A Meditation on Lent through the lens of Romans 5

Therefore being justified by faith,

we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:

By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand,

and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

 

And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also:

knowing that tribulation worketh patience;

And patience, experience; and experience, hope:

 And hope maketh not ashamed;

because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts

 by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.

 

For when we were yet without strength,

in due time Christ died for the ungodly.

For scarcely for a righteous man will one die:

yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die.

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that,

while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

 

 Much more then, being now justified by his blood,

we shall be saved from wrath through him.

For if, when we were enemies,

we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son,

much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.

 

Lent is a good season for the Church to meditate on the mysteries of God and the fallenness of our own human condition.  It is an echo of Biblical accounts in which the people of God were prepared in the wilderness; 40 years Moses grew up in Pharaoh’s house, and 40 years he spent in exile tending sheep in the wilderness; 40 years the Hebrews were prepared in the desert, awaiting their next generation’s readiness to enter the Promised Land; 40 days the Lord Jesus Christ was tested by the devil in the wilderness before He began His three year preaching ministry that culminated at Calvary.  The recurrence of 40 (either days or years) as a preparatory and penitential season in Scripture has been repeated in the historic rhythms, liturgies, seasons, and calendars of the Church, and individuals as well as Christian communities have used them to good effect.  In the bustle of everyday life, it’s easy to forget to make time to meditate on God’s Word, to reflect deeply on who we are before Him, and what a life of true Faith and Repentance should look like in our own lives.  We might find it easy to locate the need for judgment and repentance in others, as our modern social media driven mobs of “cancel culture” have made the moralistic destruction of other people a daily public spectacle.  Yet the inclination to deeply meditate on one’s own short comings, to sit humbly before the light and mirror of God’s Law to allow the Holy Spirit to prick our own conscience and drive us to authentic repentance, is an act of faith which easily slips by each day… until days become months, months become years, and years become lifetimes.

 

Even so, there is a danger in such seasons of which all must be mindful.  When Lent becomes a moralistic discussion of, “What did you give up this year?” it can seem to be an exercise in self righteous comparisons.  One may look down their nose on the person who gave up chocolate for 40 days, knowing that they instead gave up coffee; another may look down on both, knowing they gave up meat; another might feel triumphant in giving up time to do service of ostensibly good works, another in giving up money, another in giving up comfort, and so forth.  Such comparative exercises assume greater piety with greater sacrifice, and infer a greater reward for the most pious.  Such shortsighted experiments are not honest penitential preparation to encounter God, but prideful exercises in elevating one’s self, or one’s community, above others.  While temporarily giving up chocolate or coffee or money or time might help address personal sins of gluttony and avarice, even these sins are often only laid down for a time, with the expectation of picking them all up again when Easter comes. And the greater sins of the heart, of the pride and covetousness and hatred which form an individual’s own self-worship and violation of the First Commandment, go unaddressed and ignored.  Such an impenitent soul clings to their self-imposed works of righteousness, thinking these dirty, polluted rags can be used to rub away the stains of sin from their own soul, all the while being driven further and further from saving faith.  Self-sacrifice can be good in its season, but never when used to bolster pride, or to attempt to earn grace.

 

The truth of the matter is what St. Paul sets forth in his epistle to the church at Rome.  We do not save ourselves by our works, no matter how pious we may think them to be.  Rather we are saved by the grace which comes from Jesus’ own life, death, and resurrection alone—a grace already earned by Him through His Cross, and which we can only receive as a gift by faith.  Of the great lessons of preparation and penitence we could learn in Lent, not least is that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.  Humanity had not prepared itself to be saved, let alone earned righteousness before God.  On the contrary, humanity as a whole, and every individual human being, had earned death and destruction through the wickedness which corrupted them to their core.  Jesus didn’t come to help good people get better, but to save lost and wicked people who didn’t even know how bad they were.  While we were yet sinners, lost in our damnable pride, our irrational philosophies, and murderous passions, Jesus gave His life as a ransom for ours, that we might be reconciled to the Father through Him.  Jesus knows all too well what our condition is without Him and His grace, and what our final sentence will be if we stand before Him to be judged according to the Law on the basis of our own works.  Jesus’ perfect knowledge and wisdom, motivated by His perfect love and compassion, and empowered by His divine omnipotence, moved Him to dwell among us, full of grace and truth; to suffer persecution, rejection, and false conviction at the hands of evil men; to be murdered upon a Roman cross by the urging of His people’s religious leaders; to be buried in a stone tomb, descend into hell, and arise the third day never to die again; to ascend to the Father as our Intercessor at His Right Hand, our High Priest who offered Himself as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world; to send the Holy Spirit by His Word of Law and Gospel to enlighten all who would hear, repent, and believe in Him; to give His people new life from above, an eternal life that could never be extinguished no matter what happened in this world.

 

This is the truth and the penitence of Lent, which prepares one to see Easter with new eyes.  Not a false piety of works righteousness in which there is no hope, but a true piety that hears the Word of God and believes it.  Such a piety is born of faith, which itself is a gift of God through His Word and Spirit, that no one may boast as if they were the authors of their own faith or salvation—a piety which receives the Law as an honest and true witness against our sinful nature demanding our repentance, as well as receiving the Gospel promise of forgiveness, life, and salvation in Jesus Christ alone.  The heart which knows and grieves that while they were yet a sinner, Christ died for them, is the heart which is prepared to receive and rejoice in the blessing of grace by faith in Christ alone, the heart which arises each day in faith and repentance to love as they have been loved, and to walk in the light of God’s Word which has become in incarnate to save them.

 

Regardless of how or whether you keep Lent this season, may the truth which the Holy Spirit uttered through St. Paul inspire you to know most deeply that while you were yet a sinner, Christ died for you, and that the love of Christ reaches to the depths of every sinful heart to wash it clean by His own shed blood, that His life might be your life forevermore.  Amen.

Respecting our Leaders: A Lenten Meditation on 1st Samuel 24

And it came to pass, when Saul was returned from following the Philistines,

 that it was told him, saying, Behold, David is in the wilderness of Engedi.

Then Saul took three thousand chosen men out of all Israel,

and went to seek David and his men upon the rocks of the wild goats.

And he came to the sheepcotes by the way, where was a cave;

and Saul went in to cover his feet:

and David and his men remained in the sides of the cave.

 

And the men of David said unto him,

Behold the day of which the Lord said unto thee,

Behold, I will deliver thine enemy into thine hand,

that thou mayest do to him as it shall seem good unto thee.

Then David arose, and cut off the skirt of Saul's robe privily.

 

And it came to pass afterward, that David's heart smote him,

because he had cut off Saul's skirt.

And he said unto his men,

The Lord forbid that I should do this thing unto my master,

the Lord's anointed, to stretch forth mine hand against him,

 seeing he is the anointed of the Lord.

So David stayed his servants with these words,

 and suffered them not to rise against Saul.

But Saul rose up out of the cave, and went on his way.

 

The humility, restraint, and mercy which David showed Saul would be remarkable on their own, but it is easy to forget the context in which this act of mercy was given.  Years before, God declared His withdrawal from Saul as king of Israel because he rebelled against the Word of the Lord through the Prophet Samuel; David was anointed by Samuel when he was still a young lad, to eventually ascend to the throne in Saul’s place, and the Spirit of the Lord was upon him; Saul was suffering from bouts of severe depression, hostility, and irrational rage, some of which came from demonic oppression due to his wandering away from God; David, once welcomed by Saul into his armies and as a champion against his enemies, was now on the run being unjustly hunted by Saul in the desert; David, with 400 men, lived the lives of refugees, having lost all the comforts of community life in the cities of Israel; Saul, in his quest to hunt David, murdered hundred of priests for the sake of one who showed him mercy by giving him bread and the sword of Goliath whom he killed years before; in the immediate context, David’s 400 desert warriors were being encircled by Saul’s 3000 choice troops, and the odds of his escape were almost nil.  In the context of all that evil and peril which Saul brought directly upon David and his men, David chose not to take Saul’s life when circumstances gave him the opportunity in that cave, because he knew it not to be his place to stretch out mine hand against the Lord’s anointed.

 

Oddly enough, the Prophet Samuel warned by the Word of the Lord that these kinds of things would happen to the people if they brought upon themselves a human king.  Samuel was the last of the Judges, a period of over 400 years where the people had no king but God alone, and their destiny was wrapped up in the Law and Mercy of God; when the people kept faith in the King of the Universe, God Almighty secured them against their enemies and prospered them in their land; when the people abandoned the King of the Universe, He allowed their enemies to triumph over them, and took away their prosperity; when the people repented and came back to the King of the Universe, He forgave, delivered, restored, and blessed them again.  And yet, in their collective rebellion to be more like the pagan kingdoms around them, they rejected the King of the Universe and demanded they be given a human king to rule over them.  God gave them what they wanted, but warned that human kings would become corrupt tyrants over them, and that regardless of their human king, their fate as a people was still bound to the Mosaic Covenant—grace by faith would save them, or judgement by unbelief would condemn them.  No human king could change the divine Covenant, any more than they could alter the Natural Law of the cosmos in which they were created.

 

Saul would not be the last king to turn evil in Israel, nor in the history of the world writ large.  Political power and wealth are alluring to fallen humanity’s cravenness, often drawing the worst out of those who achieve it, or drawing the worst kinds of people to seek it.  This was true in the ancient world for Israel and the nations around them, even as it was true of Babylon, Greece, Rome, the Huns, the Mongols, the Vandals, the French, the English, and the Americans… and every other place in which politics aggregate power and wealth into the hands of the few over the many.  This is no mystery to those who study history.  Only the most self-deluded, ignorant, or deceptive would argue for political utopia on earth produced by the hands of fallen men, if only people would give up their rights and property and power to the leaders who say they—unlike their predecessors—will take power and rule others well.  While it is certainly true that there have been better and worse leaders of countries over time, the experience of Israel is normative for all others:  the evil far outnumber the good, and even a good human politician will eventually hand over the reigns to someone who will do great wickedness with their power.  Some political structures attempt to slow this progression by separating powers and declaring constitutional boundaries, but to those who seek power and wealth through politics, such trifles rarely bind them for long.  Great power and great wealth draw great numbers of wicked hearts to pursue it, and often the strongest, most wicked of them all will seize it.

 

It is tempting to think that God has lost control of this process, and that the world which is so obviously under the sway of the devil and those who emulate him, is a lost mess of Darwinian evolutionary chaos and Nietzschean will to power.  But God is still the King of the Universe, and this little blue ball on which we live out our short lives is still part of His Kingdom, ruled by His Word regardless of who recognizes it.  No matter what political structures we build for ourselves, which wicked people will use, twist, and abuse in their pursuit of power and wealth, God’s Law and Gospel still frame the reality of the universe, from the farthest reaches of space to the deepest recesses of our own souls.  There is no other true King, as there is no other true Creator of the universe, and no other Judge before whom we shall all stand, be we mighty or weak, rich or poor, or any shade in between during our time in this world.  The truth is that God is still in control, His Word still reigns eternal, and the leaders we have are either a blessing of His grace which we receive by faith and repentance, or a curse of His Law based on our rebellion and unbelief.  Either way, they are the Lord’s anointed, be they good or evil, and they with us will stand before the Judge of the Universe to give an account of our lives.  God has not lost control of the world, and it will move toward its end, with each of us playing our small part in that great revelation.  While God calls all to eternal life through faith and repentance in His Son, crucified for the sins of the whole world, His Law remains for those who reject him and ultimately find their place imprisoned among the demons.  The devil makes his charade of earthly power, manipulating the evil inclinations of fallen men to do great harm in every age and place, but the devil is bound by the grace of Jesus Christ and the power of God Almighty, so that he flees before those who abide in the providence and grace of the King.

 

David saw this, with the Spirit of the Lord upon him.  He knew that Saul was not an accident, but a judgement upon him and the people of Israel for their unfaithfulness to God and His Word.  But he also knew that his deliverance was from God alone, and despite the suffering and persecution which he and his people had duly earned, he trusted in God’s grace to ultimately save them.  In that desert cave it was tempting to reach out and take by force what God had not yet given, but in David’s faith and repentance, Israel saw future times of refreshing and restoration.  Such faith rested in the promises of God, knowing that His Word was more sure and steadfast than any evil manipulation of men in any office of power or wealth.

 

So, too, we wait in faith through the season of Lent.  The adversaries of the Church and the Gospel of Jesus Christ are multiplied in our land, but it is not our place to deny either the Law or Gospel of God by dishonoring our leaders whom God has anointed for their times and places.  If our leaders are wicked, it is a just judgment upon us.  If we see restoration through faithful leaders, it is unmerited grace by faith and repentance in Jesus Christ.  And as it is in our families, our communities, our churches, our nations, and our world, so too it is in every human heart.  The answer to our tyranny under the devil and his minions, be it in our own soul or in our land, is not to rise up in our own fallen powers to be manipulated by him into ever greater evil, but to repent, to turn from our evil, to acknowledge our need for salvation, and to cling to the promises of God in Jesus.  We may have much yet to suffer as we walk with Christ toward Calvary, even as David had many more days and years to suffer in desert exile, but we know the Word of the Lord endures forever, and His goodness and His mercy are from everlasting to everlasting.  Let us strengthen our hearts in the promises of God, returning to Him by faith, that we may see times of refreshing after these times of sorrow are past.  And even though like David we may walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we shall fear no evil, for the King of the Universe is with us, and we shall by His grace dwell in the House of the Lord forever.  Amen.

The Times of the Judges: A Meditation for the Last Week of Epiphany

And the children of Israel departed thence at that time,

every man to his tribe and to his family,

and they went out from thence every man to his inheritance.

 In those days there was no king in Israel:

every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

 

The times of the Judges in Israel, from the end of the conquest of Canaan by Joshua to the transition of Samuel to King David, is captured in the Books of Judges, Ruth, and 1^st Samuel.  Often emblematic of these times is the phrase repeatedly written and used to conclude the Book of Judges, every man did that which was right in his own eyes.  While the season of Epiphany often focuses on the light of God’s Word which comes to us through Moses, the Prophets, and ultimately Jesus Christ which illumines the souls of men to everlasting life by grace through faith, the time of the Judges is also enlightening for us in a different way:  it shows us the dark fate of mankind when they cling to their own understanding rather than the Word of the Lord.  As Jesus would remark during His teachings, when the eye or willful intellect of man becomes darkness in his soul, what darkness it can become!

 

It is certainly true that God did not ultimately abandon the people of Israel during their over 400 years of tumult under the Judges.  As the people of God wandered from Him and His Word, God allowed Israel’s enemies to rise against them, persecuting and dominating them as tyrants.  When the remnant of surviving Hebrews would come to their senses, abandon their harlotry with foreign gods and their evil ways, God would raise up among them a savior—a Judge—to beat back the tyranny of their wicked rulers and restore them again to peace in His fellowship.  Even so, this cycle of faithful repentance would last for about a generation until a new generation cast away their fidelity to the God of their Salvation, and began again to prostitute themselves before the infernal pagan deities which once enslaved their forefathers.  In the rising and the falling of the people, plenty of sordid stories are captured of those who tried to solve their problems on the power of their own benighted intellect, with bloody calamity at every turn.  With God the people flourished, unassailable by their foes; apart from God, they flailed about in vain until enslaved by the objects of their lustful desire.

 

This is the portrait of fallen man which is validated in every age, including our own.  The Church, foreshadowed as the fulfilment of the promises of God to Israel in Jesus Christ, has watched the world ebb and flow from seasons of grace to periods of destruction, depending on whether the heart of the people was closer or further from their Savior.  In each corner of the world, one generation grows weary under the boot of tyranny from men and demons, cries out to God in faith and repentance, and sees restoration come to them, though not without sacrifice and tears.  In the aftermath of great conflict, that generation gives thanks to God for their salvation, raises up monuments to memorialize God’s good gifts to men, and teaches their children to remember God’s providence.  And within a generation or two, the children and grandchildren of those who were rescued by grace and providence through faith and repentance wax fat and wonton in their hearts, forget the God who gave them peace, and begin their descent into darkness once more.  It is a story played out more times than history can record, but the recordings of history bear witness that life and salvation are found in God alone, and that apart from Him there is only darkness, slavery, brutality, and death.

 

And yet, this cycle we see playing out before our eyes in our land today, is found within our own souls, as well.  As we begin to think that we are the measure of all things, that our intellect will save and rescue us from the perils of death and disease and discomfort, that the devices of our minds and our hands will forever secure for us the objects of our endless desires, we begin our walk away from the light and life of God’s Eternal Word.  Be it slow or quick, passionate or apathetic, our wandering away from the Light of Christ takes us ever further into the dark wilderness where the ancient tyrannical foes of our ancestors wait in malevolent anticipation for our arrival.  With eyes darkened we make out delusional images in the darkness which are not there, even as those things which are begin to circle us.  With minds deceived and twisted we think we can find our way through the wilderness to a new prosperity, even as our ravenous deceivers lure us deeper into their lairs.  There in the darkness, apart from God and His saving Word, we find ourselves no match for the ancient evil which hunts us, and in whose haunts lay strewn the remains of countless others like us, who have perished in their wandering too far from the Light.

 

As we look forward to Lent, we remember who and what we are in our fallen state—that on our own power we are lost and hopeless in a dying world which remains under the sway of the evil one until the Last Day dawns.  But unto us who sit in great darkness, a Light has come.  To us who lay under the diabolical tyranny of sin, death, and hell which we duly earned by our own most grievous fault, the Lord has raised up among us a Savior and Judge.  To us, so prone to wander from the Light of His Eternal Word and embrace the putrefying decadence of Baal, Molech, Dagon, and Beelzebub, a Victor has come to restore us to wholeness and life.  To us who deserve only condemnation and eternal judgment, has come the Gospel of His forgiveness and eternal life in Jesus.  To us who have wandered far from the Light, the Light has come to lead us back home.

 

Whatever the darkness we are lost in this day, let us remember that our God seeks and saves the lost.  In Him alone is the healing and restoration of our nation, our communities, our families, and our own souls.  It is Jesus who has been raised up among us to save us; who is our pillar of cloud by day and our pillar of fire by night; our gracious Judge who pays our debts upon His Cross and sets our tyrannical captors to flight; whose Holy Name alone is given under heaven whereby we must be saved.  Hear Him in whatever darkness you may find yourself this day; see the Light of His loving countenance and hear the good news of His Word that your sins are forgiven, and your life is restored, by grace through faith in Him.  Return to the Lord our God who has saved us from every evil, enlightened every darkness, and dispelled every wicked tyrant.  Hear Him again, and in faith and repentance, live forgiven and free forevermore.  Amen.