[Fifth in a series of posts on Ephesians 1 & 2] 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 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.
[Fourth in a series of posts on Ephesians 1 & 2] 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.
[Third in a series of posts on Ephesians 1 & 2] 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.
[Second in a series of posts on Ephesians 1 & 2] 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)
[First in a series of posts on Ephesians 1 & 2] 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.
[Seventh in a series of posts on how to read the Bible] 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.
[Eleventh in a series of posts on church words] Confessional Lutherans have an uneasy relationship with the word “Protestant.” In 1526, with Emperor Charles V engaged in war with France and their Ottoman Turk allies. At the first Diet of Speyer, the papal princes and territories of the Holy Roman Empire agreed with their Lutheran peers to back the empire militarily in exchange for toleration and the calling of a church council in Germany. With France defeated, Charles V revoked the agreement at the Second Diet of Speyer. The Lutheran princes responded by submitting a document of protest of this action. For that reason, Lutheran princes and territories were nicknamed Protestants by their papal opponents.
Lutherans more or less rejected the term, preferring to be called, “Evangelicals.” But by the middle of the 17th century, the term was used to refer to all Christians in the West that did not accept the authority of the pope. Yet Confessional Lutherans have been unwilling to apply the term to themselves because the majority of theological traditions called Protestant deny the sacraments and their power to save and to create faith, among other things.
As we have discussed over the last seven posts, Lutherans have been drawn to various titles to describe them. Each has its charms and the ones that attract us tell us more about what the individual believe than the definition itself. Because many of these titles are claimed by other Christians, Confessional Lutherans are not entirely comfortable with any of the terms, so what do we do?
Perhaps C. F. W. Walther’s advice is best. We call ourselves Lutheran, not because we worship Luther, but because our Lutheran Confessions faithfully teach the doctrine of Holy Scripture and that all may know what we believe by reading them. It is not loving to hide what we stand for from others. Truth-in-advertising is the best policy in an age when many are looking for something enduring.
The Roman system of law was not much different from ours, kind of a cross between our Grand Jury, Indictment and trial system and a general court-supreme court model. A local court would take on most of the infractions, would look at the evidence when it comes to serious matters and return a charge for the Roman court where necessary. The gathering at the High Priest’s home was much like a grand jury, the Sanhedrin, meeting in the outer courts of the temple, the lower court that brought the formal charges and Pilate’s court the high tribunal.
Pilate was an able, competent and experienced Prefect — a military governor — who had ruled Palestine mostly successfully for over thirty years. The Jewish people were notoriously unruly, requiring occasionally violent suppression from time to time. There were a few incidents where the leaders of the Jews set traps for him, resulting in reprimands from Rome.
When the Sanhedrin came with Jesus, he knew immediately that it was for envy that they charged him. He first tried to shift it back to them, only to be told that only he could judge Jesus, because Jesus was worthy of death. He next sent him to Herod, who was hoping Jesus would entertain him, but Jesus didn’t play along. So, it was back to Pilate.
After questioning Jesus, and hearing from his wife that she had been warned in a dream, Pilate was convinced that Jesus was innocent. So, Pilate offered to release a revolutionary, Barabbas, to them or Jesus. They shouted for Barabbas.
Pilate was still ready to release Jesus, repeating he found Jesus innocent. When, however, the Sanhedrin threatened to report him to Caesar, he gave in and allowed Jesus to be crucified.
He washed his hands, saying he would have nothing to do with it. That really did not work. Every Sunday, we confess Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate.
We are tempted to blame him, seeing he killed a man he knew to be innocent to save his skin. We are tempted to blame the Jewish leaders, for it was they who accused Jesus and assumed responsibility for his death.
But in the end, it was not Pilate, not the Jewish leaders, but Jesus, who is responsible for his death. He told Pilate as much when he said Pilate would have no authority if it wasn’t given to him. It is why he became a man in the womb of the Virgin Mary in the first place. It was he who bowed to his Father’s will, knowing full well he would bear the sins of the whole world to the cross.
Why would Jesus be condemned to die, then? It is because of my sins, because of your sins and the sins of all God’s children. He loved us before the creation of the world, was not willing to be parted from us for all eternity. Someone had to die and only God was innocent enough and man mortal enough to do it. So, he came, the Lamb of God, to take away the sins of the world. He set his face towards Jerusalem and went to his death, for you and for me. So, in this Lent, and always, when we are tempted to downplay our sins, God invites us to consider the cost, repent of them and receive from Jesus the forgiveness he earned for us that first Good Friday.
Encore Post: Our evangelical brothers and sisters in Christ are all about making a decision for Christ. They will often ask, “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Savior?” Such a question sounds strange to Lutherans, along with the similar question, “are you born again?” The reason is Lutherans believe these are really the wrong questions. Why? Because Jesus sought us, found us, saved us by his suffering and death, accepted us in baptism and gave new birth in it by water and the Holy Spirit. So, yes, thank you, I am born again, but no, I did not accept Jesus as my personal Savior. He accepted me and made me God’s child and his brother. There is nothing more personal than that.
I once was asked by someone if I could study all the Bible passages with him that talk about accepting Jesus as Savior. My answer was no, because there are no such passages. In fact, if you go through the Bible looking for people who were lost and sought God, you will find very few. Think about it for a moment: God made Adam and Eve. When they sinned, he came and found them. He went to Noah and told him to build the ark. He found Abraham and told him to leave home, promising to give him a son. He came to Jacob when the patriarch ran away and wrestled with him. He called to Samuel in the night. He sent Samuel to find and anoint David. Almost every book of the words of the prophets begins with: “and the word of God came to…” We don’t seek God, he seeks us out.
Why is this? We were dead in our sins. (Ephesians 2:1-3) As the saying goes, “Dead men tell no tales.” As Martin Luther says it, “I cannot by my own reason or strength, believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to him.” (Small Catechism 2.3) Because he loved us, he is gracious to us. He was moved in Christ Jesus to become one of us, live a perfect life for us, take our sins upon himself and die on the cross for us. It is by this grace we are saved, through his gift to us of faith.
In a sense, we can talk about decision theology, then. God decided to save us. He is our personal savior, because he made it so. We will live with him forever because of this. We can rest in the peace this brings, confident that he will remove every sin from us one day, the day he calls us forth from our graves and dries every tear in our eyes.
Encore Post: Television, the internet, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other technologies are a blessing and a curse. News — and rumors — spread around the world at the speed of light. Even though we live in the safest, most prosperous and healthiest time in the world’s history, the flow of news and fake news makes us think we live in the most dangerous times of all. In the United States, young adults of the millennial generation are increasingly worried about their finances, health and safety. Although we can instantly connect with almost everyone we have ever known, they report they are lonelier than ever before.
Christians are not exceptions to this pattern. Yet God gives us ways to cope with the worries of this world. Although we have troubles in this world, we do not need to be afraid. Jesus gives us his peace. (John 14:27) St. Paul tells us how the peace of God sets a watch over our hearts and minds. This peace is ours because Jesus made peace between us and God when he died for our sins on the cross. He broke down the barrier between us once and for all. Now, nothing can separate us from the love of God. We will live with God forever.
How do we cope with all the uncertainties of life that cause us to worry? Jesus advises us to focus on the kingdom of God and his righteousness. God will take care of the rest. He provides food and clothing, house and home and everything we need. Yes, the evil of this world will complicate our lives. But Jesus will be with us until the end of time itself.
St. Paul tells us how we can do this. He told us to pray about everything, thanking God for all his blessings and bringing our requests to him. Being thankful helps us to reset our perspective. Life is not about being a victim, but about receiving the many gifts God gives us. We know he hears our every prayer, that he loves us and will work everything to serve for our good. Knowing these things brings the peace of God to us. Like soldiers on watch over their camp at night, this peace protects our hearts from despair and focuses our mind on the tasks God has called us to do in this life by his grace.
Rev. Robert E. Smith Pastor Emeritus Fort Wayne, Indiana
