Terms of the Covenant: A Meditation on Jeremiah 11 for the Season of Pentecost

And the Lord said unto me,

A conspiracy is found among the men of Judah,

and among the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

 They are turned back to the iniquities of their forefathers,

which refused to hear my words;

and they went after other gods to serve them:

the house of Israel and the house of Judah

have broken my covenant which I made with their fathers.

 

Therefore thus saith the Lord,

Behold, I will bring evil upon them,

which they shall not be able to escape;

and though they shall cry unto me,

I will not hearken unto them.

Then shall the cities of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem go,

 and cry unto the gods unto whom they offer incense:

but they shall not save them at all in the time of their trouble.

For according to the number of thy cities were thy gods, O Judah;

and according to the number of the streets of Jerusalem

have ye set up altars to that shameful thing,

even altars to burn incense unto Baal.

 

I find it a reflection of our age, that even the modern revised lectionary of readings for today from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, manage to clip three verses (18-20) while avoiding the calamitous Word of God which led to them in preceding verses.  Jeremiah was a prophet tasked with delivering the Word of God to the apostate people of Israel prior to the Babylonian Captivity, delivering His Law with brutal clarity and His Gospel with undiminished hope.  For example, chapter 11 records God speaking directly to the people of Israel that their having abandoned the covenant of Moses at Mt. Sinai would result in God abandoning Israel to her enemies, where in righteous judgment God would allow the wicked pagans and their infernal deities to overwhelm Israel, whose desperate calls unto their demonic gods would not save them.  Further, He warned them that in the day of judgment He would not hear their calls either, as the time of repentance would be past.  However, to that faithful remnant, including Jeremiah, God promised to preserve them in the midst of that horrible calamity which would befall the nation, even as they would be sold into slavery in Babylon.

 

Such words of national, communal judgement are not popular in our era, and nor were they in Jeremiah’s time roughly 2600 years ago.  The Founders of our nation understood it, as they appealed to God for providence and protection in the founding of this nation, and the pulpits of American churches thundered with calls to repentance, faith, and virtue that our nation might be blessed through our fidelity to God and His Word.  And indeed, our nation was blessed as a land of liberty, prosperity, and faith, always in need of repentance and yet continuing to strive toward the good.  Such calls to faith and repentance rang out in our wars of Independence, during the Civil War, and during the great World Wars of the 20^th century.  Yet over the last 100 years, and particularly in the last two generations, our people have become increasingly dismissive of the God who established and prospered us.  In place of the true God, we have pagan altars on every street, gods more numerous than the count of our cities, and growing public ascent to the secular humanist philosophies of technological atheism.  We have allowed our children to be brainwashed into Darwinian Marxism by government schools, and our adults to be intellectually neutered by self-proclaimed messiahs of technology.  The American population is wandering away from the true God much the way ancient Israel did, substituting false gods and human philosophies to substantiate their growing desire for debauchery, tyranny, violence, and evil.

 

And what has been the result?  American communities are collapsing even as families are disintegrating from coast to coast, and some American politicians are openly hostile to the Word of God, the words of our country’s founding documents, and that remnant of people still clinging to them.  Our economy is in tatters, trust in public institutions is abysmal, suicide rates have skyrocketed to historic levels, and large swaths of people drug themselves into distraction with opioids or technology.  The world is on fire due to irrational, rampant human evil, all to the cheers and encouragement of the demonic deities who have always fanned such destructive flames.  We have brought these calamities upon ourselves by abandoning the covenant of God, first of which that we should have no other gods before Him, because there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved than Jesus Christ alone.  For all the incredulity of modernity and all our presumptuous sophistication, we can’t escape the reality written into the Natural Law of the cosmos:  the Covenant of God is given on His terms, and we either receive His blessings by grace through faith in Him and His Word, or we receive His judgment through rebellion and unbelief.  There is no brokerage of this Covenant with other gods, either infernal or of our own making, and there is no escaping it.  What is true of individuals is also true of nations:  we will either live by faith, or we will die in our sins.

 

We must come to see this clearly, as hard as the truth may be, if we are to find the fountains of refreshment once again.  While Jeremiah was sent specifically to the people of ancient Israel with prophecy specifically fulfilled in the fall of Israel, the Babylonian Captivity, and the restoration of Jerusalem a couple generations later, the principles God spoke through Jeremiah ring across the ages to the end of time.  God’s Covenant with us is a gift of unsurpassed grace and mercy, leading to eternal life, for the sake of His sacrifice on our behalf in Jesus.  In Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is the hope of all mankind, calling us to a path of restoration and fellowship first with our Creator, and through Him to all creation.  It is the grace upon which individuals find their hope and purpose, and by which families are made strong in the bonds of faith, hope, and love.  It is the blessed communion of the saints in every time and place, which hears the Word of the Lord and strives to keep it, confessing Christ as the only Way, Truth, and Life.  It is this fellowship with God and one another that makes our communities kind and gracious, and our nation courageous and virtuous.  This is the Covenant where love covers a multitude of sins, where we love others in reflection of the divine love which we have first received, and shine like a beacon into the darkness of our fallen world.  This is the Covenant which declares that no greater love does any man have than to lay down his life for his friends, and so the fear of death in the face of any infernal enemy is swallowed up in the eternal life, love, and victory of Jesus.

 

We do not know the time for our nation, or for ourselves, when the call of our repentance will end and judgment will begin, but we do know that once judgment falls, it is inescapable.  The modern infatuation with pagan gods and technological messiahs will not save anyone in that final hour, nor will they quench the fires of eternal perdition.  Until that day, therefore, let us remember the gracious promises of our God, and redouble our efforts to echo His Words of Law and Gospel to all who may hear, repent, believe, and live.  For while we do not know the times and seasons which God has reserved to His own wisdom alone, we do know that the Word of God is mighty and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, able to pierce into the hearts of people and nations, so that faith and repentance might bring souls back into fellowship with the only True God who is life and blessing to all who receive Him.  May the Word and Spirit of Almighty God shatter once again our unbelief, open our blinded eyes and deafened ears, that our people may sing together now and for eternity to glory of God our Savior.  Amen.

 

  

Surrounded but Preserved: A Meditation on Psalm 116 for the Season of Pentecost

I love the Lord, because he hath heard

my voice and my supplications.

Because he hath inclined his ear unto me,

therefore will I call upon him as long as I live.

The sorrows of death compassed me,

and the pains of hell gat hold upon me:

I found trouble and sorrow.

Then called I upon the name of the Lord;

O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul.

Gracious is the Lord, and righteous;

yea, our God is merciful.

The Lord preserveth the simple:

I was brought low, and he helped me.

Return unto thy rest, O my soul;

for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.

For thou hast delivered my soul from death,

mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.

 I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.

I believed, therefore have I spoken: I was greatly afflicted:

I said in my haste, All men are liars.

 

What shall I render unto the Lord 

for all his benefits toward me?

 I will take the cup of salvation,

and call upon the name of the Lord.

I will pay my vows unto the Lord now

in the presence of all his people.

Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.

O Lord, truly I am thy servant; I am thy servant,

and the son of thine handmaid: thou hast loosed my bonds.

I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving,

and will call upon the name of the Lord.

I will pay my vows unto the Lord now

in the presence of all his people.

In the courts of the Lord's house,

in the midst of thee, O Jerusalem.

Praise ye the Lord.

 

To be encircled by the powers of death, hell, temptation, and sorrow is part of the curse of life in this fallen world.  It was as well known in the ancient Mediterranean basin as it is today in modern North America, and people across the ages in every inhabited geography have come up with a myriad of responses to it.  Fallen man continues to poison his own wells, corrupt his own communities, and reap the whirlwinds of malicious folly, bringing upon himself and his neighbors the blighted fruits of evil intentions.  Whether it is the obviousness of unjust wars where one nation seeks to plunder, dominate, and subjugate another for its own pleasure, or the theft, murder, fraud, and deception individuals or gangs of people unjustly perform upon their neighbors, where there are fallen people there will be the ominous shadows of evil death.

 

20 years ago, the evil of fallen men rose up to murder nearly 3000 people, where Islamic terrorists hijacked several commercial aircraft and flew them like guided missiles into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.  A final hijacked aircraft was overwhelmed by its hostage passengers, and rather than finding its original target, was crashed into the Pennsylvania landscape.  It was certainly neither the first nor the last evil atrocity of Islamic fanatics perpetrated upon unsuspecting or naïve populations, as Islam has been the religious ideology of a political machine to execute bloody conquest and domination from its inception in the 7^th century AD.  As a religion, Islam shares no similarities with Judaism nor Christianity beyond a baseless claim to distant Abrahamic paternity (a claim made 2600 years after Abraham lived… like someone today claiming without evidence that they are the decedents of Plato or Buddha) and commands directly from its unholy texts the murder, theft, slavery, and subjugation of everyone who won’t affirm their false prophet.  The attacks of September 11^th, 2001, were the physical emanations of real evil, of horrible ideas which gave rise to horrible consequences in a real and tangible world, where real people suffered and died.  It is an evil which still exists and has existed for centuries, bringing true tyranny, slavery, darkness, and death everywhere it has gone.  Failure to name and identify it is only ignorance, cowardice, or complicity, none of which being a worthy defense against it.

 

As awful as Islam both is today and has been for the last 1500 years, it is not alone in having wreaked evil and destruction in the world.  Atheistic Marxists caused the death and subjugation of more people in the 20^th century than all wars combined and recorded up to that point, and Marxist China is openly working to bend the whole world under its tyrannical boot even now.  And of course, even within the communities who on paper might subscribe to more peaceful philosophies, horrible atrocities have been committed across history as they are in our own day.  Time would fail to speak of the past and present genocidal rampages across Africa, India, Asia, the Pacific Islands, Europe, and the Americas.  We might like to think ourselves more enlightened in our time than our ancestors, but no matter what group of people an individual has descended from today, they will likely find great evil committed by someone or some group in their patrimony… just as they see it playing out in their contemporary communities every time they read or watch the news.  The problem with evil in our fallen world isn’t so much the world around us, but the evil within us—we are the ones who first drug this good creation into the fiery depths of this infernal fall, and we are the ones who continue to fan the flames of our own destruction.  No matter what label we use to define and segregate ourselves on this globe, be it philosophically, religiously, or socially, the root cause of our having been surrounded by death, hell, and sorrow isn’t just the evil around us, but the evil within each and every one of us.

 

As David and the ancient Hebrews came to see rightly, the salvation of the individual soul as well as the preservation of the whole community was not something to be won by the hands of man, but by the grace and power of God.  If man is to be saved from the evil which encompasses him, he must first be saved from the evil which permeates him, where only the Word and Spirit of God can reach.  There, deep in the dark recesses of the human mind, where lurk the motivations to gratify disordered passions at the expense of abusing our neighbors, the Word of God speaks of a love, compassion, forgiveness, and eternal life which no person can win on their own.  It is a Word of freedom which daily breaks the chains of dark impulses in our fallen nature, and imbues a person with a new heart and a new mind to see their neighbors as God sees them:  as people made in His image, created to love and be loved in liberty, truth, and virtue.  Such a Word gives new eyes to those blinded by evil, new ears to those deafened by a cacophony of injustice, that they might rise up in their generation and bear witness to the One who seeks and saves those who are lost on this sea of troubles.  This Word which first spoke the universe into existence, which thundered out the Law on Mount Sinai and cried out the Gospel from a Cross on Mount Calvary, which shall come again on the Last Day to judge the living and the dead and whose Kingdom has no end, is the Word which comes to each of us surrounded and permeated by the terrors of death and hell.  This Word is Jesus.

 

Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh who dwelt among us 2000 years ago, still dwells among His people today.  Today He calls out to those surrounded by darkness to give them a Light which cannot be overcome, a life which cannot be taken away, and a strength to shoulder every sorrow until that Day when darkness, death, and sorrow shall be no more.  Today the Word of God comes to you, rescuing you from the evil down deep in your own soul, as well as the evil which surrounds you in the hearts and hands of others.  Today, Jesus offers you the inestimable gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation, of victory over every dark and evil force at work in the world around us, all by His incomparable work of grace that we may receive it by faith and trust in Him.  Hear Him as He speaks His Word of life, liberty, and victory to you, that you may stand before God and men without fear, knowing that what has transformed you by grace through faith into a child of the Living God, is the only power which can and will transform and save our fallen world.  To God alone be the glory, now and forever, and unto ages of ages.  Amen.

 

Respect of Persons: A Meditation on James 2 for the Season of Pentecost

My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ,

the Lord of glory, with respect of persons.

For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring,

 in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment;

 And ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing,

and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place;

and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool:

 Are ye not then partial in yourselves,

and are become judges of evil thoughts?

Hearken, my beloved brethren,

Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith,

and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him?

But ye have despised the poor.

Do not rich men oppress you,

and draw you before the judgment seats?

Do not they blaspheme that worthy name

 by the which ye are called?

 

If ye fulfil the royal law according to the scripture,

Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, ye do well:

But if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin,

and are convinced of the law as transgressors.

For whosoever shall keep the whole law,

and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.

For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill.

Now if thou commit no adultery, yet if thou kill,

 thou art become a transgressor of the law.

So speak ye, and so do,

as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty.

 For he shall have judgment without mercy,

that hath shewed no mercy;

and mercy rejoiceth against judgment.

 

It may come as a surprise that our modern cults of celebrity were well known in the ancient world.  St. James wrote not long after the death and resurrection of Jesus, before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and was most likely the half brother of Jesus (born of Joseph and a previously deceased wife, rather than Mary the Mother of Jesus.)  Regardless of how St. James may have regarded his younger half-brother before the events of Calvary, he became a leading Apostle after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, ultimately martyred in Jerusalem by the same religious authorities who murdered Jesus.  St. James knew what it meant to live the faith in persecution and tribulation, and he also knew first-hand how vapid, unreliable, and treacherous people of worldly prestige could be.  People of rank, privilege, education, and power had manipulated courts, mobs, traitors, and foreign powers to torture and execute Jesus, and they would do the same to Jesus’ followers for centuries to come.

 

And yet, the lure of power, wealth, and influence still holds a strange attraction to Christians. For the unbelieving world who have no internal conviction of enduring or transcended good, nor of the judgement they must eventually face before the throne of their Creator when they die, it may not be surprising that they court the powerful, the beautiful, the wealthy, and the influential.  For those whose hope is only in this world, the pursuit of money and power is a natural if twisted inclination, drawing them into the presence of those who have it, even as they try to find ways to take it for themselves, or borrow the glory of others.  But for the Christian who knows better, why the attraction to the rich and powerful of this age?  For the Church of Jesus Christ, endowed with every eternal gift of forgiveness, life, and salvation won through His shed blood, with grace upon grace to raise us up into the restored image of our God and Savior by the omnipotent power of His Holy Spirit, what possible value can the baubles of this world offer?  What can Christians possibly think they can add to the Eternal Gospel of Jesus Christ, through the affluence of celebrities?

 

There is, I think, the rub.  Christians while still at war in this world against their own sinful flesh, their own corrupted minds, and the daily assaults of the devil, still wrestle with unbelief—specifically, unbelief that the Word and Work of Jesus Christ is enough to do what God has sent it into the world to do.  Every day, Christians still wake up and try to figure out what they can add to the Gospel, how they can help God in the work of saving themselves and in saving the whole world.  It is an arrogance born of unbelief, a hubris projected from personal insecurity, knowing deep down that if any of this soul saving Gospel is dependent on us, we are lost beyond hope.  Somewhere deep down in the heart of the Christian, there is still a war going on between faith and unbelief, as the Holy Spirit continues day by day to conform every baptized believer into the image of their Savior.  This is a battle we never quite finish in this world until we lay our sinful flesh in the dust, and the Word of Jesus finishes its promised work to raise us up to eternal life, purged of all our sinful inclinations and unbelief, forever.  Thus in this world, true faith is never found without repentance, and Gospel is never present without Law.

 

So the inclination of Christians over the centuries and in our own day, to somehow borrow or even take the prestige of the educated, the powerful, the influential, and the rich, really isn’t such a mystery after all.  Nor is it a mystery why St. James pens such a strong admonition to Christians to repent of such idolatry and unbelief, knowing that a transgressor of the Law in one point, is guilty of the Law as a whole.  While there may be broad ranges of horror which people work out according to their unbelief, it is still unbelief which separates us from God and from His life-giving grace in Jesus Christ.  The call to Christians for repentance is essential to a living faith, as our wrestling against sin, death, hell, and the power of the devil isn’t over until we leave this broken world behind.  And yet, the comfort of that Gospel Word is that Jesus has accomplished all things necessary for our victory over all the forces of darkness, and that He as the Author of our Faith, is also the Finisher or fulfiller of our Faith.  There is nothing we can add to His saving Word or Work, but to live in faith and repentance which flow from His Word and Spirit, and to live forgiven and free in His fellowship forever.

 

This is the heart which flows with mercy and love for the neighbor, because it has already received mercy and love from Jesus, and has no fear of the final judgment.  If today your heart is troubled about that Last Day because you have not believed the Word of the Lord, return to it again, and hear His Spirit speak to you the forgiveness, life, and salvation won for you by Jesus Christ alone.  Hear again the peace and mercy He speaks to you from His Cross, that the shadows of unbelief might be driven away, and that your heart might overflow with His love and mercy to all around you.  Let go of the false hope you have in your own works to save you, or in the works of celebrities to somehow improve the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Rest again in the saving Work and Word of Jesus, that He might raise you up to fulfill the promise of your faith in works of love and mercy to everyone He sends you to, and to accomplish His good works through you which He has designed from before the foundation of the world.  For our victory in this war between faith and unbelief is not assured by our own works or passion, but by the very Word which gives us renewed life in this world, a saving faith never found without repentance and good works, and eternal life in the world to come.  Amen.