[Fifth in a series of posts on Bible Stories] Encore Post: After the Fall, sin spread to every corner of creation and infected it with evil. Two groups of people emerged among the sons of Adam and Eve. One group, Moses called the Sons of God, those who clung to God according to faith, and the other the daughters of men, who lived according to their sinful desires. When the Sons of God began to marry the daughters of men, the trend of unfaithfulness to God grew in strength. God saw “that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” ( Genesis 6:5). But Noah found favor in God’s eyes.
The first time we read about the flood, we get the impression that Noah and his family were saved because they were saints in a world full of sinners. But this is not true. They were just as sinful at heart as their neighbors. The difference was that they “walked with God” (6:9) and were righteous by faith (Hebrews 11:7), trusting God to care for them and obeying His commands. Even when God decided to wipe out the entire world, he delayed while Noah as a prophet warned people and built the Ark. When the flood came, God preserved the lives of Noah and his family and breeding stock of all living creatures. He made a covenant with mankind through Noah, never to destroy the entire world by flood again, sealing it with a rainbow as a reminder to him to spare them all.
The flood reminds Christians of baptism, in which our sins are drowned and we are safely carried to new life. Martin Luther’s “flood prayer,” which calls attention to God’s saving of Noah, has returned to the Baptism service in the latest Missouri Synod hymnal. The early church used the image of the Ark as a symbol for the church, which carries us to everlasting. In fact, the place in a church building where the people sit is called the nave, Latin for ship, because of that imagery.
After the Fall, God was still with Adam and Eve. He blessed them with many sons and daughters. We do not know the names of most of them. After some time, how long we do not know, God blessed Adam and Eve with a son, Cain. Martin Luther was convinced she thought he was the promised Messiah. Even if this is not true, she recognized he was a gift from God. “I have gotten a man (with the help of) the Lord.” (Genesis 4:1) Not long after, she gave birth to another son — Abel.
Adam and Eve, like many of us, put a lot of hope in our firstborn child. God, however, is not impressed with appearance, skill, or birth order. He looks for what is in a person’s heart. (1 Samuel 16:7) In Genesis, especially, God tends to favor the secondborn. Here it is, Abel, who trusted God rather than Cain, who didn’t trust God so much.
Both Abel and Cain brought offerings to God. Cain gave some of his crops to God because he felt he had to. Abel gave the very best of the very best of his flock because he loved God. God accepted both gifts, but favored Abel’s over Cain’s because Abel gave his gift by faith, while Cain offered his as a work. This made Cain angry and jealous. God warned him not to give in to these sinful thoughts. But Cain did not do so. Instead, he killed Abel, committing the first murder.
Cain thought he had silenced Abel. But no one can hide anything from God. Abel’s blood called out for vengeance. God cursed Cain to the life of a nomad, but protected him from the vengeance of others. The Scriptures are silent whether Cain ever repented, although he did not at first. We do know God never gave up on him.
Jesus named Abel as the first martyr, killed for his faith in God. Yet, as the hymn writer puts it:
Abel’s blood for vengeance Pleaded to the skies; But the blood of Jesus For our pardon cries. (“Glory be to Jesus” Stanza 4)
Jesus also died an innocent death, but he did so willingly. He took the guilt of the murders of all the martyrs and all people to the cross, where God worked his vengeance on his only Son. Having paid the price of all sins once and for all, he rose from the dead to justify all who had faith in him.
The story of Cain and Abel is the beginning of a long, sad tale of evil, but it is not the last story. The Cross is God’s answer, and one day Jesus will return so all can live happily ever after.
Everything was perfect in the Garden of Eden. Sin did not exist. There was no sickness, suffering, grief, or pain. Death did not exist. If nothing had happened, Adam and Eve would have lived in harmony with God, each other, and all creation. There was only one rule: do not eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Into this perfect scene, Satan came in the form of a snake.
Satan tempted Eve with a lie. This is not surprising because he is a liar and the Father of Lies. “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4–5) The irony, of course, is that they were already like God. And, in trying to become like God, they became not like God at all. They decided to become their own gods.
The church calls this “Original Sin.” The effect was immediate. Instead of being turned outward to serve God and each other, the original sin changed their orientation. They were curved in on themselves, serving their desires above all else. They were separated from God and hid from him, as if you can hide from God. (which, of course, you cannot!) They transmitted this orientation to their children, and, through them, to every human being (except one … but that’s later in the story of the Bible!) — including us.
God was not kidding when he warned Adam: “In the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:17) Everything was cut off from God, the author of life. From that moment, everything began to die: Adam, Eve, plants, animals, their children … even the air, the sea, and the ground. Disease began to infect people. Everything became a struggle to survive. God summed it up: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19)
Yet even on this, the darkest day, the first ray of the gospel shone. God himself gives the first prophecy of Christ, called by the Church the protevangelium, — the First Gospel. To Satan, he said, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” (Genesis 3:15) Jesus, the Descendant of Eve, will wound Satan by defeating him on the cross. While God held Adam responsible for the Fall. St. Paul explains that sin infected all people through this one man, Adam. However, the good news is that by the sacrifice of one man, Jesus Christ, sin is paid for, and God’s forgiveness comes to all people. Yet much suffering was yet to come before his coming.
Moses tells the story of creation twice. Hebrew writers believed that if something is important, you repeat it while covering different details each time. The first story tells us how God created most of the universe simply by speaking — and it came to be! The creation of Adam and Eve is much different. God gets down on His hands and knees and makes us with His own hands. He does this because we are much more important to Him.
When God said, Let us make man in our own image, He did not mean that we look like Him or that we are the only beings that make decisions like He does. God made Adam and Eve to be holy like He is. Sadly, by trying to be just like God (Genesis 3:5) Adam and Eve became less like Him. By the Cross, God once again makes us just like Him by making us just like Jesus. (Romans 8:28-29)
The creation of Adam and Eve reveals more about God and people than just that. God made Adam first and all alone. His first task was to name all the animals. Along the way, Adam noticed something was missing. There was no one just like him. God sums it up when he said, “I will make him a helper fit for him. ” So God made Eve from one of his ribs. With joy, Adam said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (Genesis 2:23)
In doing this, God established marriage. From that day forward, a man and a woman will leave their parents and form a family, which, when God blesses, includes children. No other relationship prospers like this one, made and blessed by God. In it human beings come as close as they can come to reflecting the Holy Trinity. Two people, distinct and individual, become one. Although sin has damaged the relationship between husbands and wives, parents and children, still God blesses families where father and mother love each other and care for their children. Those who grow up in families do better than all other situations in which they might find themselves. God was right. It is very good indeed.
During the nearly twenty years my wife was Sunday school superintendent in two congregations, I wrote a weekly newsletter to help parents review the week’s lessons and apply the point we made to their children’s lives. One feature was the Did you know? paragraphs. The idea was to teach the parents something they did not know about the story. These posts expand on those paragraphs for this blog.
There are two stories about creation at the beginning of the Bible. The first one is an overview of how God made the world and everything in it. The second one tells the story of how God made Adam and Eve.
The first story in the Bible has a rhythm. Every day we hear that “God said let … and it was so, and God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1) Every day ends: “evening and morning was the __ day.” God made everything in a very orderly fashion. First He made the land, sea, and sky. Then He filled it with living creatures. On the sixth day, He made men and women in His own image. When God had finished creation, He called it very good.
The world is far from very good today. The sin of Adam and Eve brought sin, suffering, grief, and death into the world. Yet the beauty and wonder of creation is still there. One day, Jesus will return and take away this curse once and for all. Then we all will see the work God has done and say with Him, It is very good.
[Eighth in a series of posts on how to read the Bible]
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 serve as a moral guide to aid your decision-making. 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 into my situation here, 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 to heal the sick, give sight to the blind, cast out demons, and forgive 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 the 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!
The legacy of Saint Athanasius is one of standing firm in the face of opposition to the word of God. Throughout his 45 years as Bishop, including 17 years in exile, he stood unwaveringly against the errors surrounding him. The Arian heresy, denying the divinity of Jesus, and all the derived and adjacent heresies are still with us. But we have a firm confession from the Word of God to fall back on in defense of the faith. That is the continuing gift given to us by Athanasius and those of his theological tradition. “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:25-30)
Alexandria in Egypt, the bishopric of Athanasius, is no longer a center of Christendom. Augustine of Hippo, who owes much to Athanasius, and is a father for us in the western church, presided over a region of North Africa that is no longer a center of Christianity. It’s wise for us to remember, but the centers of Christianity Today may not be the centers of Christianity tomorrow.
The concluding remarks of the Athanasian Creed can give us pause. While reinforcing the bodily resurrection, the creed seems to assert works righteousness.
“He will come to judge the living and the dead. At His coming, all people will rise again with their bodies and give an account concerning their own deeds. And those who have done good will enter eternal life, and those who have done evil into eternal fire.”
We should always hear these words of judgment within the context of Jesus’ work of Salvation for us. The accounting of our deeds is not done according to human reason. Just as Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness. So, by faith, we receive eternal salvation. Let’s consider the sheep and the goats.
The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, chapter 25: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats … Then the righteous [sheep] will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? … Then [the unrighteous goats] also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’”
Neither the sheep nor the goats can make any sense out of this accounting. Those who are righteous by faith are ever more aware of their sin and their need for salvation day-by-day. Those who condemn themselves by their sin and persistent unbelief are ever self-justifying and judging themselves to be “good” by their own standard apart from faith. And Saint Paul gives us this useful nugget.
The epistle to the Ephesians, chapter 2: “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, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
The good works are credited to us, sheep. These works themselves are produced by faith, which is from God, alien to our nature. And those works are prepared for us beforehand. The works we set out to do may not even be among them. Dear Christians, live in the Word and in the Christian faith. The Spirit produces faith and good works from the Gospel of salvation in Christ Jesus.
Dear Baptized, let us celebrate the faith credited to us as righteousness!
The errors faced by the early church in Alexandria were not just about the Trinity. There were also Christological confusions. Saint Athanasius was present and attentive for the decisions of the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD). Concerning the person and nature of Jesus Christ, the term, ὁμοούσιος (homoousios — of the same substance), was used to sort out the heresies. But the wisdom of man thinks itself wiser than the wisdom of God.
The third section could almost be its own creed. It deals with Jesus’ incarnation. The two natures in the one person of Christ are on full display here.
In the Athanasian Creed, we reject Eutychianism, that Jesus’ human and divine natures merged into a new, different nature. We also reject Nestorianism, that the two natures of Christ are not unified in His person. And, we reject the Gnostic notion that we will be free from matter and our bodies, specifically in the next life. These heresies or errors generally arise from an attempt to fill in the blanks of the mysteries of God with our human reason. That is not a good practice we should engage in. Some things are known to us. And some are not yet revealed.
The Eutychians held that Jesus’ human and divine natures merged into a new nature. In their intent to firmly affirm the unity of God and man in Christ, they created something different. The Eutychian Jesus must be separate from the Trinity because he is of a different substance. His human and divine natures make him a new, unique thing that is neither God nor man. Since it is not either, it cannot be truly God.
“But pastor, why does that matter?” That’s a perfectly fair question. Only God can atone for all the sins of all of mankind. We know that Jesus died for our sins, each and every one, and all together. So, our understanding of the nature of Christ has to allow for that truth to remain constant. Instead, we confess, “our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is at the same time both God and man.”
The Nestorians found the other ditch. Like the brilliant Vizzini from the movie: The Princess Bride, “clearly I cannot choose the cup in front of you.” If the complete unity of the two natures into a new nature is wrong, then the two natures of Christ must not be unified in His person. This creates a host of new potential misunderstandings. Does Jesus retain his humanity? Did Jesus remain human throughout His ministry, life, death, and resurrection? Did God depart from the man, Jesus, at any point? The answers to those questions, in many cases, are their own unique error, which we may discuss at another time.
The rubber meets the road here. On the cross, God turned his back on Jesus, who is also God. On the cross, God the Son died for our sins. And God the Son was raised to life again. All of the hows, whys, and wherefores are not for us to know. We’re given exactly what we need to understand and trust completely that our sin was atoned for on Calvary.
“He is God and man, He is not two, but one Christ: one, however, not by the conversion of the divinity into flesh, but by the assumption of the humanity into God; one altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person.”
The Gnostics had a notion that we will be free from matter and our bodies one day. Specifically, we will be only spiritual in the next life. The taking up of Enoch and Elijah bodily into heaven speaks against this. Job’s confession that he will see God face-to-face with his own eyes does so. Mary Magdalene confesses the resurrection to Jesus just before he restores Lazarus to life. In the resurrection, Jesus eats and drinks with His disciples and invites them to touch Him. He is with them bodily, not spiritually.
In the Christian faith, we live with the certainty that the resurrection promises we will be whole and complete. This is a challenge, especially at the time of the death of our own loved ones. We want to know that everything is complete for them. We want to know that they are “in a better place.” Yet the Bible teaches us it isn’t quite done. The promise of salvation isn’t full and complete until we are resurrected in our bodies to eternal life. We confess the resurrection of our bodies! “At His coming, all people will rise again with their bodies.”
Instead of intellectualizing the complex in a way that makes sense, we are better served by acknowledging the witness of scripture. Some things are clear and known to us. Other mysteries are not revealed to us in this life. But, we can know with certainty that all of the things pertinent to our Salvation are clear and known.
Dear Baptized, let us praise the one Christ, truly God and truly man, for our salvation!
The exact date and author of the Athanasian Creed are unknown. It derives its name from the theological tradition of Saint Athanasius. It is typically dated to the late 4th or early 5th century AD. Augustine’s On the Trinity (415 AD) has very similar language to the creed. Athanasius’ lifelong battle against the heresies prevalent in the early Christian church in North Africa helped shape a theological tradition that heavily influenced the Western church.
“Just as we are compelled by the Christian truth to acknowledge each distinct person as God and Lord, so also are we prohibited by the catholic religion to say that there are three Gods or Lords.”
In the second section of the creed, we confess the personhood of the Trinity, each distinct from the other. This rejects Modalism, which holds that God changes masks, appearances, or functions but remains the same in person in each case. Rather, we confess that the individual persons of the Triune God possess unique attributes to the exclusion of the others.
This distinctness of a person also describes the divine economy. That is economy in the sense of interrelationship, not of money. Within the Trinity, there is an economy of relationship between the persons. The Father is eternally neither made nor begotten. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father. The Holy Spirit is eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son, neither created nor begotten.
These expressions of the Christian understanding of the Trinity push back against modalism by affirming the concurrence of personhood. It is impossible for the Father to put on a Son mask. He is eternally the Father, and His personhood is unique from the Son. The Son cannot put on a Holy Spirit mask because His attributes in His person are distinct from the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit cannot wear the attributes of the Father because they are unique from His own attributes. All of these attributes are eternally the attributes of the persons of God.
But these immutable characteristics do not make a hierarchy. All persons of the Trinity are equally God. And, none is before or after another.
The Father is not the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the Son. The Son is not the Father. The Holy Spirit is God. The Son is God. The Father is God, coeternal and coequal.
Dear Baptized, the Trinity in Unity and the Unity in Trinity is to be worshipped!
Saint Athanasius was bishop and patriarch of Alexandria, Egypt (under Roman control) from 328 to 373 AD. He attended the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD as secretary to his predecessor, Alexander. Athanasius was ordained as bishop and patriarch after Alexander’s death. In his 48 years presiding over the region, he was exiled five times, by four different Roman emperors, for 17 years, over theological controversies in North Africa.
Each of the three sections of the creed begins with a similar language. The Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds start with “I believe…” But the Athanasian Creed takes a different approach. Rather than solely confessing together with one voice. Here, we also exhort one another, “Whoever desires to be saved must, above all, hold the catholic faith.” Then, in each section, we confess the catholic faith.
We Lutherans need not fear the word “catholic.” The term catholic does not refer to the modern Roman Catholic Church, but to the universal, invisible, orthodox, faithful church of Christ on earth. We retain the use of the term “catholic” in the Athanasian Creed in opposition to the papal church of Rome. “Catholic” simply means “universal,” and as such, we boldly confess it from our Lutheran identity.
The first section addresses the unity of our Triune God. He is uncreated, infinite, and eternal, “not three gods, but one God.” This language rejects Subordinationism, that the Son and the Spirit are less God than that Father is God. Rather, God is of one substance. Subordinationism was, in part, an overcorrection for the error of modalism. Subordinationists were seeking to clarify the distinctness of the person within the Trinity. Their over correction created a theological position that hedged upon tritheism. To protect our understanding from merging God into just one thing of only one sort, they created an understanding where God can easily be three things of three sorts. And these three loosely connected God characters have a hierarchy within their pantheon. This is an error.
The modalist error is also addressed by the second section of the Creed. This serves to remind us that the opposite of an error isn’t always a truth. Sometimes the opposite of an error can simply be an error in the opposite direction.
“But the Godhead of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is one: the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.” The God-ness of the Trinity is whole and one. The attributes of God in His unity are shared and are one: uncreated, infinite, eternal, and almighty. But these are not a dozen attributes, four of each, unique to each person. There are four attributes that each person possesses as one. There are not three gods, but one God. There are not three lords, but one Lord. There are not three eternals, but one Eternal. We worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.
Don’t let yourself be dismayed or discouraged by these complicated understandings. They were intense struggles for the early church and remain intellectual difficulties for us today. The big takeaway from the Athanasian Creed is that we can never fully understand the Trinity. We can, with the help of the fathers of the faith before us, identify those things that are outside the proper understanding.
Dear Baptized, let us celebrate the Trinity in Unity and the Unity in Trinity!
