The Urgency of Today: A Meditation on Hebrews 3, for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost

Many have reflected that while the past is behind us and the future ahead of us, it is only the present moment that we have to live in.  Indeed, no one can go into their past, no matter how passionately they may want to, and improve anything they have done.  Rather, each person’s past is written like a book in stone which cannot fade, having passed beyond our grasp forever.  Likewise, the future always stays ahead of us, just out of our reach and vision.  We might wish we could jump forward to a time we think will be better than the moment we’re in, but the reality of our existence shows us that we have no idea what tomorrow will bring.  Every plan we put in place today, can be dashed to pieces by wars, famine, disease, death, market collapses, or any of a thousand different variables.  The past, while we can see it, is outside our reach, and the future sits shrouded beyond our ability to transcend it.  What we have is this present moment alone in which we live, and it is the only time we can influence.

It is this present moment we all live in, which the Apostle Paul writes about in his letter to the Hebrews as he speaks about “Today.”  In his third chapter, he draws a clear analogy between the People of God in the Church, and the People of God in the desert with Moses.  God came to His people with Moses, and many rebelled against Him, bringing condemnation and death upon the people.  They used their Today in which God called them to faithfulness, to instead live in unbelief.  Since grace and salvation come only through faith, the choice made by God’s people in Moses’ day to reject God and His Word resulted in great calamities—from the earth opening up to swallow whole groups alive into sheol, to the 40 year wanderings that left a whole generation dead in the desert.  God visited His people in their day, and there were only two responses to Him that had eternal consequences:  receiving God’s Word by faith brought grace and life, while rejecting God’s Word in unbelief brought condemnation and death.

St. Paul would have us know that this same Today comes to each and every one of us, as well.  To every Christian, and to the whole world, God calls through His Word Today for all to respond in faith and repentance.  Today, God gives His Spirit to every human heart through His Word, that they may believe in Him, cling to Him, and turn away from the darkness of their own evil.  Today, God the Word—Jesus Christ—who has suffered and died and risen again to save every person who will ever live upon this globe, calls all people away from death and hell, and into His eternal life.  Today the Word calls to everyone, Jew or Gentile, Muslim or Buddhist, Korean or Austrian, to live by grace through faith in Him.  Today, God visits His people, and Today His call demands an answer.  St. Paul urges us, together with the Christians to which he wrote:

Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief,

 in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily,

while it is called Today; lest any of you be hardened

through the deceitfulness of sin. For we are made partakers of Christ,

 if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end;

While it is said, Today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts,

as in the provocation. For some, when they had heard, did

provoke: howbeit not all that came out of Egypt by Moses.

But with whom was he grieved forty years? was it

not with them that had sinned, whose carcasses fell in the

wilderness? And to whom sware he that they should

not enter into his rest, but to them that believed not?

So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief.

How stark a difference between the Word of God written in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the wisdom on our own age!  Who today senses an urgency to the Gospel which demands an answer from us?  Who does not say in his own heart, “Tomorrow I shall repent of my sin, if it is convenient—tomorrow I shall believe, when I have nothing better to do—tomorrow I shall follow God, after I have satiated myself with all my worldly pursuits”?  Our generation is marked by reliance on tomorrow, on the human promise of something better or more pleasing on the horizon, and the avoidance of virtue or duty today.  Today we indulge our lusts.  Today we embrace our sins.  Today we write into human law the flagrant disregard for God’s eternal Law.  Today we neuter the Gospel of Jesus Christ and decorate it like a transgendered whore, so that a decadent and deluded western culture—itself an aging prostitute to every technological wonder or philosophical sophistry born of selfish hedonistic pride—might better tolerate or appreciate it.  Today we are found to be worshippers of ourselves, gluttonous consumers of every vice, butchers of babies and destroyers of nature.  Today, we have shown ourselves to be dead in our trespasses and sins, with every day of our past written in the unfading stone of eternity, like a hellish eulogy declaring the justice of our condemnation to eternal perdition.

And yet, it is Today that the Lord Jesus Christ comes to you, even in the midst of your wickedness and debauchery.  Today, He shows to you His pierced hands and feet, His pierced side from which blood and water flowed for you.  Today, He brings to you the gift He won for you through His most holy Cross, that your sins might be forgiven, and that your dreadful past full of days which earned for you only hell, be absolved and washed clean by His grace.  Today Jesus calls to you, showing you how He entered into your evil and darkened world, so that He might take your suffering and death upon Himself, that you might not die forever.  Today the Lord of Life calls you out of your darkness, and into His eternal light.  Today His Holy Spirit enlivens you through His Word to turn your back on the evils which bring only death, so that you might by grace through faith in Him rise up unto everlasting life.  Today the Father declares to you through His Only Begotten Son a day of grace and mercy and compassion which you could never earn.  Today He yearns to tell your repentant and faithful heart, “Your sins be forgiven you—go, and sin no more.”

Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, and to Whom all time is present, knows that Today He is your only hope.  Do not harden your heart against His Word of Law and Gospel, for when Today is past, it is gone forever.  Today the Word of Life calls you.  Repent, believe, and live.  Amen.