Sermon Audio
March 6, 2016 Fourth Sunday in Lent
Can You See It?
Ezekiel 39:21-29, Psalm 147, Galatians 4:21-31, St. John 6:1-14
In this season I am loathe to utter the word “election.” I fear that so doing I will turn minds away from the Good News of Jesus Christ to the bad news that pours out of your television sets.
In my own house we’re grappling with what to do should a certain pair of candidates contest the general election in November. She’s talking Croatia and I’m thinking Cuba. We may meet in the middle, so to speak, in Costa Rica.
But we have election of a different sort before us today. Our epistle lesson from the fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Galatians is a gnarly one, so much so that many lectionaries don’t include it. But ours does.
And that is good news indeed because it prompts us to look at God’s direction of history in three areas.
Before we consider them, let’s deal with one of the hurdles in interpreting this passage. Without naming him, it mentions Ishmael, Abraham’s elder son by his Egyptian servant Hagar. We know Ishmael to be the father of the Arabs and, as such, of the Muslims as well.
We must keep in mind that as Paul wrote these lines the prophet Mohammad stood afar off in the future – some six centuries in the future. There is no reference to Islam embedded here; Ishmael represents the natural as opposed to the supernatural and the law as opposed to grace for reasons that have nothing to do with Islam.
Now, we find God moving history in these three areas: from universal to particular to universal; from supernatural to natural to supernatural, and from grace to law to grace.
We begin with the first. God created Adam and Eve as the parents of all mankind and for centuries He dealt with the human race as a single, seamless entity. In time, with evil rampant upon the earth, He annihilated the inhabitants of His creation, preserving only Noah and his family to sustain the race.
When wickedness saturated the world again, He scattered the people and elected one man, Abraham, and his descendants to represent Him to all the nations. This is movement from universal to particular. Centuries later, He would send another man, Jesus Christ, to unite the diverse nations into one people, the church. Here is movement from particular back to universal.
The second area is that of nature and supernature. God acted upon His creation when He scooped up dust and made Adam, when He extracted a piece of him and fashioned it into Eve. In Abraham’s day He was still acting supernaturally.
Abraham’s life is bathed in the supernatural. When God calls him to be His elect representative He tells him: "Get out of your country, from your family and from your father's house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:1-3).
God pledges seed, land and blessing. He will give Abraham a multitude of descendents who will populate the land of Canaan. He will not only multiply them but also protect them. And this seed of Abraham will be a blessing to all the families – or nations – on earth.
All three materialize, and in such a way that Abraham achieves nothing by his own resources and strength. Everything happens contrary to nature to demonstrate God’s transcendent power. It is the seed that interests us today.
In Genesis 21, we find Abraham celebrating the weaning of his son by his wife Sarah with a feast. Ishmael, by this time a teenager, scoffs. Sarah tells her husband to send Hagar and her son away, an idea not agreeable to Abraham, who obviously has affection for Ishmael.
God takes Sarah’s side, commanding Abraham to do as she says, adding that he will multiply Ishmael’s descendants into a great nation but, “In Isaac your seed shall be called.”
Isaac must be the father of the people in whom all the nations of the earth shall be blessed; Ishmael cannot be the conduit of the blessing. In the end, as Paul explains in Galatians, that seed is singular, the God-man Jesus Christ.
He will come in a most unnatural way to bless all the nations.
The prepossessing matter with Ishmael is not, as is commonly supposed, that he was the issue of an adulterous act, or that his mother was an Egyptian or even that Abraham’s faith failed as he aged and despaired of having a son by Sarah.
Those issues all matter and figure in the narrative in their own ways, but the primary problem with Ishmael was that he was conceived in the usual way. As such, he was the natural seed of Abraham. The child of promise must spring forth from a supernatural act.
Abraham’s wife had been kept barren until he was, in the words of Scripture, “as good as dead.” He was 100 years old when he begat Isaac. Sarah, too, was “full of years.” She was at least 90 at the time. Even back then, when people lived far longer than we do today, Isaac’s arrival was a “hot off the presses” sort of event.
And its purpose was to reveal God’s omnipotence.
In our text, Paul harks back to the words of the prophet Isaiah to remind the Galatians that God had brought forth His first church, Israel, in impossible circumstances: "Listen to Me, you who follow after righteousness, You who seek the LORD: Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the hole of the pit from which you were dug. Look to Abraham your father, and to Sarah who bore you; for I called him alone, and blessed him and increased him" (51:1-2).
More than that – and this is the verse Paul cites directly – the prophet says: "’Sing, O barren, you who have not borne! Break forth into singing, and cry aloud, you who have not labored with child! For more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married woman,’ says the LORD” (54:1).
Isaiah was prophesying to Israel in exile in Babylon. Israel herself was the barren woman, from whom God would bring forth more children than those of her captors on her return to the land of promise. The oracle speaks ultimately, however, of the multitudes of God’s children who would comprise His New Testament church.
Paul has laid the predicate in the previous chapter, Galatians 3, asserting the universality of that church. It is not race or gender or social position that brings blessing, but faith. The true children of Abraham are not his natural descendants.
As John the Baptist had said, God could raise up such as those from the rocks if He wanted. The true children were those – whether Jew or gentile – who placed their trust in God’s own Son Jesus Christ for their salvation. These are the heirs of the blessing.
So God had dealt with Abraham on a supernatural basis. He had not given him a code of conduct to follow but by giving Him promises He – God – would keep. He had not begun by saying to him, “Thou shalt not” but “I will” – and He had shown the glory of His power in delivering on His promises.
That would change. After His people rebelled against Him, after they bowed down to an idol rather than worshiping Him alone, God would deliver that code through Moses the law-giver. He would curtail the supernatural oversight He had accorded Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and leave the people to their own – to their natural – devices.
He would use the law to show them that their resources, their strength, were inadequate . . . that they were doomed to perdition absent divine intervention. As Paul says to the infiltrators who are infecting the Galatians with their false teaching, “Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law?”
Here is movement from supernatural to natural. But God is good. He will restore His supernatural presence and oversight in His New Testament church in the Persons of first the Son and then the Spirit. “So then, we are not children of the bondwoman but of the free.”
Because we are descended not from Hagar but from Sarah, in whom God brought forth life from death, we of the church make up the church-age Israel which is characterized by life in the Holy Spirit, whose indwelling presence transforms natural man into spiritual man.
Third, we see movement from grace to law to grace. Be not deceived. From Adam to Noah to Abraham, God had always required obedience of His elect. His relationships with them were nevertheless grounded in grace, which expects a response not from duty but from love.
He gave His people freedom and lavished the blessing of His presence upon them. Their rebellion and idolatry provoked His just wrath and indignation against them and brought the law down on their heads.
But in His infinite mercy He promised through His prophet Jeremiah to restore the covenant of grace and He did so in the Person of His Son Jesus Christ, whose saving act upon His cross purchased freedom for any who will access it by faith. Here is grace restored.
And here, all around us, is the new creation that operates under the terms of that new covenant. Do you see it? Some will always refuse.
A legalist is harder to reform than a 12-year-old bully. A couple of examples come to mind. In Sardinia, Italy, Mario Mamelli went to city hall to get a new identity card. He learned he had been officially dead for 19 years and was breaking the law by remaining alive.
The famous Philadelphia preacher Donald Gray Barnhouse taught a Bible conference in Montrose, Pa., early in the 20th century. About 200 young people and a few old folks turned out. One day, a couple of old ladies alerted Barnhouse that some of the girls weren’t wearing stockings.
“The Virgin Mary never wore stockings,” Barnhouse replied.
They gasped. “She didn’t?”
Barnhouse went on to inform them that the first women known to have worn stockings were prostitutes in 15th-century Italy. And he refused to rebuke the girls.
The Israelites in captivity in Egypt could not see the tabernacle they would transport through the wilderness. The Jews of Samuel’s time could not see the Jerusalem temple even though God had promised them an enduring place of worship.
The disciples who followed Jesus could not see the new creation He brought with Him from His place in heaven at His Father’s side. Even after Pentecost, even after the Holy Spirit entered them, we find them confused as to the shape and composition of the kingdom on earth.
They cannot grasp that Christ washed away those hoary old differences between Jew and Greek with His spilt blood, moving history back from particular to universal, from natural to supernatural, from law to grace.
So the apostle takes up his pen and spells it out for them, and for us. The new creation has arrived. Can you see it?
Until our Lord returns and His kingdom is fully realized on earth, you must look with the eyes of faith . . . but you must look in the cold, clear light of day. Ishmael scoffed. So must we endure scoffers. And as in Isaac’s case our real enemy is not those outside the camp.
It was his own half-brother who refused to bless him but cursed him instead. Who were Jesus’ accusers if not His fellow Jews? Paul, the rabbi who learned on the Damascus Road he could no longer deny Jesus as the Christ, met resistance and hostility both from those within Israel and then within the church.
When medieval Christians cried, “Enough!” and broke with Rome, the papacy descended on them with unrelenting fury. And for us, the true adversary is not those of the world. Some of them will receive the gospel. Some will ignore it. Many of them are too little bothered by us to persecute us.
It is the members of the nominal church who pose the greatest threat to the faith once delivered to the saints. They drain the beauty, the holiness, the very life from it and we watch as the world finds us ever easier to ignore.
And so our lot is the lot of Isaac. We have inherited both his curse and his blessing. We may be despised and rejected by men but we are children of God. As Paul wrote to the church in Rome: “ . . . and if children, then heirs-- heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (8:17).
And he told the church in Corinth we carry on “. . . by honor and dishonor, by evil report and good report; as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things” (2 Corinthians 6:8).
And as for election . . . God’s election stamps “null and void” on every election man conducts. A hundred million years from now – as we measure time – the elect of God will not be fretting over the election of 2016. We will be basking in the glory of the Lord in His eternal kingdom. Can you see it? Amen.
Can You See It?
Ezekiel 39:21-29, Psalm 147, Galatians 4:21-31, St. John 6:1-14
In this season I am loathe to utter the word “election.” I fear that so doing I will turn minds away from the Good News of Jesus Christ to the bad news that pours out of your television sets.
In my own house we’re grappling with what to do should a certain pair of candidates contest the general election in November. She’s talking Croatia and I’m thinking Cuba. We may meet in the middle, so to speak, in Costa Rica.
But we have election of a different sort before us today. Our epistle lesson from the fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Galatians is a gnarly one, so much so that many lectionaries don’t include it. But ours does.
And that is good news indeed because it prompts us to look at God’s direction of history in three areas.
Before we consider them, let’s deal with one of the hurdles in interpreting this passage. Without naming him, it mentions Ishmael, Abraham’s elder son by his Egyptian servant Hagar. We know Ishmael to be the father of the Arabs and, as such, of the Muslims as well.
We must keep in mind that as Paul wrote these lines the prophet Mohammad stood afar off in the future – some six centuries in the future. There is no reference to Islam embedded here; Ishmael represents the natural as opposed to the supernatural and the law as opposed to grace for reasons that have nothing to do with Islam.
Now, we find God moving history in these three areas: from universal to particular to universal; from supernatural to natural to supernatural, and from grace to law to grace.
We begin with the first. God created Adam and Eve as the parents of all mankind and for centuries He dealt with the human race as a single, seamless entity. In time, with evil rampant upon the earth, He annihilated the inhabitants of His creation, preserving only Noah and his family to sustain the race.
When wickedness saturated the world again, He scattered the people and elected one man, Abraham, and his descendants to represent Him to all the nations. This is movement from universal to particular. Centuries later, He would send another man, Jesus Christ, to unite the diverse nations into one people, the church. Here is movement from particular back to universal.
The second area is that of nature and supernature. God acted upon His creation when He scooped up dust and made Adam, when He extracted a piece of him and fashioned it into Eve. In Abraham’s day He was still acting supernaturally.
Abraham’s life is bathed in the supernatural. When God calls him to be His elect representative He tells him: "Get out of your country, from your family and from your father's house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:1-3).
God pledges seed, land and blessing. He will give Abraham a multitude of descendents who will populate the land of Canaan. He will not only multiply them but also protect them. And this seed of Abraham will be a blessing to all the families – or nations – on earth.
All three materialize, and in such a way that Abraham achieves nothing by his own resources and strength. Everything happens contrary to nature to demonstrate God’s transcendent power. It is the seed that interests us today.
In Genesis 21, we find Abraham celebrating the weaning of his son by his wife Sarah with a feast. Ishmael, by this time a teenager, scoffs. Sarah tells her husband to send Hagar and her son away, an idea not agreeable to Abraham, who obviously has affection for Ishmael.
God takes Sarah’s side, commanding Abraham to do as she says, adding that he will multiply Ishmael’s descendants into a great nation but, “In Isaac your seed shall be called.”
Isaac must be the father of the people in whom all the nations of the earth shall be blessed; Ishmael cannot be the conduit of the blessing. In the end, as Paul explains in Galatians, that seed is singular, the God-man Jesus Christ.
He will come in a most unnatural way to bless all the nations.
The prepossessing matter with Ishmael is not, as is commonly supposed, that he was the issue of an adulterous act, or that his mother was an Egyptian or even that Abraham’s faith failed as he aged and despaired of having a son by Sarah.
Those issues all matter and figure in the narrative in their own ways, but the primary problem with Ishmael was that he was conceived in the usual way. As such, he was the natural seed of Abraham. The child of promise must spring forth from a supernatural act.
Abraham’s wife had been kept barren until he was, in the words of Scripture, “as good as dead.” He was 100 years old when he begat Isaac. Sarah, too, was “full of years.” She was at least 90 at the time. Even back then, when people lived far longer than we do today, Isaac’s arrival was a “hot off the presses” sort of event.
And its purpose was to reveal God’s omnipotence.
In our text, Paul harks back to the words of the prophet Isaiah to remind the Galatians that God had brought forth His first church, Israel, in impossible circumstances: "Listen to Me, you who follow after righteousness, You who seek the LORD: Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the hole of the pit from which you were dug. Look to Abraham your father, and to Sarah who bore you; for I called him alone, and blessed him and increased him" (51:1-2).
More than that – and this is the verse Paul cites directly – the prophet says: "’Sing, O barren, you who have not borne! Break forth into singing, and cry aloud, you who have not labored with child! For more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married woman,’ says the LORD” (54:1).
Isaiah was prophesying to Israel in exile in Babylon. Israel herself was the barren woman, from whom God would bring forth more children than those of her captors on her return to the land of promise. The oracle speaks ultimately, however, of the multitudes of God’s children who would comprise His New Testament church.
Paul has laid the predicate in the previous chapter, Galatians 3, asserting the universality of that church. It is not race or gender or social position that brings blessing, but faith. The true children of Abraham are not his natural descendants.
As John the Baptist had said, God could raise up such as those from the rocks if He wanted. The true children were those – whether Jew or gentile – who placed their trust in God’s own Son Jesus Christ for their salvation. These are the heirs of the blessing.
So God had dealt with Abraham on a supernatural basis. He had not given him a code of conduct to follow but by giving Him promises He – God – would keep. He had not begun by saying to him, “Thou shalt not” but “I will” – and He had shown the glory of His power in delivering on His promises.
That would change. After His people rebelled against Him, after they bowed down to an idol rather than worshiping Him alone, God would deliver that code through Moses the law-giver. He would curtail the supernatural oversight He had accorded Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and leave the people to their own – to their natural – devices.
He would use the law to show them that their resources, their strength, were inadequate . . . that they were doomed to perdition absent divine intervention. As Paul says to the infiltrators who are infecting the Galatians with their false teaching, “Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law?”
Here is movement from supernatural to natural. But God is good. He will restore His supernatural presence and oversight in His New Testament church in the Persons of first the Son and then the Spirit. “So then, we are not children of the bondwoman but of the free.”
Because we are descended not from Hagar but from Sarah, in whom God brought forth life from death, we of the church make up the church-age Israel which is characterized by life in the Holy Spirit, whose indwelling presence transforms natural man into spiritual man.
Third, we see movement from grace to law to grace. Be not deceived. From Adam to Noah to Abraham, God had always required obedience of His elect. His relationships with them were nevertheless grounded in grace, which expects a response not from duty but from love.
He gave His people freedom and lavished the blessing of His presence upon them. Their rebellion and idolatry provoked His just wrath and indignation against them and brought the law down on their heads.
But in His infinite mercy He promised through His prophet Jeremiah to restore the covenant of grace and He did so in the Person of His Son Jesus Christ, whose saving act upon His cross purchased freedom for any who will access it by faith. Here is grace restored.
And here, all around us, is the new creation that operates under the terms of that new covenant. Do you see it? Some will always refuse.
A legalist is harder to reform than a 12-year-old bully. A couple of examples come to mind. In Sardinia, Italy, Mario Mamelli went to city hall to get a new identity card. He learned he had been officially dead for 19 years and was breaking the law by remaining alive.
The famous Philadelphia preacher Donald Gray Barnhouse taught a Bible conference in Montrose, Pa., early in the 20th century. About 200 young people and a few old folks turned out. One day, a couple of old ladies alerted Barnhouse that some of the girls weren’t wearing stockings.
“The Virgin Mary never wore stockings,” Barnhouse replied.
They gasped. “She didn’t?”
Barnhouse went on to inform them that the first women known to have worn stockings were prostitutes in 15th-century Italy. And he refused to rebuke the girls.
The Israelites in captivity in Egypt could not see the tabernacle they would transport through the wilderness. The Jews of Samuel’s time could not see the Jerusalem temple even though God had promised them an enduring place of worship.
The disciples who followed Jesus could not see the new creation He brought with Him from His place in heaven at His Father’s side. Even after Pentecost, even after the Holy Spirit entered them, we find them confused as to the shape and composition of the kingdom on earth.
They cannot grasp that Christ washed away those hoary old differences between Jew and Greek with His spilt blood, moving history back from particular to universal, from natural to supernatural, from law to grace.
So the apostle takes up his pen and spells it out for them, and for us. The new creation has arrived. Can you see it?
Until our Lord returns and His kingdom is fully realized on earth, you must look with the eyes of faith . . . but you must look in the cold, clear light of day. Ishmael scoffed. So must we endure scoffers. And as in Isaac’s case our real enemy is not those outside the camp.
It was his own half-brother who refused to bless him but cursed him instead. Who were Jesus’ accusers if not His fellow Jews? Paul, the rabbi who learned on the Damascus Road he could no longer deny Jesus as the Christ, met resistance and hostility both from those within Israel and then within the church.
When medieval Christians cried, “Enough!” and broke with Rome, the papacy descended on them with unrelenting fury. And for us, the true adversary is not those of the world. Some of them will receive the gospel. Some will ignore it. Many of them are too little bothered by us to persecute us.
It is the members of the nominal church who pose the greatest threat to the faith once delivered to the saints. They drain the beauty, the holiness, the very life from it and we watch as the world finds us ever easier to ignore.
And so our lot is the lot of Isaac. We have inherited both his curse and his blessing. We may be despised and rejected by men but we are children of God. As Paul wrote to the church in Rome: “ . . . and if children, then heirs-- heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (8:17).
And he told the church in Corinth we carry on “. . . by honor and dishonor, by evil report and good report; as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things” (2 Corinthians 6:8).
And as for election . . . God’s election stamps “null and void” on every election man conducts. A hundred million years from now – as we measure time – the elect of God will not be fretting over the election of 2016. We will be basking in the glory of the Lord in His eternal kingdom. Can you see it? Amen.