200105 Sermon on Genesis 46:1-7 (Christmas 2) January 5, 2020 I think one of the attributes of the Scriptures that indicate its truthfulness is the way that the history of God’s people has not been edited to “clean it up.” There is a natural compulsion in all of us to want to be liked and highly esteemed. Toward that end, we put our best foot forward. If company is coming, then we clean the house. The posts that we put on Facebook are not about our failures. We only put the good and respectable stuff on there—the stuff that will make people think highly of us.We might do the same thing about our family history. We, understandably, might be embarrassed about someone in our family being shamefully exposed. We might not want to admit that our family has been poor or poorly educated. This is a matter of self-interest. There is truth in the saying, “The apple does not fall far from the tree.” If our family is a bunch of losers, then there’s a good chance that we are too. This is something that everybody naturally hides, and so we might leave out certain details about our lineage.The vast majority of the Bible is the history of one family that eventually grew to be a nation. From Genesis 12 onward the Bible is the story of Abraham and his descendants. Abraham’s grandson was originally named Jacob. God would eventually give him a new name—Israel—and that would be the name of the nation. Jacob’s twelve sons would be the founding fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel. The Bible chronicles the history of this people.If the Israelites saw the Scriptures merely as their own family record—if they looked at it like their own genealogy book—then I can’t imagine how the embarrassing things that we find in the Scriptures could remain. The sins and foibles of even their most important people are right there, black on white. There was that one time, for example, where Noah got drunk and was passed out, naked. His son Ham laughed at him, but Japheth and Shem covered him with a blanket, walking backwards so that they would not see his nakedness. Or have a look at what the Bible says about Jacob’s four oldest sons. You will find sexual sins. You will see wrath and cruelty. These are not the kinds of things that normally go into the family album.In fact, even though we are not blood relatives of the Israelites, our Christian publishing houses tend to be embarrassed about what is in the Bible. A lot of Christians don’t know what is in the Bible because all that they know about the Bible is what they learned in Sunday School. They’ve never read it themselves. The materials that are used in Sunday School are almost always edited to take out anything that is distasteful. If there is too much violence or seediness or if anything is too frightening, then it gets cut by the publishers. This is no good! The Israelites managed to pass down what God gave them without editing it for thousands of years and those were stories about their very own people. Why are we so embarrassed that we cannot own and embrace the Scriptures that God has given to us?The Scriptures speak the way they do because it is the truth. The Scriptures also speak the way they do so that we could know what’s what. The Bible tells the story of God’s people. It is the story of the relationship between God and those people. God’s people are sinners—real, bona fide sinners—not fake ones. The Bible, over and over again, shows that the sinner’s fantasy—that they will get away with all their sins without being punished—cannot come true. Over and over again the Bible shows that God is angered by our sin and punishes sinners. The Bible also shows that God has mercy on those who have been humbled and who ask him to have mercy.So what happens when the Bible is falsified by our publishing houses? A great deal of what I have just told you is left out. The people in the Bible are not thought of as sinners—or at least not as poor, miserable sinners who have done appalling things. God’s anger against sinn

191229 Sermon on Luke 2:22-40 (Christmas 1) December 29, 2019 There are four books of the Bible that tell us about the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. These are called Gospels, which means, “good news.” They have been grouped together at the beginning of the New Testament. They are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They are named after their authors, and so we say at the beginning of our Gospel reading, “The holy Gospel according to St.-whoever-wrote-that-Gospel, the such-and-such chapter.”  There is a common expectation that the four Gospels are like biographies. Biographies almost always begin with the birth of a person, and then the life of that person is laid out in a systematic and sequential way. This style of telling a person’s life, however, has not been around very long. Biographies weren’t really written before the 1800s. The Gospels aren’t biographies. They are far from complete records of everything that Jesus did and said. St. John the Evangelist tells us why he included what he did in his Gospel. He said that if everything were written down about Jesus, then all the libraries of the world wouldn’t be able to contain them all. But these things were written that you should believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that you may have life in his name. Learning about Jesus is different than just learning about somebody famous. It’s not meant to be just information. It calls for judgment. What do you say about Jesus? Is he the Christ, is he the Savior, or not?And so the Gospels are different from biographies. They do not systematically tell a complete story. In fact, two out of the four Gospels do not say much at all about Jesus before he was baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. Only Matthew and Luke speak of his life prior to his baptism. And even in Matthew and Luke there is quite a bit we might otherwise like to know. Both Matthew and Luke speak about the very early life of Jesus, but after he is maybe about 2 years old, the Gospels don’t tell us anything more about Jesus until his baptism, except for one episode when he was about 12. That is when he went to Jerusalem with his family. The family headed for home and accidently left Jesus behind. He was busy discussing God’s Word in the Temple. But this is the only thing we hear about Jesus’s life from about 2 years old until he was perhaps around 30 years old, when he was baptized.During this Christmas season, when we are thinking about Jesus’s birth, it is only natural that whatever the Gospels do say about Jesus’s earthly life should be focus of our readings, and so it is. Although we don’t know hardly anything about Jesus as a boy and a young man, the Gospels tell us more about when he was a baby.The first part of Luke chapter 2 is the Christmas Gospel. This is where we hear about Mary and Joseph making their way to Bethlehem because of a census and giving birth while lodging in a stable because there was no room for them in the inn. This is also where we hear about the shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night, but an angel of the Lord appears to them and tells them that a Savior was born for them.Our reading today is the second part of Luke 2. This is about 6 weeks after Jesus’s birth. The Law that God gave to Moses required sacrifices for Mary and Jesus. Mary needed to offer sacrifice in order to become ritually clean after childbirth. Jesus, her firstborn, needed to be redeemed as the firstborn child by sacrifice. This hearkened back to the time of Passover while the Israelites were still in Egypt. The firstborn belonged to God and he would take that life unless it were redeemed by the blood of the lamb that was placed on the sides and tops of the doors. Ever since that time, the firstborn of each family was redeemed by the sacrifice of an animal in their place.This devotion to the Law is God humbling himself. When he sent his Son to be born of a woman, he entered also under the Law, even tho

191225 Sermon on John 1:1-18 (Christmas Day) December 25, 2019 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” That is the first sentence of the book of Genesis. The book of Genesis was written with two great objectives in mind. Moses speaks about two things more than anything else. He speaks about God and he speaks about God’s people. God created Man. Man feel into sin. God called him out of darkness into the light. Some received that light; some did not. Abel believed. Cain did not. Noah believed. The rest of the world did not. Abraham believed. The rest of the world only fell deeper and deeper into darkness. God blessed Abraham and his descendants. He was their God. They were his people. He was present among them and blessed them and fought for them. He made a mighty nation of them and they lived for hundreds and hundreds of years in the land that he had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” is the first sentence of the book of Genesis. “In the beginning was the Word,” is the first sentence of the Gospel of John. “The Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him everything was made, and without him not one thing was made that has been made.” The apostle John is obviously referring to the first book of the bible by using the same words. He also shows us something that we might not otherwise see as easily. He says that the Word was with God—referring to the Son of God. It was through the Word that God created. Now how did God create? He spoke. He used words. He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. The Trinity is there already in the first verses of Genesis. God, as in God the Father, was there. The Word, as in the Son, was there. The Holy Spirit was also there, for Moses says, “and the Spirit hovered over the face of the waters.” The triune God created all things, and without the Trinity nothing was made. There is one God, one Creator. He has universal significance.The apostle John has something to say about this God as it has been shown to him in Jesus Christ. That is why he is writing this Gospel. What is of great importance to God is his relationship with Man. Remember that I said Moses had two objectives in Genesis. He wanted to speak about God and he wanted to speak about God’s people. The same is true here with John in his Gospel. He says that John the Baptist came, telling people about the Word, the Light, that has come into the world in Jesus, born of Mary, but these people who were descendants of the people of God did not receive him. “But,” John says, “to all who did receive him, to those who believe in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. They were born, not of blood, or of the desire of the flesh, or of a husband’s will, but born of God.”Here we are introduced to a peculiar nation, a peculiar tribe, a peculiar family. The families that we know of are ones that are produced through the desire of the flesh and the will of a husband. Father and mother come together and children are born. One generation follows another, and if God so wills it, they might increase greatly in number.This is what God says to Abraham, as you might remember. He says, “Look at the stars. Try to number them. That is how many descendants you will have.” A side note here: even with all our technology, our scientists still have not been able to number all the stars. The farther into space they look, the more stars they see. And God directs Abraham to the sand of the seashore. All those countless grains of sand—that’s how many descendants you will have.But just as the apostle John has shown us some things that we might not otherwise see with the opening words of Genesis—namely, that the Trinity was the God who created the earth—so also he might be filling us in on something here too. The true descendants of Abraham, the true children of God, are not those of the flesh. It’s not a matter of genetics or family

191224 Sermon on Luke 2:1-14 (Christmas Eve) December 24, 2019 One of the books that I use to teach bible history has a picture of Adam and Eve after they have been kicked out of the Garden of Eden. In the artist’s mind it must be several years later. Cain, their firstborn son is in the picture. He looks like he might be about 12. Abel also is in the picture. He looks like he might be about 6. The picture also has some of the fruits of their labors. There is a humble shelter. Some wooden fences have been assembled. What I find most interesting about the picture, though, are the poses and faces of Adam and Eve. Adam is resting his chin on top of his hands while he leans on his hoe. Eve is sitting down with a tattered mop in her hands. Both are looking at Abel who is contentedly playing with sheep. The expression on both of their faces is best described with the word tired. They are not exactly sad. They certainly aren't beaming brightly. Adam is tired of hoeing out the thorns and thistles that infest the ground. Eve is tired of cleaning that which, so very quickly, only gets dirty again. This artist understood what life is like, particularly as we age. Children still have some get-up and go, and it seems that the artist understood this too. Cain and Abel do not look tired. They look ready to tootle about. Adam and Eve look like they are ready for a vacation. Or retirement.  But wait a minute: will that solve their problems? Not quite. Vacations and retirement aren’t the fountain of youth. They don’t make us into children again. About all that they can manage to do for us is to offer us a little more pleasant way to pass the time—no hoeing or mopping.I’m going to be honest about what is going on here. Some of you might get mad at me for this, but I think you have to acknowledge the truth of it. As we age we get closer to death. Practically every part of ourselves progressively breaks down. Our strength goes. Our flexibility goes. Our curiosity goes. Our mind goes. Our energy goes. You see, “In the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.” The curse of death hangs over us all.Now what have I done? Have I gone and wrecked our holly, jolly Christmas? That depends on how you answer this crucial question: “Is there anything that can be done about death?” If the answer is, “No,” then the best that we can do is try to ignore it. There are a lot of ways to do that. You can eat, drink, and be merry. You can get drunk on the sentimentality of Christmases past. You can spend your hard earned cash for stimulants—some new toy or gadget that will allow you not to be bored for a while, not to feel so tired for a while. Have you noticed how hard it is to buy a gift that an old person really enjoys? That’s because they’re all strung out. They’ve all been there and done that. A child, on the other hand—all you really need to give them is a big cardboard box. Old people need new cars or to win the lottery to feel good.All of these stimulants are ways to try to deal with the curse of death that hangs over us without actually facing it. They are kind of like cold medicine. Cold medicine does nothing to make the cold go away any faster. All that it can do is alleviate some of the symptoms. Although cold medicine helps, we all know that it isn’t the real deal. Decongestant makes it so you can breathe out your nose, but your nose still feels funny. There’s no replacing the vim and vigor that returns to us naturally once the cold has finally left us.And so all the stimulants we buy are like shuffling along with cold medicine while stubbornly denying that we have a cold. Nobody knows of anything better, and so it is expected that we continue shuffling along, taking our stimulants when we can get them. This is a hopeless and depressing way of looking at life, and so I can understand why some of you might be irritated. But this reaction is built upon the firm belief that there isn’t anything that can be done about death, and so might as well just

191222 Sermon on John 1:29-34 (Advent 4) December 22, 2019 The first thing that is noticed with John is how he was cowed by no one. We can see that in our reading for today. John was out preaching, and who should show up but some bigwigs from Synod headquarters. They’ve come to make sure that everything that John is doing is proper and in order. They’ve heard some strange things about John baptizing, and they aren’t so sure about that. Had John received the prior approval from his ecclesiastical supervisors before doing that? Or maybe John has some grand ideas about himself. Does he think he’s the Christ or Elijah or the Prophet that Moses speaks about in our Old Testament reading? In any case, they thought they better get to the bottom of it.John, however, was indifferent. If the church bureaucracy doesn’t like what he has to say, then they will just have to continue to not like what he says. He is not accountable to them. He is accountable to the God who sent him to preach and to baptize. He has no need for their exalted titles. He’s content with being just a voice. He is the voice of one calling out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord.” The glory of the Lord is about to be revealed in Jesus Christ, whose sandal strap he is unworthy to untie. These words do not require great intelligence to be understood. John was not a genius. He was a voice who spoke what was given to him to speak. But what did set him apart from others was that his voice was wholly dedicated to God and God’s will that has been made known through his Word. What other people thought did not overly concern him.The word that we might use to describe John’s willingness to go against the grain might be “independence.” Someone who is independent is not beholden to others. But that would almost be the opposite of what is really going on here. John was completely dependent—not upon men, to be sure, but upon his God. He was free from making his words sound pretty or plausible so as to please people. God’s truth, served straight, was the way he did things. If trouble came as a result, which it often did, then he was wholly dependent upon God for his comfort, strength, and protection. This dependence upon God set him apart from the herd. Being set apart from everybody else looks like independence, but this is actually an extreme form of dependence.Being dependent upon God and becoming only ever more dependent upon God was the way that John lived and this was the message that he urged upon those who heard his voice. Independence is not a good thing according to the Bible. What happened when Adam and Eve became independent? They ended up going away from God. And when God came after them, they only wanted to get further away. One of the common pictures used in the Scriptures for sin is the picture of a sheep wandering off on its own. “We all like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way.” The picture of turning away from sin corresponds to this. The sheep are called back. They return to the shepherding of the Lord. When the shepherd finds the one who has wandered off he places it on his shoulders and carries it back to the fold rejoicing. Such sheep are independent no more. They have returned to dependence upon the Good Shepherd.Something that responsibility requires as an accompaniment to this message is the danger—the impossibility—of independence from God. It simply won’t work. Sheep are defenseless against the wolf if they are left to their own devices. They aren’t very big. They don’t have sharp claws or teeth. They aren’t that fast. They also aren’t that smart. If a person decides that he or she wants to remain estranged and alienated from the Good Shepherd, then it is necessary to point out that this can’t turn out well for them.John had the guts to lay out this danger clearly and vividly. The ax is laid at the root of the tree. God’s winnowing fork is in his hand. He will gather the grain into the bin, but the chaff shall be

191223 Funeral Sermon for Butch Schroeder, December 23, 2019 Christmas can be a hard time for people who have lost a loved one. Christmas is, bar none, the most nostalgic of all holidays. When a person is missing from the Christmas get-together, there is a hole. With Butch’s death coming so close to Christmas, and this funeral service coming even closer to Christmas, it’s on our minds. There are a lot of people here who are sad when they think of those difficult moments in the couple days ahead for Butch’s family.Because we do not want to remain sad, and we don’t want others to be sad either, there is a tendency to chop some logic to make it seem better. There is some truth in the gentle arguments that get made at such times. Butch lived to be 72. We’d all like it if he had lived longer, but 72 years is nothing to sneeze at. He had fairly good health despite his very serious disease until not long before he died. Regardless of whatever else gets said, we might also add that the memories of him will live on even though he has died.Some more specifically Christian logic can be chopped at such a time as this too. Biblical truths are taken in hand. The goal is the same. We’d like to feel better—not feel so sad. There is something that I’d like us to consider this afternoon, though, that might surprise you. It has to do with what happened to a friend of Jesus’s. What we find is that sadness is not taken away, even for Jesus, who obviously knew all the truths of God’s saving will towards us, for he himself is God.The friend’s name was Lazarus. His sisters were Mary and Martha. One day Lazarus fell sick, and his family sent word to Jesus in the hopes that he could come and heal him like he had healed many others. Jesus, however, didn’t come right away. He stayed where he was for a couple more days. In the meantime Lazarus died, was prepared for burial, and by the time Jesus got to where they lived, he was already in the tomb. This was not by accident. Jesus knew what he was going to do.When Jesus came near to the house word of this came to Martha. She ran out to meet Jesus on the road, and she tells him what undoubtedly had been on her mind the last few days. She said, “Jesus, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” “That’s true,” Martha replied through the tears, “I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the Last Day.” Martha knew her Bible. She also knew that Lazarus believed that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. She knew that through this faith in Jesus, her brother Lazarus had received salvation from sin, death, and hell, and that he was destined, therefore, to eternal life. Here are some of those Christian truths I referred to before which are looked to to take away sadness.Jesus responded to Martha with some words that you will hear as part of our service in a few minutes. He said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though he dies. Whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” Jesus powerfully confirms everything that Martha has just said. Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in him will live, even though he dies. With faith in him, death hardly even deserves to be called death anymore, for Jesus has defeated it. Here’s some more truth we can chew on.Martha then sends somebody back to the house to get her sister Mary. Mary comes, weeping. Everybody else is weeping too. Now here’s why I bring this up. When Jesus saw Mary it says that he was deeply moved in his spirit and troubled. There was a tightness in his chest and a lump in his throat he had a hard time choking down. He asked, “Where have you laid him?” They said, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus could hold back the tears no longer. He wept. And when he got to the tomb, it says that he was deeply moved yet again.If there were ever anybody who knew the saving truths of God’s will, it would be Jesus. Indeed, Jesus even knew that he

191215 Sermon on Isaiah 40:1-11 (Advent 3) December 15, 2019 We are in the season for “Dear Santa” letters. “Dear Santa, I’d like this and this and this and this. Be careful that it’s this one and not that one. Make it just so.” Everybody knows that Santa is the giver of good gifts. Christians know that God is the giver or all good things. James, in his letter, says, “Every good act of giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the lights, who does not change or shift like a shadow.” God alone is good, as Jesus says. If anything is good, then, it comes from him. And so might we write our own “Dear God” letters? “Dear God, I’d like this and this and this and this.” What might we put on that list? Better health? More money? More glory? Less sadness? There are a lot of things that boys and girls of all ages want. There are also a lot of things that folks don’t want, too, but that might be what they get. Are these things like coal in the stocking?Even those we know God approves of, get from him things to which we might say, “Yuck! Keep that away from me.” Do you suppose that John the Baptist wrote a letter that said, “Dear God, I’d like to be put in prison. I’d like to be afflicted with doubt. I’d like to have my head chopped off because of a stupid dare that some girl made at a drinking party”? Sounds weird doesn’t it?Or consider the author of our epistle reading, Paul. Do you suppose that he wrote a letter that said, “Dear God, I’d like to be stoned and left for dead. I’d like to be chased and harassed from one city to the next. I’d like to be shipwrecked. I’d like to be given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, which you refuse to remove. Oh, and after all this, I’d like my head to be chopped off too.”This can all sound ridiculous because of a principle that we are hardwired to accept. The principle is that this life is everything. If this life is everything, then you better hold on to every possibility for pleasure that comes your way and don’t let a single one escape. Fight for what is yours. Don’t make trouble for yourself. If trouble or suffering or hardship come your way, then you better figure out a way to get rid of it, otherwise your life will not be worth living.From a perspective such as this, the Christian life that is filled with suffering looks like the stupidest thing anybody could ever do. Paul would agree with you. In 1 Cor. 15 he addresses the resurrection from the dead. Some of the people in Corinth were saying that there was no such thing as the resurrection from the dead. When Paul responds to them he says that if there is no such thing as the resurrection from the dead, then Christians are to be pitied above all people. All that sacrificing and suffering would be to no purpose. If this life is everything, then it only makes sense to try to suck everything out of it that you possibly can. Those who don’t are fools!Paul kind of embraced this label as being a fool. Several times in his letters he calls himself a fool. If people wanted to think that he was a fool, then there wasn’t much that he could do about that. He wasn’t bothered by it because the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men. The weakness of God is stronger than the strength of men. Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. In Christ Paul has redemption from the devil and the adoption of being a child of God. In Christ Paul has the resurrection from the dead to live an infinitely better life than the one that we have in this sinful flesh. That was why Paul was free to love and thereby also suffer as a Christian. There was nothing that he gave up or sacrificed that would not be given back to him a hundred fold in the life to come. He aspired to live for love—for the good of others—rather than for himself. So if people think he is foolish for living the way he did, then they would also have to think that Christ is foolish and that God is foolish, for God is love. It is not foolish, though,

191211 Sermon on Council of Jerusalem Part 2 (Advent 2 Midweek) December 11, 2019

191208 Sermon on Luke 21:25-36 (Advent 2) December 8, 2019 The day of the Lord is an important thing you hear about in the Scriptures in many different places. At its most basic meaning, the day of the Lord is the day when the Lord intervenes and acts. He has held his peace until that day. Now waiting is over. Now he is going to do something. So let’s consider a couple examples of God intervening and altering the normal course of events.First, think of God’s redemption of Israel from Egypt. God had been tolerant of the enslavement of his people. Their cries of lament finally moved him to put a stop to it. God gave Pharaoh the opportunity to repent, but soon God hardened his heart in judgment. Although Pharaoh was asked to change his mind, God made it so that Pharaoh couldn’t. God was going to make an example out of Pharaoh’s hard head. He slammed his hammer upon this anvil and the news of it flew like sparks into all the surrounding countries. People learned of the mighty deeds that God did to the most powerful nation on earth at that time.We won’t go into the details of all of God’s actions against Pharaoh and Egypt. You are familiar with the ten plagues, the redemption of Passover, the rescuing of the people of Israel when God held back the walls of water. These were good days for the Israelites.  That’s an understatement. This is the high point of Israel’s history. What more could they ask for than that they should dwell together with God, seeing his glory at Mt. Sinai, or Mt. Horeb, and knowing that all was well. God loved them and would fight for them. The day of the Lord is always a good thing for God’s people. It is when they see him act with power and glory.But note that this same day is not good for those who are not God’s people. The plagues tortured the Egyptians until they were finally glad to see the Israelites go. The waters of the Red Sea did not harm the Israelites, but those same waters crushed and killed Pharaoh and all his soldiers. God is good to his people and takes vengeance upon his enemies.With this first example of a day of the Lord, a day of God’s acting, we see God saving all the descendants of Israel because he loved them and had made a covenant with their ancestor Abraham. With my second example of the day of the Lord we will see that the matter wasn’t so black and white. After God’s people entered the Promised Land they grew fat and rich. For their standing before God they relied upon the fact that they were blood-descendants of Abraham. Although they honored God with their lips, their hearts were far from him. They did not fear love and trust in the Lord their God. They did not call upon him in every trouble, pray, praise and give thanks. They did not gladly hear and learn preaching and his Word. Instead they lived like all their neighbors. Their hearts went after other sources for blessing and success.God was patient with these shenanigans for a long time. But finally he had had enough. He destroyed the northern kingdom and largely took away his Word from them. He also destroyed the southern Kingdom. Jerusalem with her temple was razed to the ground. But God did not entirely take away his Word from the survivors. The Jewish leaders would eventually come back from Babylon and do the tremendously hard work of rebuilding what had been torn down.With this second example of the day of the Lord, the day of God’s action, you see that he even discarded those who had once been his people. They lost their faith even though they went to Church every week. God is not a respecter of persons. He would have liked to have gathered them under his wings like a hen does with her chicks, but they would not. Therefore he said those awful words: “Depart from me you workers of lawlessness. I do not know you.”With this second example of the day of the Lord things aren’t as black and white as they were in the first example. God takes vengeance upon his enemies, and the people of God can’t rejoice with all their hea

191204 Advent Midweek Sermon on Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) December 4, 2019 Today and next week we will be considering the same event with the same text. The topic is the council of Jerusalem. The leaders of the Christian Church gathered together, perhaps about 20 years after Christ’s ascension into heaven. They needed to discuss whether people who were from Gentile rather than Jewish backgrounds needed to observe the regulations that God gave in the Old Testament. This was the most important controversy Christians had in the early part of their history. This issue is in the background of much of the New Testament, especially St. Paul’s epistles. It is good for you to understand it, so that you can read the Bible more easily and profitably.Since we have two weeks to look at the council of Jerusalem, tonight I’d like to introduce the controversy by, first of all, looking at the big picture. The essential element behind the question of whether the Old Testament Law must be kept is faith. What God is being believed in?This is a question that goes all the way back to the beginning. Adam and Eve started out believing in God. They soon switched their allegiance to a different god—the devil. They were obedient to him and his Word rather than the God who had given them the command not to eat from this certain tree. God restored faith in Adam and Eve by coming to them again with his Word and promise, but ever since then mankind has been changed. We are more prone to believe in all kinds of things besides the true God.This happened with the first generations after Adam and Eve. The descendants of Seth called upon the name of the Lord. They believed in him and his word and his promises. The descendants of Cain, however, tried to make a paradise out of this world. In so far as they made advancements and progress, to that extent their heart grew cold towards God. They came to believe in themselves and what they could accomplish with their smarts and technological advancements. They believed that they would be better blessed by these things rather than being blessed according to the Word spoken to Adam and Eve about the Messiah. This was a kind of idolatry that is similar to the idolatry of today. Moses does not tell us any names of gods or goddesses that the descendants of Cain believed in. He only speaks of their many and great accomplishments. So it is also today. People do not think that they are worshipping gods, but indeed they are. Whatever a person trusts in for blessing or power or success—whatever that thing might be—that is a god for the person who thusly believes. When we believe that we are going to be happy and successful because of money or education or technological progress or any other thing, then we are worshipping idols. It doesn’t matter that it is not formal. Worship is more a matter of the heart than it is of particular services or labels.Eventually the idol worship among the descendants of Cain developed these religious rites and ceremonies. The things that the people trusted in came to receive names. Temples were built. Priests and priestesses were inducted into them. Those who wished to have a good crop were thought to be wise to go to the temple of Baal, just as today people believe that a successful harvest is dependent upon the blessings of professors and universities. The use of temples and priests had a lot of various practices that came along with it. Depending on the god or goddess involved there would be certain foods that were eaten or prostitutes visited or the sacrifice of animals or even children.In the midst of all this unbelief in the true God and belief in idols, God chose a certain man and woman named Abram and Sarai. They would eventually be given the names Abraham and Sarah. God said to Abraham that he was his special, chosen one. He would be good to Abraham and give him happiness and success. Abraham’s descendants would be as numerous as the stars. Princes would be born of his descendants. Al