And He Suffered Under Pontius Pilate

Encore Post: [Twenty-Seventh in a series of posts on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism] You say it every time you confess the Apostles’ Creed, “And He suffered under Pontius Pilate,” but what does saying it convey?

Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor who had authority over the use of the death penalty. That is a historical fact. And it is important to show that faith in Jesus Christ, as recorded in Holy Scripture, is historical. We can look at the historical record and see a governor named Pilate who served in Judea, and it was this man who gave the Jews the go ahead to crucify Jesus. This is extremely important to acknowledge, but there are some important theological implications of reciting Pilate’s name as well in the Creed.

We remember from Holy Scripture that Pilate desired to release Jesus because Jesus had done nothing wrong. Certainly Jesus did nothing that required the judgement of death by crucifixion. Pilate judged rightly that the Jews were bringing Jesus to him because they were jealous of him and how the people chased after him.

However, Jesus was before him, and he had to pass judgment. Because of his position as governor, his judgment was as if God spoke the judgement: “I find no fault in him at all.” And that right there is of great theological importance. Pilate, as governor, goes on record to say that an innocent man dies for the sins of the people. That is the Gospel proclamation. The innocent man receives the punishment of death while the sinner goes free. While Pilate wanted to release Jesus, he was getting nowhere with the people. The priests and the scribes had caused a riot to begin. Pilate, being afraid, gave Jesus over to them that they might crucify Jesus.

And in so doing, Pilate allowed the Chief Priests and the Scribes of the Jews to actually fulfill their duties as those who would sacrifice the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Yet, Christ is the Victim and the Priest on this Good Friday at the altar of the Cross.

Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate. He was handed over to the ruthless Priests and Scribes for crucifixion, but facing the cross, Jesus did not blink nor did he complain. But rather suffered under Pontius Pilate that we might be set free from the punishment of our sins and live with Him in everlasting life.

Originally posted at What does this Mean? Blog: https://whatdoesthismean.blog

The posts in the blog What does this Mean? are now available at What does this Mean? | Rev. Robert E. Smith | Substack

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
Christ Lutheran Church
Noblesville, Indiana

©2019 Jacob Hercamp. All rights reserved. Permission granted to copy, share and display freely for non-commercial purposes. Direct all other rights and permissions inquiries to cosmithb@gmail.com

It’s His Story

Encore Post: [Twenty-Sixth in a series of posts on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism] People love stories. From small children who beg to read the same book over and over again to adults who will go back to their favorite movie just to escape the moment for a while into another world. But it’s not just fiction that captures our imagination and emotions. Stories about real life help us make sense of everything. It tells us where we fit and gives meaning to life. In fact, history is really telling stories about the past.

Every religion tells a story about how the world began, what its gods did to make it that way and how the world will come to an end. Most importantly, it tells what will happen to us. These stories are called by scholars myths or salvation histories. The Apostle’s Creed is THE salvation history — how God acts to save us.

The Second Article of the creed is all about Jesus. The story begins with Jesus, the eternal Son of God, who was born of the Virgin Mary, as a true man. Why did he do this? Because we were lost and condemned by our sin. So he redeemed us, not by gold and silver, but by his own blood, shed on the cross. Now we belong to him and will live with him forever. This story gives us a place to be, no matter how the story of our lives fills with complicated plot twists. We can put up with it because we know how the story ends — we live happily ever after.

Most importantly, the Bible is his story. It is all about Jesus, the son of God.

Originally posted at What does this Mean? Blog: https://whatdoesthismean.blog
The posts in the blog What does this Mean? are now available at What does this Mean? | Rev. Robert E. Smith | Substack
 
Rev. Robert E. Smith
Pastor Emeritus
Fort Wayne, Indiana
 

©2018-2021 Robert E. Smith. All rights reserved. Permission granted to copy, share and display freely for non-commercial purposes. Direct all other rights and permissions inquiries to cosmithb@gmail.com

Son of God

Encore Post: [Twenty-Fifth in a series of posts on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism] Caesar Augustus, Emperor of Rome, built a temple in honor of his Great-Uncle and father by adoption, Julius Caesar. The empire proclaimed Julius Caesar a god after his death. Augustus called himself the son of god from that moment on.

As strange as that sounds to us, many ancient rulers would call themselves the son of one god or another. The move would help cement their political power and stroke their egos. That is why no one was surprised when the Bible used that title for the people of Israel as a whole, and the Messiah in particular.

What was unusual was how the Scripture uses the title for Jesus. Jesus, you see, is not a son of god as another way of saying he is great. He is literally the Son of God, the creator of the universe, both in eternity and in the womb of The Virgin Mary. More than that, Jesus does not claim the title himself in so many words. The Angel Gabriel gives it to Mary when he announced she would be the Mother of the Messiah. (Luke 1:30-35) God the Father himself calls Jesus his “Beloved Son” at his baptism and the transfiguration. (Luke 3:21-22, Luke 9:28) St. Peter confessed him to be “the Son of the living God.” (Matthew 16:16) After Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee, his disciples also called him the Son of God. (Matthew 14:33) An officer in the Roman Army proclaimed that Jesus was the Son of God. (Matthew 27:54) Even Satan and his demons knew who he was. (Matthew 4:1-11, Matthew 8:29, Mark 3:11)

We accept no substitutes. We worship Jesus Christ because he is the one and only Son of the Living God.

Originally posted at What does this Mean? Blog: https://whatdoesthismean.blog
The posts in the blog What does this Mean? are now available at What does this Mean? | Rev. Robert E. Smith | Substack
Rev. Robert E. Smith
Pastor Emeritus
Fort Wayne, Indiana

©2018 Robert E. Smith. All rights reserved. Permission granted to copy, share and display freely for non-commercial purposes. Direct all other rights and permissions inquiries to cosmithb@gmail.com

God is Hands On

Encore Post: [Twenty-Fourth in a series of posts on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism] Benjamin Franklin, like many of the leading thinkers of his time, liked to compare God to a clockmaker. God was a master craftsman. He skillfully formed the many precision parts of creation. Like the clockmaker, he assembled his ingenious machine, each piece carefully assembled, balanced and put it in its proper place. He then wound it up and set it in motion. He then left it alone, only rarely touching it to clean it. God, Franklin thought, was watching us — from a distance.

While God is indeed a great craftsman, he is not distant at all. The Scripture tells us he is involved in every detail of our lives. He maintains the distance between Sun and Earth with precision. He controls the seasons, rains, and all its rhythms. His providence gives us all we have and need to live and enjoy our lives. Some it he does directly, others using the people, things and creatures in this world. He even contains the evil our sins let loose in this world.

We tend not to notice all these ordinary miracles and are tempted to believe our blessings come from our own efforts. When things do not go well, we then blame God as if he doesn’t care about us. We can’t comprehend that God can permit sin and evil in the world without being its cause. This is another of the mysteries that we run into when we try to understand our creator.

This is why it is good to build thanksgiving to God into our daily lives, when we wake, when we eat, when we worship, and when sleep. Most especially, it is good to thank him for his mercy in Christ Jesus.

Originally posted at What does this Mean? Blog: https://whatdoesthismean.blog

The posts in the blog What does this Mean? are now available at What does this Mean? | Rev. Robert E. Smith | Substack

Rev. Robert E. Smith
Pastor Emeritus
Fort Wayne, Indiana

©2018 Robert E. Smith. All rights reserved. Permission granted to copy, share and display freely for non-commercial purposes. Direct all other rights and permissions inquiries to cosmithb@gmail.com

God Made Me and All Creatures

Encore Post: [Twenty-Third in a series of posts on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism] Life can sometimes be confusing. Maybe you have two good opportunities that you have to choose from. Maybe a series of setbacks or changes in your life hit you in quick succession. Or life just seems to drag on. Maybe you lose someone close to you. Or you discover the harder you try to obey God’s law, the more you fail to do so. You wonder who you are.

That is a good time to remind yourself of who you are and whose you are. The basic fact of your life, my life and every life is that God made you. Martin Luther put it this way: “I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my limbs, my reason, and all my senses” (Small Catechism 2.1) He made you who you are — a man or a woman, tall or short, blue eyes, brown hair and more — written in every cell of your body. Even twins are unique in their own ways. There is no one like you.

But the Father not only made you — he made you new again. In Baptism, he adopted you as his Son. You belong to him now and forever. So, you can answer the confusion of the world, the accusing devil and the lure of our sinful self. “Go away! I am made by God and baptized his own.” Such a statement can bring peace, no matter the mess around you.

Originally posted at What does this Mean? Blog: https://whatdoesthismean.blog

The posts in the blog What does this Mean? are now available at What does this Mean? | Rev. Robert E. Smith | Substack

Rev. Robert E. Smith
Pastor Emeritus
Fort Wayne, Indiana

©2018 Robert E. Smith. All rights reserved. Permission granted to copy, share and display freely for non-commercial purposes. Direct all other rights and permissions inquiries to cosmithb@gmail.com

God Can Do Anything He Wants to Do

Encore Post: [Twenty-Second in a series of posts on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism] When we say that God is almighty, it seems simple enough. We can even explain it to a three-year-old: God can do anything he wants to do. Yet the more we think about it, that God is omnipotent, παντοκράτορ — all powerful, the more we have trouble taking it all in. We get a feeling of this when some child discovers the snarky question: “can God make a rock that he can’t lift?” or some opponent of the faith asks the classic question: “what did God do before he made the world?” The questions normally get the answer they deserve: an equally silly response like: “he made hell so he has a place to send people who ask such questions!”

What such questions point out is there is a limit to how much we can understand our maker. They show what happens when we try to pit one quality (attribute) of God against another. So … For God, who is eternal, time does not exist. There is no before or after creation for him. He makes all the rules, so he doesn’t have to follow them. That’s what makes a miracle possible.

Why it is important that God is almighty is it means he can — and does — what he promises. To save those who rebelled against him, ruined and still ruins his perfect world. He did so by being born of a virgin, died to pay for their sins and rose again from the dead. On the day he chooses, he will call his children to rise from the dust to live with him forever. It means that he saves us and will bring an end to sin, death and the devil. So we confess: “I believe in God, the Father almighty” and marvel and all he can do, wants to do and will do for us.

Originally posted at What does this Mean? Blog: https://whatdoesthismean.blog
 
The posts in the blog What does this Mean? are now available at What does this Mean? | Rev. Robert E. Smith | Substack
 
Rev. Robert E. Smith
Pastor Emeritus
Fort Wayne, Indiana
 

©2018 Robert E. Smith. All rights reserved. Permission granted to copy, share and display freely for non-commercial purposes. Direct all other rights and permissions inquiries to cosmithb@msn.com

Calling God our Father and Meaning it

Encore Post: [Twenty-First in a series of posts on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism] Calling God our father is second nature to Christians. After all, Jesus invites us to do so. We teach the Lord’s Prayer to our youngest children as their first prayer. So it may come as a surprise how unique that is among the world’s religions. Most religions hold their gods at a distance. The high god of native religions makes the world and goes away, leaving it to lesser spirits and humans. For Muslims, Allah is a strict, distant god. You must toe the line to please him. In Judaism, while God is seen as having a warm relationship with them, even to pronounce his name is considered disrespectful. For Hindus, Buddhists and other Eastern religions, god is not a person at all. The universe is their god and they see humans as god in a real sense.

For Christians, however, God is very much a Father who loves us and is a part of our daily lives. The Father adopted us as his sons and heirs with Christ. He invites us to call him abba — daddy — and approach us the way a little child approaches her father.

When we confess God as Father, we claim he loves us, cares for us, wants to be with us now and forever. It is incarnational — a statement that God cares for us so much that in the person of his Son, he became a flesh-and-blood man, lived with us as one of us, suffered and died for us and rose again for us. By doing so, he restored the relationship between himself and us. He is indeed our father and a model of what fatherhood is all about.

Originally posted at What does this Mean? Blog: https://whatdoesthismean.blog
The posts in the blog What does this Mean? are now available at What does this Mean? | Rev. Robert E. Smith | Substack
Rev. Robert E. Smith
Pastor Emeritus
Fort Wayne, Indiana

©2018 Robert E. Smith. All rights reserved. Permission granted to copy, share and display freely for non-commercial purposes. Direct all other rights and permissions inquiries to cosmithb@gmail.com

The Three Ways God Cares for Us

Encore Post: [Twentieth in a series of posts on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism] When we baptize a new Christian, we ask him to promise several things and to confess several things. Following the ancient tradition of the Church, we ask the candidate if they believe what the creed proclaims. But we do this with three questions: “Do you believe in God the Father…?” “Do you believe in Jesus Christ…?” and “Do you believe in the Holy Spirit…? We do this because each person of the Holy Trinity has His own role in our life and salvation.

This is a bit of a mystery, since all three persons are involved in all these acts of love for us, yet the Scripture speaks of each having these roles. Rather than try to puzzle out how this is so, we rejoice that each person loves us in his own way.

Martin Luther, in his Small Catechism, calls each person’s work an article and speaks about them separately. So, he talks about the good news that God the Father created and provides for us, that God the Son redeems us with his own blood and the Holy Spirit makes us holy. This good news gives us joy, especially since we just considered his law in the Ten Commandments. We have been confronted by the fact of our sinfulness. Now we can have peace in the gospel of the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation.

Originally posted at What does this Mean? Blog: https://whatdoesthismean.blog
The posts in the blog What does this Mean? are now available at What does this Mean? | Rev. Robert E. Smith | Substack
Rev. Robert E. Smith
Pastor Emeritus
Fort Wayne, Indiana

©2018 Robert E. Smith. All rights reserved. Permission granted to copy, share and display freely for non-commercial purposes. Direct all other rights and permissions inquiries to cosmithb@gmail.com

What’s a Creed, Anyway?

Encore Post: [Nineteenth in a series of posts on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism] We say creeds together every time we worship together. We study them in confirmation and memorize two of them. They contain the basic teachings of Scripture that all Christians believe. Even Protestant churches that reject formal creeds cheerfully confess what they confess. But what are they, anyway?

The word creed comes from the Latin word credo which means “I believe.” they are statements of what we know about God, especially the gospel. In one sense, they are salvation history — a statement of how God saved us and where we fit in his plan. They are short and sweet — something we can take with us forever.

While the Apostles did not write the creeds, the words and phrases reflect how the Bible proclaims the Gospel. When new Christians were taught the faith in the early Church, their teachers had them memorize short sentences and phrases that summed what they believed. When they were baptized, they would recite them. Some of these are in the Bible. Here are a few:

“Hear, O Israel…” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5​)
“There is one God… one Lord…” (1 Corinthians 8:6​)
“Christ died for our sins…” (1 Corinthians 15:3-8)​
“Jesus Christ is Lord…” (1 Corinthians 12:3), (Philippians 2:11)​

Over three hundred years, these statements grew in size. Christians began to use the same words. In the 4th century, they developed into the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. They became ways in which all Christians knew Jesus’ story and where they fit in it. When we recite the Creed, it reminds us of who we are and whose we are.

Originally posted at What does this Mean? Blog: https://whatdoesthismean.blog
 
The posts in the blog What does this Mean? are now available at What does this Mean? | Rev. Robert E. Smith | Substack
 
Rev. Robert E. Smith
Pastor Emeritus
Fort Wayne, Indiana

©2018 Robert E. Smith. All rights reserved. Permission granted to copy, share and display freely for non-commercial purposes. Direct all other rights and permissions inquiries to cosmithb@msn.com

God the Jealous God

Encore Post: [Eighteenth in a series of posts on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism] In our tour of the Ten Commandments, we learned God wants more than just a casual keeping of his law. He wants our heart and soul to match our behavior. “Love your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5) Of course, we know we cannot keep the law perfectly in this life and God knows it, too. Jesus died to pay the price for our disobedience and earned us the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. So, why should we try at all to be good?

The reason is that sin has its consequences in this world and the next. When Adam and Eve sinned, sinned multiplied and became a part of the lives of everyone of their children. It brought with it death, sickness, disaster, grief and pain. It destroyed the close relationship between people and between people and God. Since we were made to share our lives with God and each other, it harmed the very purpose for which we exist. It sin that God sent his Son to save us from, not to be a fire insurance policy against hell.

God describes the relationship he has with his people as a marriage. Sin amounts to being unfaithful with other gods, dividing our love for him by giving ourselves to others. So it is that God warns us in the First Commandment that he is a jealous God and there are consequences when we are unfaithful to him. (Exodus 20:5-6) God that the death of Jesus breaks the power of sin and death in our lives. With prayer and the help of other Christians, we can fight back against these sins and sometimes even be free of them.

After all, God’s warning comes with a promise. It is not only sins that travel from generation to generation, but blessings as well. With the help of the Holy Spirit, when we establish habits of doing good — attending worship faithfully, praying with our children, reading God’s word to them and caring for others, these, too, will be a part of their inheritance.

Originally posted at What does this Mean? Blog: https://whatdoesthismean.blog
The posts in the blog What does this Mean? are now available at What does this Mean? | Rev. Robert E. Smith | Substack
Rev. Robert E. Smith
Pastor Emeritus
Fort Wayne, Indiana

©2018 Robert E. Smith. All rights reserved. Permission granted to copy, share and display freely for non-commercial purposes. Direct all other rights and permissions inquiries to cosmithb@gmail.com