What About Antiochus IV Epiphanes? (or Hitler if you like.) – 01/08/2017

WARNING PREACHY…

Mark 12:30-31

³⁰ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’³¹ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

I find it very telling that when Jesus was asked what the most important Law of the Old Testament was, he didn’t answer the way we might have expected him to; like “Thou shall not murder” or “Thou shalt not commit adultery”, but rather he answered with something other than an actual written Law but rather with more of an idea promoted by the Law.  He answered with the idea that the Law was actually intended to promote.  In humanity, we tend to look at the written statutes quite woodenly rather than why those statutes were written.  So when Jesus answered the question put to him, he did so by answering with the Spirit of the Law rather than the Letter of the Law.  Part of what made Jesus so unique was that he was not at all a “letter of the law” type of guy.  He said those things that were unexpected and not the normal pat answers that are so common with the religious leaders of his day – and of ours today.

Even when Jesus taught in the Matthew 5, he spent a lot of time correcting the Jewish catechism, if you can call it catechism in the Jewish community.  No matter what it’s called, the fact is that from the time they were babies the Jews were taught the Law of God in doctrine and practice.  So when Jesus taught them saying “You have heard that it was said” he was referencing what they had always been taught, what was common knowledge to them all from their religious training.  But in the Matthew passages he added the words “But I tell you” just before he corrected and expanded their initial teaching.  Read the Matthew verse below o see what I mean.

Matthew 5:43-45

⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵ that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

It seems that every time we get to this point of Jesus’ teaching about loving our enemies, someone is going to pipe up with a “What about Hitler?”

Of course the Jews in Jesus' day could not have asked such a question about Hitler, but they certainly could have asked "What about Antiochus IV Epiphanes[1]?" Antiochus IV Epiphanes was a Hellenistic Greek King from around 165 BC.  He persecuted the Jews, even sacrificing a pig on the altar of God in the Temple.  Antiochus IV was in a way the Greek equivalent to our modern day Hitler.  So I imagine that when Jesus taught the Jews to love their enemies, and those who persecute them, they would have been incredulous at the idea of loving Antiochus IV.

Going back to Hitler, I have to admit that I struggle with how to respond.  Was Hitler deplorable?  Yes.  Was Hitler pure evil?  I believe that he was.  Did Hitler deserve a bullet to the brain?  Absolutely, but when Jesus shed his blood on the Roman Cross he did so to complete the Law of God by dying for the sins of mankind.

At this point I am stuck having to justify the Cross of Jesus with the despicable acts of Hitler.  My emotions tell me that the acts of Hitler are unforgivable while my faith in Christ tells me that Jesus completely destroyed the effects of Sin for humanity.  How can I possibly be a man of faith and love Hitler while condemning his atrocities against mankind? 

The issue for me is this; do I accept the great power of the blood of Christ as more significant than the evil acts of the man Hitler?  In other words; is Jesus blood more powerful than Hitler bad actions?  In faith I must conclude that Jesus is greater, however that doesn’t get rid of my detest and contempt for the Hitler or his actions.  Despite this though, I have to conclude that the blood of Jesus covered over even Hitler’s sin. 

Romans 5:6-8

⁶ You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. ⁸ But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

And so the scripture that tells me that Jesus died for me when I was still in the detestable state of sin must remain true for men that I would rather not give grace to.  The blessing is that grace and forgiveness is given to all men by God through Jesus Christ - and not me or how I feel about it.  And honestly, I am grateful for that.

But the natural question then becomes; “So is everyone forgiven?”

I need to be careful here, so please stick with me.  

 I have pondered this question and turned it over and over in my mind.  As I look at the Scripture and pray for guidance from the Holy Spirit I have concluded that YES, all men have been forgiven of sin by the single act of Jesus on the Cross and the shedding of his blood.  However, just because I do believe that all men are forgiven by the blood of Jesus does not mean that I consider all men to experience eternal benefit from that blood.  So, put simply, just because the sin of men has been eradicated and forgiven by the blood of Jesus does not mean that men automatically go to heaven and experience eternal life.  I believe this because there is an obscure verse in the Bible.

Jude 4-5

⁴ For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord. ⁵ Though you already know all this, I want to remind you that the Lord at one time delivered his people out of Egypt, but later destroyed those who did not believe.

In this passage from Jude, the Jews are the intended audience.  In verse 5 Jude reminds them about what they already know, that God delivered the Jews from Egypt but he later destroyed those who did not believe.  It’s this word “later” that makes me think what I think.

Back in the days of Moses, God released ALL of the Jewish people from their slavery to Egypt, irregardless of their belief in Him or their right or wrong actions, and he redeemed them out of Egypt and set them free to the dessert.  But many of those redeemed people walked the dessert and did not believe that it was God who had set them free; so they were later destroyed by God.

Likewise, I see the Christian situation as mirroring the ancient one.  Jesus, on the Roman Cross shed his blood to set mankind free (all of us) from the slavery of sin.  He forgave us all and set us on the path to the Promised Land (i.e. eternal glory in heaven).  And now, a Great and Terrible Day of Judgment of Christ is coming and at that time it will be determined who bent a knee to Jesus and who did not.  Who believes that Jesus death on the Cross set us free of our sin and who does not.  And unfortunately, there are many men, like Hitler, who have not (to the best of our knowledge), and will not believe in the Christ as the salvation of sinful men, so their judgements are sure.

The Good News today, however, (i.e. The Gospel Truth) is that Jesus has set us free from the slavery of sin and death.  Today, you are walking across your own dessert toward the Promised Land and you have Jesus to thank for it.  And like Hitler, you can either believe it or not.

So what about Hitler?

In my limited knowledge, I don’t think he ever really believed in Jesus or the redemption that he had in Christ.  And because of this I feel sorry for him.  I don’t “love” him per se, and I cannot generate sad feeling for him, but I do pity him for he was a man just like me that was so saturated by demons, mental illness, and the obsession of self that he became like the name of Judas in our present day, and so completely (I suspect) missed the grace of our savior.

And so the real question is not “what about Hitler” but more immediately “what about you?”  Do you believe in Jesus for the forgiveness of your own sins?  If you don’t, I hope and pray that you will.

Be blessed my friends…

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiochus_IV_Epiphanes

Required of the Law. - 01/01/2017

(SORRY THIS IS NOT EDITED AS WELL AS I WOULD LIKE, PLEASE DEAL WITH IT.)

WARNING PREACHY… 

We love New Year’s resolutions:  rules and regulations give us comfort because, I believe, we perceive security in them.

A guy I went to school with was greatly frustrated when the professor would not just tell him what to think or believe about a subject.  He was not happy with being taught “how” to think, he just wanted to know “what” to think.

We’re all prone to this.  That's why many of us had such angst in school when it came to writing papers that did not have a set number of required pages.  My father in law was a school teacher for many years and when his students would ask him how long a paper had to be he would tell them, "It needs to be likes a woman's skirt; long enough to cover the point but short enough to keep it interesting."  While I like the creativity of this answer, in the end the students still did not know how many pages they needed to write.

We like rules; they are unambiguous, definite, and defined.  At the end of the day we judge ourselves on how many of the 10 Commandments that we got right.

In this morning’s Scripture reading (Luke 2:21-40), Joseph and Mary are taking Jesus to the temple to be presented as is commanded by the Law.  At this 8^th day presentation the baby Jesus is circumcised and officially counted as a Jew.

I always question the need for Jesus to be required by the Law to be circumcised; was it really necessary? Martin Luther wrote about the circumcision of Jesus: how it is that sin is passed on from man to man, and why the Virgin Birth was necessary. 

However, it is certainly true that if the deity of Jesus did not require circumcision his humanity still was obligated to it. We see the same idea at the baptism of our Lord.

Matthew 3:11-15

 ¹¹ “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹² His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
¹³ Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. ¹⁴ But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”
¹⁵ Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented.

Again, the deity of Jesus did not make a baptism of repentance necessary but his humanity of flesh obligated him to it.

And so Jesus, being God, did not need the things which the Law required but subjected himself, his humanity, to us in order to guide us to the Cross on Calvary. Likewise, Jesus, again, being God, did not need to go to his death on the cross for his own sins, but in his humanity he did so for the sins of mankind: because the Law required it.

Jesus was subjected to the Law of God in order to set us free from the Law.  In other words, he set us free from the 10 Commandments.

Philippians 2:5-11

⁵ In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

⁶ Who, being in very nature^[a] God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; ⁷ rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature^[b] of a servant, being made in human likeness. ⁸ And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!

⁹ Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰ that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹ and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Our lord subjected himself to the Law so that you and I do not need to and now we look directly to Christ and the leading not of rules and regulations but of the Holy Spirit of God.

This creates problems in our faith for us because we feel secure in the Law.  We like hard and fast rules and regulations (Heck, we even create rules for ourselves and call them “New Year's resolutions”. We crave defined and definite order with guidelines so we can have a crystal clear image of how to lice our lives of faith (or should I say; how many pages to write?)

But Jesus destroys the sin that requires us to live by law and statute because he gives us a new statute to follow; a statute of selflessness.

John 13:34

³⁴ “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.

or

Matthew 16:24 

²⁴ Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

Both of these verses require class of what “love” and “pick up their cross daily” actually means but neither requires the Law because Jesus has fulfilled the Jewish Law in its entirety as He said in Matthew 5:17.

And so Jesus gives us a new law to live by but one that is not guided by statute but by his Holy Spirit.  And we are not always comfortable with this.   Living life dynamically with a living and active God who gives us his personal Spirit, who requires relationship when rules and regulations do not.  

This is exactly why we brake when we see a police officer while driving.  The rule is merely a road sign and we are not concerned about it because we know it is not personally aware of our offense, but when the rule is between ourselves and a God who is personally active and on the scene, then we recognize the stark difference between simply being religious and having a living and active relationship with Jesus.

This is how it is when our faith is guided by Law versus being guided by God’s Holy Spirit.  One is impersonal and easy to ignore while the other is personal and not so easy to disregard out of hand.

Now today, as we consider this New Year, I encourage you to do so with an eye toward the Christ who lives and the guidance of his Holy Spirit.  It is likely that your New Year’s Laws (eh’hem, I mean Resolutions) will stay with you a few weeks but it will only be with your eyes firmly focused on Christ that you can know the victory that he has given us.

I close here with a final Scripture as our parting thought...

Galatians 2:15-21

¹⁵ “We who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles ¹⁶ know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in^[d] Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.

¹⁷ “But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, we Jews find ourselves also among the sinners, doesn’t that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! ¹⁸ If I rebuild what I destroyed, then I really would be a lawbreaker.

¹⁹ “For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. ²⁰ I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. ²¹ I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”^[e]

Christmas Eve 2016 - 12/24/2016

WARNING PREACHY

(Read Luke Chapter 2)

The Celebration of Birth…

I asked Google for the percentage of the world that claims Christianity as its faith of choice and it told me that 32.5% of people who claim a religious faith claim Christianity.  That’s about 2.1 billion people around the globe who are having a birthday party for Jesus tomorrow.

You may have heard me say this before but do you know why we have birthday parties in the first place?  (Other than it’s a good reason for cake?)  The reason might seem a little morbid, but the reason we celebrate someone’s birthday is because they did not die in the past year.

What is the most important birthday that we celebrate?  It’s the very first one.  Mortality rates for new-borns were not always as good as they are today.  Not so long ago, new-born babies had a very high mortality rate for any number of reasons.  Today this is not the case but all the same we make a big deal for baby’s first birthday.

Then, we not only celebrate birthdays for the people who are alive but we also commemorate the birth of long dead people in our history.  We remember the birth of George Washington, Abe Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. as a nation.  In my family, we remember Grandma McMacken’s birthday by eating Cheerios with Sugar for breakfast and her 4-Hour Beef Stew for dinner.  Birthdays are important to us as a nation, as a culture, as families, and as Christians.

Tonight we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus tomorrow and celebrate Him.  We commemorate Him, and His life on earth, as described to us through the Scriptures but we also celebrate Him as actively present with us because He lives.  

Don’t miss this fact; we celebrate God’s grace to us in the human form of Jesus who died on the Roman Cross, but He was raised back to life on the Third Day.  This Christmas, Jesus is most definitely alive and with us via the Holy Spirit of God who may not be visible to us in physical form, but He is very much alive and with us.

Tomorrow morning, being Christmas Day, we Christians remember to honor the creator of our salvation and celebrate our God who lives.

Fourth Week of Advent – 12/18/2016

WARNING PREACHY…

Christmas is God sharing Himself with humanity.

Hebrews 2:10-18

¹⁰ In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. ¹¹ Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. ¹² He says,

“I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters;
    in the assembly I will sing your praises.”

¹³ And again, “I will put my trust in him.” And again he says, “Here am I, and the children God has given me.”

¹⁴ Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— ¹⁵ and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. ¹⁶ For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. ¹⁷ For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. ¹⁸ Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Vs. 10 – “make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered.”

The English word “perfect” needs a little explanation here.  The way we generally understand perfect is to mean “without flaw” -- we describe tests this way; when there were no wrong marks on it we put 100% on it and call it "perfect".  However, the connotation of the Greek word is more like “complete”.  So if you have a 2-gallon pail and you fill it with water, at the very moment the pail is at the brim full it becomes perfect – or rather “complete”.

What the Hebrew writer is getting at is that the humanity of Jesus was completed through the things that he suffered as a human.  Because just becoming flesh does not make someone able to help others.

This is why I don't take marriage or parenting advice from an unmarried or childless person.

In the same way then, what help with life could Jesus offer me if he didn’t really know what real life it like?

Vs. 14 – “Since he had flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity…”

This is the miracle of the Christmas season!  

     - Not that the ox and ass kept time puh, rum pa pa, pum – but that God became flesh!

     - Not that there was no room at the inn – but that God became like us!

     - Not that the Angels sang to the shepherds, or that the Wise men saw a star – but that God came to us!

Jesus is not just a good man, a wise teacher, or even a Holy Priest – He is the eternal God on Earth sharing in the plight that you know -- even now.

He became flesh and blood like you and me and shared in our humanity…

Vs. 17 – “That he might make atonement for the sins of the people”

It’s not popular in our culture to speak of the sins of the people.  We are offended at the idea of sin because we don’t like idea of someone that we love being a “bad person”.  And worse, we certainly do not like it if we are portrayed as a bad person.  But the sins of the people, while certainly including our actions, is about our initial separation from a Holy God.  And this “sin of the people” needs to be atoned for and eradicated in order for men to have peace with God.

This is why Jesus is born.  To atone for the sins of men, yours, mine, and everyone else’s, and to live as a man in order for God to completely understand the plight of humanity.

And so God, through the Christ child shares in our humanity and is not separate from us.  He experienced the plethora of pains that we humans experience but he did it without sin, and always at the leading of the Holy Spirit.

There is excitement at the birth of every child because of what that Child might mean, now at Christmas we experience the excitement of the birth of Jesus because of what he meant to us and our world. 

Now, as we celebrate Christmas, we have the privilege of sharing the Good News of Great Joy of Jesus with our world.

Luke 2:8-14

⁸ And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. ⁹ An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. ¹⁰ But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. ¹¹ Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. ¹² This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
¹³ Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

¹⁴ “Glory to God in the highest heaven,
    and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

And so, as the world focuses on the traditions of exchanging presents with on another, we in the church will do well to remember to share the Good News of Christ with the world!  Just as God shared Jesus with us at Christmas, we now share Jesus with the world for Christmas.