God – Page 5 – What Does This Mean?

He Descended into Hell

Encore Post: In the Apostles’ Creed, all of the teachings we confess are pretty straightforward, so much so that we can explain it to children — except for one. “He descended into hell.” Most Christians have a hard time figuring out what it means. Was this a part of Christ’s suffering? Was he visiting the dead to preach the good news to them? The first doesn’t seem right, since Jesus’ last words were to say “it is finished” and to commit his soul to the Father. The second seems off because Scripture tells us that no one can come to faith after death.

These instincts are correct. Scripture tells us that after Jesus rose from the dead, he went to hell to announce his victory over sin and death to Satan, his demons and the lost. (1 Peter 3:18-20) He defeated the devil and broke the power of sin and death over us. (Colossians 2:13-15) What this means for us is that, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can stand up to the devil. “Scowl fierce as he will, he can harm us none.” (Martin Luther, “A Mighty Fortress“) In Jesus, we are more than conquerors, because he descended into hell.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

And He Suffered Under Pontius Pilate

Encore Post: 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 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. Due to 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.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
Christ Lutheran Church
Noblesville, Indiana

It’s His Story

Encore Post: 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 awhile 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 it’s 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 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.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Son of God

Encore Post: 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 the way that 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 announces that 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.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

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God Can Do Anything He Wants to Do

Encore Post: 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.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

Calling God our Father and Meaning it

Encore Post: 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. 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. In a previous post, we spoke about how 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 that he loves us, cares for us, wants The Three Ways God Cares for Us to be with us now and forever. It is incarnational – a statement that God cares for us so much that in 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.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

The Three Ways God Cares for Us

Encore Post: 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, 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.

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God the Jealous God

Encore Post: In our tour of the Ten Commandments, we learned that 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 that 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 as well as 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.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

God’s Good Gift of Marriage

Encore Post: “It is not good,” God said, “that man be alone. I will make a helper fit for him.” (Genesis 2:18) Formed from the rib of Adam, God presented Eve to man. “At last bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!” replied Adam. … “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh,” Moses concludes his account of the first marriage. (Genesis 2:23-24)

God’s gift was very good. Marriage is the closest picture we have of the nature of God. In it, there are two persons, yet one flesh. It is a reflection of the relationship between Christ and his bride, the church. It is the foundation on which God builds families, where children can be raised in love and security. It is sealed with God’s gift of sexual intimacy. God thinks so highly of marriage that he makes it a part of the ten commandments. That is why he limits sexual activity to marriage.

In our culture, which makes sexual freedom into a god, it can be more challenging than ever to keep this commandment. Everywhere are sexual images, pornography, temptation to all manner of sexual encounters. Jesus makes it no easier when he tells us that even to look at someone not your spouse with desire for her is to break this commandment. (Matthew 5:27-28)

Thank God we have resources that can help us resist these temptations. Marriage itself helps by providing the place for these feelings to be expressed. We also have each other. All of us have these temptations and we can urge each other to be faithful. When we see a friend tempted, we can plead with them and remind them of the consequences of such sin. And when we do fall into sin, we know that Jesus died to forgive our sins and is with us always to help us resist it.

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Being for Life and not Death

Encore Post: On the surface, “you will not murder” seems easy enough to keep. In spite of what the TV and the Internet like to make us believe, very few people outside the military ever actually kill another person. Most policemen on the job do not draw their weapons even once in their careers. It should be easy to check this one off, we are tempted to think.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us there is a lot more to this command than that. Murder begins in our hearts when we become angry with someone and wish harm to them. (Matthew 5:21-26) hatred has a way of spilling over into action when we give it room to fester.

Martin Luther sees in this command every place God forbids us to harm our neighbors in any way. It also calls on us to help anyone who is hurting, in danger, weak, hungry or ill. God, the Author of Life, wants us to be for life, too. When we do not come to the aid of others, we kill them, even if it is only in a small way. Jesus even promises to remember on the last day when we do not care for them. What we do or do not do to the least important of our neighbors, he will count as having been done to him. (Matthew 25:31-46)

In our modern culture, it is ever more challenging to defend life, protect the weak and care for those who suffer. Mothers are taught it is their right to kill babies in the womb if they do not want to raise them. Doctors urge patients and their families to put to death those who suffer greatly. In some cases, governments take these decisions out of the hands of family and kill patients they find too expensive to treat. Rightly so, Christians come to the defense of the weak and defenseless.

Because God in Christ died so that we might rise again, we seek not to harm others, but to help them as he helped us.

Rev. Robert E. Smith
Concordia Theological Seminary
Fort Wayne, Indiana

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