Trinity Sunday, 2013
Romans 5, Beckmann
The news in our country over the last couple of months or so has been very rough. We were not yet over the Newtown school shooting when we hear of the bombing in Boston - and children being killed and dismembered - and then we had the Benghazi hearings and learned what really happened this past 9/11 and how much the WH has tried to cover up for political reasons - which is simply horrible - and most recently, as the scandals continue to flow like a torrent out of the Federal Administration, I could say, our whole country was hit by a tornado in Oklahoma, and again our minds picture children dead in a school. It's just all so horrible. And in the face of it all, the hearts of people everywhere cry out to God - Why? Why did these things happen? Couldn't you have stopped this, God? Couldn't you have done something to keep the shooter from getting to the school, the bombs from working, and the tornado from blowing?
And what is so sad is that so many people have turned away from the answers provided by God for us in times likes these in the Trinitarian Christian faith. Why do I emphasize the trinitarian nature of the Christian faith? It's not just because it's Trinity Sunday. It is, for one thing, to distinguish our faith from other faiths that may call themselves Christian, but do not believe in the trinitarian understanding of God. But most importantly, it is to point us to an understanding of the universe that directly relates to the problem of suffering we have in this world.
Those of you who are familiar with the life of C. S. Lewis will know how tortured he was as a young, nine-year-old boy with the death of his beloved mother. This experience, along with others that went along with it, directly lead to his atheism. When he was but 18, when writing to his friend Arthur Greeves, he considered himself an agnostic about anything that existed beyond this world or of life after death. He speaks of the Christian God as a bogey that wants to torture him forever if he should fail to come up to his impossible moral ideals - a spirit "more cruel and barbarous than any man". Such Christian ideas had "always considerably lessened" his happiness. (12 Oct., 18 Oct.)
However, much later in his life, in the 1940's, when he was composing his broadcast talks for the BBC, as a Christian, when he confronted the problem of suffering in this world, he took a much more different approach. Somehow, he had become reconciled to the God who would allow suffering in this world. He could now say with the old saint Job, who - you will remember - lost all his children in a great wind storm like the children were lost in Oklahoma this past week - The Lord giveth, The Lord taketh, blessed be the name of The Lord. How could Lewis be reconciled to such a religion? It is because he had come to the conviction - to use his own words, that "atheism is too simple." (MC, ,p. 40).
You see, he recognized that, when he was a child and lost his mother, his understanding of God was too simple. At the time, he reasoned thus: If God is all powerful, and if God answers prayer; when I prayed that He would heal my mother and he didn't do it, then he was being cruel to me. Therefore God is not good - why should I want to have anything to do with him? This is where a very simple view of God will get you. This happens to lots of people.
Tomorrow is Memorial Day, when we remember all those who have gone to war for the sake of our country. Recently, I was listening to a man on the internet who was assigned to the grave digging detail in the US Army in WWII. As a result, he had to go pick up the bodies of our dead boys and have them buried. This meant he saw the horrors of what war can do to the bodies of young men that no one should ever have to see. And in that experience, he decided that he would turn away from his faith in God. He, like Lewis, just could not conceive of a God who could be good, someone that he would want to know and worship, who could allow such horror to occur in this world. To this day he refused to believe in God.
Lewis, however, changed his mind, and he was able to do so ultimately because of the trinitarian nature of the Christian faith. Why do I say this? Because, when you search for what is the ultimate reality behind all we experience of this universe - when you seek out the very core of all existence - when you want to know what God is like - you are hit with the baffling fact that God is essentially one and three at the same time. In other words, in all your thinking about life and the universe, your very starting off point is a truth - a reality - a fact - that is incomprehensible and mysterious. You immediately start out with something that is not simple. Right off the bat, as Lewis puts it, reality is not simple. And this surely means that there are going to be answers to questions we are going to have - such as why such terrible things have happened in our country - that are not going to be simple to answer. Yet! If you really do want an answer, you are going to have to accept this. It's the way things really are.
But why do we believe that God is one and three at the same time? It is primarily because of what we read in the New Testament. We believe that the Scriptures reliably tell us things that are true about God, and we find that the authors of the New Testment are very comfortable portraying a God who is one and yet also He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We find this, for example, in our New Testament reading in the service this morning from Romans 5.
Let us take just about 5 minutes to look at this passage more closely. Paul writes: "Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ." Stop there. In the previous chapters, Paul has proved for us that the Old Testament teaches us that God has been able to give a righteous standing to sinners like you and me and yet remain just and fair himself. How? By not sweeping our sins under the rug, but by perfectly punishing them in His own Son on the cross of Calvary. And then God took the righteousness of His son, which is infinite and perfect, and put it on our account. And all this he does for us freely, and it works for us, it becomes something true about our lives, when we receive this gift by faith. We become a people who are justified before God by faith, through the sacrifice and righteousness of Jesus. But note the implication here: There is something going on between God and Jesus. Jesus makes peace between God and us. This justifying work brings peace between us and God. As Paul goes on to say later, our sin made us God's enemies and God is angry with the wicked every day. But Jesus' work for us has brought an end to that warfare and we, who have received this reconciling work by faith, are now at peace.
Now here's the point. No one can satisfy the penalty of the sins of all humanity for every age unless he is both truly a man but also more than a man. And no one can reconcile God with man unless he Himself has the very infinite and eternal qualities as God Himself. This is why Jesus is called here, "Lord." He acts as the divine Son in coordination with God, His Father, for our salvation. This is the trinity in action.
Then look at the last verse. See where it speaks of God's love. It says that God's love is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given us. How can a being perfectly convey the infinite and eternal qualities of God in our hearts unless He Himself is also divine? Indeed, the Holy Spirit, poured into our hearts by God so that we may know His love, is able to do this because He himself is the God of love. Again, here we have the trinity in action.
It is passages like this that teach us that, though there is one God, something else weird to us is going on. God is not simple. He's complex. There are Three recognizable beings working together when God works, because God is both one and three. Christianity, at its very heart - even in our most minimal creed, the Apostles Creed - is a view of the God of this universe that is profoundly not simple.
And so it is, as Christians, we recognize the very thing that Job recognized when his children died in a storm that God could have prevented. Life is not simple; reality is complex. And that means that, even though God allows suffering, this world is complex enough that that does not mean he himself is cruel. He can still be good. And Job believed this. As far as we know - and he may have known more than we realize - he did not have the revelation of the trinity that we have, but Job did have the right idea about God - that His thoughts and ways are not simple; they are complex. Job understood that, though he may seem evil if we take the simple approach to answering the question of why bad things happen, nevertheless, he is still a good God. That is why he refused to curse God, like Lewis did when he was young or as other people have done who have tried to answer the question of suffering in this world in too simple a fashion. He instead accepted the mystery that is God, and said, "yeah, though he slay me, yet will I trust him."
Indeed, as Paul tells us, we as believers - and believers only; the world does not have the same hope we have - we may rejoice in our sufferings. How does this work? Paul tells us. There is a trinity of steps in a process that God takes us through to bring us to a hope in Him that leads to joy, even in suffering. Look at verses 3 & 4:
Paul says that our suffering produces endurance; or patience. How is that? God gives you His presence and grace in the midst of suffering; He does things for you while you are going through things that tend to despair, and as a result, you find that you are enduring them - even though imperfectly.
You remember the man in the Gospels whose daughter was dying and he went to Jesus and asked him to heal her. Jesus said she would be well if he could believe. The father cried out, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief." He felt that his faith was not what it should be; just like you and I feel that - a lot, probably. Yet he did have faith, though it was weak. That is all Jesus asked for. His daughter was healed. And that is all our Father asks of us when we are suffering. We do better if our faith is strong, but if it is weak, we still believe and He gets us through it; he gives us patience, even though our faith comes and goes.
And this endurance, leads, as it says in the ESV, to character, but the better word is experience.
As you go through these sufferings and find God's grace, you realize what God can do to bear you through times of pain and you grow in your conviction that this is what God does do. You start to learn from your experiences that you can expect him to do what he does.
And this experience of God's grace leads to hope. You become settled - basically not perfectly - you get in stride with God, as it were. You have an expectation of Him. He comes through; one way or another.
And this hope does not disappoint; it's a hope He has worked in your heart by the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us that we not be discouraged or despair, because He helps us to know that, even though we suffer like this, God still loves us.
Friends, God not only justifies His people, He makes us a people of hope; hope in the midst of suffering. He makes us a people who can even rejoice in the bad times, because we know that God is going to work all things together for good for those who love Him, because He has loved and He does love, and He will love us forever.
As the news in this country continues to be disappointing, and as you go through your own daily struggles, do not despair, and do not give into the doubts that overly simple ideas of God bring. Remember that your God is God - and though we cannot understand everything about Him because He is complex, yet He does all things well - even when we do not understand what we are going through either. He wants to lead you into a life of settled hope, and even joy. He who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, he will make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you. Hope in Him: His love will not fail us. Amen.
Romans 5, Beckmann
The news in our country over the last couple of months or so has been very rough. We were not yet over the Newtown school shooting when we hear of the bombing in Boston - and children being killed and dismembered - and then we had the Benghazi hearings and learned what really happened this past 9/11 and how much the WH has tried to cover up for political reasons - which is simply horrible - and most recently, as the scandals continue to flow like a torrent out of the Federal Administration, I could say, our whole country was hit by a tornado in Oklahoma, and again our minds picture children dead in a school. It's just all so horrible. And in the face of it all, the hearts of people everywhere cry out to God - Why? Why did these things happen? Couldn't you have stopped this, God? Couldn't you have done something to keep the shooter from getting to the school, the bombs from working, and the tornado from blowing?
And what is so sad is that so many people have turned away from the answers provided by God for us in times likes these in the Trinitarian Christian faith. Why do I emphasize the trinitarian nature of the Christian faith? It's not just because it's Trinity Sunday. It is, for one thing, to distinguish our faith from other faiths that may call themselves Christian, but do not believe in the trinitarian understanding of God. But most importantly, it is to point us to an understanding of the universe that directly relates to the problem of suffering we have in this world.
Those of you who are familiar with the life of C. S. Lewis will know how tortured he was as a young, nine-year-old boy with the death of his beloved mother. This experience, along with others that went along with it, directly lead to his atheism. When he was but 18, when writing to his friend Arthur Greeves, he considered himself an agnostic about anything that existed beyond this world or of life after death. He speaks of the Christian God as a bogey that wants to torture him forever if he should fail to come up to his impossible moral ideals - a spirit "more cruel and barbarous than any man". Such Christian ideas had "always considerably lessened" his happiness. (12 Oct., 18 Oct.)
However, much later in his life, in the 1940's, when he was composing his broadcast talks for the BBC, as a Christian, when he confronted the problem of suffering in this world, he took a much more different approach. Somehow, he had become reconciled to the God who would allow suffering in this world. He could now say with the old saint Job, who - you will remember - lost all his children in a great wind storm like the children were lost in Oklahoma this past week - The Lord giveth, The Lord taketh, blessed be the name of The Lord. How could Lewis be reconciled to such a religion? It is because he had come to the conviction - to use his own words, that "atheism is too simple." (MC, ,p. 40).
You see, he recognized that, when he was a child and lost his mother, his understanding of God was too simple. At the time, he reasoned thus: If God is all powerful, and if God answers prayer; when I prayed that He would heal my mother and he didn't do it, then he was being cruel to me. Therefore God is not good - why should I want to have anything to do with him? This is where a very simple view of God will get you. This happens to lots of people.
Tomorrow is Memorial Day, when we remember all those who have gone to war for the sake of our country. Recently, I was listening to a man on the internet who was assigned to the grave digging detail in the US Army in WWII. As a result, he had to go pick up the bodies of our dead boys and have them buried. This meant he saw the horrors of what war can do to the bodies of young men that no one should ever have to see. And in that experience, he decided that he would turn away from his faith in God. He, like Lewis, just could not conceive of a God who could be good, someone that he would want to know and worship, who could allow such horror to occur in this world. To this day he refused to believe in God.
Lewis, however, changed his mind, and he was able to do so ultimately because of the trinitarian nature of the Christian faith. Why do I say this? Because, when you search for what is the ultimate reality behind all we experience of this universe - when you seek out the very core of all existence - when you want to know what God is like - you are hit with the baffling fact that God is essentially one and three at the same time. In other words, in all your thinking about life and the universe, your very starting off point is a truth - a reality - a fact - that is incomprehensible and mysterious. You immediately start out with something that is not simple. Right off the bat, as Lewis puts it, reality is not simple. And this surely means that there are going to be answers to questions we are going to have - such as why such terrible things have happened in our country - that are not going to be simple to answer. Yet! If you really do want an answer, you are going to have to accept this. It's the way things really are.
But why do we believe that God is one and three at the same time? It is primarily because of what we read in the New Testament. We believe that the Scriptures reliably tell us things that are true about God, and we find that the authors of the New Testment are very comfortable portraying a God who is one and yet also He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We find this, for example, in our New Testament reading in the service this morning from Romans 5.
Let us take just about 5 minutes to look at this passage more closely. Paul writes: "Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ." Stop there. In the previous chapters, Paul has proved for us that the Old Testament teaches us that God has been able to give a righteous standing to sinners like you and me and yet remain just and fair himself. How? By not sweeping our sins under the rug, but by perfectly punishing them in His own Son on the cross of Calvary. And then God took the righteousness of His son, which is infinite and perfect, and put it on our account. And all this he does for us freely, and it works for us, it becomes something true about our lives, when we receive this gift by faith. We become a people who are justified before God by faith, through the sacrifice and righteousness of Jesus. But note the implication here: There is something going on between God and Jesus. Jesus makes peace between God and us. This justifying work brings peace between us and God. As Paul goes on to say later, our sin made us God's enemies and God is angry with the wicked every day. But Jesus' work for us has brought an end to that warfare and we, who have received this reconciling work by faith, are now at peace.
Now here's the point. No one can satisfy the penalty of the sins of all humanity for every age unless he is both truly a man but also more than a man. And no one can reconcile God with man unless he Himself has the very infinite and eternal qualities as God Himself. This is why Jesus is called here, "Lord." He acts as the divine Son in coordination with God, His Father, for our salvation. This is the trinity in action.
Then look at the last verse. See where it speaks of God's love. It says that God's love is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given us. How can a being perfectly convey the infinite and eternal qualities of God in our hearts unless He Himself is also divine? Indeed, the Holy Spirit, poured into our hearts by God so that we may know His love, is able to do this because He himself is the God of love. Again, here we have the trinity in action.
It is passages like this that teach us that, though there is one God, something else weird to us is going on. God is not simple. He's complex. There are Three recognizable beings working together when God works, because God is both one and three. Christianity, at its very heart - even in our most minimal creed, the Apostles Creed - is a view of the God of this universe that is profoundly not simple.
And so it is, as Christians, we recognize the very thing that Job recognized when his children died in a storm that God could have prevented. Life is not simple; reality is complex. And that means that, even though God allows suffering, this world is complex enough that that does not mean he himself is cruel. He can still be good. And Job believed this. As far as we know - and he may have known more than we realize - he did not have the revelation of the trinity that we have, but Job did have the right idea about God - that His thoughts and ways are not simple; they are complex. Job understood that, though he may seem evil if we take the simple approach to answering the question of why bad things happen, nevertheless, he is still a good God. That is why he refused to curse God, like Lewis did when he was young or as other people have done who have tried to answer the question of suffering in this world in too simple a fashion. He instead accepted the mystery that is God, and said, "yeah, though he slay me, yet will I trust him."
Indeed, as Paul tells us, we as believers - and believers only; the world does not have the same hope we have - we may rejoice in our sufferings. How does this work? Paul tells us. There is a trinity of steps in a process that God takes us through to bring us to a hope in Him that leads to joy, even in suffering. Look at verses 3 & 4:
Paul says that our suffering produces endurance; or patience. How is that? God gives you His presence and grace in the midst of suffering; He does things for you while you are going through things that tend to despair, and as a result, you find that you are enduring them - even though imperfectly.
You remember the man in the Gospels whose daughter was dying and he went to Jesus and asked him to heal her. Jesus said she would be well if he could believe. The father cried out, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief." He felt that his faith was not what it should be; just like you and I feel that - a lot, probably. Yet he did have faith, though it was weak. That is all Jesus asked for. His daughter was healed. And that is all our Father asks of us when we are suffering. We do better if our faith is strong, but if it is weak, we still believe and He gets us through it; he gives us patience, even though our faith comes and goes.
And this endurance, leads, as it says in the ESV, to character, but the better word is experience.
As you go through these sufferings and find God's grace, you realize what God can do to bear you through times of pain and you grow in your conviction that this is what God does do. You start to learn from your experiences that you can expect him to do what he does.
And this experience of God's grace leads to hope. You become settled - basically not perfectly - you get in stride with God, as it were. You have an expectation of Him. He comes through; one way or another.
And this hope does not disappoint; it's a hope He has worked in your heart by the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us that we not be discouraged or despair, because He helps us to know that, even though we suffer like this, God still loves us.
Friends, God not only justifies His people, He makes us a people of hope; hope in the midst of suffering. He makes us a people who can even rejoice in the bad times, because we know that God is going to work all things together for good for those who love Him, because He has loved and He does love, and He will love us forever.
As the news in this country continues to be disappointing, and as you go through your own daily struggles, do not despair, and do not give into the doubts that overly simple ideas of God bring. Remember that your God is God - and though we cannot understand everything about Him because He is complex, yet He does all things well - even when we do not understand what we are going through either. He wants to lead you into a life of settled hope, and even joy. He who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, he will make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you. Hope in Him: His love will not fail us. Amen.
Comments