Encore Post: Now and then, the news is filled with excitement over lottery jackpots worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Long lines form at convenience stores as everyone wants to buy a ticket. For all but a handful of people, the only value of the ticket is entertainment. Yet the very lucky winner is very happy indeed. She has won a fortune! Yet her bank account hasn’t changed a penny. Until the money is deposited, nothing has changed — other than she discovers she has more cousins than she ever knew she had!
Because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, we have amazing riches in heaven. God loves us, gives us his grace. We are his children. Our sins are forgiven and we will live forever. Yet without a way of these things coming to us, it is not yet applied to us. To give these gifts to us, God uses the Means of Grace.
The Means of Grace are visible means by which God the Holy Spirit gives the gifts Jesus earned by his death on the cross. He uses these to plant faith in our hearts, strengthen and preserve it. Through them, we receive the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. He uses this to enter our hearts and live there.
Encore Post: Children love to play dress-up. They walk in their parent’s shoes, try on their clothes, put on costumes in their toy chest or use other toys as masks. Adults sometimes do the same on Halloween or at a masked ball. Most often actors will go to great lengths to look the part.
God also chooses to wear masks. Because he is absolutely holy, no sinner can stand in the presence of his full glory and live. (Exodus 33:20) So, God approaches people through priests, prophets, bushes, a donkey and the person of the Son of God before he was born in the person of Jesus. Most often, the Son of God is called the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament.
In the New Testament, God appears to us in flesh and blood in Jesus. In him we know and see God. (John 1:18) Through him, we receive the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. Through him, we can approach God and call him father. When God sees us now, he sees his sinless Son and calls us saints — Holy Ones. (Ephesians 1:4-6)
God also chooses to give his gifts of grace, faith, the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation through his Word, read and preached to us, and through the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In theology, we call these the Means of Grace. We have no promise that he will come to us in any other way. In these means, we know without a doubt that God loves us.
Encore Post: In the last post (So, Does God Hate Me?), I mentioned the mess that the sin of Adam and Eve made of the world. God intends to clean it up. But it isn’t easy. God is Holy and can’t just look the other way. Every sin must be paid for in full. Because we are all sinners from birth, (Psalm 51:5) we must die and go to Hell forever. Even worse, we cannot make up for our sins by anything we can do or say. In fact, no one else can even offer to die in our place, since everyone sins. (Romans 5:12-21) Someone without sin must die to save us.
So, because he loves us, God sent his Son to die in our place. (John 3:16) That is why the Eternal Son was born a man, conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Because Jesus is God, he never sinned, but remained faithful to His Heavenly Father. Because Jesus is a man, He could die for us. When He shed his blood on the cross, the price was paid for our sins and the sins of the whole world (Redemption). Our sins areforgivenand God gives us his grace, adopts us as His own heirs, reveals to us what He plans to do. (Ephesians 1:7-10)
One day, when the time is right, Jesus will return from heaven, raise us from the grave, restore our bodies to be like his and bring an end to sin, death and the power of the devil. On that day, he will remake Heaven and Earth and we will live with him forever.
That is why we speak of the grace of God as something he gives us, for Christ’s sake.
Encore Post: So, does God hate me and you? He has plenty of reasons to do so. When God made the world, it was perfect, without sin, evil, sickness or death. He made us, male and female in his image (Genesis 1:26). He blessed us and called all He made “very good” (Genesis 1:31) But our first parents, Adam and Eve, believed the lie of Satan that they could become more like God by disobeying His command. (Genesis 3:4-6) This first sin (Original Sin), brought sin, sorrow, grief and death into the world. Since then, all men and women descended from them, including us, have been born as sinners. From the moment we were conceived in our mother’s womb, our every thought has been polluted by sin and evil. (Genesis 6:5, Genesis 8:21, Matthew 15:19) So, God has every right to hate us.
Thank God that He is a gracious and merciful God (Psalm 103:8). In fact, St. Paul tells us that God loved us before He made the world. He picked us out to be made holy (Sanctified) and blameless (Justified) and rigged events so that we might be adopted as His sons through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. (Predestination).(Ephesians 1:3-6) So, God does not hate His children. He has always loved us. This attitude towards us is what we mean by the word: Grace.God is gracious to us because His Son was born of the Virgin Mary at just the right time in history, lived a perfect life for our sake, suffered, died on the Cross for the forgiveness of sins, rose again from the dead (Resurrection) and Ascended into Heaven so that we might live with Him forever. (Eternal Life)
So, grace is not some kind of substance that is given to us a little bit at a time or some kind of magical power that gives us a do-over. It is that God loves us and is bound and determined to save us — and does.
Encore Post: Once in a while, you have a bad day. You know the kind. Your alarm doesn’t wake you for work. The traffic lights are all against you on the way to work. You get there late and spend the whole day apologizing. Your car gets a flat tire when you are on your way home. You might begin to wonder if you did something to get God angry at you. This feeling is even stronger when you suffer from disasters — when you or your loved ones suffer from serious illnesses; when violent weather wipes out your home, your neighborhood or even your city; when evil people steal your property, wound or kill those you love or when you are dying and the doctors can’t make you well.
You are not alone. Everyone feels this way from time to time — even people who do not have faith in Christ. The world around us teaches us that there is a God, he is all powerful and that he has rules for us to live by. It also teaches us that he will punish us for breaking these rules and that someday we will die. This Natural knowledge of God is imperfect, though. It does not tell us what God really thinks of us, and how we can keep him from punishing us. We need God to reveal himself to us to know the answer to that question.
Thank God that He, in His love and mercy, does this for us in two basic ways. He Himself became a man in Christ Jesus (John 3:16, Philippians 2:1-11). When we find it hard or impossible to know what God is like, we look at Jesus. (John 1:18) second, God Himself has spoken to us through prophets and other authors in the Holy Scriptures, the books contained in the Bible. (Hebrews 1:1)
Encore Post: It sometimes happens at a wedding reception, a dinner party or other social event. You are sitting near someone you’ve never met before. During the polite small talk, you learn your new friend belongs to a church you’ve never heard of before. If you are a curious person, you might ask about it. After learning a few surface details, you move on to another topic. When you get home, you are quite confused and cannot figure out how it all fits together. You’re not alone. Unless you have some place to begin to make sense of it all, it is easy to get lost when talking about what a church believes — including your own!
The teachings of a religion are almost always connected one to another. A pastor, priest or other religious leader can begin at virtually any teaching and explain all the rest of what they believe in terms of it. If you look at several formal books of theology — especially systematic theologies — you will notice they begin at different places. Some begin with talking about God and His traits (in theological language attributes), others begin with definitions and other concepts needed to understand what Christians believe (prolegomena). Some begin with Christ, still others take up salvation first. Where they start can tell you a lot about who they are in and of itself.
When I’ve spoken to others about what Lutheran Christians believe, I’ve found it useful to begin with the Formal and Material Principlesof Lutheranism. A formal principle is the source that a faith turns to as its ultimate authority on what to teach and how to live.A material principle is what a faith is made of — the central principle which explains everything else that it teaches.
For Lutherans, the only source and authority for what a Christian should believe is the Holy Scriptures, the Bible, alone. Our Material principle is all about God’s grace and how Christ earned for us salvation. The disadvantage of beginning here is it starts without explaining sin, how people got lost in the first place, who God is and what he’s like, and many other truths. The advantage is it majors in the majors.
Encore Post: Anachronism is taking any historical custom, person, object, or event into a time period other than its own. The Biblical narratives exist in time. (Narratives are those passages that relay specific events as a narrated story). They are to be heard and read from within their contextual window.
There was a common refrain around twenty years ago: What Would Jesus Do? The notion was that Jesus, as revealed in the scriptures, could be used as a moral guide to aid your decision-making process. If you would just imagine Jesus in your situation, the correct answer would become clear.
The anachronistic fallacy here is that Jesus does not walk the earth in my time. By trying to drag Him here into my situation, I’m ignoring the teachings in their context. And, I’m about to put my words into Jesus’ mouth somehow to sanctify my choices into biblical truth.
Let’s try another fitment. “Jesus was a socialist, distributist, capitalist, or anarchist.” Jesus lived 1800 years before most of the codified economic systems we know developed. His experience with taxes, market forces, production, and consumption looked far different from our own. The application we should pull from “render unto Caesar” is simply: be a faithful Christian first and the best citizen, resident, or alien you can be second. Anything further pulls Jesus into our temporal context.
For a more timely application that will likely age poorly, would Jesus wear a mask? He came healing the sick. So, surely, that means that he would wear a mask. Again, our specific time and concerns applied to Jesus. We couldn’t discern the answer to that question.
This one dials in more tightly upon the problem with that question. It’s not a good question. Jesus came healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, casting out demons, and forgiving sin as signs of what was to come. These signs demonstrate the fullness of God in human flesh subsisting. Jesus healed, recreated, forgave, and even raised dead to life again to teach what His death meant. Jesus died to forgive the sins of the world. All the brokenness and other evidence of the corruption of sin will fade away in the blinking of an eye at the resurrection of all flesh. His life and ministry testify to that. Who cares what political system, hand sanitizer, or chicken sandwich he may or may not have preferred?
Dear Baptized, let us abandon anachronism and bless the Lord of time and eternity! Thanks be to God!
Rev. Jason M. Kaspar Sole Pastor Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church & Preschool
Encore Post: The Bible, it’s stories, phrases, poetry and images are so woven into our culture we don’t even notice it. Even more so, it is a part of our worship, prayers and teaching that it is a natural part of our faith. So it is easy to forget that God’s word was not originally spoken and written in English, but in two or three eras of the Hebrew language, Aramaic, and the everyday Greek of the Roman empire. The King James Version was so well done that it had a staying power of nearly 500 years and influences all of our modern translations. Yet even it loses some of the meaning moving across languages, culture and time period. That is why Lutheran pastors have been traditionally taught to read the Hebrew and Greek of the original texts.
One way to see that is to try to translate from English to English. Think of the word “Excellent.” What word would you use in its place if you could not use the word “Excellent?” Does the word you picked mean exactly “excellent?” Not really. Some shades of meaning are lost — like when you see a picture in black-and-white instead of color.
So, when you are trying to understand a passage, consider the original language. If you never learned them, there are tools you can use to get at the original. With the advice of your pastor, select two to four different translations for your study. Pick ones that are somewhat different in approach. When you study, read them together. If they say virtually the same thing, you know the original is not difficult to translate. If they are very different, check the notes of a study Bible or ask your pastor what is going on behind the translations.
Christianity is often a system of maintaining polar opposites without compromise. The law accuses us of sin (even in its instructive sense), and the Gospel forgives sin with no merit or worthiness in us. We receive salvation through God’s gifts of repentance and faith by Sacrament and Word. Damnation comes to unbelievers solely because of their stubborn unbelief and hatred of God.
These aren’t systems we built for ourselves. They are truths taught by God’s Word that leave us with concepts that defy our human logic. The tension makes us uncomfortable, leading us into accidental error. Arminian decision theology and Calvinist double predestination are two notable examples.
Jacob Arminius harmonized the clear teaching that damnation is our own doing and our own choosing in unbelief, by teaching that we choose salvation as well. “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.” (John 3:18-19 ESV) He was and is half right. Damnation is entirely on us and because of our sinful unbelief.
John Calvin harmonized the clear teaching that God chooses some for salvation, by teaching that salvation and damnation were solely by God’s choosing. “In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.” (Ephesians 1:4b-6 ESV) In Calvin’s desire to uphold God’s sovereignty, Calvin made God a capricious ruler, separating without discernible reason.
The biblical position, which we Lutherans hold, is that damnation is our doing and salvation is God’s doing. We sometimes call this single predestination.
The same sort of harmony confusion is at play here. We should much more correctly say that God loves us despite the way we are. Poorly hidden behind the God-loves-me-just-the-way-I-am view of myself is a desire to overwrite God’s Law. I don’t want to leave my former sins behind. I want God to bless my sin and call it good. I want Jesus to Jesus me in the way that I would have Him Jesus me, rather than the way that he does.
Jesus doesn’t bless our sin. He forgives it AND sends us off without sin. To the adulteress spared from stoning, He says, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.” (John 8:11b ESV) The forgiveness we receive delivers a clear conscience, which will flee from sin.
St. Paul describes our sinful situation as a state of death. Only God can bring life into dead things. “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 2:4-7 ESV)
God loved us despite our deadness in sin. His love revives us and sets us free from that sin. He has delivered us out from the “way we are” into the way He would have us be.
Go forth and sin no more,
Rev. Jason M. Kaspar Sole Pastor Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church & Preschool La Grange, TX
