Living Words

Let the Day Perish

Job 3:1-26

by William Klock

It’s not easy to really understand something you haven’t experienced.  I’d love to be able to hand the book of Job over to someone else—someone who has a greater grasp of suffering than I do.  As we get to Chapter 3 we transition from the prologue into the dialogue between Job and his friends.  The Lord will eventually, near the end, enter the dialogue, too.  But it begins with a great lament from Job.  And I’m not sure that any of us can grasp the depth of Job’s lament, although I’m sure there are some of you who can grasp, who know that kind of lament, better than I do.  Job has expressed his faith.  “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return.  The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (1:21).  And, later, when his wife told him to give up, to curse God and die, Job responded, “Shall we not receive the good from God, and shall we not receive evil” (2:10).  We’re told that in all this, Job did not sin.  But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t upset, that he didn’t lament, or that he didn’t ask the big question: Why?

I can’t say I’ve ever struggled all that deeply with that question.  In the times that bad things have happened to me and I’ve asked “Why?”, it doesn’t usually take much introspection to realise that the answer is that I did something dumb and brought my problems on myself.  Personally, the deepest I think I’ve ever come to lament was on the birth of our stillborn daughter.  It wasn’t until the nurses brought her back to us, dressed in an outfit made by volunteers, and left her with us to grieve that the life and death of this little person—my child, but still a stranger—was real.  Veronica was still sedated from the surgery, but I was left there with this tiny, lifeless child and had to ask, “Why?”  But I can’t pretend that my asking the big question was anything as deep as Job’s asking or that my lament was nearly as deep as Job’s lament.  He’d lost everything, including his ten adult children, and was afflicted himself from head to foot.  It’s not surprising that as I’ve been making my way through the commentaries on Job, I’ve found the evangelical ones tend to be rather shallow, while the best I’ve found have come out of Judaism—from a people who have known deep loss and suffering.  There seem to be a lot of Evangelicals who struggle to deal with Job’s questions.  How can a faithful person ask the things Job is asking?  But people who have truly known suffering have usually asked those questions of God themselves and they understand.

So that’s where Job’s at as we get to Chapter 3.  His friends have come to comfort him, but they’re so struck by the situation and by his appearance when they find him on the ash-heap, that they lose all words.  They simply sit with him.  The language describing their actions suggests that they’re treating this as if it were a funeral ritual.  Job might as well be dead.

And Job might wish he were dead, but he’s not ready to give up.  His lament is in three parts and he begins by cursing the day he was born.  Look at Job 3:1-10.

After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth.  And Job said:

“Let the day perish on which I was born,

         and the night that said,

         ‘A man is conceived.’

Let that day be darkness!

         May God above not seek it,

         nor light shine upon it.

Let gloom and deep darkness claim it.

         Let clouds dwell upon it;

         let the blackness of the day terrify it.

That night—let thick darkness seize it!

         Let it not rejoice among the days of the year;

         let it not come into the number of the months.

Behold, let that night be barren;

         let no joyful cry enter it.

Let those curse it who curse the day,

         who are ready to rouse up Leviathan.

Let the stars of its dawn be dark;

         let it hope for light, but have none,

         nor see the eyelids of the morning,

because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb,

         nor hide trouble from my eyes.

 

Job doesn’t curse God, but he does curse the day on which he was born and he spares no words to do so.  We get a sense of his overwhelming despair.  No doubt the day he was born was a happy one for his parents.  It had been a happy one for Job, until all this happened.  Now he looks back on the joy with which is parents spoke of his birthday and he says, “Curse the day!”  Curse the day that saw me born and curse the night when my parents conceived me.

Next he heaps up words for darkness.  “Let that day be darkness…nor light shine upon it.  Let gloom and deep darkness claim it…clouds dwell upon it; let the blackness of day terrify it.”  This is the language of “de-creation”.  Creation began in the darkness and chaos, and God began his creative work of bringing order and purpose to that chaos by calling for light.  Light symbolises the creative and sustaining hands of God.  Light symbolises his goodness and his care.  Light symbolises the order that God brought out of the chaos of the precreated cosmos.  And so Job calls down darkness on the day he was born.  “May God not seek it out.”  May the day of my birth pass by God unnoticed, unordered, unsustained, for then I might not have been born.  Job laments his very creation.  If only God had been sleeping, not paying attention, or otherwise busy on that day, it might have passed by, Job would never have been born, and he never would have known all this sorrow.

While his parents knew joy the night he was conceived, Job calls out to the keepers of Leviathan, the great chaos beast of the sea.  You see, for the Jews—as for many ancient Near Eastern peoples—the sea was a remnant of that pre-creation chaos, a bit of the chaos still untamed.  (This, by the way, is probably why St. John’s vision of the new creation has no sea, not because the sea will literally be gone, but because it’s a symbol of the Lord finishing what he began and leaving nothing to wreak havoc again as the serpent had.)  Leviathan personified the chaos of the sea.  It was a beast of uncreation and Job calls on its keepers to set the great monster loose to curse the day of his birth, wishing that day had never been.

Job has lost hope.  Even in the darkest of days, the birth of a child brings hope.  New life coming into the world.  There’s excitement and anticipation.  If you were to ask an expectant mother if she’s looking forward to anything she might think you were crazy.  Of course she’s looking forward to something!  Isn’t it obvious?  Job’s mother and father felt that way once, but Job’s discouragement is so deep that he wishes that day had never happened.  Again, he’s lost all hope.  And so, knowing that he can’t actually curse the day of his birth, he moves from pronouncing a curse to wailing a formal lament for the day.  Look at verses 11-19:

“Why did I not die at birth,

         come out from the womb and expire?

Why did the knees receive me?

         Or why the breasts, that I should nurse?

For then I would have lain down and been quiet;

         I would have slept; then I would have been at rest,

with kings and counselors of the earth

         who rebuilt ruins for themselves,

or with princes who had gold,

         who filled their houses with silver.

Or why was I not as a hidden stillborn child,

         as infants who never see the light?

There the wicked cease from troubling,

         and there the weary are at rest.

There the prisoners are at ease together;

         they hear not the voice of the taskmaster.

The small and the great are there,

         and the slave is free from his master.

 

If he had to be born, why couldn’t he have been stillborn?  Again, we get sense of the depth of Job’s grief and despair.  He’d rather be dead, in fact, he’d rather know nothing of life itself.  Better the quiet and peace of the grave than the pain he’s known.  He could lie down with kings and counsellors and princes—with great men—and even though dead, they’d be better company than the life he knew.

In the grave, the wicked are no longer able to cause trouble.  In the grave the weary finally find rest.  In the grave, the prisoner finally finds release.  In the grave, even the slave finally knows what is to be free.  Had he died at birth, Job would know only the quiet of the grave and, he’s sunk so low, what a blessing that would be!

I think that here, if we listen closely to Job, we get a sense of the difference between his perspective and our perspective and we get some insight into where he (and his friends) are coming from as they grapple with the question of justice.  I think, too, that Job offers some push-back against the way that many of us think about this issue as Christians.

As Christians Job’s attitude might seem foreign.  Better dead than suffering?  And especially in light of the fact that when Job talks about “dead”, he’s talking about the grave.  As Christians, we may experience evil and pain and suffering in our lives, but we know that no matter how bad it gets, we have a hope the other side of death.  Life—real life, a life that the life we now know is only a shadow of—resurrection to life awaits those who are in Jesus by faith.  Someday, when Jesus has put every enemy under his feet, he will finish the work of new creation that he has begun and the culmination of that will the resurrection of the dead to life in the presence of God.  We may not know justice this side of death, but we can live in hope knowing that all things will be made new someday and that everything that is wrong will be set to rights.  But Job didn’t know that hope and neither did the other Old Testament saints.  Towards the end of the Old Testament period we see a belief in the coming of a future king and of the resurrection of the faithful dead begin to develop—in the writings of prophets like Isaiah—but even then, it wasn’t a well-defined idea.  For the most part, in the Old Testament, there was only the grave.  Their word for it was sheol.  Job doesn’t use sheol in his lament, but he does several times later in the book and that’s what he’s getting at here when he speaks of the grave.  Sheol wasn’t really good or bad.  It just was.  Sometimes it’s used metaphorically to simply point to the grave.  Other times it’s a reference to the afterlife, the abode of those who have died.  It’s neither presented as a place of punishment or a place of reward.  It just is.  Sheol is the great equaliser, the destiny of everyone, rich or poor, good or bad.  The connotation is usually that, at least compared to life, sheol isn’t a pleasant place, but then that really underlines Job’s despair.  To have been still born, to have never known life, to know only this sort of limbo existence in sheol, would be better than his current state.

And that there was no punishment or reward to be found in sheol points to Job’s need to wrestle with this question of the justice of God.  For the Old Testament saints, justice was something to be expected in this life.  We see this throughout the psalms, where the psalmists cry out—and expect!—to be delivered from their enemies.  They trust that the Lord will destroy or punish their enemies while they go on to lead a long and happy life.  This was Job’s thinking and it explains his confusion and his frustration with God.

Again, I think this can give some needed balance to how we think as Christians.  The Old Testament saints didn’t follow the Lord for or didn’t build their faith around a hope of eternal life with God.  While sheol was not out of God’s reach, it was a place apart from him.  They expected to walk with the Lord and to receive his blessings in life.  And, of course, this is where the Adversary’s challenge came from.  “Is Job only pursuing God for the good stuff he’ll get in return?”  Well, now we’ve seen that, no, Job is pursuing God for God’s sake.  Now, as Christians, Jesus has given us hope greater than anyone knew in the Old Testament.  New Creation has begun and we live in hopeful expectation that Jesus will finish that work and make us a part of it.  But how often are we guilty of the same thing?  We’ve often been guilty of structuring our evangelism around this very problem and when we do that, we lead people astray from the get-go.  We persuade people to faith with the fear of hell and the reward of heaven, but if we leave it at that or if we stress that aspect of things too much, we may very well be making a whole lot of Christians who are serving God not for God’s sake and not pursuing righteousness for righteousness sake, but doing it for the reward.  There are therapeutic ramifications of the gospel, but if we present the gospel as primarily therapeutic, we end up making Christians who are in it for themselves.  Don’t misunderstand.  We need to stand with St. Paul and declare that to live is Christ and to die is gain.  We need to live in hope of life with God in the age to come and we need to declare that hope to the world.  But I think the faith of the Old Testament saints, the faith of people like Job, pulls us back from the future and cautions us against escapist and gnostic fancies and down to earth, prompting us to seek righteousness and justice in life, not just as pie-in-the-sky when we die.

Now, in the final part of Job’s lament comes the big question, the one he’s been working towards: Why?  Look at verses 20-26:

“Why is light given to him who is in misery,

         and life to the bitter in soul,

who long for death, but it comes not,

         and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,

who rejoice exceedingly

         and are glad when they find the grave?

Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden,

         whom God has hedged in?

For my sighing comes instead of my bread,

         and my groanings are poured out like water.

For the thing that I fear comes upon me,

         and what I dread befalls me.

I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;

         I have no rest, but trouble comes.”

 

“Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?” asks Job.  There’s some irony here.  Because we, the readers, have been let in on the scene in the Lord’s council, we know that Job had been hedged in.  Job now cries out that the Lord’s hedge is an injustice.  In reality, the Lord’s hedge brought Job incredible blessing, but Job knew nothing of that.  All he can see now, from his vantage point of suffering, is that the Lord has put a hedge between himself and Job.  Job knew the Lord and his fellowship.  He knew the Lord’s blessing.  And now it’s as if the Lord has placed a wall between himself and Job.  Job feels alone and he feels as though he’s in the dark, and from the dark he’s crying out, “Why?”  And it feels like his cries to the Lord are simply bouncing off that wall.  It’s often when we need God the most that he seems the most distant and uncaring.  After his wife died, C. S. Lewis wrote a little book titled A Grief Observed, sort of a journal of his journey through grief.  He experienced this same phenomenon and I think he describes it very well:

“This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him…if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms.

But go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once.”

I suspect we’ve all been there at some point.  The door seems closed, but we know that God is there on the other side and we can’t give up.  Somehow we have to keep pushing the door, calling over the wall.  Hope—even if all we have left of our hope is a sliver—our hope demands we not give up our pursuit of God.

And we see this with Job.  As he cries out he says he’s lost all hope.  He cries out for death.  But, Brothers and Sisters, that he still cries out to God highlights that he really hasn’t lost all hope.  Maybe he thinks he has or maybe he’s just angry and discouraged, but the hope is still there, otherwise he’d give up, turn away from the hedge, and curse the God behind it.  But he doesn’t.  He doesn’t understand how any of this can be.  How can God bring such suffering on a righteous man?  How can such a God be just?  Job wrestles with these questions because he has known this God, because he has known this God and known him to be good, and so his questions become a lifeline—a way of holding fast to God even when his fingers feel like they’re grasping at thin air, even when Job doesn’t realise what he’s doing.

We cry out to God from our grief and ask “Why?”, not because we question his goodness, but because we’ve just experienced something very bad and, yet, we know that God is good.  We know it in our heads, in our hearts, in our guts.  We know that God is good.  The evidence of his goodness is there in Scripture on page after page after page.  We know he’s good.  And so we cry out “Why?”  We want to square the circle, to settle our question, to reconcile our present experience with our experience and what we know of God.  From the darkness we cry.

And, once again, the gospel meets us in the darkness.  If Job knew God’s goodness well enough to cry out “Why?”, to seek to reconcile his circumstances with what he knew of God, how much better do we know the goodness of God this side of the cross?  We know the goodness of God demonstrated in his humbling himself to be born a human being and to die on a cross for the sake of his enemies.  Brothers and Sisters, the cross assures us of God’s goodness no matter how dark our days, not matter how firmly shut the door, no matter how high the wall.  And it also points us in the right direction to find our answer.  Job asked, “Why?” because he couldn’t reconcile his understanding of justice with what God had done.  Why had God rewarded righteousness with suffering?  Friends, the same thing happened to Jesus.  He who knew no sin suffered.  And yet there was a reason for it.  He who knew no sin became sin for us.  In Jesus we get a glimpse behind the scenes to see that God is bigger than the retribution principle, that God is not a divine vending machine dispensing blessings in return for service.  In Jesus God shows us that his justice is deeper than we can ever fully grasp.  In Jesus we have a glimpse of the perfect wisdom of God at work to bring goodness and blessing the likes of which the Old Testament saints never knew.  They looked for blessings in this life and then expected nothing more than the grave.  But Brothers and Sisters, because of Jesus we know a hope of the life of the age to come, a life in a world set right, a life in a world where we’ll never have to ask “Why?”.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, keep your Son and his Cross ever before our eyes and especially so as we struggle through difficult days.  Keep Jesus and his Cross before us as we struggle to understand and when we ask “Why?”.  Let the cross of Christ be a reminder to us that even when our vision is clouded, even when we’re stumbling in the dark and can’t see where we’re going, even when you seem distant, we can confidently hold onto the knowledge that you are good and that you are there and that you love us.  Strengthen our faith as we walk through difficult days in the shadow of the cross, we ask, that we might hold ever tighter to Jesus.  Amen.

Holding Fast to Integrity

Job 2

by William Klock 

Sometimes things just seem to go from bad to worse and just when we think they can’t get any worse they do.  On Friday a friend posted a meme on Facebook that was titled “May 2020”.  It showed a nice country scene—with the Death Star in in orbit.  Another was captioned, “Every day in 2020 be like” and it had a picture of Captain Kirk asking for a damage report”.  Stock market crashes, oil market crashes, viral pandemics, unemployment, economic collapse…what next?

Maybe, just maybe, we have an inkling of what Job felt.  He lost his livelihood and his family—none of us is there and I pray we never get there—but we still have this ongoing sense of things going from bad to worse.  People are asking, “Where is God in all of this?”  Others are asking, “Can my faith withstand the loss.”  I’ve had a few calls these last several weeks from people who have driven by on a Sunday and saw we were meeting.  A couple called to thank us for still being open and for praying for our community.  A few have simply been looking for a lifeline.  They were unchurched people finally reaching out to God.  One just recovered from serious medical issues and was looking forward to life returning to normal—and then all of this.  He was almost destitute, not being able to work.  Now he can—and desperately needs to—but has no job to return to.  I’ve seen posts on social media from people who are angry that God allows things like this to happen.  People question his justice or his integrity.  Others are, for the first time, reaching out for help.  I’m reminded again of that scene of Jesus and his friends meeting the blind man in John 9.  The disciples asked, “Who sinned?  This man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  They assumed that the Retribution Principle was at work—this idea that God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked.  And Jesus sidestepped the question, not to be annoying, but because it was the wrong question to ask.  Jesus responded, “He was born blind that the works of God might be displayed in him.”  He was born blind to give others a reason for faith, a reason to believe, a reason to trust in the wise sovereignty of God.  How do we, as Jesus’ people, use these difficult days to witness our faith, to declare the good news, and to bring the world to our Lord?

Brothers and Sisters, as I said last week, that’s what the book of Job is about.  It strikes at this perennial problem, at our tendency to view God’s governance as mechanistic or to view him as a vending machine: do this and get that in return.  It strikes at our tendency to question God’s justice, imposing our own limited and flawed standard of justice on him, rather than acknowledging that God is not subject to external standards of justice.  His justice is perfect.  It flows from his wisdom.  And ultimately the real standard of justice flows from him.

But learning these lessons is rarely easy.  Even when we know these things in our heads, it often takes suffering for that thinking to find its way into our hearts.  It often takes suffering and hardship for the head knowledge to transform into real faith.  And so we come back to Job.  He’s lost everything.  Now remember what I said last week, Job’s not the one on trial.  What’s on trial, what’s being challenged by this Adversary character amongst the Lord’s councillors is the Lord’s policy for governing the world.  The Adversary has questioned whether this policy of blessing the righteous is really what it seems.  What if Job is only serving God because he knows he’ll get good stuff in return?  If that’s the case, if Job’s really only in it for himself, isn’t his righteousness really unrighteousness?  And so the Lord has allowed the screws to be put to Job to test his own policies.  Will Job curse God and reveal that the Lord has been doing things wrong all this time?  Or will Job maintain his integrity and prove the Lord to be in the right?  And, of course, poor Job isn’t privy to any of this.  The narrator of the story lets us in on the purpose for this test, but Job and his friends are in the dark—which, of course, is what makes it a valid test of God’s policy.  So let’s continue with Chapter 2.

Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and [the Adversary] also came among them to present himself before the Lord.  And the Lord said to [the Adversary], “From where have you come?” [The Adversary] answered the Lord and said, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.”  And the Lord said to [the Adversary], “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?  He still holds fast his integrity, although you incited me against him to destroy him without reason.” (Job 2:1-3)

Some time later the Lord’s council convenes again.  In good storytelling fashion the scene is present as a virtually word-for-word repetition of the last council meeting.  The Adversary is back and the Lord once again calls his attention to Job.  “You’ve had your eye on Job.  He lost everything, but he still blesses me.  It looks like you were wrong about him.”  And, of course, that implies too that the Adversary was wrong about the Lord’s policies.

Now, one particularly important thing to note here is that the Lord takes responsibility for Job’s affliction.  The Hebrew grammatical construct used here when the Lord says, “you incited me against him” is one we see in a number of places in the Old Testament[1] and it makes it clear that while it was the Adversary who initiated this action, it is the Lord who is responsible.  It’s common for people to take Job as promoting a sort of dualism, a battle between the devil and the Lord.  As I said last week, there’s no reason in the text to understand the Adversary here as some kind of diabolical character.  But even if he were, the Lord is fully in control.  The Adversary acts within bounds established by the Lord and with the Lord’s consent.  And, in the end, the Lord accepts the responsibility.  The Adversary is working as his agent.

So Job’s affliction has, so far, not only vindicated Job’s integrity, but also the Lord’s policy.  But the Adversary pushes further.  Look at verses 4-8:

Then [he Adversary] answered the Lord and said, “Skin for skin!  All that a man has he will give for his life.  But stretch out your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.”  And the Lord said to [the Adversary], “Behold, he is in your hand; only spare his life.”

  So [the Adversary] went out from the presence of the Lord and struck Job with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.  And he took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat in the ashes.

 

“Skin for skin,” says the Adversary.  No one really knows what that means.  It was probably a proverb, but the meaning has been lost.  What it seems to be getting at is the idea that what’s most important to a man is his person and his physical well-being.  Taking away his livelihood and even his children is one thing, but hurt him in his person and he’ll abandon his principles and integrity.  In other words, Job might be able to withstand having his blessings taken away—losing his stuff, losing the positives in his life—but afflict his body, make him hurt, now you’re going beyond taking away his blessings, now you’re going beyond leaving him in that neutral state.  Remember Job’s statement in 1:21?  “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return”.  Attack that body and now you’re moving him from that neutral state to something truly negative.

Once again the Lord’s policy is being tested and once again the Lord gives the Adversary permission to afflict Job—to test his integrity.

And so the Adversary afflicts Job with sores.  Not just sore, but loathsome sores from foot to head.  The text doesn’t give us enough information to diagnose Job’s affliction.  The sores could be ulcers or boils of some kind.  Some people have thought it was leprosy.  Francis Andersen, in his commentary, collated all the bits of Job that reference his medical state and this is the summary he made of it.  It’s a picture of utter misery.

“Some kind of acute dermatitis spreading everywhere and developing infections with darkened (30:28) and peeling (30:30) skin and constantly erupting pustules (7:5b) would manifest the pruritus and purulence highlighted in 2:7. Other symptoms may be the results of complications in the wake of such a severe malady: anorexia, emaciation (19:20), fever (30:30b), fits of depression (7:16; 30:15f.), weeping (16:16a), sleeplessness (7:4), nightmares (7:14). These and other general sufferings, such as putrid breath (19:17; cf. 17:1), failing vision (16:16b), rotting teeth (19:20) and haggard looks (2:12) are less direct clues. They add up to a hideous picture of a man tortured by degrading disfigurement (Isa. 52:14) and unendurable pain, a bleak reminder that a man is flesh, made out of soil from the ground.”[2]

To add insult to injury, Job is forced to the ash-heap.  This isn’t a sign of mourning.  The ash heap is a reference to the city dump where refuse was burned.  And it wasn’t just ordinary garbage.  This is where human waste, the city’s sewage was dumped.  No one knew whether Job’s disease was communicable or not and, in the ancient world, skin disease like this made you unclean, made you an outcast.  So Job is forced to leave his home.  He can no longer sit amongst the elders of the city at the gate, in his usual place of honour.  Instead he sits alone in the smouldering garbage dump, his only companion a potsherd to scratch himself and to scrape the oozing pus from his sores.

To make matters worse, Job’s wife seems to have lost faith.  We can only imagine how she must be grieving the loss of her children and the family livelihood.  Has she been forced to move out of their home?  It may not be wise to ask too many questions here.  As I said last week, I think the best way to approach Job is as a piece of wisdom literature—as a “what if” thought experiment aimed at exploding simplistic views of God and of justice.  Job’s children and wife—even his friends—are bit players in the story.  They serve a purpose and then move on.  Job’s wife seems to make the case for the Adversary.  Presumably she was a righteous woman, but with everything having been taken from her, she’s lost faith.  She comes to Job on the ash heap and says to him:

“Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.”

 

Why serve God when he’s afflicted you this way?  She’s the devil’s advocate here.  That’s her purpose in the story.  Job isn’t privy to the Adversary’s challenge of God’s policy, but Job’s wife makes sure that at least the temptation to curse God is brought to his attention—that at least he has to face the temptation.  And so she says to Job, “How do you still hold onto your integrity?  How do you still devote yourself to God after he has done all this to you?  Get it over with.”  She sees no out.  She sees no chance of things changing course.  She knows Job’s integrity better than anyone and so she knows better than anyone that Job doesn’t deserve this.  Is the God who would do this worthy of worship?  Worthy of faith?  No, she thinks.  “So just curse God and die!”  Get it over with.  Be done with it.  But Job’s wife also serves to spur Job on to express his continuing faith.  He responds in verse 10:

You speak as one of the foolish women would speak.  Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?”  In all this Job did not sin with his lips.

 

Sitting there in abject misery, scraping his sores with a potsherd in the garbage dump, Job still holds onto his faith.  The word he uses is important.  Shall we receive good and evil from God?  To receive or to accept something implies some involvement on our part that goes behind passively submitting ourselves to the will of God.  Job may not have a choice in the matter, but his attitude isn’t one of resignation and that’s important.  To quote Andersen again,

“Such positive faith is the magic stone that transmutes all to gold; for when the bad as well as the good is received at the hand of God, every experience of life becomes an occasion of blessing. But the cost is high. It is easier to lower your view of God than to raise your faith to such a height. We shall watch the struggle as Job’s faith is strained every way by temptations to see the cause of his misfortune in something less than God.”[3]

And that’s just it.  Job isn’t privy to the scenes we’ve been shown in the divine council chamber.  He’s left to wonder and to speculate.  Why would God do this?  Is God not as just or as righteous as I thought he was?  Is he worthy of my faith and my worship?  And that’s where Job’s friends come into the picture.  God has been now been vindicated in his council chamber.  Job has maintained his faith, he’s maintained his integrity and proved the Adversary wrong.  But what about the scene back on earth?  How does a person trust as Job has trusted in light of such suffering?  What’s the basis for our faith.  And we’ll get a sense of just how important this question is, because even Job struggles and doubts.  Now, enter Job’s friends.  They become the author’s means of exploring this problem.  Look at verses 11-13:

Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that had come upon him, they came each from his own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They made an appointment together to come to show him sympathy and comfort him.  And when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him. And they raised their voices and wept, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads toward heaven.  And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.

 

At one point in time the places from which these three friends came were known.  Today we know only that Teman was in Edom and that’s enough to suggest that these friends are known for their wisdom.  As I said last week, the East—and particularly Edom—were known as centres of wisdom.  Some have suggested that the three friends represent North, South, and East, the collective wisdom of the East coming to comfort Job and to help him sort all of this out.

As the dialogue unfolds we’ll get a sense that these three men represent three different perspective.  The writer presents them as each representing one of the traditional ancient Near Eastern approaches to wisdom.  Eliphaz is something of a mystic who argues his point from his own experience.  Bildad stands firmly on tradition.  He’s studied the wisdom of the ages and he argues his case from that.  And Zophar has developed a systematic approach to wisdom from which he argues—sort of like a modern rationalist.  And whereas Job’s wife assumes that the best Job can hope for is death, his friends operate with the assumption that this problem can be set right.  Somehow, if they can figure out what’s gone wrong, Job can be made whole again.  And that brings back to that idea of the Retribution Principle I talked about last week.

Back in 1966, Matitiahu Tsevat of Hebrew Union College wrote a wonderful paper on the meaning of Job and came up with a helpful diagram for understanding the dialogue between Job and his friends.  He uses a triangle.  At one point of the triangle he places God.  At the second he places Job.  And at the third he places the idea of retribution or justice—the Retribution Principle—this standard of justice that says the righteous must be blessed and the wicked punished.[4]  There’s a tug of war as Job and his friends try to hold all three points of the triangle together.  In the end they fail.  Job’s friends defend both the righteousness of God and the justness of the Retribution Principle, but the only explanation for Job’s situation that leaves them is that Job’s must not be as righteous as he claims.  He must have some secret sin.  Confess that sin and repent, they urge him, and God will restore you.  And this angers Job, because he knows that he is blameless.  Of course, Job also assumes that the Retribution Principle is just and that it is how God governs, and so he’s reluctantly driven then to question the righteousness, the justice of God, because God has rewarded his righteousness not with blessing, but with cursing.  Back and forth they go for twenty-five chapters.  That’s the heart of the book.

But we’re not quite there yet.  Right now we see Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar arriving to comfort their friend.  They arrive in the city and are directed, not to Job’s fine house, but to the garbage dump.  And there, surrounded by smouldering dung and garbage, sits poor Job.  They know it’s him, but the text says he was unrecognisable.  And as they approach they wail in mourning and throw ashes on their heads.  They came to comfort Job, but apparently they weren’t prepared for just how horrible his situation is.  Instead of offering Job comfort, they engage in a sort of funeral rite.  Their friend is as good as dead.  In fact, they don’t even say anything to him.  They weep, they cover themselves in ashes, and sit with him in silence for seven days.  These wisest of the wise arrive to comfort Job, but they find themselves speechless and their wisdom drives them to silence.  Sometimes it’s all you can do.  It takes a speech from Job after seven days of silence to get them to start talking.

Job is alone, even with his friends present.  It may have been that the wisest thing they did was to sit in silence.  When they do speak, they offer no comfort.  As the wisest of the wise apply their wisdom to the situation, they offer only false accusations.  All the wisdom of the world only served to make things worse for poor Job.  And while none of us have ever known the depths of suffering that Job did, I think that most of us can identify with his loneliness.  Only the sufferer knows his suffering.  As friends we can often identify with that suffering, but we can never know the full personal cost of that suffering to another.  And so we often try to commiserate, to sympathise, to explain, or to cheer and in the end only make the suffering worse.  We’ve all been on both the receiving and the giving end of that conundrum.  We inject some humour into the situation—the Death Star arrives in orbit in May—but it doesn’t fix the job that was lost in April or the dismal prospects of finding another one in future.  It’s hard to know what to do.  It’s often even harder to hold onto our faith.  It’s hard to trust God, especially when we think we deserved something better or when we think that justice hasn’t been served.  And when we struggle to trust in God, when our faith falters, we draw away from the one who—when everything and everyone else has failed—still cares for us, the one who knows the number of hairs on our heads and cares even for the fallen sparrow.

Brothers and Sisters, we’re not the first to know that loneliness and despair.  Job—and especially so in his persistent faith—points us to Jesus.  Think of the night, after supper, when Jesus took his friends with him to pray in the garden.  Jesus knew what was going to happen.  He knew that he had to die.  And he knew it would not be an easy death.  He was, says the evangelist, “greatly distressed and troubled”.  He left his friends to pray while he went some way apart and prayed himself “with loud cries and tears”.  But when he went back, he found his friends asleep.  At least Job’s friends sat vigil with him seven day and seven nights.  Jesus’ friends couldn’t pray with him for one short hour.

The next day Jesus was abandoned by his friends.  Naked and alone he was nailed to a cross and left to die.  In his agony—not just the agony of his physical suffering, but the agony of utter loneliness in his soul—he cried out to God, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Jesus descended into the abyss of loneliness and, Friends, he did it for our sake.  He did it to restore us to the presence of his Father.  He did it so that all things might be made new, so that one day he might wipe away every tear.  As I said last Sunday, in light of his death and resurrection we need never question the justice, the righteousness, or the wisdom of God.  But in the same way and for the same reason, we need never know the depths of loneliness that we see in Job—or in Jesus, for that matter—because if we are in him, if we have passed through the waters of baptism in faith, we have been united to him, we have been plunged into God’s own Spirit.  Brothers and Sisters, in Jesus we have been united with the one who has suffered loneliness for our sake and who has joined us forever with God who reveals his goodness, his love, his righteousness, and his faithfulness in the incarnation and in the cross of Jesus.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, in today’s collect we prayed for the light of your truth to reveal our errors.  May the light you’ve given us in Job’s story lighten the darkness of these difficult days and may the truth of your righteousness revealed in the cross flood our darkened hearts that we might know you better and that our faith in your faithfulness might be strengthened.  Through our Lord Jesus, who died and rose again, we pray.  Amen.

[1] 1 Samuel 26:19; 2 Samuel 24:1; and Jeremiah 43:3

[2] Job, TNTC (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 1976), epub version.

[3] Ibid.

[4] “The Meaning of Job” Hebrew Union College Annual 37 (1966): 104-105.

There was a Man Named Job

Job 1

by William Klock

I want to switch gears this morning.  For the last month, since we’ve been feeling the hardships of our government’s response to a pandemic and many are living with fear either for their health or for the future fallout of the measures taken to stem the virus’s tide, I’ve set aside our study of the book of Exodus.  In his providence and through the lectionary, the Lord has given us some timely passages of scripture for these days, but as our situation continues, I think it’s better to let God’s word speak to us more systematically through the exposition of a book rather than trying to find ways to apply the lectionary readings.  Of course, the book of Job comes immediately to mind.  Job knew suffering the likes of which none of us has ever known.  And so for the next few months I’d like for us to look at this beautiful, difficult, and humbling book from the Old Testament’s library of wisdom literature.

As I said, it’s a difficult book.  In the mid-17th Century, Joseph Caryl, a Congregationalist minister in London, preached two-hundred-and-forty-something sermons on the book of Job over a period of twenty-four years.  That’s a lot of study in the book of Job.  And even he, in his last sermon, apologised to his congregation, saying, “I have not attained so clear an understanding of some passages.”  “What am I to do?” I thought.  The good news is that the emphasis of my master’s degree was on Old Testament wisdom literature and that I studied under Bruce Waltke, one of the best.  The bad news is that I spent most of my time studying Sirach (or you might know it as Ecclesiasticus) in the Apocrypha and that that was twenty-five years ago.  I’ve jumped into a crash-course refresher the last couple of weeks and I pray that the Holy Spirit will speak as we dig into this book he’s given us.

So Job.  Who, what, why, where, when?  I think the best place to start is with the first verse:

There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.

 

We don’t know exactly where the “land of Uz” was other than that it was somewhere east of the Jordan River—to the east of Israel.  It could have been anywhere from Syria, east of the Sea of Galilee in the north, to the Arabian desert in the south.  The east was known for its wisdom, which according to the book of Kings, rivalled the wisdom of Solomon.  It was from the “east” that the wise men came to worship Jesus.  And so it’s appropriate that this wise man named Job comes from the east as well.  We should note that he is not an Israelite.  The book of Job does not address it’s questions from the standpoint of God’s covenant with Israel.  It’s application is wider and more general—and more individually focused.

The text says “there was a man”.  Was there a real Job?  Or is Job a literary construct?  Was he a folk hero renowned for his wisdom around which our story was later written?  We don’t know.  Those words “there was a man” are sometime used in the Bible to introduce parables and other times real history.  The book itself, many scholars think, may be one of the oldest in the Bible.  The Hebrew in which it is written is unusual and different from the rest of the Old Testament.  In fact, it’s different enough that translating the book is difficult and the meaning of roughly three per cent of it is uncertain—although that doesn’t mean we can’t understand the meaning of the book itself.  The book has a prose introduction that sets the scene and a prose epilogue that closes out the story, but the heart of the book is forty chapters of some of the most eloquent, sophisticated, and sublime poetry in scripture.  The scenes in heaven, given in the first two chapters, would have never been known by any human—let alone Job and his friends—and despite the knowledge and wit of the players, no one would have discoursed the way they do in the grand poetry used in the heart of the book.  I’m inclined towards the conclusion that the book of Job is—like a lot of other ancient wisdom literature—fiction.  It’s an exploration into the justice and wisdom of the Lord through a hypothetical dialogue between five wise men debating the subject amongst themselves with a prologue which gives, us the readers, the setting needed to understand the story’s big picture.  It may be that there was a real Job, known for both his righteousness and for experiencing great suffering, who was put at the centre of this thought experiment.  At the end of the day we don’t know.  But we don’t need to.  All we need to know is that the Spirit has inspired and given us this book to help the Lord’s people in every age find their way through difficult times and to trust in the Lord’s wise governance of the world.

The key thing about Job is that he was blameless and upright and he feared God.  Now, that doesn’t mean he was perfect.  These are words that the book of Proverbs uses to describe men and women who are favoured by God.  The sense is that Job was a godly man and that he was characterised by integrity.  Not only that, but he’s wise.  The heart of biblical wisdom is the fear of the Lord.  Now, except in his initial response to tragedy given in the prose prologue, Job as a non-Israelite never names God by his covenant name, but he nevertheless fears the Lord.  And he certainly knew God’s blessing.  He had seven sons and three daughters, 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 donkeys, and many servants.  He was, says verse 3, “the greatest of all the people of the east”.  All of these numbers point to idealisations, to perfection.  Not only is job a man known for his righteousness and integrity, but he’s also the man who has everything.  As is noted later, he’s known in the city gate—he’s got civic status as well.  Everyone knows Job, which will make his fall all the more humbling.

Now, in verses 4 and 5 we’re told that Job’s sons “each on his day” would hold a feast in his home and that all the siblings would gather.  The general consensus seems to be that these were probably birthday parties of some kind.  Whatever the case, we’re told that when these

…days of the feast had run their course, Job would send and consecrate them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all.  For Job said, “It may be that my children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts.” Thus Job did continually.

 

We have no sense that Job’s children were hellions running wild or anything like that.  There’s no reason to think they were any less pious than Job.  What this seems, I think, to be getting at is that for all his wisdom and integrity, Job’s understanding of God may be flawed.  The gods of the Ancient Near East were often petty, arbitrary, and easily offended and their worshippers often went out of their way in attempts to appease them lest they fall out of favour.  Is that what Job’s doing here?  Is he approaching the Lord the way the pagans approached their gods?  We see him making sacrifices on behalf of his children in case they’ve done something wrong—making sacrifices on their behalf lest they fall out of God’s favour.  Job expresses this fear about God later in his speeches and I think that explains his actions here.  And this is the weak spot in Job’s faith, in his piety, in his wisdom.  And the Adversary will exploit it.  Is Job righteous because he values righteousness, is he serving God because he loves God, or is he—at least some of the time—going through the motions and treating God like a vending machine, being righteous merely to ensure God’s continued blessing.  This is the flaw in Job’s righteousness that causes the Adversary to question the Lord’s policies.

Now let’s look at that.  We’ve met Job and now the narrator of the story shifts scenes to the Lord’s council chamber.  In verse 6 we see the Lord holding court and his council members or cabinet ministers—what the text calls the “sons of God”—are summoned.  And amongst them is one called the Adversary or the Challenger.  In Hebrew it’s the satan.  It’s not a proper name.  Hebrew doesn’t use the definite article with proper names.  It’s a title given to one of these heavenly councillors or ministers.  There’s not enough information given here, or for that matter in the Old Testament as whole, to develop a dogmatic explanation of this character.  The Hebrew word satan can be both a verb or a noun—referring to some kind of opposition or to a character involved in some kind of adversarial work—but always either at God’s direction or subject to his sovereignty.  I’m inclined to see this character’s role as something like that of the opposition in Parliament.  They’re there to push back, to challenge, to question, and to act as a check on the government.  That’s their job.  In fact, how do we refer to them?  As “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition”.  They’re not there to challenge the sovereignty of the Queen, but to help ensure the Queen’s government is on the right track.  And that seems to be something of the role of the Adversary or Challenger here in the Lord’s court and it will get at the core theme and purpose of the book. There doesn’t seem to be anything here to indicate this character is diabolical or has evil intentions.  To come to that conclusion, we have to import it from outside the text.

The Lord calls on the Adversary and asks him, “Where have you been?  What have you been up to?”  And the Adversary responds, “I’ve been ‘going to and fro on the earth, and…walking up and down on it’” (v. 7).  “Ah!” says the Lord, “then you must have run across Job, my most devoted servant!”:

“Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?”  (Job 1:8)

Yes, the Adversary does know about Job.  And he knows, that Job is indeed upright and blameless and that he really does fear God.  There’s no question about that.  But!  But what if it’s not what Job does that’s the problem?  What if Job’s motivations are wrong.  The Adversary responds to the Lord:

“Does Job fear God for no reason?  Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side?  You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.  But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.”  (Job 1:9b-11)

Here’s what the book of Job is about.  Ultimately, it’s not Job who is on trial, but the Lord’s policy, the way he chooses to govern his Creation.  You see, the book of Job is aimed at a problem that Israel struggled with.  And it’s not just Israel.  Each generation of the Lord’s people seems to struggle with this issue in one way or another.  It’s something that theologians and biblical scholars call the Retribution Principle.  The basic affirmation is that God blesses righteousness and punishes wickedness.  Now, the Retribution Principle obviously isn’t wrong.  God does bless righteousness and he does punish wickedness.  But if we leave it at that, the formula becomes overly simplistic.  And in this overly-simplistic form, the Retribution Principle leaeves in question the motives of the people God blesses.  As the Adversary asks of Job: What if Job is only being righteous for his own benefit?  What if Job is only serving the Lord because the Lord has blessed him?  Is Job really devoted to the Lord in his heart, or is he just in it for himself?  If he’s in it for the stuff he gets from God, well, isn’t his righteousness actually unrighteousness?  And if his righteousness is really unrighteousness, is the Lord just in continuing to bless him?”  The Adversary is perfectly aware that the Lord rewards righteousness and punishes wickedness and he challenges that policy.  “What if it gives people the wrong motive for serving the Lord?” he asks.

And, of course, as we’ll see when Job’s friends arrive and the great dialogue begins, if we know it’s true that God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked, is it then also true that a blessed person is righteous and a suffering person unrighteous?  Think of the disciples in John 9.  This is the principle they were working from when they asked Jesus about the man born blind.  “Who sinned,” they asked, “this man or his parents.”  The assumption was that because the man was blind, someone must have sinned and the blindness was the punishment.  And Jesus didn’t answer their question directly, because it wasn’t the right question in the first place.  He said to them, “It’s not because he sinned, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”  There’s more to it than a simple formula about righteousness being blessed and wickedness being punished.  Yes, as a general principle, God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked and in a perfect world this might be all we need to understand.  But the world isn’t perfect.  We’ve broken it.  God will set it to rights one day, but in the meantime that means that there are complicating and mitigating factors in God’s governance of his creation as he brings things to that ultimate goal.

This is how the dialogue between Job and his friends unfolds.  They all assume that the Lord’s actions can be explained with this simplistic model.  They all also all begin with the assumption that God is just.  And so Job’s three friends argue that if the Retribution Principle explains God’s actions and that if God is truly just, which he must be, then Job’s righteousness is called into question.  And so they hector Job: “We know that to all outward appearances, you’re a beacon of righteousness.  But, Job, you’ve got to be hiding some secret sin.  Confess it, repent of it, and all will be well with you again.”  Job, for his part, is just as sure that the Retribution Principle is just.  But Job also knows that he is indeed righteous.  He has no secret sins to confess.  And so the only thing left to him is to question whether God is truly just after all.  Elihu, the fourth disputant, arrives in the second half of the book and, in his wisdom, gets a little closer to resolution.  He changes the terms of the debate a bit.  What if God is afflicting Job not for something he’s done in the past, but for what he’s doing right now.  What if this affliction is mean not to punish, but to correct or something like that.

It’s not until the four have finished their disputation that the Lord enters in a whirlwind and we find that justice isn’t the aspect of the Lord’s character in question here.  They’ve been asking the wrong question all along.  The problem is that human beings, with our limited scope, have inadequate knowledge and wisdom to evaluate the justice of the Lord’s actions.  To do so is to repeat the sin of Adam and Eve when they tried to take God’s role on themselves.  No, the real issue is the wisdom of God, which informs his justice.  We can’t hold God to our standard of justice, because our standard of justice is limited and imperfect—we lack his wisdom.  Rather, we have to understand that justice flows from God himself according to his perfect and infinite wisdom.  And so the book of Job becomes a call to faith in the midst of suffering and tragedy.  The book of Job is a call to give up our persistent attempts to take God’s role on ourselves, our persistent attempts to judge him from our limited perspective, and to put our trust in his perfect goodness and wisdom.

So Job isn’t the one on trial.  The Adversary has called into question the Lord’s policy.  That’s what’s on trial.  And so the Lord, in verse 12, hands Job over to the Adversary, “All that he has is in your hand.  Only against him do not stretch out your hand.”

In the verses that follow a string of messengers comes running to Job with news of tragedy.  First it’s a hoard of Sabean raiders who have stolen Job’s cattle and killed his servants.  Then it’s word that “the fire of God from heaven”—probably a lightning storm—has fallen on the sheep and the servants tending them, killing them all.  Third, Chaldeans have raided Job’s camels, stealing them all and killing their keepers.  Just like that the incredible wealth of Job is wiped out.  And last and worst of all, a messenger brings word that a great wind—perhaps a tornado—hit the house where his seven sons and three daughters were feasting, knocking it flat and killing everyone inside.

Everything that Job had, his material wealth and his beloved children, are taken away just like that.  He has nothing left.  In verse 20 we’re told that:

Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped.

 

Tearing one’s robe was a universal act of anguish and mourning.  So was shaving the head in many cultures—although this again tells us that Job is not an Israelite as shaving the head was forbidden to Israelite men.  Job is in anguish.  The ESV says that he worshipped, but the Hebrew literally says he prostrated himself.  If we look at how this word is used this way in the Old Testament, it’s not so much as act of worship as it is an act of acknowledgement and acceptance of what God has done.  Job humbles himself before the Lord.  And he speaks.  Look at verse 21:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return.  The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

 

Despite what has happened, Job maintains his faith in the justice and goodness of God.  It’s interesting and says something of Job’s belief in the sovereignty of God that he doesn’t curse the desert raiders who stole his livestock and killed his servants.  He doesn’t curse the king’s men who should have been protecting the borders of the land from lawless men.  He doesn’t curse the lightning or the tornado.  He acknowledges that God holds all these things in his hands, just as it was the Lord who prospered his business and his family.  The Lord gave.  The Lord has taken away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.  The Lord’s policy is vindicated in this first test.  Job has lost the material blessings the Lord had given and still he maintains his righteousness, still he holds onto his faith, still he trusts in the Lord.  The narrator closes the chapter with the words:

In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong. (Job 1:22)

The Adversary had challenged the Lord saying that Job would curse him if his blessings were reversed.  There’s a clever word play at work in the Hebrew.  The Adversary uses the word “bless” either ironically or euphemistically to mean the opposite.  And so as Job blessed the Lord, he does exactly what the Adversary said he would do while simultaneously vindicating the Lord’s actions.  In the midst of incredible tragedy, Job acknowledges the Lord at work and blesses him.  Now, that’s not to say that Job did this easily.  It might look that way if this is where the story ended, but there’s more to come.  Job knows that it’s a lot harder to bless the Lord when he takes than when he gives.  And because Job has affirmed the sovereignty of God, he will find himself wrestling deeply with doubt about the justice and equity of God.  Nevertheless, he maintains his integrity and the Lord is—so far—vindicated.

Brothers and Sisters, this is the point of the book of Job.  The book wrestles with the issue of faith.  In the end, the book isn’t really about Job.  It’s about the Lord and his just, good, and wise rule.  And in that it’s a call to faith.  This opening scene is important.  These are events Job will never know of, but we’re given this glimpse into the Lord’s council chamber so that we understand: Despite the role of the Adversary, it was the Lord who initiated all this when he brought Job to the Adversary’s attention and it’s the Lord who approved of all that will happen to poor Job.  There’s no easy out here.  We can’t just blame suffering on some evil power outside of the Lord’s control.  To conclude that Job is about a man who suffered because of a bet between God and the devil is to miss the point entirely.  The book of Job is a call to think well of the Lord even in the face of tragedy and suffering, not so much because Job’s faith serves as an example to us, but because, as we’ll see, the Lord is wise.  Job calls us to look beyond the issue of justice—again, a category we are too limited and finite to judge—and to trust in the wisdom of our good and loving Creator even when that wisdom is beyond our understanding.

This was, I am sure, a difficult thing for Job to grasp.  It took the Lord coming to him in a whirlwind and revealing his majesty.  Brothers and Sisters, it’s still to this day a difficult thing for us to grasp, but we have a great advantage over Job.  The Lord came to Job in a whirlwind, declaring his power and might and sovereignty over Creation.  But to us he has come in the person of Jesus, his own Son, who has humbled himself and taken on our flesh.  He has come to us in Jesus, who knew no sin, yet was humbled again as he died on a cross.  Job’s loss points us to Jesus and the cross.  Like Mary weeping at the foot of the cross, like the disciples grieving the empty tomb, thinking that Jesus’ body had been stolen.  We so often meet suffering with fear and with anger—sometimes even anger at the God whom we know is sovereign in this world.  The death of Jesus was, to his friends, a horrible mystery.  Why would God allow such a thing?  And then came Easter and they met the risen Lord.  Jesus walked them through the scriptures, through the promises of God, and suddenly it all made sense.  Suddenly the very worst day they had ever known became the greatest day in all of history, the day on which the righteousness of God was not only vindicated, but the righteousness of his people too.  New creation had burst forth into the world that day, the source of life and hope for a world set to rights, a world where no one has to ask these questions anymore.  Friends, it is no easy thing to trust the Lord—let alone bless him—in the midst of suffering, but the cross reveals his goodness, his wisdom, and his righteousness and so it is to the cross we must turn in the midst of our suffering.  It is there we see the faithfulness of God and it is there that we find our faith renewed.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, give us insight as we study the story of Job and teach us, we pray, to trust you in the midst of our suffering.  Teach us to focus our eyes on the cross of Jesus that we might see everything—the world, our lives, the events and people that surround us—in light of your goodness, faithfulness, and wisdom revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Amen.

Peace be with you

St. John 20:10-23

by William Klock

In the Easter acclamation we announce, “He is risen!”  Jesus has risen from the dead.  That’s good news, but what does it mean for us?  What’s the application?  What does it have to do with who we are as Christians?  How does it change things for us?  What do we do with it?  Maybe, most appropriate right now: Does it mean anything to us in the midst of a viral pandemic?  Our Gospel today has something to say about all this in that odd scene where Jesus breathed on his friends.  Look again at John 20:22-23:

[Jesus] breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”

What does that mean?  Jesus breathes out the Holy Spirit on his friends—which is kind of an odd thing in itself—and he tells them that if they forgive sins those sins are forgiven and that if they withhold forgiveness, forgiveness is withheld.  Did he actually?  Or was it a symbolic act?  A sacramental act?  What do we do with this?

Some Christians see Jesus imparting a gift of the Spirit specifically to the apostles—a gift that would empower them literally to forgive sins and to pass that gift on to the bishops and the priests who would succeed them.  This was one of the ideas that the Reformers objected to in the 16th Century and our liturgy reflects it.  The Church’s ministers do not give forgiveness.  They announce the forgiveness of sins that God offers through Jesus to those who are repentant and believe.  The Church’s ministers are ministers of grace—God’s grace.  And when I say that about the Church’s ministers, that means all of us, not just the clergy.  Brothers and Sisters, grace belongs to God.  We do not control it.  Forgiveness does not depend on the willingness of a priest to “give” it.

But if this isn’t Jesus giving special powers to his apostles and their successors, what is this about?  To understand that, we need to take a step back in the story.  In verse 19 John says that the disciples were hiding.  They gathered together, locked the doors, and barred the windows.  I expect they were being very quiet lest anyone hear them.  They hoped that if anyone passed by it would look like no one was home.  They hoped that if the authorities came knocking, they’d quickly move on in their search.  Jesus’ friends had been hiding since Friday, since he was crucified.  And they were hiding because, when the Romans crucified a revolutionary or someone who claimed to be the Messiah, they didn’t typically leave it at the leader of the movement.  They usually crucified the other leaders and close followers of whomever they had convicted of treason.  In the great revolt that would take place a generation later, the Romans didn’t just crucify a handful of leaders.  They crucified everyone.  They couldn’t make crosses fast enough and ran out.  So Jesus had been nailed to a cross and his friends thought they were likely to be next.  It’s not hard to imagine how afraid they were.

John also tells us that it was the first day of the week.  It was Sunday.  Mary had gone to the tomb just that morning and found it empty.  She had gone to tell the others.  As we read last Sunday, Peter and John went to see the empty tomb for themselves.  But that didn’t mean they weren’t still afraid.  The tomb was empty.  Mary and John insisted Jesus had been raised from the dead.  The others were sceptical.  This wasn’t how resurrection was supposed to happen.  It was supposed to be everyone all at once, not just one person.  Imagine them arguing in that shut-up dark house.  Voices started to rise.  And then a big “Shhhh!” from one of them.  “Whatever happened to Jesus happened to Jesus, but the Romans or Herod’s soldiers are probably out there right now combing the city and looking for us!  John thinks Jesus rose from the dead, but I’m not ready to test that theory myself!  Keep your voices down!”

But then John says that Jesus suddenly appeared in the room.  The doors were locked, but somehow Jesus got inside and to these men who were already afraid and who were now probably really afraid of this man who suddenly appeared in their midst, Jesus says the one thing they most needed to hear: “Peace be with you!”  There’s something very practical in that.  But it’s full of kingdom reality too.  Jesus came to bring peace—to his friends and to the whole world—and so it’s natural that the very first thing he says to his friends as they sit there cowering in fear and thinking that all the hopes they had put in Jesus had come crashing down on Friday—it’s natural that the first thing he would say to them is “Peace be with you”.  Don’t be afraid.  That was the first Easter message.  But, also, don’t lose hope.  Jesus is saying in those few words, “I’m alive.  You’re hopes weren’t misplaced.  When they killed me they declared that I’m not the Messiah, not the King, but God has overturned their verdict and here I am.  Peace be with you.  I really am the Messiah and I really am making all things new.”

Remember what Jesus was all about.  The Messiah was to set God’s world to rights.  Because it was wrong—because of our rebellion and idolatry—God and human beings had been separated.  In his graciousness, the Lord had established the temple as a place where heaven and earth overlapped and human beings could enter his presence—only, of course, after having purified themselves and offered sacrifices for their sins.  And remember that Jesus had hinted that God was about to do something new and much bigger.  Jesus declared that the temple’s days were over.  He would tear it down and in three days build a new one.  Think about that again.  The temple was the place of God’s presence.  It was the place where humans could meet God.  And it was the place where humans could find forgiveness of sins.  It was the greatest place on earth.  It was a beacon of light in a dark world.  And Jesus was going to tear it down and build something new and better.

And now, on the third day after his crucifixion, the risen Jesus—vindicated by God and declared to truly be the Messiah, to truly be the King—appears to his disciples.  John says they spent some time marvelling as he showed them the wounds in his hands and in his side.  There was no doubting that it was him.  John says they were glad—which is, no doubt, an understatement.  And then Jesus says to them in verse 21:

“Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”

 

“Peace be with you,” again.  This time there’s more to it than just, “Don’t be afraid.”  This is a commissioning.  Jesus came to bring peace and now he’s giving his friends a mission to carry his peace to the world.  There’s to be no more hiding.  “As the Father sent me, even so I am sending you.”  Jesus had sent them out to the towns and villages of Galilee to prepare the way for him.  Now he’s sending them out again, but this is an even bigger mission.  As we go on, keep the temple in the back of your mind.  Again, it was the place where human beings and God came together.  It was the place of forgiveness.  So Jesus sends them out to carry on his mission and he now equips them:

And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

 

Brothers and Sisters, when Jesus rose from the grave he set the power of God’s new creation in motion and here, Jesus breathes on them—yet another one of his powerful visual object lessons he was so fond of—to say that because of his resurrection, new creation has now been imparted to them.  In both Hebrew and Greek the words for wind and breath and spirit are all the same.  As God breathed life into Adam, now Jesus, the second Adam, breathes new life into the disciples.  I suspect C. S. Lewis had this scene in mind when, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he wrote about the great lion, Aslan, breathing life back into the people the White Witch had turned to stone.  Aslan, the Christ-figure of Narnia, breathed on these dead stone statues and, like flame licking its way across paper, their colour returned and in moments they were moving again—and soon after they were running through the witch’s palace looking for others so that Aslan could breathe on them and restore them to life.  That’s something of the visual Jesus offers here.  He breathes on the disciples, recalling God’s breathing on Adam, as if to say, “Because of my resurrection, you have received God’s Holy Spirit.  Because of my resurrection, the life of God that Adam rejected has been given back to you.  Now go out to find others, proclaim the good news about me, so that they can share in this gift of life.

People often think that the purpose of the Holy Spirit is to give us some kind of spiritual experience or to make us holy.  The Spirit certainly can and does do those things, but first and foremost, Jesus has given us the Spirit to equip and to empower us to go into the world in the same way that the Father sent Jesus into the world.  Jesus gives us the Spirit—he breathes the very life of God into us—and makes us the new temple, the new place where God meets human beings.  Think on that this week.  We Christians are the place where earth and heaven meet, because God’s spirit indwells us.  We, the Church, are his temple.  And as he gave Adam the task of expanding the garden of Eden, he gives his disciples the task of expanding the temple—of taking it to the world and of inviting the world to become a part of it.

Jesus died on Good Friday.  He rose on Easter.  He accomplished the forgiveness of sins.  He began the process of making all things new.  But how does what he did two thousand years ago in that time and place, how does it impact the rest of the world?  How does it come to peoples and cultures with no thought for God’s kingdom?  How does it speak to people halfway around the world who had no knowledge of God’s Messiah and had never even thought of putting their hope in his coming?  How does it speak to people two thousand years after it happened?

Back in John 4, Jesus said to the Samaritan woman that “salvation is from the Jews.”  Salvation is from Israel, for the whole world.  The story of God and Israel reached its climax in Jesus.  He embodied Israel himself and died for Israel’s sins.  But now these Jewish disciples, empowered by Jesus himself, are called to take this message of God’s faithfulness out to the nations and anyone who believes, anyone who acknowledges that Jesus is Lord—the King sent to set this fallen world to rights—can take part in this salvation and, in finding new life in Jesus, can become part of this new Israel, this new temple, this new creation.

Notice that John tells us that this was the first day of the week.  His point is that in Jesus, God’s work of re-creation has begun.  Jesus has set it in motion.  And the task of his disciples is to take what Jesus has begun and apply it to the world around them—to start living and announcing the reality of the kingdom—to start expanding it and spreading it around.  This is the New Testament call to be fruitful and to multiply.

Jesus’ breathing on his disciples speaks of new creation in another way too.  Think back again to Genesis.  We’re told there that God would come to Adam and Eve, to fellowship with them in the time of the evening breeze.  After they sinned, we’re told that when God came looking for them he came not as a gentle breeze, but as a whirlwind.  But here, now on that first Easter, the gentle breath of Jesus flows over and around his disciples.  Jesus had undone Adam’s fall and God is with man once again.  As God had breathed life into Adam, the second Adam now breathes life into his friends.

Jesus had twice promised peace.  I expect he promised it many more times that than, but John specifically records two instances in chapters 14 and 16.  And now Jesus announces that peace to them again.  It really has finally come.  And he sends them out to proclaim it.  This is what those difficult words about forgiving sins and not forgiving sins are all about.  Jesus is sending them out to proclaim the good news.  Jesus who was crucified is risen.  He is Lord and he is making all things new, he’s restoring sinful human beings to their Creator.  The good news is a royal summons to forgiveness and to life for all who will believe and give their allegiance to Jesus.  But, Jesus says, they are also to retain sin—which is probably a better translation than to withhold forgiveness.  Jesus is commissioning them not only to announce forgiveness, but to warn the world that the wages of sin truly is death and separation from God.  Jesus highlights something we need badly to hear today: You can’t proclaim the good news without also announcing the bad news.  Sin has consequences.  Serious consequences.  We see it in the cemetery surrounding us and we see it in the world.  In the midst of this pandemic, we see the evidence of sin everywhere as we are confronted with our mortality.  But this is why the good news is such good news.  We are dead in our sins and the world has been corrupted and turned upside-down by our sins—that’s the bad news and the warning—but if we will repent and follow Jesus, the good news is that we have a share in the life of God and of the age to come.  Jesus has inaugurated God’s new creation and promises us a place in it.

I think Mary that first Easter morning gives us a very down-to-earth example of the kingdom and of new life and of the good news about Jesus.  Not only that, but we see how the good news meets us where we are and brings forgiveness, life, and hope.  Mary’s there in the eight verses between last Sunday’s Gospel and this Sunday’s.  She went to the tomb that morning in tears.  She was a wreck.  Her friend and master was dead.  And then she got there to find his body gone.  Now she’s devastated.  Think to one of those times when you were absolutely crushed by something and grieving your heart out.  You thought it couldn’t get any worse and then it got worse.  The angel asked her why she was crying and she sobbed out, “They’ve taken my lord away.”

Brothers and Sisters, as we proclaim the good news about Jesus we come face to face with the pain and the grief and the tears of real people.  Like Mary they are broken and devastated.  If we ask why they’re crying they may tell us, “They have taken away…my husband, my wife, my child.  They have taken away…my hope, my life, my dignity.  Mary embodies the grief and the pain of a world set wrong by sin.

And that’s when Mary turned around and someone was there.  Who was he?  Mary guessed that he was the gardener.  She was wasn’t really wrong.  There was Jesus, risen from the dead and the world’s true Lord.  You would think he had better things to do, but there he was gardening.  John doesn’t say specifically what he was doing, but whatever it was led Mary to think he was the gardener.  But it makes perfect sense.  Jesus knew what he was doing.  New Creation broke into the world that morning.  Pilate had declared, “Behold, the man!”  And here he is, the first man of the New Creation, the new Adam.  And here’s the new Adam, doing the task that Adam had rejected: taking care of the garden.  I like to think that when Mary saw him, Jesus was hard at work ripping a thorn bush or brambles from the ground to make way for a fruit tree or flowers.

But Mary didn’t recognize him.  The same was true for some of us the first time we saw Jesus and the same thing is true for so many of the people we will bring to him.  We can hear the back and forth between Jesus and Mary as she cried and poured out her heart to this man she thought was a stranger, bringing her problems to him.  And then he says her name.  She didn’t know him, but he knew her and that’s true of all of us.  It’s true of everyone.  And when he says our names he says so much.  He greets us.  He rebukes us for our unbelief. He consoles us in our pain and grief.  He invites us to himself.  And suddenly, like Mary, we know him.  He was different and the same all at once.  He’s alive with a new kind of life the likes of which we have never seen before.  I suspect the only people who would have recognized it were Adam and Eve, because they were the only ones who had ever known that life.  Everyone else since has lived apart from it, cast out of the garden.  But Jesus now offers it to us.  He makes us clean, he forgives our sins, and he wipes away the tears, not just of our own guilt, but all the pain caused by the sins of others.

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus welcomes us into his new creation, into the garden restored, into the temple.  It’s a building still under construction.  We may see ourselves as broken or worthless, but Jesus knows our pain.  He was the stone that the builders rejected.  But he has become the cornerstone of God’s new temple.  And he knows just the place for each of us.  He breathes God’s spirit into us, he wipes away our tears, he washes away our sins, he restores us to the life of God, he makes us whole and he makes us holy—and he gives us a holy task.  Because his temple will not be complete until each stone has been brought, until, as God planned for Eden in the beginning, the garden, the place of his presence has filled the earth.  As God spoke through the prophet Habakkuk, one day the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.  Friends, Jesus now sends us into the world to proclaim the good news—to announce that in him God’s King has come, that he will judge sin and set the world to rights, but that he also offers forgiveness and the life of his new world to all who will come to him as Lord and Saviour.

Let us pray: Lord Jesus, as you breathed your Spirit into your friends that first Easter Sunday you have fill us with your Spirit in our baptism.  You have made us whole and you have made us holy.  Now send us out into the world, equipped and empowered by your Spirit, that we might proclaim the good news to others, that they might be made whole and holy by your death for sins and your rising to give life.  Amen.

Do Not Be Afraid!

Colossians 3:1-4 & St. John 20:1-10

by William Klock

St. John tells us in today’s Gospel that “on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb.”  He says nothing more of what Mary found there that morning and tells us that she ran to find Peter and John.  She didn’t understand.  She didn’t know what had happened.  She suspected someone had stolen the body.  We get a sense of her fear as she ran to tell the others.  Jesus was dead.  It couldn’t get any worse than that—well, aside from the authorities now coming for his friends—but it did get worse.  Now his body’s gone.

Matthew, Mark and Luke fill us in a bit more on the details.  In the other gospels we read about the angels who met Mary at the tomb.  And the first thing the angels says is, “Do not be afraid!”  It’s the first thing angels in the Bible always say when they meet a human being: “Do not be afraid!”  Unlike most modern depictions of angels, what we read in the Bible tells us that there’s something both fierce and glorious about these heavenly beings, something that moves human beings to fear.  So there’s Mary, crying on her way to the tomb.  She’s lost her friend and her lord.  All of his disciples and friends were afraid—would the authorities be looking for them next?  And then the empty tomb.  Mary was upset and afraid and naturally so.  And the shock of the angels.  She needed to hear those words, “Do not be afraid!”

I think we need to hear those words today, too, and the rest of the Easter story reminds us why.  Our immediate circumstances and our reasons to be afraid today aren’t the reasons that Mary and Jesus’ disciples were afraid, but it’s hard to miss the fear that’s out there today.  You and I may be coping with it—or not—but even if we are, the palpable sense of fear around us—even to the point of paranoia—is so thick you could cut it with a knife.  What does Easter have to say to us?

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be afraid.  Even when the angel said, “Do not be afraid” to Mary, he wasn’t just wiping away everything that Mary and the disciples had to fear.  The angel could give them assurance that Jesus’ body hadn’t been stolen.  God had raised him from death!  But that didn’t change the possibility that the authorities might be out looking for his associates, to crucify them, too.  And the fact that Jesus has risen from the dead doesn’t mean that we have no reason to fear the sickness raging through our world right now.  Jesus’ resurrection doesn’t erase the potential for coming social and economic devastation.

It’s foolish to think that sickness can’t touch us just because we’re Christians.  We all know personally the reality of disease.  You can’t just “declare” it away in the name of Jesus.  There are folks doing that, but they’re foolish and their theology isn’t the theology of the Bible.  It’s paganism with a thin veneer of Christian-sounding talk over the surface.  Sickness, pain, trials, tribulation are real.  As I’ve been saying these last few weeks, we modern people have often thought ourselves invincible.  Science or economics or government will save us.  We’ve made false gods of these good gifts that God has given us.  And they’re being exposed right now and we have good reason to be afraid.  The things we’ve relied on, the things we’ve trusted in for security are failing.

The causes of our fears are real and they’re here.  What we need is to learn how to fear in the right way—how to fear in a way that brings honour to God.  That might sound weird, but bear with me.  There really are things out there to legitimately fear.  St. Paul, himself, wrote to the Corinthians:

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair… (2 Corinthians 4:8)

Paul knew what it meant to be afraid.  He’d been arrested, beaten, stoned, shipwrecked—all for the sake of the gospel message he proclaimed.  Eventually he would die for that good news.  He was afflicted in every way, but his fear never crushed him.  Circumstances never drove him to despair.  Paul knew fear, but that fear never drove him to paranoia.  He knew sleepless nights, but he never lost hope.  When the angel says, “Do not be afraid”, he’s not telling us to ignore the things that make us afraid.  He’s telling us to fear in a God-honouring way.

And that’s our calling, Brothers and Sisters.  To bring honour to the name of the Lord is our calling as his people.  That calling doesn’t change just because our circumstances have.  The challenge is how to fear rightly.  And Easter tells us just that.

You see, when God tells us not to be afraid, those exhortations are always connected to two things.  First, they’re always connected to the assurance that God cares for us.  Second, God’s exhortations to fear not are connected to the promise that even though bad things happen and even though we are sure to know suffering and tribulation, we have a sure and certain hope of life in a future world where every tear has been wiped from our eyes and everything wrong with the world has been set to rights.

Consider an example from Luke’s Gospel.  In Luke 12—the parallel passage is in Matthew 6—Jesus exhorts his disciples not to worry.  He says in verse 32:

Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

 

Why would they be afraid in the first place?  Consider the cost of discipleship.  Jesus tells his disciples to do things like sell all they have so that they can give to the poor.  He warns them that they will be persecuted—even face death—for his sake.  But he also gives them a promise as they face destitution and persecution.  They may, indeed, lose things in life that they hold dear.  The Gospel is, at the very least, a call to leave our comfort zone.  But losing everything—even our lives—isn’t the end of the story.  What we look forward to, the end of the story that we so often lose sight of in the midst of suffering and tribulation—is something we can never know apart from giving up everything for the sake of Jesus.  If we are in him, God has promised us the life of his kingdom and of the age to come.

You see, Jesus wasn’t asking his friends to ignore the very real possibility of suffering.  He wasn’t whistling past the graveyard and neither should they.  What Jesus was asking them to do was to trust in the goodness and faithfulness of God.

But how do we know that God is really and truly good and faithful?  To trust in someone—to really trust them—we have to feel that they’re actually worthy of our trust.  Does God really love us?  And is God capable of delivering on his promises?  Well, that’s just what Jesus outlines for his disciples in the verses leading up to his exhortation for them not to be afraid.  Here’s what he says starting in Luke 12:4:

“I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do.”

 

This wasn’t an idle warning.  Of Jesus disciples, all but John—who was imprisoned on the island of Patmos—all of them were martyred.  They died for their faith in Jesus.  The time was coming—they thought it had arrived right after Jesus’ crucifixion, but as it turned out, it would be decades—the time was coming when they were faced with a choice: deny Jesus and live or confess Jesus and die.  And Jesus says, “do not fear” these people who threaten you.  Being my people, proclaiming the good news about me is more important than life itself.  That’s a tall order.  But Jesus says two things about how to fear the right way, the God-honouring way.  You see, there’s fear and there’s fear.  Again, there’s more than on kind of fear.  There’s bad fear and there’s good fear.  And so he says to them, “Do not fear those who kill the body”, instead:

Fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into gehenna.  Yes, I tell you, fear him! (Luke 12:5)

Judgement was coming on the people of God.  Would the disciples trust in Jesus as the Messiah even as the corrupt and faithless leaders of Israel threatened them with death?  Judgement was coming, God would visit his people, and those who opposed him would be destroyed.  Jesus calls up this image of Gehenna—the smouldering garbage dump just outside the city—where the dead would be dumped.  On that day when judgement came on Israel, the Lord would deliver those who stood firm and confessed Jesus even in the face of death, but he would cast out, would put from his presence and destroy those who rejected him.  Jesus’ point is that there’s something worse than death and that’s facing death apart from the Messiah’s redemption, facing death as someone whom God has rejected, to whom he has said, “You are not my people”—to be excluded forever from the life of God’s kingdom.

As Proverbs tells us, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”.  The Lord holds our life and our death in his hands.  We have good reason to fear him.  And yet it’s not a cowering fear of some sadistic being just waiting to smite us.  As much as I appreciate Jonathan Edwards, I think much of his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God” is off the mark—particularly when he talks of God dangling us over hell like a man dangling a spider over a fire, just waiting to drop us.  Edwards was right in that destruction is what sinners deserve.  But Edward’s is not an accurate picture of the God who gave his Son out of love for sinners.  The fear of the Lord is a reverence for the God who is both the source of life and the one whom we know will faithfully and lovingly set his creation to rights one day.  To fear the Lord is to acknowledge that out of love for his creation, God must one day wipe every bit of wickedness and sin from it.  That includes the unrepentant.  But this is also the same God who has given his Son as a means of reconciliation so that we can be spared being wiped from the face of creation on that final day.  To fear the Lord is to stand in awe of the mercy shown as he delays that final judgement, even though it means the temporary continuation of suffering and tribulation and wickedness, so that the good news about Jesus can reach the ends of the earth and the entire human race.

This is what St. Peter was getting at when, as Jesus’ people began to face persecution, he wrote:

Even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed.  Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy.  (1 Peter 3:14-15)

Again, there’s something beyond the suffering we face in this life.  For Jesus’ people, death isn’t the end.  There is a hope beyond suffering and death and so we honour Christ the Lord as holy despite the suffering of this life.  That’s what it means to live in hope.  We fulfil our God-given calling as his people.  We proclaim the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen.  We continue to proclaim the royal summons—Jesus is Lord—even when we face persecution.  We live the gospel in our daily lives, even as the world around us falls apart.  We bring new creation into a broken world.  Because we are God’s people and bringing honour to his name is our calling.  We fear the Lord, because we know that one day he will come as judge, one day he will purify his creation and set all to rights, and our duty is to bring the world to Jesus in faith that they might escape his judgement and know life through him.

So this is what it means to rightly fear—to fear in a way that honours God.  But to trust in God we need to be assured of more than just the fact that he will judge the world and set it to rights someday.  To rest in his goodness and faithfulness, we need assurance that he really does care for his people.

In the Luke passage, as Jesus explains to his disciples how to rightly fear, he also tells them:

Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God.  Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.  (Luke 12:6-7)

Right after this Jesus tells them that there’s more to life than worldly goods.  He tells a parable about a rich man who gathers in a great harvest.  He builds bigger barns and he finds his assurance in his wealth.  He relaxes, he eats and drinks and generally makes merry.  And that night he dies.  It was all for nothing.  And Jesus says to the disciples:

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on.  For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.  (Luke 12:22-23)

God takes care of the raven, even though he doesn’t build barns like that rich fool to store his food.  God clothes the lilies in garments that make Solomon’s pale in comparison.  And he clothes the fields of grain in beauty even though the destiny of the grain is the scythe and the oven.  Jesus says,

Do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried.  For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them.  Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you.  (Luke 29-31)

The Lord will surely care for his own.  We need to hear that today more than ever.  And Jesus continues:

“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.  Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys.  For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.  (Luke 12:32-34)

St. Paul points heavenward, too, in our Epistle today from Colossians 3:

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.  For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.  (Colossian 3:1-4)

There is something greater awaiting us than the things of this life and Jesus gives us every assurance to trust in God’s goodness and faithfulness.  The evidence is around us everywhere.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to trust.  The Gospel this past Thursday reminded us that Jesus himself struggled with fear.  That night he was arrested, after the Last Supper, he went to the garden to pray.  He knew that his hour had come.  He knew that he’d be abused and brutally killed.  Mark says that he was “greatly distressed and troubled”.  He fell on the ground and prayed:

“Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”  (Mark 14:36)

Three times he prayed.  Three times he committed himself to the goodness and faithfulness of his Father.  And when he was finished he rejoined his disciples and simply told them, “Let us be going”.  Going where?  Going to his arrest.  Going to his suffering.  Going to be mocked for trusting in his Father.  Going to the cross to die.  But he went knowing that there was something bigger and something better than his fear and something better the other side of his death.

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus’ faith was vindicated on Easter morning when God raised him from death.  God’s new creation, his new world was born that morning.  John tells that when Mary returned, after running to tell Peter and John about the empty tomb, she met Jesus in the garden.  She didn’t recognise him.  She thought he was a gardener.  It wasn’t until he said her name that she realised who he was.  There he was pulling weeds.  A weird thing for the resurrected Messiah to do—until you realise that this act was the simple, small beginning of new creation.  This new creation would spread as Jesus’ people, empowered by the Holy Spirit, carried the message to the world that this Jesus, dead and now alive, is the world’s true Lord.  Men and women in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and eventually across the Roman Empire and beyond bowed their knees to this Jesus who forgives rebellious and sinful hearts and makes all things new.  Even as they faced rejection, persecution, and martyrdom they submitted themselves to Jesus knowing that there was something greater than fear of those who kill the body.  They bowed the knee to this risen Lord in whom they saw the faithfulness of God made manifest and the goodness of God at work.  In Jesus the promises of God to his people are being fulfilled and so in Jesus the world has hope for a day when all will be set to rights, a day when the world will be filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Until that day we will live in a creation suffering the results of our rebellion against God.  We will face sickness.  We will struggle with sin.  We will toil to draw our bread from the earth.  We may even face rejection and persecution for our commitment to Jesus and his kingdom.  And one day each of us will die.  But we face the realities of this fallen world in faith-filled and expectant hope—even joy—knowing that what God has begun in raising Jesus from the dead, he will one day bring to completion.  We live as Easter people.  Jesus has now entrusted to us the task of taking and spreading his new creation into all the earth.  We do that as we carry the justice, the mercy, the grace, the love of God to the world around us.  We do that as we proclaim the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen.  By the cross, Jesus has redeemed his people from sin and death and gives a promise of life in the age to come.  Like the angel, our task is to point the world to the empty tomb and to declare, “Do not be afraid!”

Let us pray: Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant us by your grace to set our minds on things above; that by your continual help our lives may be transformed; through the same, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Hosanna!

Zechariah 9:9-12, Philippians 2:5-11, & St. Matthew 21:1-17

by William Klock

In the Collect this morning we recalled that it was because of his tender love for mankind that the almighty and ever-living God of Creation sent his Son, Jesus, to humbly take our nature upon himself and to suffer death on a cross.  And with that in mind, we also asked of God that in his mercy, we might walk in the way of Jesus’ suffering so that we might also share in his resurrection.

We don’t pray for suffering very often, do we?  I’m not sure if the author of the Collect was actually asking for suffering—it’s entirely possible, considering the purifying nature of suffering that we modern people have all but forgotten—or if he was simply acknowledging that to live is to suffer.  Today’s Collect goes all the way back to the time of Gregory the Great, to the 6th Century, and to a day when human beings had no illusions about being in control of things.  Poverty and disease and war were realities of daily life and the most that most people could do was to ride out the storm and trust in the good promises of God.  He would one day set all to rights and he’d begun the working of doing so that first Easter Day when Jesus rose from the grave.  We may suffer, but we live in hope that as Jesus has been raised from the dead, so too, we will be when Jesus has put every enemy under his feet.  Do you know what Gregory the Great did in those days of suffering?  He sent out missionaries to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord to the barbarian tribes of Germany and Britain.

It’s helpful to be reminded of times like Gregory’s and the way that Christians responded to them.  I was reminded, too, this week of the story of Martin Rinckart.  He was a German pastor during the Thirty Years war.  His village was sacked three times.  But, even worse, his part of the country was ravaged by a horrible plague.  Every other pastor in the area died and he was left doing sometimes as many as fifty funerals a day.  This man who lived through more sorrow and grief than we can imagine wrote the hymn “Now thank we all our God”.

Now thank we all our God, with heart, and hands, and voices,

Who wondrous things hath done, in whom the world rejoices;

Who from our mother’s arms hath blessed us on our way

With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

 

O may this bounteous God thro’ all our life be near us!

With ever joyful hearts and blessed peace to cheer us;

And keep us in his grace, and guide us when perplext,

And free us from all ills in this world and the next.

 

All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given,

The Son, and him who reigns with them in highest heaven,

Eternal, Triune God, whom earth and heav’n adore;

For thus it was, is now, and shall be, evermore.

 

The faith that could inspire those words when faced with days so dark that what we’re dealing with seems like almost nothing ought to give us reason to hope.  Brothers and Sisters, we serve the same God that Martin Rinckart served.  We confess the same faith and the same Saviour that Martin Rinckart confessed.  We look for the same hope that Martin Rinckart looked for.  And that faith is one that doesn’t ignore the suffering we face, but it is a faith that presses on, nevertheless, not looking for escape, but looking to do the kingdom work that Jesus has called us to, looking to do the kingdom work that the Spirit enables us to do.  It’s a faith that is sure and certain of the sovereignty of God and of the lordship of Jesus.  It’s a faith that goes beyond mere acknowledgement of God’s sovereignty.  It’s easy to say it.  It’s definitely not so easy to do it.  But this is a faith that rests, again, sure and certain of it.

That’s a message we need to hear right now and, providentially, that’s one of the key themes of our Scripture lessons on Palm Sunday.

Our Old Testament lessons is taken from the prophecy of Zechariah, roughly five hundred years before the birth of Jesus.  Whereas our Old Testament lessons the last couple of weeks have come from the time of Israel’s exile, this one comes from the time of Israel’s return from Babylon, but the theme is similar.  The people had returned to the ruins of Jerusalem.  They had an enormous rebuilding project ahead of them that was made worse by hostile neighbours.  They were bad times.  But through the prophet the Lord exhorted his people

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!

         Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!  (Zechariah 9:9a)

Zion had little to rejoice about, but the Lord calls his people to rejoice anyway.  Why?

Behold, your king is coming to you;

         righteous and having salvation is he…  (Zechariah 9:9b)

Rejoice, because your king is coming and he will bring righteousness and salvation.  This king, says the Lord, will bring peace to the nations and his rule shall be from seas to sea and to the ends of the earth.  In verse 11 the Lord says that he will do this because of the blood of his covenant.  The Lord reminds the people of his faithfulness.  What he has promised he will surely do.

And yet this wasn’t a promise that any of the people of Zechariah’s day would see fulfilled.  They would rebuild Jerusalem.  They would rebuild the temple.  But they would do it through great hardship.  And even when the temple was rebuilt, it wouldn’t be the same.  The ark, the Lord’s throne was long gone.  The shekinah, the cloud of glory that represented the Lord’s presence with his people would remain absent from the new temple.  But the Lord called his people to rejoice anyway.  They were to live in hope knowing that the Lord will do what he says even if it’s not today or tomorrow or even in our lifetime.  It wasn’t a call to blind faith.  It was a call to look back to the history of their people and to know the Lord’s past goodness and faithfulness.  Every generation has its part to play in the Lord’s story of redemption and the part assigned to Zechariah’s generation was to rejoice in hope of the Lord’s coming even while facing very difficult days.  In doing so they brought glory to the Lord’s name in the sight of the watching nations.  It’s should be a reminder to us that for God’s people there’s more to life than just today or tomorrow or even next year.  We’re part of a story bigger than ourselves.  Our ministry is built on the ministry of the generations of believers who have come before and what we build today will serve as a foundation for the believers who will come after us.

And, of course, the Lord proved his faithfulness as we see in our Gospel.  Matthew makes a point of just that.  Look at Matthew 21:

Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me.  (Matthew 21:1-2)

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem one last time.  The Lord is coming to his people, just as he had promised in the days of the prophets.  And Matthew goes out of his way to highlight this.  Jesus doesn’t just send his disciples to go into the village to round up a donkey.  Jesus sends them into the village to round up a donkey, but does so using the word of Zechariah.  Matthew says in verses 4-5:

This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying,

“Say to the daughter of Zion,

‘Behold, your king is coming to you,

         humble, and mounted on a donkey,

         on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.’”

 

We should feel an almost overwhelming sense of the sovereignty of God here.  Not only is Jesus coming to his people to fulfil what the Lord had promised, but he’s doing it just as the Lord had promised through Zechariah.  But it goes a step further.  The Palm Sunday story is familiar.  We all know what’s about to happen.  It’s not just that in Jesus the Lord is finally coming to his people.  Jesus is also going to his death as he rides into the city.  All hell will break lose in just a few days.  Jesus will be crucified.  The disciples will run off in fear to hide.  It’s as if the Lord knew that all this would happens and so, out the outset of that first Holy Week, on Palm Sunday, he uses these events to remind the disciples that he is in control.  The God who has brought Jesus to Jerusalem to fulfil his promises will remain in full control as the events of his arrest and crucifixion unfold.

Of course, the disciples didn’t grasp this at all.  We all know that living in faith in the midst of disaster isn’t easy.  It’s all too easy to lose our focus, to be swept up in the crises and difficulties of the day, and to forget God’s promises and God’s sovereignty.  This is why we need to be steeped in the story of the Lord and his people.  This is why we need to centre ourselves on Jesus and on his death and resurrection.  Because there we see supremely the goodness and faithfulness of God.  There was no darker day than that first Good Friday.  It looked like a disaster to Jesus’ friends.  But the reality was that even on that worst of all days in the most horrific of all events, God was in control and working through to bring the most glorious day ever.

The rest of the story reminds us of God’s sovereignty as well.  Matthew goes on:

Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.  And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”  And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, “Who is this?”  And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.” (Matthew 21:8-11)

“Hosanna!”  It was a cry to God for help that, over time, became a cry of praise to the Lord.  During the Feast of Tabernacles, the priests would process around the altar waving branches and shouting “Hosanna!”—a cry to the Lord for help, but also a cry of praise and faith knowing that the Lord hears the cries of his people.  But on this day, as Jesus rode into Jerusalem, the people waved their branches at him and cried “Hosanna!”  The Lord had finally come.  The Messiah was here.

Palm Sunday stands in stark contrast to Good Friday.  Today we hear the praises of the people as Jesus arrives, but in just a few days the praises turn to jeers and to cries of “Crucify him!”.  But, again, the story reminds us that God was never out of control.  Jesus knew he was going to his death and he knew that death was part of the plan.  To save his people he had to die the death that they deserved.  Even as sin and death rose up to their full height and did their worst, God remained sovereign and turned the death of Jesus back on his enemies on Easter morning.

St. Paul looked back on those events as he wrote to the Philippians:

God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  (Philippians 2:9-11)

The devil for one brief moment thought that he was bringing Jesus down, but then we discover when it’s over, that God was using the cross to exalt his Son, to defeat his enemies, and to bring salvation from sin and death.  The crowds were angry with Jesus for getting their hopes up.  They had thought he was the Messiah, but when he stood before them in chains, they lost faith and they lost hope.  The Messiah was supposed to conquer Herod and the Romans, not let himself be arrested and beaten by them.  But the resurrection changed everything and one day, after the gospel message has gone out to all the world, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord.

Brothers and Sisters, this is a timely message.  Most of us have lived our lives up to this point feeling like we have some semblance of control—or at least that the powers that be in this world have control of things.  As I said a couple of weeks ago, we’ve put our faith in the ability of science and medicine and economics and government to tame this world in which we live.  And all it has taken to bring modernity to its knees is people eating bats getting infected with a mutated virus that has quickly spread around the world.  And now we see the limits of science and government and economics.  They can all be good things.  Science can tell us how to slow the spread of this disease and it can bring us a vaccine, but not right away.  Government can issue directives to slow the spread, but those same directives are wreaking economic havoc.  Like the devil, exposed as a fraud on Easter morning when his plans fall apart, the gods of modernity are being exposed before our eyes today.  Just like ancient peoples who worshiped the Sun, rather than receiving God’s good gifts and giving him glory and honour for them, we’ve turned his gifts into gods, we’ve placed our faith in them, they’ve become our sources of security, and we’ve all but forgotten the God who gave them to us.

This is the time when we Christians need to recover a profound sense of God’s goodness, of his faithfulness, of his sovereignty.  This pandemic caught the world by surprise, but it was no surprise to the Lord.  This is the time when we need to look to Jesus and his cross and have our faith in the Lord strengthened and renewed so that we can carry on the mission of the Church.  Brothers and Sisters, the false gods of the world are being exposed.  A world that has swept our mortality under the rug is being confronted with it head-on.  This is the time when we need to be faithful to our calling to proclaim the good news that Jesus, crucified and risen, is the world’s true Lord.  And to do that we need to be sure and certain of our hope.  This Holy Week our ability to meet together as the Church to recall and to rehearse the events of that led Jesus to the cross is hindered by the crisis around us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t steep ourselves in God’s word.  We are walking through a time of social and sacramental fasting.  Use this time to feast on the word.  Read the story of God and his people and be reminded that he is sovereign and that he is faithful, even on the darkest day.  Read the story and be reminded that Jesus is Lord and be renewed in faith and hope.  Live that faith in God’s sovereignty and in Jesus’ lordship as the world watches, as faith in our false gods is shaken, and be prepared to give an answer for the hope that is in you.

Let us pray: Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for mankind you sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility:  Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Deliver Us for Thine Honour

Isaiah 1:10-20

by William Klock

It’s not easy to know what to think of the events that are taking place around us right now.  There’s no shortage of people in the media writing about it.  And there’s even less shortage of people sharing their thoughts—which are often less than thoughtful—on social media.  It’s unavoidable, but I’ve been trying to avoid it anyway—and probably not succeeding very well.  But what I’ve found remarkably grounding in the midst of all this is our daily praying of the Litany.  Prayer itself is an acknowledgement of God’s sovereignty, but the Litany in particular, it’s deprecations and suffrages, are all rooted in and express a firm belief in the fact that God is in control no matter what and that, by the mercies of Jesus, we can run to him for help.  And it’s not just whistling in the dark.  The Litany—and other prayers like it—remind us that we are appealing to the God who, for our sake, humbled himself to share our form and to die on the cross.  This is the grounding we need in troubled times.  That God is sovereign, not as some distant governor of the cosmos, but as the one who knows our suffering, cares deeply about our welfare, and who truly walks beside us.  Think about it.  We not only have Jesus himself, God Incarnate, sharing our nature, but he’s given us his own Spirit.  In Greek the Holy Spirit is often referred to as parakletos—the helper who comes alongside us.

In the Litany we pray:  By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity and Circumcision; by thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation…By thing Agony and Bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension; and by the Coming of the Holy Ghost, Good Lord, deliver us.  That litany of the life and ministry of Jesus—all of it—is the ground on which we appeal to him for deliverance, remembering his loving and merciful grace.

But something really jumped out at me as we were praying the Litany a few nights ago.  It’s probably because I hit on this point in last week’s sermon and because this has been a point that Exodus has reminded us of as we’ve looked at the Lord’s calling of Israel to be his people.  What jumped out at me was that prayer in the final suffrages: “O God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers have declared unto us, the noble works that thou didst in their days, and in the old time before them.”  And the response is, “O Lord, arise, help us, and deliver us for thine honour.”  It calls back to the promises of God.  We’re heard them, our forefathers in the faith have handed them down to us, and they are now the basis for our appeal to the Lord for deliverance.  We don’t talk much about honour anymore in our culture, but the idea here is that the Lord brings honour on himself, not only amongst his own people, but before the witnessing people of the world, when he makes good on his promises.

I touched on this last Sunday as we looked at our Old Testament lesson from Ezekiel.  Israel had been defeated by Babylon, Jerusalem and the temple destroyed, and the people carried off into exile.  There they were, the people to whom the Lord had promised: I will be your God and you will be my people.  They lived in the land he had promised them.  His presence was manifest in a cloud of glory in the temple.  And suddenly everything he’d promised to them had been taken away.  What happened?  Had the Lord stopped being faithful?  Because they knew the Lord, that wasn’t a conclusion they could make.  They knew he was sovereign.  That was a non-negotiable, too.  And so the Lord spoke to them through the prophets.  They were the people called to bring honour to his name, but they’d failed to do so.  And he reminded them that there were two sides to his covenant with them: If his people would honour him, he would bless them.  But—and this was the bit they chose to ignore—if his people dishonoured him, he would curse them—he would discipline them, that the watching nations would know him and know his faithfulness.

Think of it in terms of parents and children.  A good father blesses his children when they do what’s right.  But when a father continues to bless his children when they misbehave, he dishonours himself.  People watching chalk him up as a fool and as a bad parent.  You don’t reward children for doing wrong.  No, a good father disciplines his children when they misbehave.  And so the Lord disciplined his people, removing them from the land he’d promised and taking away his presence from them.

In our Old Testament lesson today, from Isaiah 1, the Lord addresses Israel again, to explain why they were defeated and exiled.  Look at verse 10:

Hear the word of the Lord,

         you rulers of Sodom!

Give ear to the teaching of our God,

         you people of Gomorrah!

 

This is way beyond your mother angrily calling you and using your full name.  The Lord speaks to Israel, but he addresses his people as Sodom and Gomorrah.  They’ve been that bad.  They were a holy people, but their life together had be become so unholy that the Lord addresses them with the names of the cities he destroyed in the days of Abraham, with names synonymous with idolatry and sin.  But what has Israel done?  Look at verse 11:

“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?

         says the Lord;

I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams

         and the fat of well-fed beasts;

I do not delight in the blood of bulls,

         or of lambs, or of goats.

 

The Lord is through with Israel’s sacrifices.  But what happened?  These are the sacrifices that the Lord instructed his people to make.  Well, the issue isn’t the sacrifices themselves.  The problem lies in the hearts of the people.

“When you come to appear before me,

         who has required of you

         this trampling of my courts?

Bring no more vain offerings;

         incense is an abomination to me.

New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations—

         I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly.

Your new moons and your appointed feasts

         my soul hates;

they have become a burden to me;

         I am weary of bearing them.

When you spread out your hands,

         I will hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers,

         I will not listen;

         your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

         remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;

cease to do evil,

learn to do good;

seek justice,

         correct oppression;

bring justice to the fatherless,

         plead the widow’s cause. (Isaiah 1:12-17)

The worship of the Lord is a good thing, but it becomes an abomination to the Lord when his people’s hearts are impure.  Israel payed lip-service to the Lord.  They did the easy part of the torah.  They made their sacrifices—they went through the motions of worship—but they worshiped false gods alongside the Lord, they broke his commandments, they abused orphans and widows.  Israel was supposed to be a place where the Lord’s rule was on display before the nations.  It was to be sort of a microcosm of the world set to rights—or at least a foreshadowing of that future hope.  But Israel did just the opposite.  Instead of the nations seeing Israel and praising the Lord for what they saw, they mocked both Israel and the Lord.  Israel brought dishonour on the name of the Lord.

Brothers and Sisters, are we guilty of the same?  A couple of weeks ago, a friend who pastors in Washington, D. C. began writing about how the Church might respond to a government-ordered shutdown.  He was ahead of the curve on that one.  He knew that in October of 1918, during the Spanish Flu epidemic, the churches of Washington were closed for a month by government order and so he went back to look at what the pastors of a century ago had to say about the situation.  He’s been sharing with many of us what he’s found.  One sermon stands out in particular, preached by Francis Grimke, the pastor of Fifteenth Presbyterian Church.  Grimke was someone who understood the sovereignty of God.  He also understood the goodness, faithfulness, and mercy of God.  He said this in a sermon preached in November 1918, on the Sunday the churches were allowed to reopen:

“I…know that large numbers of people have regretted the closing of the churches.  I hope that now that they are opened again, that we will all show our appreciation of their value by attending regularly upon their services.  It would be a great calamity to any community to be without the pubic ministration of the sanctuary.  There is no single influence in a community that counts for more than the Christian church.  It is one of the institutions, particularly, that ought to be strongly supported; that ought to be largely attended, and that ought to have the hearty endorsement and well-wishes of every right thinking man and woman within it.  It is a great mistake for anyone to stand aloof from the Christian church.  Everybody in the community ought to have a church home, and ought to be found in that church home Sabbath after Sabbath.”[1]

Based on what the preachers of Washington were writing and preaching at the time, the end of the Spanish Flu epidemic brought a renewed appreciation for the Church and, especially, for its public gatherings of corporate worship.

What I’m seeing today in our community seems to be the very opposite.  Last Sunday I saw a post in a local community group on Facebook in which someone lamented the fact that churches are closed while cannabis stores are open.  The post garnered several hundred comments in just twenty-four hours and they were discouraging to read through.  One or two were supportive of the original comment, but the hundreds of others were mostly foul and offensive—and mostly blasphemous—rants against Christianity and the Church.  The really troubling thing about many of these “critiques”—if I can call them that—is that there was some truth to them.

Brothers and Sisters, there will always be people who stand opposed to Jesus and his Church no matter what we do.  But the mission of the Church is to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord and to live out our lives in full allegiance to him so that we bring honour to his name.  It’s not hard to see that we’ve been guilty, instead, of too often shaming the name of Jesus.  Jesus promised that we would be persecuted for the sake of his name, but we are, I think, more often not persecuted for the sake of his name or for standing up for his word, but mocked because we’re hypocrites, mocked because we’re jerks, and mocked because of our compromises.  We name Jesus, but we do shady business.  We name Jesus, but we treat people poorly.  We name Jesus, but we trust instead in money and politics.  And sometimes the people out there see it better than we do.

Friends, God is not mocked.  He will not allow his people to bring dishonour on his name forever.  The Church is the means he has chosen to spread the gospel.  The Church is the means he has chosen to bring honour to his name.  And if we do the opposite, as he did with Israel, he will discipline us to get our attention and to get us back on track.  As I said last week, I cannot but think that his warning and chastening hand is at work in the shuttering of churches across North America.  It could be worse.  What we’re experiencing is only temporary, although I think there will be some long-term ramifications.  But if we do not heed the Lord’s warning, worse could happen to us.  And yet, as I look around, I think most of us are trying to carry on, as best we can, as if it’s business as usual.

I rarely break from the lectionary or a book study to address current events in my preaching, but even I am stunned.  I listened to dozens of sermons this past week and almost no one I listened to addresses these issues.  Most carried on with whatever they were preaching before.  I watched service recordings of pastors that are typically enthusiastic and happy-clappy and they didn’t miss a beat, despite performing with their bands to empty churches, just as happy-clappy as ever.  It calls to mind Israel in the Second Temple period, after the people returned from their exile in Babylon.  They rebuilt Jerusalem and they rebuilt the temple.  They carried on with their sacrifices and offerings.  But the ark—the Lord’s throne—was gone.  The holy of holies was empty.  But they carried on anyway.  The high priest would enter with the blood on the Day of Atonement and sprinkle the blood where the ark had once been.  But at least the Jews of those days, as much as they carried on with what their forefathers had done, knew that something was horribly wrong.  They grieved the fact that the Lord’s presence had left them.  And many of them fasted and prayed, longing for the Lord’s return.

I’m not, these days, seeing that sort of grieving over the situation we now find ourselves in .  I sat in a clergy meeting on Friday and none of this was discussed.  Instead, the closure of churches is being treated as a technical hurdle.  Pastors and vestries are looking for ways to keep thing as much like business as usual as possible.  I’ve had countless articles come my way and their emphasis is pretty much on two things: How do we keep people’s attention when they can’t come to church and how do we keep their money flowing in.  It’s not that those things aren’t important in their own ways, but no one seems to be asking, “Is the Lord trying to get our attention?”

There’s a prayer in the liturgy for the Visitation of the Sick in the Prayer Book that, I think, sums up how we should be approaching these days we’re in.  It goes like this:

“Hear us, Almighty and most merciful God and Saviour; extend they accustomed goodness to this thy servant who is grieved with sickness.  Sanctify, we beseech thee, this they fatherly correction to him; that the sense of his weakness may add strength to his faith, and seriousness to his repentance: That, if it shall be thy good pleasure to restore him to his former health, he may lead the residue of his life in thy fear, and to thy glory…through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Grimke closed his sermon with these words:

“It is a good time for those of us who are Christians to examine ourselves to see exactly how it is with us, whether the foundation upon which we are building is a rock foundation—whether our faith is really resting upon Christ, the solid Rock, or not.  And I still feel that one important function of this epidemic will be lost if it fails to have that effect upon us, if it does not lead to careful heart-searching on our part.”[2]

Brothers and Sisters, we need to search our hearts.  We need to ask if we are bringing honour to the name of Jesus, or if because of our sins or half-hearted allegiance to him, we cause his name and that of his Church to be mocked by the world around us.  The Lord will not let us go on forever with half-hearted faithfulness.

But Isaiah reminds us that there is good news for the repentant.  Look at verses 18-20:

“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord:

though your sins are like scarlet,

         they shall be as white as snow;

though they are red like crimson,

         they shall become like wool.

If you are willing and obedient,

         you shall eat the good of the land;

but if you refuse and rebel,

         you shall be eaten by the sword;

         for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

 

Brothers and Sisters, we live on the other side of the promises of Isaiah.  In the Messiah Jesus, the Lord has returned to his people.  By the mystery of his holy Incarnation; by his holy Nativity and Circumcision; by his Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation…By his Agony and Bloody Sweat; by his Cross and Passion; by his precious Death and Burial; by his glorious Resurrection and Ascension; and by the Coming of the Holy Ghost he has washed our crimson sins away and made us white as snow.  And yet, as the people who have God in our midst, not in a tent, but by the Spirit and in our very selves, it is, I think, an even more grievous thing for us rebel against the Lord than it was for Israel.  I pray that we would take seriously our Lord’s “fatherly correction”.  I pray that, knowing the Lord’s promises, we would be moved to repentance and that our faith would be strengthened—that we would let go of everything else and give to Jesus our full and whole-hearted allegiance.  I pray that with the rest our live we would devote ourselves to the gospel work of bringing honour to the name of the Lord.

Let us pray:

O God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers have declared unto us, the noble works that thou didst in their days, and in the old time before them.  O Lord, arise, help us, and deliver us for thine honour.  Amen.

[1] Some Reflections Growing Out of the Recent Epidemic of Influenza that Afflicted Our City (1918), p. 9.

[2] Ibid., p. 11.

Good Lord, deliver us

Ezekiel 39:21-29 & St. John 6:1-14

by William Klock

One of the defining marks of modernity is our feeling of safety.  We each face our trials and our hardships, but our society, in general, is characterised by a feeling of safety and security.  Something bad may happen to a person here or a person there, but our society, our economy, our world will keep humming along no matter what.  We have control.  Even when something bad does happen on a large scale, it’s a given that things will bounce back.  Last week, as the markets crashed, people were saying, “Ignore your portfolio.  You’re in it for the long haul.  Don’t worry.  It’ll recover.”  And chances are it will eventually, but it highlights our general attitude.

And now a new virus has spread around the globe.  People are dying.  Whole countries are in lockdown or even under martial law, and the illusion of safety has been shattered.  People don’t know what to do.  They panic.  They hoard.  They lose hope and spiral into despair.  People are afraid.

We’ve put our faith in science, in medicine, in government, in the economy and every one of those things is being shaken to its core right now.  People are afraid.  And it’s not just people “out there”.  It’s people in here.  It’s Christians, too.  In good times we share Bible verses about “Fear not” on social media, but when everything starts to fall apart it’s not so easy.  And not surprisingly, I’ve been mulling over that this week.

We’ve started praying the Litany daily.  I knew to do that because it’s what the Church does in penitential seasons and in times of trouble.  And yet these days have given it new meaning for me.  We’ve never used it here at Living Word as part of the liturgy, but in our previous churches it was always the way the service was begun during Lent.  But I have to say that it didn’t mean that much.  It helped to establish the penitential nature of the season with its sombre tone, but that was about it.  It had something of an historical feel to it.  To sing words like, “From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us,” just seemed a little over-the-top.  “Plague”?  We’re not living in the Middle Ages anymore.  When I was in seminary, we’d jokingly—on occasion—add our own over-the-top deprecations.

Or think of the words of “Eternal Father, strong to save”.  Somehow everyone knows the words, but for the life of me, I can’t remember the last time I sang it in church.  “Eternal Father, strong to save…O hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea.”  It seems archaic in a day when the only time most of us have ever been at sea is on an enormous pleasure boat.  It was a great setup when we saw them singing it in the chapel service in the Titanic movie, but we all know that things just aren’t like that anymore.  We don’t sail little caravels around anymore.  Titanic was a fluke.  Our ancestors in ancient times—like the Hebrews—feared the sea.  It was that bit of creation that God never fully tamed.  But that’s okay, because we’ve finally done it for him.

Modernity has saved us.  Science.  Industry.  Democracy.  Capitalism.  They’ve saved us.  Through them we’ve taken control of the world.  We’ve become prosperous like no generation in history.  We’ve eradicated plague and polio and nearly every other disease that cut the lives of our grandparents short.  We’ve become so safe that we’ve actually had to downgrade our fears.  Where previous generations feared disease and death, famine and war, today we fear speech that hurts our feelings or challenges our thinking.  Even when tragedies do happen, modernity buffers us and lets us think we’re still in control.  People still die of cancer, but we know that science has a cure just around the corner.  Car accidents and plane crashes are flukes.  It’s not that we didn’t know what to do.  It’s just that we should have set the speed limit lower or that an engineer at Boeing made a mistake.  He’s been fired and we trust it won’t happen again.  And just so with this bug that has confronted us with fear like our generation has never known.  It’s a fluke.  Or many are developing wild conspiracy theories.  Why?  Because we’ve deceived ourselves into believing that our ship is unsinkable.  But we’re starting to wonder.  Is this our generation’s iceberg?  We’re starting to wonder if, just maybe, we’re not really in control after all—that modernity isn’t as unsinkable as we thought.

Our forefathers knew better.  They knew plague and pestilence and famine and war first hand.  Thomas Cranmer wrote the Litany in 1544 during King Henry’s war with Scotland and France.  The Litany is a testimony to the fact that our forefathers in the faith knew they were not the ones in control.  Only God is sovereign and so they cried out to him, “Good Lord, deliver us”.  Since then, we’ve all but forgotten.  It’s even infected our liturgy.  This week I went looking for the Collect for Times of Plague and Sickness.  Our Reformed Episcopal Prayer Book is supposed to be “traditional”, but it’s not there.  I went back to the 1928 Prayer Book.  Not there.  I looked in the old Canadian Prayer Book—the 1918 one—Ah!, there it was, but that wasn’t it.  It was a watered-down version.  I had to go all the way back to the 1662 Prayer Book to find the full version of that collect, the one I’ve been praying each evening at the end of the Litany.  The one that speaks of the Lord sending a plague on the obstinate Israelites when they rebelled against Moses and Aaron.  The one speaks of the plague the Lord sent on Israel in David’s day because of the King’s sin.  The one that calls on the people of its own day to repent and to plead the Lord, by his mercy, to withdraw his destroying angel.  It was a collect prayed in faith just four years after it was written, prayed by a desperate people during the 1666 London plague.  Prayed by people who knew that they had no control and could only cry out to the Lord for deliverance.

Brothers and Sisters, Scripture reminds over and over that God is sovereign.  Scripture calls us over and over to see his goodness and to see is faithfulness.  Right from the beginning.  He created this world and it was good.  It was we who rebelled, who broke it and introduced corruption.  It is our own fault that we were cast out of the presence of God.  Sin cannot live in the presence of the holy.  We, ourselves forged the very chains that enslave us, sin and death.  We are to blame, not God.  And yet he does not abandon us to sin and death.  He made clothes for Adam and Eve to cover their nakedness and he gave them a promise that he would, one day, set right what they had broken.  He called them to live in faith.

Scripture also reminds us that while God is not the author of suffering, sickness, and death, he often allows these things, uses them to get our attention, to call us back to faith when we have wandered, and to bring us to repentance.  To remind, in those times when we’ve forgotten our enslavement, when we’ve come to embrace making bricks without straw as if it were what we were created for, when we’ve forgotten that the Lord created us for more than bondage.  Think of Pharaoh, whom we read about in our study of Exodus not very long ago.  The Lord sent Moses to Pharaoh with the command, “Let my people go!”  Pharaoh responded, “I do not know this Lord.”  And so the Lord made himself known to Pharaoh, not once, not twice, not three time, but ten.  The king who thought himself a god, the king who thought he controlled the cosmos, was brought to his knees before God.

But even God’s own people rebelled.  They were the people who lived with the Lord in their midst.  They were the people enlisted by God to be part of his project to set this broken world to rights.  Of all the people on earth, they were the ones who knew his goodness and his faithfulness first hand.  And repeatedly they rebelled.  But over and over we see his patience with is people.  Israel’s history is a long story of human rebellion, of God calling them to repentance, of Israel refusing to listen, of God bringing calamity on them, and of the people finally repenting and returning to him.  Only to be repeated in the next generation…and the next and the next…until the whole nation was finally defeated by the Babylonians and carried off into foreign exile.  If they were not going to live as the people with God in their midst, God would take away his presence from them.  That’s what our Old Testament lesson from Ezekiel is about.  The people of Israel sat by the waters of Babylon and wept as they wondered what had happened.  And through the prophet Ezekiel the Lord answered them:

I will set my glory among the nations, and all the nations shall see my judgment that I have executed, and my hand that I have laid on them.  The house of Israel shall know that I am the Lord their God, from that day forward.  And the nations shall know that the house of Israel went into captivity for their iniquity, because they dealt so treacherously with me that I hid my face from them and gave them into the hand of their adversaries, and they all fell by the sword.  I dealt with them according to their uncleanness and their transgressions, and hid my face from them.  (Ezekiel 39:21-24)

This is the God that many people in the Church today have forgotten: the God who chastens his people in order to bring us to repentance, in order to bring us back to our calling and mission—to be the people with God in our midst, to be the people called to be part of God’s project to set this broken world to rights.  Brothers and Sisters, to be that people we must walk in faith.  We must give our whole allegiance to the Lord.  Think of Israel.  Israel never stopped worshipping the Lord.  But the people worshipped other gods in addition to the Lord.  They trusted in horses and chariots instead of trusting in the Lord.  They cheated the poor and abused widows and orphans.  Before the eyes of the watching nations, they made a mockery of the Lord.  As I’ve said these last few weeks in our study of Exodus, Israel was to be the people that brought honour and glory to the Lord’s name, but instead the nations looked at Israel’s faithlessness, her corruption, her idolatry and mockingly said, “Where is your God?”

As the Lord says here, his glory will be known amongst the nations…one way or another.  If the people he has made his own will not bring glory to his name, then his glory will be made known in judgement.  All the nations would know, the Lord says, that Israel went into captivity because of her iniquity.  Like Adam and Eve, sinful Israel was cast out of the presence of the holy.

I can’t help but think that God is chastening us now.  He’s been calling and calling and calling to us, getting louder and louder, ever more obvious, but we refuse to listen.  And now, in many places—in fact across the entire country in which I was born—he has allowed the civil magistrate to close our churches in response to this sickness sweeping across the globe.  And it’s almost that bad here in Canada.

Now, we aren’t old covenant Israel.  The Church is the people who live with God in our midst, not because we gather around a building housing his presence, but because he has placed his own Spirit within us.  But something vitally important has been taken away when we are no longer able to gather corporately as the people of God.  Our community is stifled and crippled.  And our witness and voice to the community is muffled.  Jesus told us not to hold our light high to lighten the darkness, but we’ve allowed our light to become dim.

Like the rest of our society, we’ve put our trust in science, in industry, in government, in the economy.  Don’t get me wrong.  Science and medicine, industry, good government, and sound economics are all gifts of God’s common grace.  They’ve benefitted us immensely and we should thank him for them.  But that’s just it.  We’ve allowed our science and industry to displace God.  We’ve put our trust not in him, but in the gifts he’s given us—to the point that that old collect for times of plague sounds archaic.  We look at our prosperity and we take the credit for it ourselves.  Look what we’ve done!  We claim it all as a triumph of the human spirit.  We applaud our children as they graduate high school, standing at podiums across the country, proudly proclaiming those awful words of Henley: “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”  That could be the motto of modernity.

This week as the world fell into fear a bunch of celebrities got together and thought they’d cheer us all up and restore our hope by singing John Lennon’s “Imagine”.  I’ve never understood its appeal.  It’s an ode to Nihilism.  “Imagine there’s no heaven…no hell…all the people living for today….nothing to kill or die for and no religion too.”  It’s a song that declares that there is no God, that there is nothing beyond today.  And that’s exactly why it pops up every time there’s a tragedy.  It assures people that Providence is a myth and that all we need to do to make things better is to work harder to control this world ourselves.

But, Brothers and Sisters, it’s not just the world.  The Church has been unashamed in buying into these false sources of security, too.  Like Israel, we’ve brought false gods into the Lord’s temple.  Like Israel, we’ve put our trust in horses in chariots—or in our case, science and industry and government.  Like Israel, we’ve cheated the poor, we’ve abused widows and orphans.  Like Israel, we’ve robbed God of his tithes.  We’ve increasingly built our churches and our liturgy with ourselves at the centre and we’ve gradually pushed God to the perimeter.

I tremble to make such a statement, but I believe the Lord is chastening us.  I tremble to say that, because it’s a frightening thing to consider.  I tremble to say it, because it’s no longer fashionable to say things like that.  And yet we see it in Scripture over and over and over.  And our forefathers, like those men who wrote the collect for times of plague and sickness in the Prayer Book back in 1662 saw it plain as day.  I think that if they saw our squeamishness, they’d simply ask, “Why would you think that God works differently today than he always has?”  And they would be right.  Brothers and Sisters, our light has become darkness and the Lord has put a basket over it.  He’s put a basket over it that the world will no longer look at the Church and say, “Where is there God?”  And he’s put a basket over it as a wake-up call to us to repent and to return to him.  We must let go of our false gods, of our sense of self-importance, of our false belief that we are in control.  We need to take hold of the Lord in faith with both hands and let our lights be kindled again by his merciful grace.

And, Friends, that’s the good news.  We could go on with the lesson from Ezekiel.  The Lord did go on to promise that he would restore his people after a time of chastening.  But I think we should turn over to our Gospel now.  St. John tells us the familiar story of the feeding of the five thousand.  John tells us that a large crowd was following Jesus.  They’d seen him healing the sick and they wanted to hear his message—they were hungry for the Word.  But it had been a long day, they were far from home, and they had nothing to eat.  Mark writes that Jesus saw this and that he had compassion on them.  He took the lunch of one boy, five loaves of bread and two fish—and you know the story—he blessed it and divided it and somehow this huge crowd the size of Comox had enough to eat and leftovers to spare—twelve basketfuls.

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus is the proof of God’s compassionate love for sinners.  By his incarnation, by his death, by his resurrection—by his great sacrifice—he has saved us.  Like the crowds that day who so desperately wanted to be near him and to hear what he had to say, if we will draw near to Jesus, we can be assured that he will have compassion on us too.  It doesn’t mean the way will be easy, but it does mean that the God who takes notice when something so small as a sparrow falls will be with us.

We may be living in the moment when the world’s faith in modernity is shaken to the core.  This is the time, now more than ever, that the world needs to hear once again the good news that Jesus, crucified and risen, is the world’s true Lord.  If we will but take hold of Jesus ourselves and let go of everything else, he will remove the basket and kindle our lights.  We are privileged right now to be able to gather here this morning.  Our presence here, our cars parked outside for the public to see, are a little bit of light that the Lord has allowed to escape from under the basket this morning.  R. R. Reno wrote this week in First Things, “When we worship, we join the Christian rebellion against the false lordship of the principalities and powers that claim to rule our lives, including sickness and death.  This does not mean carelessness about our health, nor does it mean indifference to the health of others.  Instead, it means that as Christians we have higher priorities.  Our end is in God….The massive shutdown of just about everything reflects the spirit of our age, which regards the prospect of death as the supreme evil to be avoided at all costs.  St. Paul observed that Christ came to free us from our bondage to sin and death.  This does not mean we will not die.  It means we need not live in fear.”

And so this morning we gather to bring glory to the Lord.  May these dark days drive us to repentance.  May these dark days renew our faith and cause us to hold tighter to Jesus than ever before.  And with our faith renewed, we pray for our friends, our families, our community and our world, lifting our prayers up to the one who is truly in control: Good Lord, deliver us.  Amen.

Fine Twined Linen and Blue and Purple and Scarlet Yarns

Exodus 26:1-37 & 36:8-38

by William Klock

My first job in high school was working as a draftsman for a residential architect.  Most of my time was spent drawing what we called “study plans” and architectural renderings of houses.  To this day I don’t understand why, but most people struggle to make sense of architectural blueprints—understanding floor plans and being able to see three-dimensional representation in their mind’s eye based on floor plans and elevations of the outside walls.  My job was to take a set of working drawings—the plans used by builders—and turn them into a simplified floorplan that anyone could understand and to draw a three-dimensional rendering of the finished house.  We sent these for publications in newspapers and home plan magazines and that sort of thing.

The last six months I was there we had a downturn in business.  The architect couldn’t afford to pay me $5 an hour to draw those fancy renderings and floorplans.  He was also looking for way to increase revenue, so he had the idea to photocopy our hundreds of house plans, reducing them down to 8 ½” x 11”  sheets that could be put in three-ring binders for the public to browse.  It was a good idea.  The only problem is that most people, again, have trouble reading working drawings.  So my job that last five or six months was to sit most days with a box of red ballpoint pens, colouring in the walls on the floorplans so that they’d be easier for people to read.  I went through a red Bic about once every four hours and, for what it’s worth, it did seem to help.

I was thinking about those days scribbling in floorplans so that people could make sense of them as I looked at Exodus 26.  That’s out passage today in our study of Exodus.  In Chapter 25 we saw the Lord’s instructions for the furnishing of the tabernacle: the ark, the mercy seat, the lampstand, and the table for the bread of the presence.  In Chapter 26 we read the Lord’s instructions for the tabernacle itself, for the tent inside which all of these furnishings would be placed.  And if the instructions for the furnishings were difficult to understand, the instructions for the tabernacle itself may be even more difficult.  It’s as if we were to translate several pages of blueprints into text.  There’s a ton of detail, but we’re still left scratching our heads as to exactly how it all works out.  And so, not surprisingly, there are a number of different interpretations out there as to how these details come together.  Once again we’re told that the Lord “showed” the plan to Moses, but we aren’t privy to that plan anymore.  The best explanation I’ve found is that of Richard Elliott Freedman,[1] but I don’t think there’s any reason to take a dogmatic stance on how the frames and curtains of the tabernacle were arranged.  I’ll do the best I can here, but at the end of the day it comes to this: the tabernacle was a tent.  It was a glorious tent that housed the presence of the Lord, but it was tent.  Think about that as we read these details.  The Israelites were, at the time, basically desert nomads on their way to a new home and the Lord met them and dwelled with them where they were at.  They were living in tents and so he came to live in their midst in a tent of his own.  The Lord meets his people where they’re at.  As I read these verses I can help but think of the prologue to St. John’s Gospel.  “The word became flesh and dwelt—tabernacled—amongst us.”  Jesus took our nature upon himself that he might dwell in the midst of his people and set them free from their bondage to sin and death.  The tabernacle shows us something about the character of God, about how he deals graciously with his people, and in that it points us ultimately to Jesus.  Now, let’s look at Exodus 26.

“Moreover, you shall make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twined linen and blue and purple and scarlet yarns; you shall make them with cherubim skillfully worked into them.  The length of each curtain shall be twenty-eight cubits, and the breadth of each curtain four cubits; all the curtains shall be the same size.  Five curtains shall be coupled to one another, and the other five curtains shall be coupled to one another.  And you shall make loops of blue on the edge of the outermost curtain in the first set.  Likewise you shall make loops on the edge of the outermost curtain in the second set.  Fifty loops you shall make on the one curtain, and fifty loops you shall make on the edge of the curtain that is in the second set; the loops shall be opposite one another.  And you shall make fifty clasps of gold, and couple the curtains one to the other with the clasps, so that the tabernacle may be a single whole. (Exodus 26:1-6)

There are four main parts to this tent.  The instructions begin with the tabernacle itself, the mishkan in Hebrew.  The fine linen and expensive dyed yarns given by the people were to be woven into these great cloths.  They were woven in ten sections about 2 metres wide and 14 metres long.  A design of cherubim was to be woven into them.  As with the cherubim on the mercy seat, we don’t know exactly what they looked like, but I expect they had a fierce appearance.  Remember that it was cherubim that were placed by the Lord to guard the entrance to the garden.  Here they cover the walls of the tent, surrounding the place of the Lord’s presence—the Lord’s heavenly court.

Once made, these sections of fabric were sewn together, five in one panel and five in another.  And down the middle, these two great panels were joined together with fifty golden rings.  That they had to be made in sections and that even when sewn together, the tabernacle had to be left in two sections highlights how heavy it was.  But what was to be done with this great piece of beautiful woven cloth?  Let’s jump down to verses 15-16:

“You shall make upright frames for the tabernacle of acacia wood. Ten cubits shall be the length of a frame, and a cubit and a half the breadth of each frame.

 

There were no aluminium poles with shock-cords in the Second Millennium b.c.  This wasn’t a dome tent that pops up in a few minutes.  The skeleton of the tabernacle was a series of frames made of that rot-resistant acacia wood and covered in gold.  The Hebrew words suggests that they were sort of trellis-like rather than solid, making them lighter and easier to carry and transport.  They were a little over a half-metre wide and about five metres tall.  There were twenty per side and six for the back with two more to reinforce the corners.  They were held together with horizontal bars, again made of acacia wood and overlaid with gold.  And each frame had two tenon or legs that were set in heavy silver sockets.  Imagine something like a concrete footing—the sort you might use under your support beams when building a deck—but made of solid silver.

These wooden frames were arranged, again, twenty on the north side and twenty on the south and six forming the back wall.  I’m of the opinion that they overlapped for greater structural support.  So they made an enclosure about 10 metres or 30 feet long and about 4 metres or 12 feet wide and open at the east end.  The fabric of the tabernacle, the two pieces, were laid one top of the other over the frame in a double thickness.  At 14 metres wide, it would drape down both sides to the ground and fold over to fully cover the outside of the west wall as well.  The golden rings used to hold the two large sections of cloth together ran around the entrance.

To give you some perspective, this tent would have easily fit in our church here.  It was about the same length as our nave.  It was about as wide as our centre section of pews and the two aisles.  And the two tie rods the run across our vault are just about 5 metres high, which is how tall the tabernacle was.  As beautiful and as glorious as it was, it was pretty small in comparison to a modern church building—and our building is pretty small by modern standards.  But, remember, the tabernacle wasn’t a church.  It was where the people gathered to worship, but only the priests ever entered into it and only ever a few at a time.  It was the place of the Lord’s presence, the tent that housed his throne.  As much as the Lord was in the midst of his people, they had to keep a respectful distance from the holy.

Look now at verses 7-8:

“You shall also make curtains of goats’ hair for a tent over the tabernacle; eleven curtains shall you make. The length of each curtain shall be thirty cubits, and the breadth of each curtain four cubits. The eleven curtains shall be the same size.

 

I said there were four main components to the tabernacle.  The first was the tabernacle, the mishkan, itself, the great cloth tent embroidered with cherubim.  The second component was the support structure composed of gold-over-wood frames or trellises.  The third is the ohel.  That’s simply the common Hebrew word for “tent”.  I’ve forgotten lots of Hebrew vocabulary over the years, but ohel is not one of them.  My professor had a running joke that he liked to tell over and over…and over.  He didn’t like camping, but his wife loved it and he was always joking that the Hebrews came up with this word, because “Oh hell!” was the natural response to the news that they’d be camping in tents in the wilderness.  (There, now you know a Hebrew word you probably won’t forget either.)

So the ohel or tent was a great, heavy covering for the tabernacle itself made of woven goat hair.  Like the tabernacle, it was woven in eleven sections that were later sewn together into two big panels.  Like the panels of the tabernacle, these were joined together with fifty rings, but in this case bronze instead of gold.  The whole thing was doubled over with the rings surrounding the entrance and the rest covering the tabernacle and draping over the sides and back.

Both the linen and yarns and the goat skins were the common materials of the day for constructing tents.  The inner tent made of linen and other fine cloths and the outside covered with tent of black cloth made of woven goat hair to keep the weather off.  The cherubim, the gold and bronze rings, the silver sockets for the frames and the gold overlay make this much more than ordinary tent, but it is still, nevertheless, a tent.

Verse 14 gives instructions for two more layers to be placed on top of the protective goat-hair tent:

And you shall make for the tent a covering of tanned rams’ skins and a covering of goatskins on top.

 

I’m not sure why the ESV does what it does at this point.  The Hebrew notes that the covering of rams’ skin is to be dyed red.  I’m not sure how they got “tanned” from that.  Not only do we have evidence of other Ancient Near Eastern peoples constructing tents as religious sanctuaries, we also have evidence of those tents being covered with skins that were dyed red.  The Kaaba in Mecca in pre-Islamic times being just one example.  Red dye was very expensive and it seems to have been used to mark out holy places.  The Hebrew word used for the covering over the top of that is a rare one and its meaning isn’t certain.  The equivalent Arabic word refers to dolphins or porpoises.  It might refer to a fine leather from Egypt, which is in the realm of possibility when we consider all the treasures they gave to the Israelites.  The ESV, however, seems to read the Hebrew word as one simply meaning covering, in which case this might simply be a covering used to protect all the components of the tabernacle when it was being transported.  If they’re right, this would leave the red rams’ skin covering as the outer layer, making it very distinctive.

So that’s the tabernacle and the outer tent that covered it.  Let’s go inside and look at verses 31-35:

“And you shall make a veil of blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen. It shall be made with cherubim skillfully worked into it.  And you shall hang it on four pillars of acacia overlaid with gold, with hooks of gold, on four bases of silver.  And you shall hang the veil from the clasps, and bring the ark of the testimony in there within the veil. And the veil shall separate for you the Holy Place from the Most Holy.  You shall put the mercy seat on the ark of the testimony in the Most Holy Place.  And you shall set the table outside the veil, and the lampstand on the south side of the tabernacle opposite the table, and you shall put the table on the north side.

 

This is the fourth and, maybe, most important component of the tabernacle, the veil or paroket in Hebrew.  As the Hebrew language evolved, this came to be understood as a curtain that hung in front of the ark of the covenant, but that idea doesn’t fit very well with the text here which says that it is to hang over the ark.  It’s better, I think, to see the veil as a pavilion, supported by the four pillars, covering the ark and separating it from the rest of the tabernacle.  I think this makes more senses in that it doesn’t cover over the cherubim tapestries on either the tabernacle itself or the veil.  So cherubim surround the entire tabernacle, but here in the holies of holies sits the Lord’s throne, surrounded above and around with another cohort of angels.

It’s not clear if the fabric for the veil is any different than the fabric of the tabernacle.  Both are fine linen and dyed yarns and both are embroidered with cherubim.  The veil is supported by four wooden pillars overlaid with gold.  And like the frames for the tabernacle, these pillars are set in silver supports.  The veil serves, again, as a pavilion for the ark within the tabernacle.  Here we’re told the placement of the furnishings we read about last week.  The table for the bread of the presence is to stand outside the veil and along the north wall of the tabernacle and opposite, on the south wall, the lampstand is to be placed.  Later we’ll learn about the altar of incense, which was placed in front of the veil.  The veil marks out the holy of holies, the inner sanctum.  This is the Lord’s throne room, so to speak.

Finally, in verses 36-38 we read of the screen to placed at the entrance of the tabernacle:

“You shall make a screen for the entrance of the tent, of blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen, embroidered with needlework.  And you shall make for the screen five pillars of acacia, and overlay them with gold. Their hooks shall be of gold, and you shall cast five bases of bronze for them.

The screen is similar to the curtains that compose the tabernacle and the veil, but the cherubim are absent because this is the entrance.  The entrance is flanked by five wooden pillars, again overlaid with gold.  They too are set in precious support sockets, but this time of bronze, not silver.  Do you see how, as you moved from the entrance, through the holy place, and approached the holy of holies the materials of the tabernacle become more precious?  The inner tent is fine linen embroidered with cherubim and held together with gold rings.  The outer layer is made of woven goat hair and held together with bronze rings.  The frames of the tabernacle are held by sockets of silver, but the outer entrance pillars are set in sockets of bronze.  As the priests moved from the outer enclosure into the tabernacle they were confronted, even with the constructions materials, by the presence of the holy.

In the next chapter we’ll get a look at the instructions for the outer court of the tabernacle and the altar that was there.  But so far we’ve seen the Lord’s plan for the ark and mercy seat—his throne, the place where his presence sat in the midst of his people—and the other furnishings of the tabernacle, again all focuses on the fact that he is the God who dwells with his people.  And now we’ve seen his plan for the tent that would house his throne room and the space where his priests would attend him.

If we were to jump to Exodus 36, just as with the last part about the tabernacle furnishings, we’d see these details repeated almost word for word, but whereas the Lord’s instructions are structured around seven speeches introduced by “The Lord said”, in those later chapters the details of each part of the tabernacle and its furnishings are introduced by the words “the craftsman and the workmen made”.  It’s a reminder of the Creation and of God’s creative word.  In the beginning the Lord spoke and by the power of his word, his creation came into being.  It’s interesting that we see the same theme in the story of Noah’s ark.  Judgement was coming and to save a remnant of the human race, the Lord spoke to Noah.  The Lord gave him detailed instructions for an ark, and Noah made it just as the Lord had said.  And now, once again, as the Lord calls together a people through whom he will bring salvation to the world, he speaks and they obediently make.  The Lord’s creative work calling the tabernacle into existence.

And the tabernacle becomes a microcosm of Creation.  If Israel is to be the people who live with the Lord in their midst, a people who witness to the world in some sense what creation and humanity set to rights and ordered by the Lord looks like, here in the midst of that people we see it again.  The tabernacle, the Lord’s sanctuary, is built according to his design, it sits in the midst of his people, it houses his throne.  The tabernacle said, not just to Israel, but to the watching nations, that this is the place where the Lord is sovereign, the reign of God is visible, and we see it radiating out to the people.  As we’ll see later, the twelve tribes were to set up their camps in an orderly fashion and according to a specific pattern, arranged around the tabernacle.  It stood at the centre.  And it gives a wonderful visual of the reign of God.  The priests coming and going, in and out of the sanctuary, performing the duties the Lord had given them, attending to his throne room in an orderly fashion.  But it’s not just the priests who actually go into the tabernacle.  The people, Israel, go about their lives and their business with the Lord in the centre of the camp.  Everything they do is governed by the order-establishing torah the Lord had given them.

It’s not without reason that the day on which the tabernacle was dedicated became Israel’s New Year’s Day.  The Lord was beginning the work of new creation with the creation of this people, chosen and called and set apart to be his own and to be light to the nations.  The scholarly consensus these days seems to be that Genesis 1 was probably something of a liturgical text written to be used in the dedication of the tabernacle, driving home this work of new creation through which the Lord would begin to set his creation and his people to rights.

Here in this small and lonely place in the wilderness, the Lord’s rule was established and it speaks to his plans for the rest of the world: the priests going to and from his throne, mediating his presence to Israel, but then Israel mediating his presence from there out to the nations.  They are a kingdom of priests.

And so there’s a connection between what we see here in Exodus and the life we live in Jesus.  The presence of God, as I said last week, is no longer restricted to a tent into which no one is allowed.  Through Jesus, through his redemptive death on the cross, the veil has been torn and all are invited into the presence of the Lord.  But, too, through Jesus, he has made his very people his tabernacle, filling us with his own Spirit.  The church has now become the microcosm of creation set to rights, from here we go out into the world, to be families, to go to school, to our jobs, to interact with friends and neighbours, and like Israel, as we do so, we carry the light of God’s new creation out into the world to make known the saving rule of the Lord.

Let’s pray: Gracious Father, we thank you for the work of new creation that are doing in this world.  We have rebelled against you and made a mess of your world, but through Jesus you have forgiven us and made us your people, through your Spirit you have regenerated our hearts and renewed our minds.  Lord, you have spoken, give us the grace to be obedient to your word as we live as your people and proclaim your good news to the world.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

[1] “Tabernacle” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), VI.292-300.

They Shall Make an Ark

Exodus 25:10-40 & 37:1-24

By William Klock 

We’ve walked with Israel out of Egypt, into the wilderness, and as the Lord met them at Mt. Sinai.  We’ve read how the Lord established a covenant with Israel.  He has named Israel his son and has declared, “I will be your God and you will be my people.”  He has promised to take them to a land he has claimed for himself and he has promised to live—to tabernacle—in their midst.  This is how they will be a blessing, a light, a revelation to the Gentiles—as Simeon put it that day in the temple when he met the infant Jesus, come to fulfil Israel’s mission to the world.

And that’s the heart to of Exodus.  I will be your God and you will be my people.  The first part of Exodus tells us the story of how this all happened.  The second half of Exodus tells us what life as the community with the Lord in its midst looks like.  This is why Exodus doesn’t climax with the Red Sea and the drowning of Pharaoh’s army.  That’s where we might end the story.  But that’s really just the beginning.  No, the heart of Exodus is here in the second half, the part where we read about the giving of the torah and the building of the tabernacle.  The covenant is the centre and here’s what the covenant looks like.  The tabernacle is the dwelling place of the Lord.  That’s literally what “tabernacle” means—to dwell, to live.  The Lord gives these instructions to Moses so that the people can build him a dwelling.  We’re not quite there yet.  We’ll be looking at the rest of Exodus 25 today, which is focused on the furnishings in the heart of the tabernacle: the ark of the covenant, the mercy seat, the table for the bread of the presence, and the lampstand.  But the instructions the Lord gives Moses start with these furnishings, particularly with the ark and the mercy seat, because they serve as the footstool, the place where the presence of the Lord will be enthroned.  The whole tabernacle and everything about it will revolve around his enthroned presence.

I think, too, this is the context we need to remember for the torah.  We get ourselves into all sorts of trouble when we take the torah out of this context of Israel’s covenant with the Lord.  The point of the covenant was that the Lord would dwell in the midst of his people.  For their part, the people were to bring honour to the Lord’s name.  Israel was to be, in a sense, a microcosm of Creation set to rights.  A place for the nations to see humanity living as it was meant to in fellowship with our Creator.  This was the purpose of the torah—it was Israel’s end of the covenant.  It came with a promise of the Lord’s presence in return for Israel’s obedience, but it also came with a promise of the Lord’s departure and of Israel’s exile from the Lord’s land should she fail, should she bring dishonour on the Lord’s name and reputation.

Lord willing, we’ll begin our look at the tabernacle structure itself next week.  Today, however, we’ll make our way into the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, to see what was there and then to the outer, holy place.  Look with me at Exodus 25:10-16

“They shall make an ark of acacia wood.  Two cubits and a half shall be its length, a cubit and a half its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height.  You shall overlay it with pure gold, inside and outside shall you overlay it, and you shall make on it a molding of gold around it.  You shall cast four rings of gold for it and put them on its four feet, two rings on the one side of it, and two rings on the other side of it.  You shall make poles of acacia wood and overlay them with gold.  And you shall put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark to carry the ark by them.  The poles shall remain in the rings of the ark; they shall not be taken from it.  And you shall put into the ark the testimony that I shall give you.

 

Jumping ahead to Exodus 37:1 we’re told that Bezalel, the man whom the Spirit inspired or empowered to bring Moses’ vision of the tabernacle to life, made the ark just as the Lord’s instructions explained.  The description of the ark is reproduced there nearly word for word.  The same goes for Bezalel’s making of the other items we’ll look at here: the mercy seat, the table, and the lampstand.

So the ark is basically a box about three-and-a-half feet long and two-and-a-half feet wide and high.  A cubit was the distance from the elbow to the end of the middle finger.  Of course, we don’t know whose elbow to middle finger, so our translation of these measurements isn’t precise.  But for simplicity sake, you can think of a cubit as something like 18” or a half a metre.  The box was made of acacia wood.  Remember last week, in the first part of the chapter, the Lord told Moses to ask the people for all these precious items that would be used to build the tabernacle and its furnishing.  Well, acacia wood—which is known for its resistance to rot and decay—was use to underlay the gold on some of the tabernacle’s furnishings.  So the ark was a wooden box, overlaid with sheets of gold inside and out.  We’re not sure—it depends on how we read the text—but it seems that it had a foot at each corner so that it didn’t sit directly on the ground.  And at each corner there was a ring.  Again, it’s not clear whether these rings were at the top corners or at the bottom, sort of attached to the feet—if there were feet.  But the key was that the rings were used for carrying the ark.  Wooden poles, covered in gold, were inserted through the rings and used to lift and carry the ark.  No one was allowed to touch it.  Once the poles were put in place, they were never removed.

You’ll remember that story of Uzzah in 2 Samuel 6.  David commanded the ark to be brought to Jerusalem.  Instead of carrying it with the poles as the Lord had commanded, David’s men put in on an ox-cart.  At one point, one of the oxen stumbled, the cart tipped, and the ark started to slide into the mud.  Uzzah reach out to steady the ark and was instantaneously struck dead.  It’s a frightening story.  First, if they’d obeyed the Lord’s command and carried the ark as he had said, this wouldn’t have happened.  But, too, it was a reminder of the holiness of God and the fact that sinful humans cannot survive a direct encounter with the holy.

But what was the purpose of the ark?  The Lord says, in verse 16, that the testimony he was going to give Moses was to be placed in the ark.  These are the stone tablets written by God’s own hand.  What’s the significance of that, especially when we consider that no one would have access to the ark once the tabernacle was built and the ark was inside.  Only the high priest could enter the holy of holies—the inner sanctum of the tabernacle that contained only the ark—and even then he only went in once a year.

Well, we’re told elsewhere that the ark is the Lord’s footstool.  When David was preparing to build a permanent temple for the Lord, he said to the people, “I had it in my heart to build a house of rest for the ark of the covenant of the Lord and for the footstool of our God” (1 Chron 28:2).  A number of the psalms speak of bowing before the Lord’s footstool with pretty clear reference to the ark.  So the testimony of the covenant is placed in this golden box, under the Lord’s feet.  This was a common thing for kings to do.  They would establish covenants and then place the terms of those covenants in their temples, under the feet of their gods.  The Lord takes his covenant with his people seriously, is what this says.  God’s people may be fickle, but the Lord is always and eternally faithful.  He keeps his promises.

But when we think of the ark of the covenant, the box itself probably isn’t what we think of first.  We think of the cover, what the ESV calls the “mercy seat”.  This is what made the ark so distinctive.  Look at verses 17-22:

“You shall make a mercy seat of pure gold.  Two cubits and a half shall be its length, and a cubit and a half its breadth.  And you shall make two cherubim of gold; of hammered work shall you make them, on the two ends of the mercy seat.  Make one cherub on the one end, and one cherub on the other end. Of one piece with the mercy seat shall you make the cherubim on its two ends.  The cherubim shall spread out their wings above, overshadowing the mercy seat with their wings, their faces one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubim be.  And you shall put the mercy seat on the top of the ark, and in the ark you shall put the testimony that I shall give you.  There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you about all that I will give you in commandment for the people of Israel.

 

The mercy seat is the lid covering the golden box.  It’s the same width and depth.  Unlike the ark, the mercy seat is made of hammered gold, presumably one piece.  I imagine it took quite some skill to make such a thing.  You’ve all seen pictures of the ark, I’m sure, maybe in your Bibles or you’ve seen Raiders of the Lost Ark.  The main feature of the mercy seat was these two golden cherubim, these two golden angelic figures with their wings outstretched over the ark.  It’s hard to say exactly what this looked like.  At least in terms of the style of the artwork, it mostly likely had a distinctly Egyptian look to it.  These weren’t the cute, fat little baby cherubs of a lot of Christian artwork.  The idea of the cherub was pretty common across the Ancient Near East.  They were usually depicted as some kind of human-animal hybrid, like the sphynx in Egypt.

The Jewish historian, Josephus, writes centuries later that no description of the cherubim had been preserved.[1]  The consensus is that they were probably human in form.  They may have had four faces each as Ezekiel describes the cherubim in his vision—each with the face of a human, an ox, a lion, and an eagle.  But the most prominent feature of the cherubim was their outstretched wings covering the ark.  If the box itself was the Lord’s footstool, the mercy seat was his throne, with two angels standing guard, just as they did at the entrance to the garden.  Again, no sinner may approach the holy and live.  When the work of building the tabernacle and its furnishings was complete, the cloud representing the Lord’s glory descended into the most holy place to rest on the mercy seat, enthroned there.  This was the place of the Lord’s presence in the midst of his people.

But why was it called the “mercy seat”?  “Atonement seat” might be the best translation of the Hebrew, because it was here that the high priest made annual atonement for the sins of the people.  The day of atonement was sort an annual reset button for Israel.  Despite their best efforts, everyone sinned.  On the day of atonement the high priest would sacrifice a bull and a goat.  Going alone into the presence of the ark, he would sprinkle the blood, first of the bull and then of the goat, on the mercy or atonement seat to make atonement for himself, for his fellow priests, and for the people.  I’ve often wondered what that was like.  There was something awesome about it simply because of the fact that it meant entering that most holy place—the inner sanctum, off limits even to the high priest except on that one day of the year.  Not knowing exactly what the ark looked like, it’s hard to picture the scene, but then consider that in the days of the tabernacle and the first temple, the ark was the second most awe-inspiring thing in the room.  Resting under the wings of the cherubim was the shekinah, the cloud of glory, the Lord’s visible presence.  I can’t even begin to picture what that looked like.  But after lengthy personal preparation to cleanse himself, the high priest would enter that awesome presence to sprinkle the blood of the sacrifices, to make atonement for his people.  This is why in Greek and Latin it was called the “mercy seat”.  It was here that atonement was made for a sinful people so that the Lord could continue to dwell, to tabernacle in their midst.  It was here that the Lord’s mercy towards sinners was sought.  And it was here that assurance of his mercy was found.  Later, a jar of manna, another of incense, and Aaron’s rod that budded were placed before the ark as reminders of the Lord’s past faithfulness to Israel.  They were token of the love and mercy he had for his people.

Now, the ark and the mercy seat with its poles for carrying were the only objects in the most holy place.  The outer sanctum, if you will, of the tabernacle, the holy place, lay on the other side of a heavy curtain.  There were three objects in the holy place: the table for the bread of the presence, the altar of incense, and the lampstand.  The instructions for the altar of incense are given in Chapter 30 and at this point I can’t tell you why.  The instructions for the table and the lampstand, however, are here in Chapter 25.

“You shall make a table of acacia wood.  Two cubits shall be its length, a cubit its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height.  You shall overlay it with pure gold and make a molding of gold around it.  And you shall make a rim around it a handbreadth wide, and a molding of gold around the rim.  And you shall make for it four rings of gold, and fasten the rings to the four corners at its four legs.  Close to the frame the rings shall lie, as holders for the poles to carry the table.  You shall make the poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with gold, and the table shall be carried with these.  And you shall make its plates and dishes for incense, and its flagons and bowls with which to pour drink offerings; you shall make them of pure gold.  And you shall set the bread of the Presence on the table before me regularly.  (Exodus 25:23-30)

So, like the ark, the table was made of acacia wood and covered with gold.  It had similar rings and poles used for carrying it.  There were a number of gold vessels associated with the table: there were flagons, probably used for pouring out drink offerings and bowls, probably used for baking the bread.  The bread is the key here.  The ESV calls it the “bread of the presence”.  The King James called it “shewbread”.  The Hebrew word used could also have the sense of “face”.  The idea here is that this bread was placed in the presence of the Lord, just outside the most holy place.  There were twelve loaves laid out on the table in two rows of six.  The instructions are given in Leviticus 24.  Each week fresh loaves were baked and placed on the table on the Sabbath.  The loaves of the previous week were eaten by the priests.  The symbolism is never explained.  Presumably it was obvious to the Israelites, but that’s not so much the case for us.  The only obvious thing is that the twelve loaves represented the twelve tribes of Israel.  Many down through the years attached messianic significance to the bread, but I can’t help making the connection between this table, spread with bread for the people of Israel and flagons of wine, with the meal the elders of Israel ate before the Lord on Mt. Sinai.  I could be wrong, but this really seems to me to be another reminder of the Lord’s covenant with his people.  Like the bread of the presence, perpetually on the table just outside the place of the Lord’s presence, Israel lives encamped around the tabernacle—the people with the Lord in her midst.

The final bit of tabernacle furniture here is the lampstand.  Look at verses 31-40:

“You shall make a lampstand of pure gold.  The lampstand shall be made of hammered work: its base, its stem, its cups, its calyxes, and its flowers shall be of one piece with it.  And there shall be six branches going out of its sides, three branches of the lampstand out of one side of it and three branches of the lampstand out of the other side of it; three cups made like almond blossoms, each with calyx and flower, on one branch, and three cups made like almond blossoms, each with calyx and flower, on the other branch—so for the six branches going out of the lampstand.  And on the lampstand itself there shall be four cups made like almond blossoms, with their calyxes and flowers, and a calyx of one piece with it under each pair of the six branches going out from the lampstand.  Their calyxes and their branches shall be of one piece with it, the whole of it a single piece of hammered work of pure gold.  You shall make seven lamps for it. And the lamps shall be set up so as to give light on the space in front of it.  Its tongs and their trays shall be of pure gold.  It shall be made, with all these utensils, out of a talent of pure gold.  And see that you make them after the pattern for them, which is being shown you on the mountain.

 

I bet I lost you somewhere in there.  Even Bible scholars aren’t sure exactly what’s being described here.  We have a pretty good idea of what the lampstand from Herod’s temple looked like, because an image of it is engraved on the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum, celebrating his victory over the Jews.  But that doesn’t help us much with what the original lampstand in the tabernacle looked like.  Like the mercy seat, it was made of a solid piece of beaten gold weighing around 40-50 kilograms.  That, itself, leaves many scholars stumped.  The basic idea is a seven-armed lampstand—this is the basis for the modern Jewish menorah.  At the top of each arm an oil-burning lamp was set, either ceramic or metal.  It’s likely the style of it was something like the style of Egyptian metalwork of the time.  And the description seems to suggest that the lampstand was styled after an almond tree—one of the first plants to bloom every spring in Palestine.

Apparently, even Moses struggled to grasp exactly what these furnishing for the tabernacle were to look like.  All we have left to us are these descriptions that are detailed, but still frustratingly vague.  The Lord, however, showed Moses some kind of specific pattern.  It may have been a vision.  John Walton argues that some kind of technical diagrams may have been carved on the stone tablets with the rest of the torah.[2]  Whatever the case, the details about what the priests are to do with the lampstand are given in Leviticus 24.  They are to tend the lamps “from evening until morning, continually” (24:3).

But what’s the significance?  It’s never clearly spelled out in the text, but the most convincing explanation I’ve come across is one put forth by Professor Gregory Beale at Westminster Seminary.  I think he’s correct—and we don’t have time this morning to get into all the details—that the lampstand represented both the tree of life in the garden and Israel’s calling to be the light of the world.  I think this is confirmed when we look at the lampstand in John’s visions in Revelation.  The Ephesians are called to overcome by being God’s faithful lampstand of witness and promised that if they do, he will restore their access to the tree of life in paradise.  If John’s word to the Ephesian Christians has anything to say about the lampstand in the tabernacle, then that lampstand represents the Lord’s presence in the midst of Israel, a presence that she was called to witness and to mediate to the nations around her.[3]

And I think that gets at what we can learn from all of this.  The tabernacle, its furnishings, Israel’s priesthood, the sacrificial system—the whole of the torah—can often seem weird and esoteric and irrelevant.  As I said, all of this was grounded in Israel’s covenant with the Lord.  Jesus has established a new covenant.  He’s changed everything.  So how is any of this relevant to us.  Well, I think the key lies in the Lord’s purpose for that covenant.  The covenant established a people who lived with the Lord in their midst and as that people, Israel’s mission was to live communally in such a way that she brought glory and honour to the Lord’s name.  Think of a well-behaved child who brings praise to his parents.  Think of that child as he gets older, taking advantage of the love and care his parents have given him and excelling in life—and bringing honour back on his parents in doing so.  Perhaps going on to bring honour to his parents in his choice of a wife, in going on to raise his own godly children, and maybe growing old and becoming a fountain of sage wisdom.  And all the while everyone says, “It began with his parents and how they raised him.”  He brings honour and glory to his parents.  The Lord’s expectations of Israel—his son—were something like that.  Through Israel, the nations would see the Lord and be moved to give him glory and honour and praise and one day even to come and bow at his feet.  This is the mission of the people of God.

And can you see how that mission is carried on in the new covenant that Jesus has established?  Israel failed in her mission, but Jesus picked it up and through his death and resurrection, Jesus created a new people.  In fulfilment of what the Lord had promised through the prophets, Jesus gave this new covenant people a distinguishing mark, yet a mark that has continuity with old covenant.  As the old Israel was the people who lived with the Lord in her midst, so the new Israel is the people who live with the Lord in their—in our—midst.  But whereas the Lord’s presence in the midst of the old Israel was found in the inner sanctum of the tabernacle where only the high priest could go but once a year.  Where he could only approach after making blood sacrifices for the atonement of the people, Jesus has baptised his new covenant people in the very Spirit of God.  On the cross he made atonement for sin once and for all, he has become the mercy seat of the new covenant, he has drawn us near—into the holy of holies itself—and in the Spirit has indwelt the very hearts of his people.

Brothers and Sisters, as the presence of the Lord tabernacling in the centre of Israel’s camp, was the defining feature of the people of God in the old covenant, a presence reminding them of his mercy and of his calling them to bring honour and glory to his name, the Spirit of God indwelling our hearts is the defining feature of the Lord’s new covenant with us.  The gift of the Spirit is not a second blessing, it’s not something we either earn or have to ask for in some post-conversion experience.  It can’t be and to make it so horribly undermines the new covenant itself that the Lord has promised and that Jesus has inaugruted.  The gift of the Spirit is what makes the people of God the people of God.  It’s what transforms our hearts and moves them to faith and to trust in Jesus as both the one who gave his life as a sacrifice for our sins and who, by his resurrection, has been declared the world’s true Lord.  It’s the gift of the Spirit, indwelling us, that turns the desires of our hearts to God, giving us love for him and a desire to bring him honour and glory as we walk in holiness and witness the death and resurrection and lordship of Jesus to the world around us.  In this new covenant, Jesus has declared us to be the Lord’s temple—not a tent or a building to house the Lord’s presence, but a people—and it is the gift of the Spirit—God dwelling, God tabernacling not just with us, but in us—that makes us the Lord’s temple.

Brothers and Sisters, this is what Exodus reminds us of.  It reminds us what it means to be the people of God.  It reminds us that the people of God are those called to live with him in their midst.  It reminds us that the people of God are those who have known and experienced his faithfulness and his mercy and who are therefore called to bring honour and glory to his name.  That mission hasn’t changed.  But Exodus also reminds us of what has changed.  It reminds us that Jesus is our mercy seat.  He is God with us, God become one of us, the God who came into our midst to offer himself as a once and for all atonement for our sins.  In that he draws us nearer than even the high priest was drawn near.  Jesus pours the very Spirit of God into our hearts and we, his people, become his temple.  We are the place where his presence dwells in the midst of the world.  We are his light.  Let us be faithful in bringing honour and glory to his name.

Let’s pray: Merciful Father, as we think on the glory of the tabernacle built in the days of Moses and the awesome manifestation of your presence in it, give us a greater sense of just what you have done for us in Jesus and the Spirit. As awesome as the tabernacle was, you have done something far greater in us.  Give us the grace to appreciate that and move or hearts to gratitude that we might be faithful in carrying out the mission you’ve not only given us, but that you’ve empowered us to do.  Through Jesus we pray. Amen.

[1] Ant. Jud. viii.3.3.

[2] The Lost World of the Torah (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2019), pp. 116-117.

[3] The Temple and the Church’s Mission (Leister: Apollos, 2004), p. 325.