to make such men a foot or so shorter. May the Lord God arise and scatter His enemies and may those who trouble His sheep flee from before Him.

Amen.

What sort of a God do you have? In one sense, the question can have only one answer, for the Lord God is and remains your God, whether you reject Him or not. The Ancient Israelites rejected God time and time again, and yet He remains on His throne. In another sense, the question is, perhaps, more interesting. What is your conception of the God you claim to worship? If your god would not flood the world and destroy nearly all life, then you surely have another god, not the Lord God. If your god would not command the genocide of a wicked race — to include the women and the children — then you have another god, not the Lord God. If your god will not bring this Creation to an end in flames and then consign His enemies to the same for eternity, then you have another god, not the Lord God.

The Reformed go too far in emphasizing God’s sovereignty and glory, for they do so to the extreme of effectively denying His mercy and His love — they fall off the right side of the horse. In a very real sense, Lutheranism has simply been the ship — the Ark, if you will — that has successfully navigated between Scylla and Charybdis, fallen off neither the right nor the left side of the horse, and we must be careful to do the same here: We must not so emphasize our Father’s other attributes that we — actually or effectively — deny His sovereignty or His glory. The Lord God is Master and Creator of all things. He is the Absolute Infinite, and all else is as nothing before Him. He made and named every star and He formed you in your mother’s womb and He knew your name in eternity past before your grandparents had even met. There is nothing that can contain God, for He contains all things. We could never fully describe God, for He describes all things. He is infinitely above and beyond us, and yet He also knows each and every one of us better than we shall ever know ourselves. We cannot, in absolute terms, overstate the magnificence, the awesomeness, or the glory of God.

The point of the Book of Job is the absolute transcendence, knowledge, power, and control of God over all things. At no point did anything happen to Job — and at no point has anything happened or will anything happen to you — that was not entirely within God’s control. Now, God did not personally inflict any evil on Job, but the devil is God’s devil and he has never ‘slipped his leash’. Whatever the devil did, God permitted; whatever the devil wanted to do, but did not, God prevented. The God Who set the boundaries of the sea, telling her ‘this far and no further’, also set the boundaries the demons cannot transgress. You will never suffer temptations or trials beyond what you can, by the grace and power of God, endure; even Job, the great patron saint of those who suffer for the sake of righteousness, was not tempted or afflicted beyond what God knew he could and would bear. Satan himself could not break righteous Job; whatever lesser tempter has been assigned to you will surely have even less success. This is not to minimize or downplay the suffering and trials of the average Christian; rather, it should be taken as a source of strength: God did not permit the archfiend who led angels astray and ushered sin into the world to break righteous and elect Job. The Good Shepherd will lose not one of His sheep to the wolves. But let us return to today’s text.

When God speaks to Job, does He justify Himself? Does He explain Himself? No. The first reply of God to Job is actually two verses before our reading:

“Who is this who darkens counsel / by words without knowledge?”

God’s first words to Job are a condemnation of Job’s complaint and lament, and they set the stage for the rest of God’s speech:

“Where were you when I was laying the earth’s foundation?

Now tell me, if you are endowed with understanding.

Who determined its measures, if you know?

Or who was it that stretched a line upon it?

On what have its rings been fastened?

And who is he that cast a cornerstone upon it?

When the stars were born,

all my angels praised me with a loud voice.

“Again, I shut up the sea with gates,

when it quivered with eagerness, as it issued from its mother’s womb,

and I made the cloud its clothing,

and with mist I swaddled it;

yes, I prescribed bounds for it,

setting bars and gates around it.

And I said to it, ‘Thus far you shall come,

and you shall not go beyond;

“Indeed, was it in your time that I instructed the morning light

and that the morning star saw its post,

to take hold of earth’s wings,

to shake the impious off it?

Indeed, was it you that took clay soil and formed a living creature,

and, able to talk, set him on earth?

Again, did you remove the light from the impious

and crush the arm of the proud?

“And did you go to the source of the sea

and walk in the tracks of the deep?

Again, do the gates of death open to you out of fear,

and did the porters of Hades cower when they saw you?

Again, have you been advised of the breadth of what is under heaven?

Do tell me how much it is.

“As well, in what kind of land does the light dwell,

and of what kind is the place of darkness?

Might you perhaps lead me to their borders?

And perhaps too you know their paths?

Thereby I know that you were born then,

and the number of your years is great!

“And have you gone to the storehouses of the snow,

and have you seen the storehouses of the hail?

But it is at your disposal for a time of enemies,

for a day of war and battle.

And from where does the hoarfrost come,

or from where is the south wind dispersed to what is under heaven?

“And who prepared a course for the driving rain

and a way for the tumults,

to bring rain on land, where there is no man,

wilderness, where there is no human in it,

to feed the untrodden and uninhabited

and to cause it to grow an effusion of greenery?

“Who is the rain’s father?

And who is it that has given birth to the dew’s nuggets?

And from whose womb does the ice come forth?

And who has given birth to freezing rain in the sky

that descends like flowing water?

And who froze the face of the deep?

“And did you understand the bond of Pleiades,

and did you open the barrier of Orion?

truly, will you open Mazouroth in its season,

and the Evening Star with its luminous tail—will you lead them

And do you know heaven’s changes

or the corresponding events under heaven?

“And will you summon a cloud by voice,

and will it obey you with a violent burst of water?

And will you send out thunderbolts—and will they go?

And will they say to you, ‘What is it?’

And who gave to women skill in weaving

or knowledge of embroidery?

And who is he that numbers the clouds in wisdom

and inclined the sky to the earth?

And dust has been poured out like soil,

but I have cemented it, like a block to a stone.

“And will you hunt prey for the lions

and satisfy the appetite of dragons?

For they are in a state of fear in their lairs,

and they crouch in the woods, lying in wait.

And who prepared food for the raven?

For its young have cried to the Lord as they wander about, searching for food.

Job responds correctly:

Why do I yet contend—being rebuked even while confuting the Lord,

hearing such things—when I am nothing?

And I, what answer shall I give to these things?

I will lay my hand on my mouth.

I have spoken once, but I will not add to a second time.

But the Lord continues His speech:

No, but gird up your loins like a man, and I will question you, but as for you, just answer me!

Do not shrug off my judgment.

And do you think I have dealt with you in any other way

Do you have an arm like the Lord,

or do you thunder with a voice like his?

“Go ahead take on loftiness and power,

and put on glory and honor.

And send forth messengers in wrath

and every insolent person humble.

Yes, extinguish the proud,

and at once make putrid the impious.

And hide them outside together in the earth,

and fill their faces with dishonor;

then I will acknowledge that your right hand can save.

“But look now, you are familiar with ‘monsters’;

they eat grass like cows.

Look now, its strength is in its loins,

and its power in its belly’s navel.

It stood up its tail like a cypress,

and its sinews have been interwoven.

Its flanks are flanks of copper,

and its spine is cast iron.

“This is the chief of what the Lord created,

made to be mocked at by his angels.

But when it went up on a steep mountain,

it brought gladness to the quadrupeds in Tartarus.

Under trees of every kind it lies down,

by the papyrus and reed and sedge.

And tall trees find themselves in its shade,

with limbs, as do the chaste-tree’s branches.

If there is a flood, it will never notice.

it trusts that the Jordan will tumble into its mouth.

Will he catch it in his eye;

while bent back, will he pierce its nose?

“And will you catch a dragon with a fish hook

and put a halter around its nose?

if you will fasten a ring in its nostril]

And will you pierce its lip with a ring?

And will it address you with a petition,

with a supplication, softly?

And will it make a covenant with you,

and will you take it as your perpetual slave?

And will you play with it as with a bird,

or tie it up like a sparrow for a child?

And do nations feed on it,

and do the Phoenician races divvy it up?

And a whole fleet, gathered, cannot carry the mere skin of its tail.

and its head in fishermen’s boats.

But you will lay a hand on it,

though you remember the battle that is waging in its body,

Job finally replies:

“I know that you can do anything,

and nothing is impossible for you.

For who is it that hides counsel from you,

and being sparing with words thinks to hide them from you as well?

But who will tell me what I did not know,

great and marvelous things that I did not understand?

Now hear me, Lord, that I too may speak;

then I will question you, and you, teach me!

Whereas before I would hear an aural report of you,

now, however, my eye has seen you;

therefore I disparaged myself and wasted away,

and I regard myself as dust and ashes.”«

And yet what does God ultimately say of the words of righteous Job? ‘He has spoken of Me what is right.’ What are we to make of all this?

Perhaps my earlier diction was (perhaps intentionally) too strong: Does God actually condemn what Job said in his lament? Certainly, He says that Job has ‘darkened counsel by words without knowledge’, but He finally assesses Job as having spoken what is right about God. In truth, God more or less ignores what all of the men have spoken and, instead, appeals to His glory as demonstrated in Creation. God does not reply to the words of Job; neither does He respond to the arguments, accusations, et cetera, of Job’s friends; instead, God simply speaks words of truth about Himself and about His Creation. Jesus sometimes does much the same in the pages of the New Testament: teaching instead of answering the question asked. And God is, indeed, teaching here, for those with ears to heard:

“Who is this who darkens counsel / by words without knowledge?”

This implies a number of things, two chief among them:

Again, all that happened to Job was known to God before it happened and was permitted by God according to His perfect knowledge, justice, and mercy. Nothing has ever happened without God’s permission; nothing ever will happen without God’s permission. And there is nothing hidden from His sight.

There are two ways God reveals knowledge about Himself: explicitly and implicitly. The former we all know and understand well (it is Scripture); the latter is that to which God appeals when speaking to Job, and it is also, in many ways, the greater revelation. But the implicit revelation requires greater effort from and makes greater demands upon the man who would obtain access to it. Scripture, of course, demands a lifetime (more than a lifetime, really) of study to truly understand all that it teaches about God and His Creation. This is not to say that some matters are not simple: The Gospel can be explain in ninety seconds. And yet there is an immense difference between the explicit and the implicit, but there are also immense rewards for those who invest time and effort into the implicit revelation. Some few things are known only from Scripture (e.g., the Gospel), but all else is known more fully (or even only) from Creation.

The more you study a masterpiece — whether a painting, a poem, a novel, a sculpture, or something else — the more you will discover; both about the piece and about the master who made it; the same is true of Creation: Everywhere you dig, you will find God, and the deeper you dig the more deeply you will encounter and understand God. You will find the Lord God in the ordering of the Solar System and the movement of the stars, and you will find Him in the rebirth of spring and every cell division. You will find Him in the pages of history and, when you arrive in the future, you will find Him already there waiting for you. With our modern technology, we can count our respiration rate, our heartbeat, and dozens of other such metrics, but the Lord God knew how many breaths you would take and how many times your heart would beat before you were even born. I have lived in some of the largest Western cities and camped in some of the most remote parts of this country; God was no further away in either location. There exists nowhere you could ‘escape’ from God. In the words of the Psalm:

Where should I go from your spirit?

And from your face where should I flee?

If I ascend to the sky, you are there;

if I descend to Hades, you are present.

If I were to take my wings at dawn

and make my covert at the farthest limits of the sea,

indeed, there your hand shall guide me,

and your right hand shall hold me fast.

And I said, “So then, darkness shall trample me,

and night be illumination in my delight,”

because darkness will not be made dark due to you,

and night will be illumined as day;

The Book of Job is a book for Christians. Yes, certainly, I mean so in the sense that all Scripture is written for our instruction and our comfort, but I just as certainly mean so in the sense that one cannot read and understand Job and not become a Christian. Now, we could draw out the whole of Christian doctrine from Job, but that will have to wait for another day. Instead, let us focus on the core truths that are taught in Job: Although we are beset by troubles in this life (in the words of the hymn: ‘We walk in danger all the way.’) and although we will surely be tempted and tried by fire, we can yet remain confident that we have a Father above Who knows us, and orders all things; we will be neither tempted nor tried beyond what we can bear, and every trial and all suffering will be turned by God for our good. We rely neither upon our own strength, which would surely be insufficient for the task, nor upon our own wisdom, which would surely darken counsel; rather, we rely completely and totally upon our God and Father, for He knows all things and He has never failed, nor will He ever fail.

As the righteous Son of God suffered in our place, so the righteous son of Esau suffered for our benefit, that we might look to his example and take comfort in times of trial and affliction. It is unlikely that God will permit Satan himself to afflict and tempt you, and yet even should that worst of possibilities occur, we know that God will see us successfully through the storm, and will even reach out to rescue us, as He did with Peter. We rely not on our own strength, just as we rely not on our own works. Although we exist in time and must endure all things as they come, each in its own season, God is not bound by time; God saw Job vindicated and triumphant long before Satan had even requested to afflict him. When God looks at you, He certainly sees and understands your present trials, but He also sees your eternity; He knows that your name is inscribed in the Book of Life, and He knows precisely how He will turn your every temptation and trial and all your affliction and your suffering for your eternal good. He is your loving Father Who disciplines you for your good, and His Son is the Good Shepherd, Who never loses or abandons His sheep.

Life is short; eternity is long. We know ourselves and each other here in time only as we presently are — fallen, imperfect, afflicted; God knows us as we will be in eternity, as He always intended us to be — sinless, perfect, and content. We are, in this life, simultaneously saints and sinners — simul justus et peccator —, but the God Who perfectly knows every second of our lives — both here in time and there in eternity — knows that peccator will fall away and only justus will remain. When He looks at you, the Father sees the perfect righteousness of Christ which was made yours in the waters of Baptism. Although we have only a foretaste of that righteousness in this life, and the process of sanctification is never completed in this fallen world, we believe, teach, and confess that we will be fully and finally sanctified in the Resurrection of the Just. And a mystery still more glorious: God will not merely overlook or ignore our past sins in eternity; rather, He has promised that He will forget them. How God can forget, we do not (and likely cannot) know, but we do know what God has promised and that God never lies. I want you to think about that promise for a bit: God will remember your sins no more — He will forget them. All that exists exists by the power, knowledge, and wisdom of God, and the perfection of every instance (to include you and me) exists necessarily in the mind of God. To say that God does not know something is to say that it does not exist — more, that it never existed at all.

Your sins are not merely washed away in eternity; as a true son or daughter of the Father, you will be restored to the righteousness God always intended for you, and your sins will cease to exist. Here we would do best just to stop and marvel, to affirm what God has promised, and to exclaim with Paul:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

Our Father’s gifts are always greater, deeper, more expansive, and more perfect that we can even imagine. We pray “Thy will be done.” not only because it is the correct orientation of creature toward Creator, but also because He surely intends for us things both greater and more perfect than anything we could specifically formulate ourselves.

In Peter, we see that God will reach out to save us from drowning and, in Job, we see that God will not permit temptation, trial, affliction, or suffering to break us, no matter how bad or even bleak things may seem here in time. This life is certainly one of trials and tribulations — and anyone promising you anything else is selling something other than Christianity —, but we Christians have the security of knowing that God is for us and the great privilege of doing His work. More Christians have been called and commanded to live for the truth than have been called and commanded to die for it, but both have happened and both remain distinct possibilities. Whether you are called to lose and to endure everything for the faith or to live quietly and peacefully in good works, it is all for the glory of God and for your good.

Do good, live well, die well.

Amen.

To paraphrase Luther and Walther: ‘The sheep rightly judge their shepherds.’ To be certain, there is but one Good Shepherd and He is without error and beyond rebuke, but undershepherds — pastors and teachers — are mere men and are, thus, liable to err and are proper subjects of godly rebuke should they err. And yet not all sheep should rebuke their shepherds. Women, for instance, must not do so, for Scripture commands women to be silent in the churches and to inquire of their own husbands at home. Neither should all men endeavor to rebuke the shepherds, for the man who would offer a rebuke stands in the place of a teacher — more, a teacher of teachers —, and so he must be certain that his rebuke is grounded in truth, grounded in the Word of God, for then it is not truly the sheep who is rebuking the undershepherd, but the Good Shepherd Himself, speaking through the sheep. There is, of course, also the matter of rebuking a shepherd who goes astray with regard to matters of God’s first book (i.e., Creation), but the man who would undertake that sort of rebuke must rely upon the gifts God has given him and his conscience.

The sheep are given qualifications in Scripture according to which shepherds may be judged, but there are also examples against which the sheep may judge their shepherds — and against which you shepherds should judge yourselves. One of the most powerful and important such examples is found in today’s Epistle reading: St. Paul not only expresses a desire to save the sheep, but above and beyond this, he expresses such a strong desire to save his own race that he expresses, as a hypothetical, his willingness to be cut off for the sake of his racial brethren. I would directly address other shepherds: You may be inclined to read St. Paul’s words as extreme or a sort of pinnacle; permit me to disabuse you of any such delusions: St. Paul’s words do not express the height or zenith of what it means to be a shepherd — at least not alone; rather, what Paul expresses is simultaneously the height and the bar — the minimum. If your desire to see your own people saved does not match that of St. Paul, then may I rather strongly suggest you take up digging ditches or some other honest work with your hands, for the man who would not give everything for the salvation of his own people is unworthy to hold the office or post of shepherd. But, of course, that is a matter that is between you and your conscience and God, a matter that will be perfectly and finally sorted at the Stricter Judgement. And, for the sheep: You are entitled to such a standard of care from your shepherds, not because you are worthy, but because that is the standard our Lord and Savior has set and which He demands from those who hold office under Him.

There are many unworthy shepherds these days. Paul says that, were it a possibility (hence the hypothetical nature of his comments), he would be cut off — blotted from the Book of Life — for the sake of his people; many modern ‘pastors’ (and even more ‘priests’) could not even tell you who their people are, and many would even go so far as to deny that they have such a thing as their own people. Who is wrong: St. Paul or these moderns? They cannot both be right. If St. Paul is right to express so deep and profound a love for his racial kinsmen, then the moderns stand condemned — or even damned — by their refusal to echo the same of their own racial kinsmen.

God is not the author of confusion or disorder or chaos, and the Gospel does not destroy nature. When you became a Christian — whether it was in your mother’s womb or as a full adult — who and what you are did not change. If you were American before your Baptism, then you remained American after your Baptism. If you went into the waters French, then you came out French. Soteriology does not destroy ontology. You are not less male or female, German or Scottish, or any other such essential category because of your justification and renewal; if anything, you are more what God made you, because the process of sanctification conforms you to what God always intended you to be. If you believe that the Gospel destroys, erases, removes, or even merely suppresses or limits realities such as biological sex and race, then you have listened to false shepherds and internalized their lies. Certainly, such false shepherds will receive their due punishment from God, but you must purge such false teachings from your own mind and they must never be found on your tongue. The shepherd will receive the stricter Judgement, but that does not mean that sheep will receive no Judgement or have some sort of ‘perfect’ or complete defense at the Judgement. A woman is not her own head, but, even though her head will receive the greater scrutiny, she is not thereby fully excused.

Given the state of modern shepherds, perhaps more and greater admonition is due. Shepherd is not a mere job or occupation; to be a shepherd is to hold an office and to be subject to an attendant set of duties. If you think of your office primarily as a matter of privileges, rights, honors, or any other such things, then you are utterly unfit — resign and beg God for His mercy. Unlike the office of father, which one obtains naturally and holds for life, the office of shepherd may be relinquished. Surely, if God has prepared you for the office and called you to it, then you will be judged if you decide to neglect these gifts and refuse that call — ask the faithless servant who buried his talent or Jonah who got on a ship and sailed the wrong direction —, but it will go much worse for you if you hold such office unworthily or execute it faithlessly. The faithful shepherd is promised a crown; the false and faithless shepherd should expect only wailing and gnashing of teeth. God will not be mocked, least of all by those who claim to stand in His stead and to speak on His behalf, and yet care nothing for His sheep and seek only to fill their own bellies and service their own egos and thereby fill full their cup of wrath. In the words of St. John Chrysostom: ‘The road to Hell is paved with the bones of priests and monks, and the skulls of bishops are the lampposts that light the path.’

I fear that, in desiring never to overstep, I have been insufficiently forceful, so let me be clearer: Every time you take up the pen to write or open your mouth to speak on behalf of God, you should be possessed of a holy terror, for to touch the things of God is to take your life — and your soul — in your hands. You should treat God’s truth — all of His truth — with no less reverence than the Ancient Israelites were instructed to treat the Ark. I encourage every shepherd to contemplate Oza (or Uzzah, if you are not yet familiar with the LXX). In a very real sense, Oza was dead before David even began to bring up the Ark; he was dead because his leaders — his shepherds — failed to do what God required of them. Or did you think that your wickedness or laxity would never affect others? Cursed is the one who does the work of the Lord with slackness. Oza surely died for his own transgression, but Oza also surely could have been saved had his leaders been faithful and obeyed God’s commands.

And via Oza we come to an uncomfortable (for some, anyway) truth: The faithlessness of your shepherds will not excuse your transgressions. Certainly, there is a diminishment of fault, after a fashion, for those who act in ignorance, but you do have a duty not to be ignorant with regard to certain matters. Wives are to obey their husbands, which means they must know what their husbands have told them to do or not to do. Men are to obey Christ, which means that we must know what He has told us to do or not to do. Certainly, it is the duty of shepherds within the Church to lead the sheep truly and well, but the shepherds may lead the sheep with and only with the words and truth of the Good Shepherd, for His sheep know His voice. The sheep will follow the undershepherds who speak with the voice of the one true Shepherd, but they will just as surely — must just as surely — reject the many false ‘shepherds’ who do not speak with the Master’s voice. Should the sheep wander off after false shepherds, then we know that the Master, Who seeks the lost, will surely send other, faithful shepherds after those sheep, but the sheep must then choose to which voice they will listen, whether that of the true Shepherd in the mouths of the faithful undershepherds or the voice of the liar below in the mouths of the false shepherds, leading them into the wilderness to become goats instead of sheep.

There is no way around this matter: The sheep must judge their shepherds. You, as sheep, must discern the faithful from the faithless. Some will tell you that you must simply submit to this or that authority, and that you will thereby resolve (or even avoid) the problem, but that merely abstracts the problem by a layer or two. If you submit to some authority, then you have decided that that authority is faithful, or at least that you will treat him or it as if he or it were. God has given us the only standard according to which undershepherds may be judged faithful or faithless: His unchanging and perfect Word. You may judge any shepherd by whether or not the things he says are consonant with the things God has said before him, for faithful shepherds speak with the Master’s voice. This does not, of course, mean that you must mistrust everyone in everything, for faithful shepherds prove themselves over time, much as false shepherds reveal themselves. God will never leave us without faithful men to teach His Word, to speak His truths after Him, but this remains a fallen world and Satan will continue to try to sneak his ‘prophets’ into the churches. It is the duty of the faithful prince and magistrate to remove faithless and wicked teachers, but God has not blessed us with such a man, at least not today, and so the sheep must be particularly vigilant in refusing to listen to the voice of Legion, which is, today, spoken by the mouths of thousands of false shepherds.

Wives, God will ask you at the Judgement where your children are. Husbands, God will ask you at the Judgement where your wives and children are. Shepherds, God will ask you at the Judgement where His flock is that He entrusted to your care. We all have callings, duties, tasks set before us. According to our callings and our gifts, we will be judged; according to our duties and our faithfulness, we will be judged; according to our tasks and our diligence, we will be judged. Whether you are a pastor or a housewife, a teacher or a plumber, a magistrate or a retired grandparent, you have duties, callings, and gifts; you must be neither lax nor false. Your Lord and Savior has entrusted much to your care and He will demand much in return, and from those to whom He has entrusted greater and rare gifts, He will demand all the more. And yet we must not and, indeed, should not, take any of this as demanding or burdensome:

“For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.”

The Lord God does not call you to be what you are not; rather, God calls you to be what you were always meant to be and what you will fully and truly become in eternity. It is not a burdensome thing to be a husband; it is not a burdensome thing to be a wife. Yes, as the Apostle says, you will have trouble in this life if you marry, for we, men, are fallen, and so are the women we marry, but such a small cost is surely worth the great joys of marriage, for which God designed us. And other callings are certainly similar. It is not burdensome to be a teacher, modulo the words of Hebrews 13:

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.

God has both designed and equipped us for the very callings He has assigned us and tasks He has given us. We must endeavor to do these things with joy. The Lord has already done the hard work and He has even prepared our good works for us. This life is certainly not easy, but it is, perhaps, easier than we sometimes make it for ourselves.

There is a general desire among men (and women) to ‘outsource’ certain (perhaps difficult or complicated or time-consuming) tasks, and this desire is not always wrongful. If my HVAC stops working, then I am probably going to call an expert. I do not roast my own coffee, build my own cars, or translate from Russian. And I am quite happy to have other men produce the ink for my pens. It is not wrong to rely upon true expertise, nor is it wrong to rely upon trustworthy men. But there are times and topics where men must necessarily investigate (at least to some depth) for themselves. I do not need to learn to fly a modern jetliner in order to check if my pilot is competent, but I should probably fly only on airlines that require training, licensure, and screening. Similarly, you do not need to exhaustively analyze every statement made by teachers you already trust, but you should check them from time to time against the Word of God, and you should know the Word of God well enough to do that. And yes, I do encourage you to hold me to the same standard. There is no room for error when it comes to the things of God. The sheep hear the voice of their Master; make sure your shepherds are not speaking with some other voice.

Amen.

Scripture is full of metaphor, analogy, symbolism, and dozens of other such rhetorical devices and figures of speech. This is, of course, not to say that there are not parts of Scripture that are simply literal — we do not want to wander off into the desert with those who try to torture everything into symbolism — or allegory. And yet we must recognize symbolism when and where God has employed it and then endeavor correctly to exegete and understand it. And so we must discuss ‘Jerusalem’.

First, there is not one Jerusalem — there are two:

Galatians 4:21–31 (ESV):

“Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear;

28 Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. 29 But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now. 30 But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.” 31 So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.«

Second, the Jews are children of the slave woman, of the earthly Jerusalem, and we, the Elect, are children of the free woman, of the heavenly Jerusalem. Third, the heavenly Jerusalem is the eternal city, the city spoken of in Revelation; ultimately and truly, the heavenly Jerusalem is Paradise itself, for that is the eternal home of the Elect. We should expand these a bit.

I want you to look at Psalm 125 in your Bibles. Unless you have acquired and are using a Septuagint (which you should do), then the second clause speaks of Mount Zion as being immovable, but that is not what God actually said, for the true referent, as we see in the Greek, is the same as that of the first clause: He who ‘inhabits Jerusalem’ is he who trusts in the Lord, is he who will never be shaken. This verse is comfort for the Elect; it has nothing to do with the earthly Jerusalem. In their great wickedness, the Jews altered this verse in their so-called ‘Masoretic Text’ and attempted to transfer a promise from the Elect to themselves. They truly are, as Christ called them, children of their father below, who is a murderer, a liar, and a thief. The earthly Jerusalem is just a city, like any other earthly city, and the earthly Mount Zion is like any other earthly mountain (really more a hill in this case) and both will pass away along with the rest of this Creation — they have no relevance to future prophecy or anything of that sort except for their use as symbols. All forms of Millenarianism are heresy.

The issue of the Jews is certainly a tired one, but a patient with cancer cannot reasonably expect to stop hearing about that disease just because he is tired of it, and so we must discuss wickedness and heresy. It was the Jews that led the so-called ‘civil rights movement’ that tore our country apart and destroyed our national fabric. It was the Jews that spied for the Communists (and gave them nuclear weapons) and led the Communist groups in the US. It was the Jews that overturned our blasphemy, anti-sodomy, and obscenity laws. It was the Jews that pushed to legalize abortion, and they are vastly overrepresented as ‘doctors’ in that field. It was the Jews that pushed for the legalization of all manner of drugs. It is the Jews that own and promote the pornography ‘industry’. Hear the Word of the Lord:

The Jews killed the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and they have persecuted His disciples; the Jews please not God, and are contrary to all men.

And yet there are many who claim the name of Christ and rabidly support the Christ-killing Jews. And if you recoil in the slightest from calling the Jews Christ-killers, then I encourage you to examine yourself to know the state of your heart; hear the Word of the Lord:

The God of our fathers raised Jesus, Whom you (Jews) killed by hanging Him on a tree.

Was Peter speaking to the ‘Jewish leaders’ as modern eisegetes would tell you? No, he was speaking to a crowd of ordinary Jews. The Jews are Christ-killers and this enormous sin, this incomprehensible wickedness will follow their race unto eternity. We leave the eternal disposition of those who dedicate themselves to the Jews to the perfect justice of God, but we also surely know that He will not commend as faithful servant those who serve the very men who murdered Him. For our part, we might call that ‘aiding and abetting’.

At least in some ways worse are those who rabidly — and heretically — insist that the Jews are ‘chosen’. Well, we should examine that term: What does it mean to be chosen? There are two senses; we will categorize them with two Greek verbs: προαιρεω and καλεω. The first verb appears in our first reading as ‘chosen’ and the second (in adjectival form) appears in our Epistle reading as ‘called’. Pharaoh was chosen, or, in the words of Romans 9:17:

For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.

in the waters of Holy Baptism, you were called — more, you were called by name, for the Good Shepherd Who numbered and named all the stars in the sky knows also all His sheep by their names (and so καλεω truly means). Would you rather be προαιρεω pharaoh or a καλεοω child of God (please forgive me the bad grammar for the sake of the point)? Perhaps I am somewhat partial because Romans 8:28 is my Confirmation verse, but I would strongly prefer, if asked to choose, to be chosen in the sense of καλεω (called) instead of merely chosen in the sense of προαιρεω (‘chosen’ for a specific purpose). This is, of course, not to even imply that these categories are mutually exclusive; pharaoh was chosen, but not called, but, to pick just a few, Moses, David, and Mary were all both chosen and called. The error that we must avoid here is the conflation of the Zionist and the heresy of the Dispensationalist: The Jews are not, by virtue of their descent from Abraham, chosen in the sense of called:

For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham.

If anything, the unbelieving Jews are all the more damned for rejecting the Scriptures that God entrusted to them and the Christ Who came from their line; it is far worse to know God and explicitly reject Him than simply to be an ignorant heathen. The nation of Ancient Israel was chosen for the specific purpose of being the line from which the Christ would descend, but this affords them no advantage before God’s tribunal. We are bound to ask how any Christian would miss the clear heresy of any system that would even hint at another path to the Father. ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.’ The Jews do not have some ‘second way’. Adam was the first Christian, and he entered Paradise long before Moses, to whom God entrusted the Law to be protected and spread by Ancient Israel, was even born. It has only ever been by faith in the Christ that one may be called. May the Lord God erase both Zionism and Dispensationalism from the Earth and thereby defend His great Name. Amen.

We do not look forward to the earthly restoration of any particular nation to any particular chunk of territory. We do not pin our hope on an earthly mountain, city, or hill. The only hill to which we (symbolically) assign any abiding hope is Golgotha, but our hope in Christ crucified exists because we believe in Christ raised. The existence of modern ‘Israel’ is a matter of geopolitics and corruption, not a matter of prophecy, for we know that it is only the Israel of God (i.e., the Church) and the heavenly Jerusalem (i.e., Paradise) that have any promises or ultimate meaning. The earthly Jerusalem will pass away in fire; the heavenly Jerusalem will endure for eternity with her lord and Savior as a light to all the Elect from every nation and language.

None of this should be taken to diminish or demean and certainly not to denigrate the importance of the here and now. What you do in this life not only echoes in eternity, but decides your eternity. Certainly, we are saved — alone — by the free gift of faith in the forgiveness of sins won for us by the perfect work of the Christ Who lived and died for us, fulfilling the righteous demands of the Law that we could never fulfill, but there are two judgements: There is the Judgement, which asks if you are or are not in Christ, and there is the judgement of works.

For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.

Your works cannot save you (and for that we cannot thank God enough), but just as certainly God will judge every deed you did or failed to do and every word you spoke or failed to speak. Anyone who think this life does not matter because the ultimate battle is already won would do well to examine himself and take heed lest he fall; God will not be mocked, and He sees, hears, and knows all. Again, you must not — and should not — fear for your eternity, for that was already won for you, your name inscribed in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and your status as a child of the Father signed and sealed in the waters of Holy Baptism; in fact, you were foreknown by God in eternity past before ever there was an Earth or a Jerusalem or a Golgotha, and your name was written in the Book of Life before your parents named you, before Adam named the animals, before God made and named the stars. You were called by the very name God inscribed in His Book of Life before time itself had even begun to run. You were called — καλεω — in eternity past when God foreknew you and here in time when you were pulled from the waters of Baptism as a child or an adult or sprinkled with the water of Baptism as an infant. And the infant truly is the better picture, for he can neither ‘consent’ (for whatever that means) nor truly object (save, perhaps, some crying if the water is cold); the infant must rely — entirely — on those around him and receives Baptism, and the forgiveness of sins and the salvation therein offered, as we are all commanded to receive the Kingdom of God: as little children, free from guile, objection, squabbling, or doubt. If you were an adult when you were baptized, then you still added nothing to the process, for the Sacrament relies upon God and not upon you. Truly blessed are those who receive so great a gift from God in the most worthy manner fallen man may muster: that of the trusting infant.

As Christians, as called sons and daughters of God, we must not look upon this life as misery or suffering or any such thing (although it certainly will contain those in this fallen world), and we must certainly not look upon this life as meaningless or irrelevant: Our heavenly Father has prepared beforehand good works that we should walk in them. The Cross conquered sin, death, and the devil, but there is much work left to be done here in time. We have duties to family, to nation, which is to say to race, and to neighbor. This world is perishing, and so are all who do not know the Lord. Noah was saved from a drowning world, and instructed not to draw any more into the Ark; we have a better promise than he, for we are instructed to bring as many into the new and better Ark — the Church — as possible; in the words of the parable:

And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet.’ ”

We must fill our Father’s House, the Jerusalem above, Paradise.

But this is not done simply by sharing, spreading, or teaching or preaching the Gospel. The Christian life is much more than the Proclamation. The Christian life is a life of deeds and not mere words; it is lived out both in accordance with God’s law and in service to neighbor. In fact, you cannot serve God directly — He needs nothing from you or from anyone else; your neighbor, however, needs food, clothing, shelter, and all manner of such things; you serve God by serving your neighbor — those are the very good works that God prepared beforehand that you should walk in them. And your neighbor is not some abstraction, and nor does he represent every man on Earth. Your neighbor is a concrete; he is flesh and blood; in fact, he is your flesh and blood, for you owe your loyalty, your duty, and your time, resources, and efforts first and foremost and even to the exclusion of all others to those God has placed closest to you. Family, tribe, race, and nation are not incidental, accidental, or human constructs or fictions. You are who and what you are by essence, and God created that essence. Your people need you; you serve God by serving your people of whom God has made you part; you serve Satan by denying your own people, of whom God has made you part, to preference the alien, whom God has not made part of your people. Or do you believe God was wrong to include the Table of Nations and the genealogies in Scripture and to create man as a social animal enmeshed in concentric circles of relatedness and duty? Or do you believe the Marxists — almost exclusively Christ-denying and Christ-murdering Jews — knew better than God? For they are the very men (to abuse the term via over-inclusion) you are following when you deny the reality of sex, of race, of nation, of family. And make no mistake: To deny the reality of race is actually more evil, more wicked than to deny the reality of biological sex. Satan knows full well that all of these things are real and are good creations of God — that is why he wants you to deny them. The ‘Christian’ who claims Christ and yet denies Him in his acts is an unprofitable servant who may one day — in the not-too-distant future — find himself calling “Lord, Lord…”. Do not be an unprofitable servant. We live in a dying world among the dying, and yet live in it we must. Do your duty as a Christian man or woman. Serve your family; serve your tribe; serve your neighbor; serve your race. These are the realities by which God has created you and in which He has enmeshed you. Do not risk denying the Creator by denying His Creation.

As a called, elected, sealed, and confirmed son or daughter of the Father, you have absolute certainty of your eternity, for you are in Christ and He will lose none from His hands. So comport yourself with the behavior befitting a son or a daughter of the King. He has given you work to do; do not rest on Christ’s laurels. Your people are perishing, pull them into the Greater Ark before they slip beneath the waves and are forever out of reach.

Amen.

Persecution has not been the universal experience of all Christians at all times in all places; there have been periods of peace, prosperity, and tranquility. (That these have virtually always been under the aegis of a Christian State with an established Church should not go without mention, but it will have to be a passing one today.) And yet, persecution has often been the fate of Christians down through the centuries (or even ages, if we want to include such men as Abel and Noah). And the existence of a supposedly Christian State is no perfect guarantee against persecution — Luther was persecuted by an Emperor and a pope, both of whom claimed to be Christian. Today, our government would not be called Christian by any but the most delusional of men, but Satan is never content; having virtually complete his conquest of the various Western governments and their attached or aligned institutions, he turned his attention to the churches decades ago (centuries ago, in some obvious cases). This should surprise no one; hear the words of our Lord from today’s Gospel reading:

»Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.«

Does our Lord speak of persecution by the State or some other such authority? No, not even (exclusively, anyway) in the portion of this passage immediately before today’s reading, where He speaks of being “dragged before governors and kings”. He speaks, instead, of a more personal sort of betrayal. Our Lord was certainly persecuted and murdered by the Jewish authorities (and the Jewish people generally), but He was also betrayed by Judas, His former friend; it is that sort of personal betrayal of which Jesus speaks in this passage. Despite the parallelism, we should not limit our understanding of what Jesus means when He says ‘brother’ (or ‘child’ and ‘parent’, for that matter) to the familial; what is in view here is every sort of intimate or personal betrayal, and that certainly includes all those who are brothers by ways other than blood — close friends, brothers-in-law, brothers-in-arms, brothers-in-Christ. And that last category is certainly Satans’s focus today.

Mercifully, most of you are not in a position to hear many, and certainly not most, of the stories of all the ways our churches are betraying so very many men today (and it is mostly [relatively] young men who are being betrayed), but I am in a position to hear them. And I do not think for a second that the faithless men pushing for expulsion, excommunication, and blacklisting (among many other forms of persecution) would hesitate to use the State to literally execute (which is to say murder) the men they are persecuting, if they thought the State would cooperate. In fact, such persecutors and slanderers and blasphemers have engaged in attempted murder: doxxing and false reports to law enforcement. If such ‘men’ were not so cowardly (itself a grievous sin), then they would certainly have taken up arms themselves and murdered the men they have persecuted; and they would have firmly believed that they were rendering service to God in doing so. Of course, their assessment would have been half true: They would, indeed, have been rendering service to their god, who is most certainly not the Lord God.

The very persecution of which Jesus warns in this passage is rampant in the churches. In fact, things are so bad these days that it would be accurate to say that we are in a period of widespread persecution, and — more importantly — we can ‘use’ that persecution as an indication of who is faithful and who is faithless: In times of faithlessness and persecution, those who are not persecuted are not faithful. If you have never suffered for the faith, then I encourage you to examine yourself — and particularly you men, for cowardice, which is to say a lack of courage or manliness, is damnable sin. For most, such suffering need not be the sort of ‘grand’ or high-profile persecution that has been inflicted on some of us; for many, suffering for the faith will take a more ‘mundane’ form: lost friends, estranged family, perhaps some other social or economic consequences. The point is that Satan, for the moment, controls the board, and a faith that he ignores is a faith that is in some way lacking. We do not live in a time of a Christian ruler and a faithful established Church under him; rather, we live in a time of a wicked government, a pervasively evil bureaucracy that invades almost every facet of our lives, and a nearly universal apostasy among the so-called churches; under such circumstances, the Christian should not — and the Christian will not — expect to escape persecution. You will suffer for the faith. You may not be martyred — even Luther died of old age, but both the Emperor and the pope sought his head for many years, and we, unlike Luther, do not have faithful German princes to hide, provide for, and protect us. We can certainly rely upon God, but not all saints escaped the lions. If you must go the lions, then to the lions you must go.

The Christian proclamation is one of eternal comfort, not one of temporal comfort. Temporal peace relies upon having a righteous, competent, and powerful State; that is a valid and important consideration for Christian men, but it is not the core concern of the Christian faith. Whether the king is righteous or wicked, whether the culture is Christian or not, whether it will cost you nothing or everything, you must confess Christ and Him crucified in both your words and your deeds. A faith that produces no good works is a dead faith, and it is only a living faith that saves. Or do you think that the Christ so often employed plant metaphors idly? As any gardener (or keeper of houseplants, at least) will tell you: Living plants always grow, and healthy fruit tree always bear fruit.

Learn the lesson of the fig tree: It was not the season for figs, which certainly ‘excuses’ the fig tree, but the Christ did not curse the tree as punishment of the tree, but as a lesson for you: There are no ‘seasons’ for the Christian faith; you must produce fruit in season and out. There will be no excuse or defense on Judgement Day that you lived under a wicked State or in a wicked culture or that you ‘had to’ do this or that. The Christians of the Early Church went to the lions rather than deny the Real Presence. That is the minimum to remain faithful. ‘But it was not the season for figs.’ ‘Depart from Me, for I never knew you.’

We can ask the Lord why us and why now — certainly righteous Job did so —, but after we pray or lament, we stand up and carry on. Here, perhaps, we should thank the Lord God that we are sons and daughters of Japheth, for it has always been in the nature of our race to rise from the ashes, to endure, to carry on, to rebuild. Our people have endured great hardships and suffered great calamities in centuries past, but we have, by the grace of God, always risen to the challenge and the occasion; we are here today because our ancestors did not fail and, one day, our far-distant sons and daughters will say the same of us. It is a tragedy and a crime that our forefathers in the preceding handful of generations squandered, failed to maintain, and destroyed so much that was entrusted to their care, but we cannot change the past — only the future is mutable. We must do what they failed to do; we must be like the tiny handful of faithful kings who ruled Old Testament Israel — we must repent in sackcloth and ashes. And yet repentance alone is not enough, for talk is cheap; yes, God demands our repentance, including of the sins of our fathers — ‘both we and our fathers have sinned’ —, but true repentance is not just words but also actions. We must not only denounce and turn from the evils both of the past and of our present, but we must also seek to destroy them. What does it even mean to renounce the worship of Baal if his high places and his priests remain? What does it mean to renounce the worship of Astarte if her perversions (such as prostitution and pornography) and her shrines (such as strip clubs) remain? What does it mean to renounce the worship of Moloch if abortion ‘clinics’ remain and abortionists go unpunished? What does it mean to denounce the worship of Saturn (Satan) if his synagogues, his mosques, and his false priests remain? “Who is with the Lord? Let him come to me!”

We must put to death the weak and decadent and easy faith that has masqueraded as ‘Christianity’ for the better part of a century. The Christian religion is not weak; the Christian religion is not easy; the Christian religion is not passive or pacifist, cowardly or craven, supine or submissive, inactive or indolent or inconsequential; the Christian religion is not ‘tolerant’. Do you think God will praise you for your ‘tolerance’ or reward you for your ‘restraint’ if you restrain your hand from opposing His enemies or tolerate those who blaspheme His Name?

»Maledictus qui facit opus Domini fraudulenter et maledictus qui prohibet gladium suum a sanguine.«

»Accursed is the one who does the work of the Lord carelessly, keeping back his dagger from bloodshed.«

In the waters of Holy Baptism you died to sin, death, and the devil, and you were raised to new life in Jesus Christ to fight sin, death, and the devil. You are part of the Church Triumphant with regard to eternity, coram Deo (with respect to God), and every time you participate in the Divine Service, but you are also part of the Church Militant with regard to the temporal, coram mundo (with respect to the world), and every single day you yet draw breath on this Earth in this Creation. You are a soldier in a war that has been raging since the Garden, and will continue raging until the Christ returns to claim every crown of every earthly kingdom and cast each and every one of His enemies into eternal conscious torment. Does that sound like a weak or a passive or an effeminate religion to you? The ‘Christianity’ of the world and of too many churches is a damnable and damning counterfeit. After centuries of learning from his mistakes and his defeats, Satan realized that it is far, far better to subvert the churches than to try to sell a competing religion; certainly, he still does both, but the latter pays greater dividends and he enjoys it far more. To keep the goats wandering aimlessly is one thing, but to lead the sheep astray is quite another. I do not envy the false pastors, teachers, and leaders their appointment in God’s tribunal on Judgement Day. It will mean nothing for them to plead Christ when they never knew Him and He never knew them. “Depart from Me.” is the last thing they will hear, and it will echo for eternity. Do not pity them — it is not our place to pity the enemies of God, but only to affirm that His judgements are righteous and just.

That which comforts is Gospel and that which accuses and condemns is Law: For the impenitent and the unbelieving goats, there is only Law; for the penitent and believing sheep, there is only Gospel. For the unbelieving and false ‘Christian’, eternity is a monstrous threat and a terrible promise; for the true Christian, eternity is our greatest hope and God’s promise secured and sealed to us in our Baptism and confirmed each and every time we partake of the Christ’s body and blood in His Supper. To the beloved son or daughter, every word from our Father is reassurance, comfort, and love, for even though He disciplines those whom He loves, we know that everything He does is for our good; to the damned, every word from God is a fearful promise of unending wrath, for nothing good awaits the impenitent.

In this life, you will have — you must have, under present circumstances — persecution and suffering, for those are marks of the true Christian the same as good works, but such things are nothing compared to the infinite good that God has prepared for us. And yet we must not permit eternity to become an excuse for inaction or indifference — both marks of a false ‘Christian’ with a dead faith; rather, we must meet the challenges of each day, firmly relying on God and faithfully pursuing our vocation and executing our duties. It matters not if you are a king, a prince, a shoemaker, a magistrate, a homemaker, or any of a thousand other things God has ordained for man to do under the Sun. You are to do your duty diligently and faithfully, never forgetting that your good works for family, neighbor, and nation are how you serve God — they are the very good works that God prepared beforehand that you should walk in them. Do not be the slothful servant who hides his talent in the ground or the faithless soldier who keeps back his sword from blood.

The world wants you to be a weak, worthless, unprofitable ‘Christian’; what God demands is something far different. So you must rise to the occasion, the same as our ancestors have always done. Whatever persecution may come, we will, by the grace of God, endure and overcome it. And when we have overcome the persecution, we will, again by the grace of God, turn and destroy it, so that future generations may know the peace and tranquility that did not fall to us. This we owe to God and this we will do for our sons and our sons’ sons.

God with us.

Amen.

There is only one extant example of a theatre trilogy from the Ancient Greeks: the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Now, the plays of Aeschylus are certainly a worth topic (although, tragically, only seven of his nearly one hundred plays survived into the modern era), but it is a topic for another time. Here, I wish to pull just one line, spoken by Apollo himself, in The Eumenides (or, The Furies), the third play in the Oresteia cycle:

But when the thirsty dust sucks up a man’s blood / once shed in death, he shall arise no more. / No chant nor charm for this my Sire hath wrought.

The Oresteia cycle is still performed today, but, more relevant to our purposes here, the cycle was also performed in Paul’s day — and yet more relevant, it was performed in Athens, and yet more relevant still, it was performed right on the other side of the Acropolis from the Areopagus (in the Theatre of Dionysus, which was also where it premiered).

Let me be clear: Paul stood and declared αναστησις αυτου εκ νεκρων — the resurrection of the dead — in the same place — the exact same place, in terms of the location within the play — where Greek actors would stand and declare, in the person of the god Apollo, ουτισ εστ᾽ αναστασις — there is no resurrection. Paul even used the same word; his educated Greek audience would not have missed this. Further, Scripture names two groups: the Epicureans and the Stoics; both of these schools denied the immortality of the soul (the psyche). We could even say that God used the foolish things of the world (i.e., a claim one could return from the real of the dead) to shame the wise. There is even an additional layer in that the common Greek people (some of whom were undoubtedly listening) did not agree with the Epicureans or the Stoics, and held, instead, the classical belief in the realm of the dead as a sort of shadowy limbo; similarly, the elites in Greek society were more likely to be Platonists, who also did not agree with the Epicureans ot the Stoics, because the Platonists did affirm a form of immorality of the soul.

It must be noted that when Apollo speaks of his sire, he is, of course, speaking of Zeus, the chief god and his father. Paul is saying to these educated Greeks that what the chief god of the Greek pantheon did not (or could not) do, God the Father did. Further, Paul is very heavily implying that others, too, may be raised from the dead (that is part of why some mocked him, as the next verse after our reading clearly states). Some of you may be familiar with Greek myth and will undoubtedly be wondering about Alcestis, Heracles, Odysseus, Orpheus (and, I suppose, Asclepius, but we will leave his case for another time); two points: 1) educated Greeks believe these myths to be illustrative or symbolic instead of literal and 2) anyone who returned from Hades in Greek mythology did so only temporarily — they would die again. Contrast the words of Christ: “[E]veryone who lives and believes in Me shall never die.” We will get to Baptism shortly, on the topic of death.

Even if Paul did not know all of this (and much more), God is very clear: “When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.“, and let us not forget that Paul was well educated, or, in the words of Festus: “Paul, you are out of your mind; your great learning is driving you out of your mind.”, and Paul had just twice quoted Greek poetry. God knew precisely what He was doing, and the mass conversion of Greece (and then the rest of Europe) to Christianity surely proves it. God fulfilled His promise declared through Grandfather Noah: Japheth (i.e., the European race) shall dwell in the dwelling of Shem (i.e., become and build Christendom). God can work wonders with ordinary tools and ordinary men; perhaps the men who created the lectionary knew how excellent of a job they did in selecting today’s Psalm to go with today’s first reading, perhaps they did not; at any rate, the Psalm says the Lord is the One Who places my soul (psyche) into life (ζωη) — He is the One Who resurrects me. Further, when the Psalm says that God ‘led us into refreshment [or revival]’, the word there is quite literally αναφυχη — He re-souled us. Is there a better word for the resurrcetion on the final day when we will be raised bodily to new life in a new Creation?

It is appropriate that Paul speaks of a sort of inversion before the Athenians — what Apollo says Zeus cannot do, the Father demonstrates by raising Christ — for the Christian religion truly is one of a central inversion from all other religions: Whereas every other religion says that man must work his way to god or the gods, by living a good life, making sacrifices, et cetera, Christianity bluntly states that this is impossible; the chasm between man and God is infinite and no finite can ever cross an infinite; rather, the Infinite must Himself do the work — He must cross the chasm (i.e., become incarnate) and then bridge the chasm (i.e., live a perfect life and die on the cross and return from the dead) for us. The world (and every worldly religion) tells you that you must work your way to god; God the Son tells you instead: “It is finished.”

And so let us turn to Baptism. In the waters of Baptism, you are called from and through death into new life; in the words of the Psalm, you are refreshed or revived, and, as already noted, the word there could be quite literally translated ‘re-souled’, and ’revive’ means ‘to live again’. The central good news of the Christian religion is that death is not the end, and not in the sense of the reincarnation of the East, the conflagration of the Stoics, eternal return, or any other such thing; rather, the Christian truth is that all things will be made new — only once to die and thereafter to enter, for the Christian, into the restored Paradise, Creation as God always intended it to be. And it is Baptism that is our portal, our entry into this new life.

Never look at Baptism, like the Enthusiasts do, as mere water, for Baptism is water and Word, and there God’s Word is, there there can never be no effect, for His Word does not return to Him empty, and only blasphemous fools deny that God’s Word has the power to accomplish all that He wills. And yet Baptism is not Word alone, but water and Word, for God knows our frame, He knows that we are dust. We are not soul alone, for we are also flesh; in the water of Baptism, God gives us something that is real and knowable by and to the flesh, while the words enter our mind and soul; it is the fullness of the Gestalt of man that God meets in the water and Word of Baptism. Baptism is the first resurrection. Prior to your Baptism, you were dead in your sins and your trespasses and, in your Baptism, God raised you to new life. When Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born again, He speaks of Baptism and of faith. Those who are part of the first resurrection have already passed from death to life, and so we will never taste the second death — Hell. Just as there are two deaths (physical and eternal), so there are two resurrections (Baptism and the Resurrection of the Just); if you would not taste the second death, then you must receive the first resurrection in the waters of Holy Baptism.

And yet there are always those who search for edge cases. If Christ offers you a life preserver, are you truly going to refuse it and drown in the hope that He will reach down and pull you up, fool that you are? Now, certainly, Christ will lose none from His hand and all of the Elect will be saved, but the Elect do not despise the Sacraments. So, first, we must condemn — in no uncertain terms — the pernicious and sinful desire to find exceptions. Satan seeks ‘exceptions’; Christians obey. Second, we must look at what Baptism does. IN the words of Peter: Baptism saves you. Now, in truth, we have the fullness of our answer in those few words, but let us expand and examine them for the sake of certainty and clarity. Helpfully, the word that immediately precedes “Baptism” in this passage in our Bibles is, indeed, “water”. As we all know, Baptism is water and Word, but Peter forecloses certain ‘objections’ of the Enthusiasts when he compares Baptism to the Flood. Only a particular sort of wicked fool would deny that water is clearly in view here. Of course, many of our translations fall short here (for various reasons) and thereby fuel heretics of various stripes. Baptism does not ‘correspond’ to the Flood (at least not in the mind and ear of men not deeply steeped in philosophy, particularly the philosophy of truth); our translators failed here. What Peter actually says is that Baptism is the αντιτυπος of the Flood, which is the τυπος — we are dealing in typology. As a refresher: The antitype is always greater than its types — it must be so. The Flood, as type, saved Noah from the wicked world and temporal death. Peter says that Baptism, the antitype of the Flood, saves. Well, what is the only thing greater than temporal death? Eternal death. Baptism saves you from Hell. And yet we know that salvation is sola gratia sola fide — by grace alone through faith alone. How do we square this? Rather easily: Unlike the Enthusiasts, we do not deny the plain teaching of Scripture that God works through means. We are certainly saved by faith alone, but that faith is a gift from God, and He has ordained Means by which we receive that gift.; one of the Means of Grace is the Word, read or heard, and Baptism is another. Via the waters of Holy Baptism, God bestows the free gift of faith that saves from eternal death. So let us never lightly esteem, as so many fools and blasphemers do, the great gift of Holy Baptism, for it is by the waters of Baptism that we avoid the fires of Hell.

Every Baptism is an assault upon the gates and claims of Hell; every Baptism diminishes and enrages Satan; every time the Baptism rite is performed, Satan is reminded yet again of Christ’s words from the cross announcing the defeat of Satan, death, and Hell: It is finished! In this life, as the hymn says: ‘We walk in danger all the way.’ We are still in the fallen flesh, Creation still groans for the restoration of all things, and we are still best by temptations and fall into sin, but we must never permit sin to transform into despair, for, no matter what accusations Satan may hurl, we can always, must always, retort: Baptizatus sum — I am baptized. What work Christ began when first we received the free gift of faith, He will certainly see to fruition; He has never failed and never will. We are the sheep and He is the Good Shepherd.

And it was good news that Paul proclaimed to the Greek sons of Japheth in the Areopagus: You can be born again. You can escape this wicked and fallen world, as Noah did in his time with the Ark, which preserved him from and through the destruction of the antediluvian world, but it is not an escape from the flesh, as some foolish philosophers believed (and some still believe); rather, it is a restoration, a return to what God intended us to be and what we will be in eternity in Paradise with our Creator, Whom we will behold, as did Moses, face to face. The Jews sough signs and the Greeks sough wisdom; here, then is the sign — Baptism, the sign of the true and enduring covenant — and here, then, is wisdom — what man could never do (cross the infinite divide between God and man), God as man has already done. And so we can dismiss the words of Aeschylus’ Apollo and hear instead the words of righteous Job:

For I know that there is an eternal One Who will release me, / and He will raise up my flesh.

And, indeed, the Greek word there is the verbal form of the same word spoken in disbelief by Apollo, in belief by Paul, and in belief and expectation by each and every one of us in the Creed: Resurrection, for we all with heart and mouth confess the resurrection of the body.

Amen.

We do not commonly use seals these days (at least outside the legal profession and certain hobbies, and, even then, they are still rare), and so it is worth mentioning what a seal actually is. The word used here in the Greek is σφραγις — a combination of sounds that is not particularly pleasing to the English ear, but the Greeks are another people, and other peoples are, indeed, other, and have different sensibilities. At any rate, a σφραγις (I will go back to calling it a seal) has two core meanings: first, the instrument (often a ring) used to make a seal and, second, the seal itself. Figuratively, then, it may be anything that confirms or authenticates. When a man seals something, he is affirming that the contents are as he intends or he is asserting ownership. Such seals are still used by some of us who write physical letters.

Now, some may immediately think of the opening of Romans (among other parts of Scripture): Παυλος δουλος Χριστου Ιησου — Paul, a servant (or slave) of Christ Jesus. This is a good instinct, but there is a nuance here that must be highlighted: Letters, for examples, are sealed — σφραγιζω, σφραγις; slaves, for example, are branded — στιγματιζω, στιγμα. Yes, Galatians 6:17: εγο γαρ τα στιγματατου Ιησου — ”From now on let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.“ —, but that is a topic of another time. The two — the seal and the brand — are related. We are, of course, slaves of God, for that is one of the senses of δουλος, but we are certainly more than that, for we are called sons (and daughters) of God, and so Revelation speaks of the mark on the forehead (a place where one might brand, for example, a runaway slave — a fugitivus [from which we get “fugitive”]) not as brand, but as seal. But what is this seal?

We know that a seal is a mark of ownership (this is obvious enough from the passage even without knowing anything of etymology, et cetera), and so the question is: When does God mark us as one claimed by Him in Christ? Again, the passage itself gives us (most of) the answer: “I said to him, “Sir, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.“ There is only one ceremonial washing in which all Christians participate: Holy Baptism. Those who deny that Baptism is a Sacrament will simply prove incapable of exegeting this passage. The seal is placed by God, not by men. Now, some will try to contend that faith itself is the seal, but faith is the thing sealed, not the seal, for it is faith that distinguishes you as one claimed by Christ, and Baptism is the seal of that faith. It is in the waters of Baptism that you are washed in the blood of the Lamb and your dirty, sin-stained rags are transformed into white robes. Never let anyone — be it by foolishness or by malice — rob you of the truth of what Baptism is and what Baptism does: In your Baptism, God reached down from Heaven and sealed you as His child, redeemed and washed clean. There are those who will grasp at the fact that a minister did the actual sprinkling, pouring, immersing, or submersing, and say that that man baptized you and not God. Granted, the hands of a man poured the water over you or immersed you into the water. What of it? Who seals the saints in our passage from Revelation? Angels, acting on behalf and at the command of God. Would anyone deny that these saints are sealed by God Himself? Certainly no Christian would deny it. The same for Holy Baptism. What the hands of the agent do at the command of the principal is done by the hands of the principal himself. Your pastor or your father did not baptize you — God did. The same as I can say: Your sins are forgiven. In fact, I can — and certainly would — go beyond this privately. In private, I can very well say: Ego te absolvo. — I absolve you, I forgive your sins. To be absolutely clear: I am not doing so here and I will never do so publicly, for I hold to Article XIV: Niemand in der Kirche öffentlich lehren oder predigen oder Sakramente reichen soll ohne ordentlichen Beruf. — No one should publicly in the Church teach or preach or administer the Sacraments without a rightly ordered call. I am not a pastor, and, absent a rather large fish (or whatever the Appalachian equivalent is — I assume Bigfoot), I never will be one. It is your pastor’s duty to absolve you in the gathered congregation, and when he does so he speaks with the voice of God. Similarly, the man who baptized you did so with and as God’s hands.

What then of those who are never baptized? First, I must address the spirit that all too often underlies such questions. When God gives a command, it is a sinful impulse to look for exceptions. God commands us to baptize all nations (yes, including the infants — hence all), and He commands you to be baptized. Second, I will address the actual question: Is Baptism absolutely necessary to or for salvation? I am tempted to give the default attorney response: “It depends.”, but I find this one better and more accurate: “Yes, but no, but yes.” I will explain.

Yes, it is necessary to be baptized to be saved: “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.” (Mark 16:16). No, it is not absolutely necessary to be baptized to be saved — Baptism is one Means of Grace and edge cases do exist (I will not insult your intelligence by commenting on the thief on the cross). Yes, you must not denigrate the Sacrament of Baptism or refuse to be baptized to be saved — denigration and rejection of Baptism are both signs of apostasy and apostasy damns. So, yes, Baptism is a necessary part of the Christian life, but it is not absolutely necessary to be baptized to be saved, but only in the sense that there exist edge-case exceptions. Perhaps similarly, there are cases in which a poison may be prescribed as part of a specific medical treatment, but that fact does not mean you should consider the poison generally good.

We can hardly think too much of Baptism, nor can we praise it too highly. Fools are they who would take the work of God and transform it into the work of men (as if such a thing could even be done). By what work of men could we ever be kept safe from the Day of Judgement, from the day of darkness and not light, from the day of gloom and not brightness? Surely the works of man cannot save: ‘We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, because by works of the Law no one will be justified.’; we are indeed saved by works — those of Christ. And yet there are those who will cry: ‘What of Sola Fide — by faith alone!?” To them we reply: Yes, certainly, we are saved by faith alone, but how does God bestow this faith that saves? We know the answer to this question, no matter how much other Christians may (to their great detriment and shame) hate the answer: the Means of Grace. Yes, of course, God the Holy Ghost kindles faith via the Word read or heard, but so, too, does He use Holy Baptism. And we must never forget what a Sacrament actually is: a physical sign plus the Word. Even in the Sacrament of Baptism, the Word is not absent, for water alone saves no one. Was Noah saved by the Flood? No. Was he saved by the Ark? No. He was saved by his faith in God. Do you believe Noah owned the only boat in the antediluvian world? And yet he alone was saved, because he believed God’s word. Similarly, it is not the water alone that saves us, for mere water only makes us wet (and, perhaps, cleans the body); no, it is the Sacrament of Holy Baptism — water and Word — that saves us by bestowing the free gift of faith. To those who would deny this truth, we can repurpose Luther’s comment on the Real Presence: “If a hundred thousand devils, together with all fanatics, should rush forward, crying, How can bread and wine be the body and blood of Christ? I know that all spirits and scholars together are not as wise as is the Divine Majesty in His little finger.” I do not care what the world says about Baptism, for I know what God says about Baptism.

And yet I would be remiss if I did not comment on ‘infant Baptism’. And so let me begin by saying there is no such thing. Is there such a thing as ‘man’s Baptism’ or ‘woman’s Baptism’ or ‘German Baptism’ or ‘French Baptism’ or ‘American Baptism’? No. And so, also, there is no such thing as infant Baptism, for the Baptism of an infant is simply a Baptism. There is a great irony inherent in the arguments of those who deny Baptism to young children — perhaps they should read what Christ said about preventing little children from coming to Him; those who argue (to be unduly charitable) against baptizing young children would take Baptism and make it the work of human hands, which is to say that they inevitably believe they they did something when they were baptized. One would think that the passive verb would tell them something. But let us, here, recall what Christ says of those who have not been converted: He says that they are dead in their sins and trespasses. In my experience, corpses do not act. In fact, infants, have an advantage, as their wicked wills do not yet resist the Spirit so actively nor so vigorously as those of adult sinners. In Baptism, the Spirit finds the infant no so much more cooperative as less uncooperative than the adult. But what of the adult convert who comes to the font having already been converted by the Word? Such a man was surely dead in his sins and trespasses prior to his conversion, but he comes to his Baptism already believing the promises of God. Does such a man do anything in his Baptism? The answer, of course, is that he does precisely as much as he did in his conversion: nothing. Now, certainly, he walks to the font and professes his faith before the congregation, but in Baptism itself he does nothing, for it is God Who meets Him in the water and marks him as one redeemed by Christ the crucified. Just as such a man undoubtedly walked (or, more likely, drove) to church to hear the Word or read it by himself, but still did nothing in the matter of his own conversion, for it was God Who met him in the Word and bestowed upon him the free gift of faith. That our hypothetical man drove himself to church or purchased (and actually read) a Bible means something — just as the good works of unbelievers are still good within a certain frame —, but nothing he did or could do justifies him, gives him the free gift of faith: God alone can and does bestow belief.

Some argue against this on grounds that more or less boil down to an objection based on a lack of ‘consent’. I would have to ask such a man if he would object to the man who uses the defibrillator to restore his cardiac rhythm or the man who performs CPR to save him from brain damage or death or the man who saves him from overdose with naloxone. You cannot save yourself from temporal death in any of these situations; you cannot save yourself from eternal death in any situation by any means — only God can save you from eternal death and He has ordained two Means by which He will do so. You did not ‘consent’ to your creation; you did not ‘consent’ to your birth; you did not ‘consent’ to your death, and nor will you; and you cannot ‘consent’ to your rebirth in the waters of Holy Baptism or your resurrection on the Last Day. Consent surely has a proper place and time and purpose, but it has nothing to do with your salvation — except in the negative, for you can certainly object, and you can certainly reject God’s free gift. So do not reject your Baptism, do not take off the white robes you were given, lest you hear the words of the Master from Matthew 22: “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?”

Man is not spirit alone (and interactions with the spirit of a man are typically mediated by the flesh — by the senses — anyway), and so God has not left us with no way for the flesh, for the body, to interact with His good promises. God has graciously provided us with the Sacraments — Holy Baptism, in which we are sealed in Christ, and the Lord’s Supper, in which the faith given to us in the waters of Baptism is strengthened — and we should esteem and cherish these gifts, for they are, respectively, our seal and confirmation that we are, indeed, invited wedding guests who belong at the glorious feast at the consummation of all things.

Amen.

We will ignore the Gospel today — the Gospel reading anyway, and, even then, only until the end of this homily. Instead, let us, somewhat appropriately, begin with the first reading:

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, / and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not be quiet,

Before we turn to the Christian understanding of this verse, let us look at how a Dispensationalist or a so-called American ‘Evangelical’ might interpret it. First, they will typically conflate Zion and Jerusalem — this is sometimes permissible and so of only minor concern. Second, they will interpret both terms as referring to physical locations: the city of Jerusalem and the hill on which David built his city. This is the heart of their error, but they go further. Third, they will restrict both of these terms by making them refer explicitly to the Jews. This, of course, gives away the game even more obviously than the second point: They are simply rank Judaizers.

From a little earlier in Isaiah:

It shall come to pass in the latter days / that the mountain of the house of the LORD

The Judaizers would have us believe this is a literal, physical mountain. Well, we have survey data and satellite imagery. How tall is ‘Mount’ Zion? It is a hill outside Jerusalem and it is approximately twenty-five hundred feet above sea level. There is a peak nearby, under which the Appalachian Trail passes; that peak, Clingman’s Dome, is the tallest peak in Tennessee, and it is six thousand, six hundred, and forty-three feet tall. It is more than two and a half times the height of Mount Zion, which the Judaizers would tell us is literally the tallest literal mountain. I have included in the written (which is to say online) version of this homily a picture of my dog from one of my camping trips with him; the picture was taken on a rock outcropping just north of Big Baldy, which is the same height in meters as Mount Zion is in feet, which is to say that Big Baldy is more than eight thousand feet tall. The claim of the Judaizers is laughable, but is is even more pernicious. If the Old Testament is meant merely for the Israelites — the ‘Jews’ —, then it is not actually good news at all. But the Old Testament is good news and it is not the ‘book of the Jews’ or any other such nonsense. Was Adam a Jew? Was Noah a Jew? Was Japheth a Jew? Was Job a Jew? Was Abraham a Jew? The answer for all of these is, of course: No. The Gospel was first delivered to Adam and Eve (and Satan, but it is not good news for him, or for his children); neither Adam nor Eve was a Jew.

When Scripture speaks in terms of promises and ultimate things, ‘Jerusalem’ is the true city of God — the heavenly Jerusalem, the new Earth. Similarly, ‘Zion’ is the gathering of all believers into the presence of God; where God is, there Zion is. These terms are, thus, somewhat interchangeable, even if there is a difference in nuance. As a Christian, you should find comfort and truth in the Old Testament; and you should read the Old Testament with the sure, certain, and firm faith that the promises therein contained apply to you as an adopted son of God. We, the Church, are the true Israel of God, the promises have always been ours and will always be ours.

Thus, let us turn to the twin issues of adoption and inheritance. A central part of the Christian religion is the adoption of Christians as sons of God. Now, there are some very important differences between Roman adoption (the context of Scripture) and modern adoption (a false lens), but I will write more on that in the near future. For our purposes, it suffices for us to recognize that what is in view is inheritance. To be an adopted son of God in Christ is to inherit eternal life. This, of course, is the heart of the Gospel. Christ’s work, His life, His death, and His resurrection are good news because they enable us to become adopted sons of God and inheritors of eternal life in Paradise — in Zion, in the new Jerusalem.

But what do we say to those who would draw some distinction between Israel and the Church? On the one hand, we should not forget that mockery is a Christian option, but, on the other hand, we should also give a substantive answer, if not to the Judaizers, then at least for our Christian brothers. One of God’s names in Scripture is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For now and here, I will not focus on why this is one of God’s names; rather, I will focus on what it means, in the context of Scripture, to be a ‘son of Abraham’. Hear the words of Christ as recorded by St. John:

“If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. You are doing the works your father did.

He calls those Jews sons of Satan instead of sons of Abraham, and He says that true sons of Abraham would follow in his works. Now, we must remember that the works for which Abraham is praised were undertaken in faith — only those works undertaken by the faithful have any value. But let us turn to the great Epistle to the Galatians to see what Scripture says about the ‘sons of Abraham’:

Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. For it is written,

“Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear; / break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor!

Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now. But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.” So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.

It is not those who are born “according to the flesh”, sondern those who are “born through promise” who are these true sons of Abraham. How is one born through promise? Look no further than the baptismal font. To be born through promise to be born again — it is to have faith. It is those who believe whom Scripture calls sons of Abraham. But what of the physical, blood descendants of Abraham who have no faith in Christ? Christ Himself calls them ‘children of their father, the devil’. For Christians, then, the matter is closed. Christians (i.e., those who believe in Christ) are children of Abraham according to the promise, and the Jews are children of Satan.

But let us look at another aspect of this. Naturally, adoption and inheritance are matters of headship and to be children of Abraham means to be inheritors of the promised Seed (i.e., Christ), but the promise did not come first to Abraham. The promise traces to the Garden:

“And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; He will crush your head, and you will strike His heel.”

It is to Adam — the father of us all — that the Gospel is first delivered — from the very mouth of Christ, no less. We speak often of ‘the old Adam’, but we would do well to remember that there is also ‘the new Adam’, which is often used to refer to Christ, but is also true of Father Adam. Adam was no dullard — he heard and believed the promise of God spoken in the Garden. Adam believed; Adam was and is a Christian. With regard to this new, reborn Adam, you and I and all Christians are sons of Adam — both literally by blood descent and according to promise, for Christ is His head as well as ours. Adam in his day was prophet, priest, and king and he taught the faith to his sons; not all were faithful, but the one true faith was preserved down the line to faithful Noah, who taught his sons: faithful Japheth, faithful Shem, and faithless Ham. (We could draw, here, an interesting parallel: Satan took one-third of the angels with him and one-third of man found damnation in Ham’s wickedness, but let us leave that aside for now.)

We — and I mean my European brothers and sisters — are true sons and daughters of Japheth, for we share his faith. It is no less correct to call ourselves sons of Japheth than to call ourselves sons of Abraham, for the promise was for Urvater Japheth no less than for Shem, the father of Abraham.

When we are brought to faith, we are restored into the godly line that descends from Adam through Noah to his sons and then into all the world where believers may be found. The believing Shemite may look to Shem as a true father of his great race. The believing Hamite may not be able to look to wicked, faithless Ham, but he may look to Grandfather Noah. And we, sons and daughters of Japheth and Europa, may look both to our many faithful ancestors before the fall into paganism and after the restoration of Christianity. None has a spotless genealogy; even Christ must count the pagan, the unbeliever, the apostate, and the prostitute among His ancestors. We do not honor our ancestors — a demand of the Fourth Commandment — by following in their unfaithfulness, but by faithfulness to the one true ancestral faith — Christianity.

When we are adopted as sons of God, we do not cease to be lineal, blood descendants of our forefathers — the African remains a Hamite and the European remains a Japhethite; rather, we return to the faith of our godly forefathers. The Christian is no rootless cosmopolitan, sondern one who honors both God and his forefathers. God does not play with dice and God does not make mistakes; He Who formed you in the womb and knew the number of your days even before you drew your first breath is also He Who set the times and the boundaries of the nations. What God does, He does not do idly or without purpose. Scripture tells us that the kings of the nations will bring the glory of the nations into the new Jerusalem. You were born into a body, a time, a place, a nation, a people. Your blood is neither accident nor incident, but essential and immutable. If you were born a man, then you will be a man in and for eternity; if you were born a woman, then you will be a woman in and for eternity; and the same holds for German, French, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and American. Faithful sons and daughters do not deny or denigrate their ancestry or their ancestors, and Christians are true and faithful sons and daughters, for this is commanded by God:

Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother [that it may be well with thee and thou mayest live long upon the earth].

Let us end, then, as promised, with the Gospel reading, or, more accurately, a (very close) paraphrase of a portion of it:

Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace according to Thy Word, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared before the face of all people, a light to lighten the nations and the glory of Thy people Israel.

We end our Service of the Sacrament with these words, for they express the hope of all Christians: To depart in peace and grace, having seen and believed the promises of the Lord. We see these promises every Sunday in the Sacrament and we confess our belief every Sunday in the Creeds. It is the Gottesdienst, the Divine Service, that prepares each and every one of us for death. God knows the number of our days, but we do not; the Christian takes from this comfort instead of fear or anxiety. I am Christ’s and He is mine. And the Good Shepherd has never yet — and never will — lose one of his sheep. He is the Light to lighten the nations and we are His people — the true Israel. Whenever — and however — death may come — and it will certainly come for each of us —, we know that Christians depart in peace, for our eyes have seen the salvation of the Lord, and will behold His face when they open on the other side of the veil of death, for our God has defeated death and the grave.

Amen.