TheEverlasting Gospel: A Reformation Day Meditation on Revelation 14

And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven,

 having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth,

and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, Saying with a loud voice,

Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come:

and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.

 And there followed another angel, saying,

Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations

drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.

And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice,

If any man worship the beast and his image,

and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand,

The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God,

which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation;

and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence

of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb:

 And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever:

and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image,

and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.

Here is the patience of the saints:

 here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.

And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write,

Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth:

Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours;

and their works do follow them.

I have noticed over the years that it is increasingly common for people to use words contrary to their meanings, or to use them without regard to their definition.  Sociologists, linguists, philologists, and philosophers have pointed to the Post-Modern propensity to ignore external or objective truth so as to affirm internal perceptions of truth; i.e., the distinction between the old world’s pursuit of what is actually true, versus the new world’s pursuit of what feels true to me.  In a theological context, the term “Gospel” suffers from the same confusion.  I have noticed that it is all too often bandied about as a sentimental opine, as if to evoke a certain emotional response in the hearer of warm, fuzzy, and non-descript things.  However, on this celebration of Reformation Day, it is worth remembering that the word “Gospel” has a very particular meaning as it is used by the authors of Scripture, was promulgated in the early centuries of the Church, and was defended by the 16^th century Reformers.  To the ones who coined it, preached it, defended it, and gave their lives for it, the Gospel was not a sentimental experiment in personal naval-gazing about what makes the individual feel good, but rather the very Word of God for the salvation of the human race.

The Post-Modern soup in which we stew would tempt us to exchange objective truth for sentimental experience, but doing so comes with great peril.  There is a real God who made the heavens and the earth, and each one of us.  This same God has spoken to His people to tell them who they are, where they came from, and where they are going.  He has revealed who He is, His will for His creation, and the consequences of rebellion against Him.  He has revealed the dignity and eternal destiny of all people created in his image, either in the bliss of His fellowship or the torment of His judgment.  He has revealed to us our freely chosen Fall from His good created order and into the inescapable wickedness of evil, together with the consequent death and hell which awaits every person according to His divine justice.  He has revealed His self-sacrificial plan to save all mankind from their sin, death, hell, and the power of the devil through the life, death, and resurrection of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ.  He has revealed that He has sent His Holy Spirit to abide among us, working saving faith and repentance in the world through Jesus’ Word and Sacraments, until He comes again on the Last Day to bring forth the final judgment of the living and the dead.  The several thousand year record of God’s revelation of these truths to mankind, replete with fulfilled prophecy to prove its divine origin contrary to the false witness of charlatans and deceivers, we call Holy Scripture; the people who have gathered around that divine Word in faith and repentance to receive God’s saving grace, from the time the world began until its Last Day, we call the Church.

These are true, and real, and trustworthy—not sentiments, or feelings, or personal opinions.  This is not my truth versus your truth, but the truth against which there is no other truth.  This is the reality in which we live and move and have our being, as eternal creatures before our infinite and eternal Creator, within the world of His making.  The reality of His Word—His Law and His Gospel—are as inescapable as the universe in which we live, the time in which we exist.  The Gospel is not a subjective exercise of self-patronizing theologians or political pundits, but rather the very Word of God’s salvation for the world.  Apart from that Good News, there is only the righteous and just condemnation of every rebellious, prideful, self-centered person who prefer to worship themselves in delusion rather than serve the only true and Living God.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a Word which comes from outside of you from God Himself, calling every man, woman, and child, of every tribe and tongue and nation, to turn from the deadly ways of evil and abide in Him by faith—a faith and repentance which receives from Him the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation, all for Jesus’ sake.  This Gospel is more real than the air that you breath and the earth upon which you stand, and more eternal than the uncounted stars in the heavens.  This Gospel has reached down to speak life into your dead and dying body, will secure your soul in His loving embrace when you die, and then raise you up body and soul to eternal life in a new heavens and a new earth on the Last Day.  This Gospel is more real, more true, more eternal than anything else in all creation—even more than the stone which will be placed upon your grave.  This Gospel is life everlasting from the Author of Life, love unfathomable from the Author of Love, peace and joy and reconciliation from the Author of Peace and Joy and Reconciliation. 

Do not be deceived by the soft-minded insanity of our current time and place, or the self-destructive sentimentality of a self-absorbed age.  The Word of the Lord endures forever, because He Himself endures forever.  The ancient Patriarchs knew this, as did the Prophets and Apostles, Saints and Martyrs, and the faithful of every age in every millennia down to our own time.  The Word of the Lord’s grace and mercy for the sake of Jesus—the Everlasting Gospel of salvation from sin, death, hell, and the power of the devil—bind His people to Him in every age that has passed, and every age that is yet to come, until all is fulfilled at the end of time.  This is the Gospel the Reformers fought and died to preserve in their time, and the Gospel which calls us to the same faithful witness in our time, that we might pass it on to our children for their witness in their time.  This same Everlasting Gospel will be the hope and unity of all the people saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, now and forevermore.  Hear the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Repent, believe, and live!  Amen.

Humility: A Meditation on Luke 18

And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted

in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others:

Two men went up into the temple to pray;

the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself,

God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are,

extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.

I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.

And the publican, standing afar off,

Would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven,

but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other:

for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased;

and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

Humility is not a particular mark of our age, but neither was it in Jesus’ day.  Today as then, people of certain social standing, possessed of certain titles and dignities, make sure that everyone around them is aware of their greatness.  As Americans we don’t tend to use titles of nobility from the old world to segregate ourselves, but find other substitutes that accomplish the same ends.  Our titles of middle, upper, and lower class help separate people from each other based on money; job titles such as white collar and blue collar, executive, director, management, union, labor, and others help divide people based on position; academic titles of degree, field of study, administration, and faculty separate people based prestige of intellectual accomplishment, and the awards they lavish upon each other.  In nearly every field of human endeavor there are titles to distinguish the ones in power from the ones under authority, the ones with wealth and those in poverty, the ones with dignity and those who are despised.  Try as we might, there’s simply no escaping the practical reality in human society that there are those who are exalted and those who are abased.

This rottenness of our fallen human nature which we experience in secular society, often follows us into our houses of worship.  If you’ve never found yourself in a Christian congregation where people with money, power, or various other titles of importance attempt to set themselves up in the church as the voices to which all others must yield, give it time… you’ll find that unsavory situation eventually.  The Church has the same people with the same fallen nature within her walls as secular society does, and it should not surprise us that people with pride and dominance issues seek out positions of authority and power.  It is an old axiom from the ancient world that those least suited to use power well are often most vigorously attracted to it, and those best suited to use power well are often the most resistant to such aspirations.  Something about wealth, power, and prestige pulls out the worst in people, enflaming human pride and prejudice in such a way that suffering and destruction often follow in their wake.  Those with all their titles and positions of dignity come to think of themselves as deserving of their power and accolades, while at the same time believing those under oppression have gotten what they deserve, as well.

As awful as this plays out in secular society, it is far more horrible when festooned before God.  In Jesus’ parable about the Pharisee and Publican, He pulls out the eternal significance of this evil delusion.  The Pharisee would have been a teacher of the Law, having both secular and religious authority.  He had titles, prestige, and honor in abundance.  The Publican was a tax collector, repulsive to his own countrymen because he allied himself with the occupying Romans to fleece taxes from the people… and enrich himself by the same means.  Other than the loathsome power to coerce money from people, the Publican had no prestige, no honor, and no dignity—to the Romans he was still just a Jew, and to the Jews he was traitor.  Both came before God to pray, drawn by His Holy Spirit working through His Word to faith and repentance.  Both had very different experiences.  While the Pharisee brought all his human trinkets of honor before God to justify himself, the Publican brought nothing but contrition—godly sorrow for his sins, born of a desperate hope in both the justice and mercy of God.  Both prayed, and both left the sanctuary, but only the Publican left justified.

Justification, we learn from St. Paul’s exposition of the subject in his various epistles, is to be declared righteous for Christ’s sake alone—a gift of grace and mercy given through faith alone.  No amount of earthly accolades and accomplishments can give a person what they need to be justified on their own, because as fallen creatures we can never be fully righteous before God on our own merits.  Attempting to justify ourselves to God based upon our own works and dignity leads only to the Law’s exposure of our wicked sickness unto death, and the sin which corrupts us to our very core.  Standing before God on the basis of titles, positions, wealth, power, or any other manmade segregation which people delude themselves with, receives from God only condemnation.  For when man appears before God and demands of Him what he has earned and what he deserves, God sadly gives man his just reward:  an eternity of separation in the fires and torments of hell.

On the other hand, the one who appears before God with nothing, knowing himself to be a poor, miserable, fallen sinner, declares before his holy God that he deserves nothing but death and hell.  Such a broken person does not ask of God to receive what he knows is his due, but rather begs for mercy and forgiveness, trusting in the love and compassion of his saving God.  Such brokenness of spirit and faith receives the free gift of God’s grace and forgiveness for the sake of Jesus’ death upon His Cross in the sinner’s stead.  While the unrepentant and unbelieving sinner receives from God only condemnation for his own sake, the repentant and believing sinner receives Justification unto eternal life for Jesus’ sake.  The humility of faith and repentance before God is what brought salvation to the broken hearted Publican, while the hubris of the Pharisee sealed him in judgment.

How does this Word of our Lord reach you today?  Have you puffed yourself up in titles, degrees, and trappings of prestige which you think give you honor and standing before God?  Repent!  Lay your trinkets and baubles down at the feet of Christ your savior, that He might give you the true riches of His mercy and grace.  Are you one of the broken and downtrodden, perhaps the victim of those in power who have abused and spitefully used you, seeking to find vengeance by taking their power and using it against them?  Repent!  Leave the world’s power and strivings for pride to their own destructive ends, and hear Christ call you by faith and repentance into His Kingdom of grace and mercy.  Are you a broken sinner who knows how unholy and unworthy you are, and that you have nothing to bring before God but the prayer of desperate hope which pleads, “God be merciful to me, a sinner”?  Rejoice!  For you have been called by His Word and Spirit to believe the Gospel of forgiveness, life, and salvation which Jesus alone has won for you, and by which Jesus alone declares you justified and righteous in His sight.  However this Word of our Lord finds you this day, let it pierce and destroy your pride, that knowing the depths of your fall before His holy Law, you might know the heights of exaltation in His holy Gospel of grace.  Hear the Word of the Lord, and with a humble and contrite heart, receive the free gift of grace which Jesus brings to heal, restore, and enliven you forever.  Amen.

Perilous Times: A Meditation on 2nd Timothy 3

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.

For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters,

proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,

Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers,

incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,

Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;

Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof:

from such turn away.

Sometimes the prophetic foresight of Scripture is overwhelming in its contemporary application, and such is the case with the third chapter of St. Paul’s second letter to Timothy.  Nearly 2000 years ago, Paul as an Apostle of Jesus Christ, ordained and set Timothy in charge of a locality of churches, giving him encouragement, challenge, and warnings appropriate to the work that lay before him.  As a young bishop entrusted with the care of souls, Timothy was given by Paul a great deal of practical advice for his vocation, which the Church has benefited from ever since.  For this Sunday’s lectionary readings, the Church turns her eyes and ears to this wisdom once again.

Timothy is warned that despite the nobility and high regard Christ holds for His pastoral office delegated to men, bearing that office in our fallen world would be a path of sacrifice, suffering, and service more akin to Jesus’ path to Calvary than any worldly path to glory.  St. Paul warned the young pastor that not only will his service be hard in the days at hand, but as time wears on, the world will only grow worse in its disregard for Christ and His Gospel.  This worsening of the world, the hardening of its heart against the truth of Christ revealed in Scripture and handed down since the days of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses, would manifest in ever greater public embrace of evil.  Unlike the empty headed theologians of the last century or so, St. Paul does not paint a picture of man’s efforts bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth; rather, it is God who invades this dying world with His Kingdom, preserving it by His Word, and sustaining it against the ever darkening days which culminate in the final apostasy and judgment of all mankind.  St. Paul and all of Scripture warn us that the world is getting worse rather than better, and that the cross to be born as a baptized child of God is only going to get heavier in this world, rather than lighter.

This may seem counter-intuitive, when perusing the progress of history.  From a worldly perspective, we might be tempted to see ourselves at the pinnacle of an evolutionary ladder, building new rungs upon which future generations may climb as they achieve new technological, political, and social goals.  From a human perspective, we see today’s world as ever closer to utopia, with scientists on the verge of producing Artificial Intelligence to rival that of people, medical wonders to cure disease and forestall death, complex energy and utility systems that provide electricity, water, and sanitation to all, military weaponry to quickly obliterate any foe, political alliances aimed at global trade, world peace, and common prosperity. More and more people convince themselves that they have evolved beyond the ancient world’s attachment to gods and myths, and are becoming the gods of their own persons and societies.  These individuals now free from the absolutes of good and evil which flow from an absolute and transcendent God, seek to rebuild the world and redefine everything in their own terms—everything in relation to the pursuit of personal pleasure, losing not only their grasp on God but on philosophy, reason, and even Natural Law.  We find today a world leaning forward into the vortex of disordered passion and unhinged sentimentality, building ever greater technological wonders to prop up the civilization they have dreamt.  No longer content to live upon the shores of the civilizations which gave them birth, they yearn for the horizon of a not too distant shore, where they may be the gods they desire, and fashion the world in the image of their passions.

These are perilous times, indeed.  Throughout history’s ebb and flow, there have been civilizations which rose and fell as they gained or lost their grip on reality.  Regardless of the technological wonders of the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the greatness of Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and Rome, the various empires of the East and the West, the hearts of fallen man remain the same:  bent on passion and lust, pride and avarice, if they are not curbed or held in check they produce some the darkest and most deadly of times.  In fact, we have the near history of the 20^th century, which shows in startling detail the inability of the technological wonders of the Industrial Revolution to prevent the greatest loss of human life the world had ever known—not wars of religion, but tyrannical aspirations of twisted atheists, who bent the technological wonders of their day to re-craft the world according to their disordered passions.  Hell bent to rebuild the world according to Darwinian, Marxist, and Nietzschean visions of a world without God and beyond good and evil, hundreds of millions of lives were brutally slaughtered to make the foundations of their tyrannical and murderous empires.  These atheists knew well that without God there was nothing left for man but the will to power, and they were quick to seek their place at the top of heaping skulls.  The technological marvels of the 20^th century did not curb the darkness of the human heart, but rather became the mechanized weaponry able to implement those dark passions with every greater brutality.

And now we come to our own age, this burgeoning 21^st century rushing to the end of its second decade.  New voices call for abandoning God in search for a new technological utopia, convinced that the world they will build in their image with these new tools and wonders will be better than the one’s attempted before.  Don’t be naïve—in the hands of those with darkened and fallen hearts, new technological wonders will only help them accelerate the implementation of their disordered passions in ways and rapidity unknown to past generations.  Those who know the end game of atheism know that all which remains without God is the will to power, and those who are ignorant of their ambitions will be made to know them in time, as their wicked power is brought forth to slaughter or enslave them.  As each successive generation has discovered down through the halls of human history, each technological step our race takes is not a step closer to utopia, but a weapon in the hands of evil men who unwittingly strive to bring hell on earth.  The fulfillment of the image of fallen man in the world is not a reflection of the beauty and virtue of heaven, but of the twisted fires of corruption and vice curling around the devil in his eternal prison.

Our minds in proper focue, we are prepared to hear St. Paul’s encouragement and admonition for how to endure this ever darkening world.  The answer is not in human hands, but rather in the pierced hands of Christ—an answer of grace, redemption, and restoration which God works through faith and repentance in His Only Begotten Son.  In Jesus we see the good that the world and all mankind was originally made to be, and in His death we see not only the height of human wickedness but the inexhaustible depths of God’s love and mercy for His creation.  In Jesus’ resurrection we see the first fruits of God’s promise to restore and resurrect His people and His cosmos to the good, the virtue, the beauty of His image.  There in Jesus we find the promise of His abiding Holy Spirit to keep and guard His people in every darkening age, and His assurance that the gates of hell shall not prevail upon His Church.  Not in the technological wonders of man’s fallen intellect, but in the eternal Word and Wisdom of God made flesh, Jesus shows us the beginning, the middle, the fulfillment, and the eternity of His saving love for us.  The salvation, preservation, flourishing, and assurance of mankind is not found in man, but in Jesus Christ alone.

And where does fallen man learn of this saving Jesus but in His Word, the power of the Holy Spirit working through it to give new life by faith through grace in Christ alone?  Thus St. Paul points his young pastor, and all to come after him, to that sure foundation breathed out by God, which has endured the rising and falling of every past age, and which will endure through every age yet to come:

All scripture is given by inspiration of God,

and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction,

 for instruction in righteousness:

That the man of God may be perfect,

throughly furnished unto all good works.

Here is the rest and the assurance of the saints in our age, no matter how dark and perilous it may become, just as it was the rest and assurance of the saints in every age before.  Hear the Word of the Lord come to you this day, breaking through the wicked delusions of fallen men, to declare to you the love and mercy of Almighty God through Jesus Christ His Son.  Hear Him, turn from your evils and the passions of evil men; repent, believe, and live.  Amen.