Reformation 2020. The Righteousness of God at the Present Time

The Sunday of the Reformation

Emmaus Lutheran Church

Romans 3:19-28

October 25, 2020

The Righteousness of God at the Present Time

Jesu juva!

In the Name of Jesus.

Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth…And he said with a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come…” (Rev. 14:6-7)

The angel’s message is arresting: Fear God, because the hour of His judgment has come.  Yet there are many who are wondering whether now is the time, now are the last days preceding the return of Jesus, and the final judgment.  We are certainly living through tumultuous times.  There are wars and rumors of wars.  Many have gone out in Christ’s name and deceived many.  Christians are delivered up to tribulation and death—if not here, then elsewhere in the world.  But even here: many will fall away^[a] and betray one another and hate one another. ¹¹ And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. ¹² And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold (Matthew 24:10-12). 

Many wonder if we have arrived at the hour of God’s judgment.  And we have, even if Christ does not return in the next few days or years. 

We have come to the last time.  It is true that the last time involves persecution, tribulation, and the final end of the world.  But it is also a blessed time.  Jesus says in the holy Gospel: For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John [the Baptist], the one who came before Jesus (Matthew 11:13).  But with the coming of John something has changed.  The times have changed.  What did the Prophets and the Law prophesy?  They witnessed to a righteousness of God without law (Rom. 3:21).  But now a righteousness of God without law has been manifested, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all the ones believing (Rom.3:21-22). 

Up until this time, the people of God had lived under the Law.  The ten commandments dictated that they should love God, they should pray and hear His Word, honor and love their parents, love and help their neighbor in his body, love their spouse and be pure, help their neighbor improve his possessions and income, protect his reputation.  And those who were estranged from God also lived under His Law as it was recorded in their consciences.  But no one was made righteous by this Law.  At best, Jew and Gentile alike were made to know their sin and their need for righteousness.  But the Jew had the advantage that the Law and the Prophets, the Old Testament, also bore witness to the righteousness that God gives to sinners as a free gift.  The Law and Prophets foretold that God’s Son would be born of a woman and would make atonement for our sins by His death, and that all who believe in Him are righteous apart from their works.

But now, St. Paul says, the hour has come where that righteousness to which the Law and Prophets bore witness has arrived.  It has been made manifest in Jesus’ death and resurrection, which is made known to the world in the preaching of the Gospel.

When people think that the angel with the everlasting Gospel is perhaps flying above the earth, announcing that the hour of His judgment has come, they are right.  The time has come when He has revealed His righteousness that He accounts to all who believe in His Son.  And the time has come in which He declares His judgment on all who reject His righteousness and continue to rely on works of Law. 

The time has come to which the Law and the Prophets testify, in which God makes known His righteousness.  But Satan is always at work to conceal this righteousness of God.  That’s why 1500 years after Paul proclaimed it, the Lord made His righteousness apart from works known again through Martin Luther.  And in our time, He is continuing to make it known, even if He is not using any mighty instruments like Luther. 

He is showing His righteousness at the present time, that He is just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

1.  First, He stops every mouth;

2. Second, He puts forward Jesus as the propitiation and covering for our sin,

3. Third, He declares those who believe in Jesus righteous without works of law.

1. 

For by works of law nothing of all flesh will be justified before Him, for through Law is knowledge of sin (Rom. 3:20). 

Adam and Eve in Paradise were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  And when they ate of it, they immediately began to cover up their knowledge of their guilt.  They made garments of fig leaves to cover their nakedness.  When they heard God approaching, they hid from Him.  In this way, they tried to suppress the knowledge of their sin.

We see around us in the world today that people are still doing the same thing.  They suppress the truth about themselves so that they are no longer able to recognize their sin.  People in the church are frequently incensed at how our neighbors are no longer able to recognize the greatest abominations as sin.  It’s no longer sin to murder one’s children in our country.  It’s no longer considered sin in our country for women to exchange natural relations for those which are contrary to nature and for men to give up natural relations with women and to be consumed with passion for one another, as Paul describes in Romans 1 (v. 26-27).   Instead we make provision in the law for people to engage in these sins. 

On the other hand, people in the church frequently become blind to their own sins.  Even though we know better, or we should, we imagine that if our sin remains in our hearts and desires, we are less guilty before God.  We forget that pride and self-trust are the greatest of sins because they are sins against the first commandment.

So God preaches the Law to us and gives us the knowledge of sin.  He shows us that there is no distinction—all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23).  The Law reveals that we not only have sinned, but we have sin.  We have eaten the poisoned fruit and it now works in us so that our hearts are constantly churning with evil desire and rebellion against God and His Law. 

Even now, with the great evil we see at work around us, God proclaims His Law in order to shut every mouth, so that everyone will become guilty before Him.  He does this because He desires to make known and give His righteousness apart from works of Law.

2.  It was to show His righteousness at the present time, so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

When you have become guilty before God—that is to say, when you have come to the knowledge of sin and its bitter fruit, that you are guilty and subject to eternal punishment—you want to become free of your guilt before God.  But how can you become free?  Human reason tells us that we become free from our guilt before God by our sorrow and by our works—whether our efforts to pay for our past sins, or our efforts to be better in the future.

But the right preaching of God’s Law shows us that there is no rescue from sin in our works.  God’s Law requires obedience.  It does not say, “Do these the best you can and you will live.”  God’s Law says, “The soul that sins shall die” (Ezekiel 18:20).  The wages for any transgression of God’s commandments is death and damnation.  And the Law reveals that we are unable to stop transgressing, even if doing so could take away our guilt.

Then the question is—if every sin and transgression of God’s Law must be punished, how can God count any sinner righteous? 

That’s the question Paul answers in Romans 3.  All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.  This was to show God’s justice, because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former sins.

When Jesus was put on trial before Pilate, condemned to die, and was crucified and lifted up, and finally gave up His Spirit, God the Father was “putting Him forward.”  He was putting Jesus forward as a propitiation, as a sacrifice that takes away guilt and turns away God’s wrath. 

The Law tells me that God is just.  If God is righteous and just, how come He calls David righteous?  Why is Abraham at His right hand?  These men were sinners.

More importantly for us, if God is righteous and just, how can He not be angry at me still?  Even though I am sorry for my sins, I still sin daily and much.  If He is righteous, doesn’t He have to be angry with me and punish me?

When Jesus is put before our eyes as crucified, as having died on the cross, God is answering our question.  He is showing that He is righteous and does not let sin go unpunished, and He is also showing our justification.  Here is where your righteousness is—in Jesus made sin for you, in Jesus bearing the judgment of God against you.

When God causes Jesus to be preached as crucified for you, He is demonstrating and exhibiting His righteousness by which He justifies you at the present time.  The hour of His judgment has come.  In preaching Jesus’ death He is judging you righteous and showing Himself to be just in doing so, because He has laid all your sin on His Son.  When He caused His supper to be celebrated and the words of Institution to be sung or spoken, He is demonstrating His righteousness, showing the death of His Son by which He made many to be accounted righteous.

3.  But this righteousness that Jesus accomplished for you, this righteousness of God comes through something to you. 

It doesn’t come through the law, through works or deeds.  There is no work that you can do that puts your sins on Jesus and takes them out of God’s sight.

Rather it comes through faith.  The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.  You are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.  Jesus Christ redeemed you and the whole world with His suffering and death.  He accomplished righteousness for you.  But that righteousness comes to us through faith, not through any work.  Not through being sorry.  Not through trying to do better.  Simply through believing what He says in the Gospel—that He has done this for us as a free gift.

Thanks be to God, we live in the last days; we live in the days when God’s righteousness is not in the distant future, waiting to be accomplished.  It is done.  It has come.  And God makes it known to us.  When Satan had buried it, He uncovered it again in the Reformation.  And He continues to reveal this eternal good news to us in the pure preaching of His Word.  God grant that it be preserved among us and to our children.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Soli Deo Gloria

Trinity 19, 2020. Built Up As A Spiritual House, Week 3

Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity

Emmaus Lutheran Church

St. Matthew 9:1-8

October 18, 2020

Raised, then Built Up: Serving, Giving, Witnessing

Jesu juva!

In the Name of Jesus.

As you come to Him, a living stone, rejected by men, but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you also, like living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:4-5). 

In the Gospel reading Jesus does not build the paralyzed man up.  He raises him up.  It is not a process.  It is instantaneous.  The man’s friends bring him to Jesus on his bed.  Jesus first pronounces the man’s sins forgiven, and then, to show that He has authority on earth to forgive sins, He tells him to rise up from his paralysis and walk.

Now that is an incredible thing to say to someone who is paralyzed.  Rise and walk.  Obviously a paralyzed man is not going to be able to obey that command.  But Jesus’ word has the power to do what it says.  It not only issues a command but gives the man power to obey.  It sets the man free.

That is how powerful the word “Your sins are forgiven” is.  When Jesus speaks it, it does what it says.  It looses those who are bound and captive and paralyzed in their sins.

At one time you also were bound and captive and paralyzed in your sins.  And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, says St. Paul, putting it in even stronger terms.  Paralyzed in sins, dead in sins.  You were held captive and you were not able to get free of sin and damnation.  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 (Eph. 2:4-6) is how St. Paul says it.  But for most of us it looked like this—someone brought us to the Church, to the baptismal font, and to the pastor.  The pastor poured water on our heads three times and said, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” 

When you were baptized, Jesus raised you from paralysis and death.  He forgave you your sins.  He remitted them. 

Remember how at the beginning of His ministry, Jesus was baptized.  He was baptized to take on your sins.  And He finished what He started, paying for the forgiveness of your sins with His death on the cross.  And what He won for you He gave you in Baptism—the forgiveness of sins and a new life in Him.

The paralyzed man was raised up to have an ordinary human life that had been denied him by his affliction.  He was raised up so that now he could walk and work and feed himself.  That is truly a great gift if you have lost the ability to do those things.

But you were raised up to have more than an ordinary, fallen life.  You were raised up to life as God’s child and heir.  You were raised up to be built up to be His dwelling place, to be His temple, in which sacrifices are offered that are acceptable to God, in which worship is offered that God accepts.

You are being built up to be people that serve after the image of Jesus, instead of seeking to be served.

You are being built up to be people that give after the image of Jesus, instead of seeking always to receive.

You are being built up to be people who bear witness to Jesus and to the forgiveness of sins in Him.

The paralyzed man was raised up once and it was over.  But our being built into a spiritual house is a process that is going on throughout our lives.  We are not completed yet.  We will be completed when the Lord returns and raises the bodies of the saints who have died believing in Him, and makes their bodies like His glorious body.

Until then He is building us up.  He does it at the beginning of the service in the absolution, where He speaks to us like He did to the paralyzed man in the Gospel reading: Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven.  Doing this, He returns us to our Baptism, where He raised us up and set us free from our sins. 

He builds us up through the sermon, putting off our old man and renewing us in the spirit of our minds by preaching the law and the Gospel to us.  He raises up our new man in faith toward Him and in fervent love toward one another by giving us His body to eat and His blood to drink in the Sacrament.

He builds us up throughout the week as we read the Scripture and His Spirit renews us.

And what is He building us into?  A spiritual house, Peter tells us, in which offerings are made that God accepts.  A spiritual house with Jesus as the cornerstone.

Jesus is the dwelling place of God, and we are being built together into a house joined with Him.

Which means that we are being built into people who serve. 

The world, of course, is not looking to serve.  People in the world are looking to be served and honored.  The world is looking to be at the head of the table, to be first.  But Jesus said: Whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many (Matt. 20:27-28).  We are being built into a house whose cornerstone is Jesus, who lived His life as a servant.  We serve in the places He has called us, and in the Church; and we are being built into people who serve willingly and gladly.

We are being built into people who give.

Our Lord Jesus was not rich in earthly wealth, but He was rich in heavenly treasure, which does not rust or get eaten by moths and can’t be stolen by thieves.  He shared the form and the glory of God the Father, but didn’t consider equality with the Father something to be held onto at all costs, but made Himself nothing and took the form of a slave for your sake (Philippians 2).  For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich (2 Cor. 8:9).  He gave all that He had and was to rescue you from sin and death.  He continually gives everything He has to you when He gives you His body and blood in the Sacrament. 

As we receive from Him, we are being built into people who give.  We give to support the preaching of the Gospel in this congregation.  We give to help those in need.  We are being built to manage our money and our time so that, as the epistle says, we may have something to share with anyone who is in need (Eph. 4:28).  Our old self, our former manner of life, is to be focused on getting for ourselves.  We may give here and there because it is expected of us if we want to be considered good people.  But the old self’s aim is not to give, but to receive.

But we are being built up by Jesus’ giving to be people who give, to be people through whom He gives.  Not that God needs our giving.  He doesn’t.  He has everything.  But our neighbor needs it.  Our neighbor needs to hear the word of God.  When we give our first and our best to the Church, God is using us to give the word of God to our neighbor.  When we give to missions above the percentage we give as our weekly offering, God is using us to bring His saving Word to people far away.

Finally, we are being built up to be people who bear witness to Jesus.  We, of ourselves, don’t have power to authority to forgive sins.  But in giving His Son to become man and bear our sins, He gave Jesus authority to forgive sins.  And Jesus doesn’t keep that authority back from those who believe in Him.  He keeps nothing back from us.  He gives us all that is His. 

So in the Church is the authority to forgive sins.  That authority is exercised when the pastor absolves, but it is also exercised privately by every Christian when he bears witness to Jesus and points to Him as the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. 

We are being built into people who bear this witness.  This is the most precious treasure we have been given.  How often we are dealing with people, even in the Church, who are desperate to be loosed from their sins as this paralytic was to be released from his paralysis!

One time ten years ago or so I was talking in front of a little child.  I don’t remember what I was saying but I must have, inadvertently, been giving voice to my guilty conscience.  This little child said to me, “But Daddy, Jesus forgives our sins!”  That witness of my son, who was maybe four years old, to Jesus—released me from my sin.

Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing, if in the Church we were continually releasing one another of sin, death, and every evil?  That is what we are being built up into, because the Lord Jesus has given to the Church the authority to forgive sins.

We are being built into a spiritual house, into God’s dwelling place.  We have already been raised up from our sins through baptism into Christ, but He is building us up through the Divine Service and the Holy Scripture to be a house of prayer and a people who give, serve, and bear witness. 

The peace of God that passes understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria

Trinity 18, 2020. Built Up As a Spiritual House, Week 2

Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity

Emmaus Lutheran Church

St. Matthew 22:34-46

October 11, 2020

Built Up As A Spiritual House: Week 2

Built Up By The Divine Service and Scripture to Pray

Jesu juva!

In the Name of Jesus.

I was glad when they said to me, Let us go to the house of the Lord (Ps. 122:1).  Those words began the service this morning in the introit.  We go to the Lord’s house when we go to the Divine Service.  One day we Christians will go to the Lord’s house when our souls and bodies part in death.  In the agenda, when the body of a deceased Christian is led into the church prior to the funeral, it calls for these words to be read: I was glad when they said to me, Let us go to the house of the Lord.  For those who believe and are baptized into Christ, death is going to the house of the Lord.

But another Psalm that we didn’t sing today reminds us that the house of the Lord is not a place sinners can approach.  It is a work of grace that someone can be glad to go to the house of the Lord.  In Psalm 15 David asks: Oh Lord, who shall sojourn in your tent?  Who shall dwell on your holy hill?  He who walks blamelessly and does what is right, and speaks the truth in his heart; who does not slander with his tongue and does no evil to his neighbor, nor takes up a reproach against his friend…(Ps. 15:2-3)  It goes on.  When you read it you wonder whether you would be permitted to dwell on the holy hill of Zion.  Or perhaps you frankly admit that if these are the terms, you would not be able to stand there.

In the Gospel reading today one of the scholars of the Law of the Jews asks Jesus which is the greatest commandment.  He tells them what we learned in catechism—the greatest commandment is the summary of the first three of the ten commandments—Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind (Matt. 22:38).  The second is the summary of commandments four through ten—love your neighbor as yourself (Matt. 22:39). 

If you love the Lord with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself, you will also be a good steward of your time, your money, your talents.  It is funny how, when you love someone or something, no one has to tell you to manage your time or save your money.  When you fall in love with your husband or wife you don’t need to be told to spend time with them.  If anything you need to remind yourself to not neglect your other responsibilities because of the love of your beloved! 

And when you look at it in this light, you see what our chief sin always is.  It is that we do not love God with all our hearts, with all our strength.  Not with the love He ought to have, since He has given us our lives and every good thing.  From this follows that you don’t love your neighbor as yourself.  His needs, his pain, his or her happiness, come second to yours.

So far Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees’ question:  Which is the greatest commandment in the Law?  The greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart. 

But now our Lord changes the topic from the Law to the Christ, the Messiah.  Whose Son is the Christ, Jesus asks them.  They say, “He is David’s Son,” which is true.  But they have forgotten or not understood another passage of Scripture, from Psalm 110: The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet (Ps. 110:1).  David calls the Messiah “My Lord,” Jesus says, so how is the Messiah David’s Son, less than David? 

The Pharisees can’t answer the question, but we can.  Stricken, smitten, and afflicted, goes the Lenten hymn:

            See Him dying on the tree!

            Tis the Christ, by man rejected;

            Yes, my soul, ‘tis He, ‘tis He!

            ‘Tis the long-expected Prophet,

            David’s Son, yet David’s Lord;

            Proofs I see sufficient of it;

            ‘Tis the true and faithful Word (LSB 451 st. 1).

David’s Son, his descendant Jesus, is also David’s Lord, the Son of God, the Son of the One we are commanded to love with all our hearts, all our minds, all our souls.  The Pharisees did not know who He was.  They were debating what the greatest commandment was, trying to catch Jesus in something.  They didn’t even know who the God they were supposed to love was, because He was standing in front of them.

The fulfillment of the commandments—love—comes from God.  He must first fulfill them and we must receive His fulfillment.  Then we begin to love God and our neighbor.

And that is what is happening in the Gospel reading.  God is showing His love.  To the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it.  Yet the Lord set His heart on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day, Moses told the Israelites (Deut. 10:15).  Everything belongs to Him, but He has become the Son of David.  He is in Jerusalem awaiting His rejection and death, in order that He might fulfill the Law for us, and render us able to dwell in God’s tent and on His holy hill.

When God’s Son is nailed to the cross and dies, our failure to love God and our neighbor passed away from His sight.  Our self-love was also crucified and buried.  Jesus’s blameless walk, His love toward God, His love of His neighbor was all accounted to us.

He makes it so that we are able to be glad when they say “Let us go to the house of the Lord”—whether that is coming to the Divine Service, or when it is time for us to go the Lord’s house in death.  We are able to go with joy and gladness because God the Son has stooped down to us and carried us into God’s house, making an entrance for us by His death for our sins, and going in to God’s presence for us in His ascension.

In the Divine Service each week Jesus not only answers the question about the Law—which commandment is the greatest—but He proclaims to us the Christ who fulfills the Law.

He not only invites us to go to the house of the Lord—to His Father’s house; He is making us into that house.  In one sense He has already made us the Lord’s house because He has forgiven our sin.  But in another sense we are still being built into His house.  We are dying with Him in Baptism and being raised up to be new creatures in Him.

When we are finished, we will be like Him.  We will love God with all our heart and our neighbor as ourselves.  It is hard to imagine ourselves like that.  But for those who believe that God has joined Himself to us and fulfilled the Law for us, it is already beginning.  Whoever believes this already loves God because he believes God has loved him.  We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19).

Stewardship begins by receiving God’s love, by returning to Him again and again to receive from Him.  We do this in the Divine Service first of all.  This is where the Son of God comes into our midst in flesh and blood to declare to us, again and again: It is finished (John 19:30).  We don’t see ourselves as being finished yet.  If we are being built up a spiritual house, all we see are scaffolds and construction materials laying around.  Nothing looks complete.  We may even wonder if we are being built up at all.  In the Divine Service Jesus comes and declares us complete, finished, perfected, because in His death and resurrection He has made us complete before the Father.  He has given us a seamless garment of righteousness.  Jerusalem is built as a city that is bound firmly together (Ps. 122:3).  There are no holes in Jerusalem’s wall, because the righteousness and salvation that God the Son accomplished for sinners when He died and rose again is without any holes or flaws.  And Jesus gives you this righteousness in the Divine Service when He preaches the Word to you, when He absolves you, when He gives you His body to eat under the bread and His blood to drink under the wine.  The first part of being a steward is receiving the Lord’s gifts of righteousness, life, and salvation in the Divine Service.

Secondly, we receive from Him in the Scripture.  In Holy Scripture Jesus gives us His Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit leads us to know the Father and the Son.  Reading the Bible in private devotion, with your family, studying it in Bible Class, are not works you offer to God—not first and foremost anyway.  To read the Scripture is to receive from God—knowledge of Him and also the Holy Spirit who defends us against the devil.  In order that we may live as stewards who manage their lives to live in love for God and neighbor, we need God’s love to fill us.  He does that not only in the Divine Service, but throughout the work as we meditate on His Word.  And as a congregation grows in the knowledge of God’s word, it also is strengthened to serve one another, to give, and to bear witness to Christ.

Third, receiving from Christ in the Divine Service and the Holy Scripture flows into prayer.  We are not able to be faithful in reading His Word or in the Divine Service, much less in giving, witnessing, serving.  We are weak.  The collect for today said it very well: O God, because without You we are not able to please You, mercifully grant that Your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts.

Because we are not able to do anything on our own, we have to pray.  We ask God for what we need in our helplessness.  Stewardship doesn’t begin with giving money and serving.  It begins with receiving from God the forgiveness of sins and the Holy Spirit.  Then we pray and ask God for His Spirit and His strength, for Him to build us into a spiritual house where we freely give, out of love, our money, our time, our talents, and ourselves to Him. 

And as the introit says, He will hear us.  Hear the prayer of your servants according to the blessing of Aaron upon Your people.  The blessing of Aaron is the benediction we hear each week at the close of the service: The Lord bless you and keep you.  The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious unto you.  The Lord lift up His countenance upon You, and give you peace.  Because the Lord’s face shines on us for Jesus’ sake, because He is gracious to us for Jesus’ sake and has cast our sins into the depths of the sea, because He lifts up His countenance upon us and looks upon us as His own sons for Jesus’ sake—He will not cast out our prayer but give us what we ask in His name.  He will finish what He has begun and enable us to offer spiritual sacrifices that are acceptable to Him—our time, abilities, money, and our own selves.

The peace of God that passes understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria