How God Responds to our Sin

We have considered this morning how the good news of Jesus is the declaration that God is light, and that this Light has begun to shine in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and continues to shine in our life in the church for the world. And this light is getting brighter. This table is central to our declaration of this light and life. At this table, we hear the words of Life as we speak them to one another, we see this Word of Life in one another as we partake together, our hands handle this Life as we pass bread and wine to one another. This meal is a central way that God continues to manifest this Life in this world, and as we partake together, we are that fellowship, that joy, that Light for the world. But there countless churches that celebrate this sacrament who effectively cover the light by the inconsistency in their lives. And this is not the inconsistency of sin, this is the refusal to believe the gospel about that sin. One way to run a litmus test on this is to ask how you respond to sin. What do you do when the three year old throws a fit? What do you do when your wife makes a biting comment? What do you do when your husband is late coming home from work and the kids have run you ragged? What do you do when your coworker insults you in front of everyone? How do you respond when you are passed over for a promotion? Or you don’t get the bid? How do you respond to sin, to friction, to correction, to hardship? How do you respond? Walking in the light means refusing to freak out, refusing to be frazzled, refusing to be shaken, refusing to think that the world is crashing down. Walking in the light means remembering that Jesus is King, you are His beloved son or daughter, and there is absolutely nothing that can change that. But in that context, we can offer the other cheek, we can forgive again, we can let love cover it, we are free not to respond with evil. God knows our weakness and failures, and He is not worried. He invites us to dinner. We sin against Him, and He says, I love you. My life for yours. Go and do likewise.

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Second Sunday in Lent: Repentance for Life 1 Jn. 1-2:2

Introduction
John begins his first epistle insisting that life has entered the world, and that life means fellowship and joy and light (1 Jn. 1:1-5). Confessing sin is the life breath of Christian life. When you begin to live the Christian life, you repent and believe, and the only way to keep breathing is to repent and believe. And if you stop breathing, there is only darkness and death and separation.

Repentance unto Life
Repentance is preaching the gospel to yourself every day in every situation: the good news that Jesus is the Christ, our King who has come to set us free from sin, death, and Satan. And in the death and resurrection of Jesus, those powers were thrown down, we were forgiven, cleansed, and set free. We have been adopted as beloved sons and daughters, and therefore are united to Christ by His Spirit and share in His glory and righteousness and power. Repentance means turning away, turning around. Repentance means that if you were going left, you go right. If you were going upstairs, you go downstairs. If you were lying, you tell the truth (Eph. 4:25). If you were stealing, you cease, get a job, and save to have extra to give to those in need (Eph. 4:28). If there were corrupt and bitter words coming out of your mouth, you begin to speak words of kindness and edification and forgiveness (Eph. 4:29-32). Repentance means hating your sin from the bottom of your heart. If you are constantly apologizing for the same things with no measurable improvement, you are not repenting, you are just feeling sorry for yourself in front of other people. Godly sorrow is desperate for freedom and leads to salvation and joy (2 Cor. 7:9-11). People who are forgiven are set free. To go from darkness to light is to go from dead to alive. This is miraculous and it fills people with joy (1 Jn. 1:4). And if you’re going through the actions of repenting and asking forgiveness, and that is not resulting in fullness of joy, then you are not repenting. You are lying to yourself and others. And people who know the power of forgiveness are quick to extend that love and forgiveness to others (1 Jn. 2:2).

Lenten Joy
This is why a season like Lent should be both a profoundly joyful season and naturally evangelistic. If you are fasting in order to cover up your guilt, you are lying to God, and God hates your fasting. If your soul is hallow, and you are not walking in the joy of the Holy Spirit and you think giving up Facebook or Coke is going to help you, you are liar. Propitiation is a big word that means covering; it was the place where the blood was sprinkled once a year in the Most Holy Place. When we confess our sins, the promise of God is that our sins are forgiven and covered by the blood of Jesus (1 Jn. 1:7-9). And it is God’s faithfulness and justice that does this cleansing, and this necessarily results in profound freedom and fearlessness and relief. Worrying about whether you will fall again or whether this will really work is another sign that you don’t really want out. Forgiveness makes you say crazy things like the Apostle John: “these things I write to you, so that you may not sin” (1 Jn. 2:1). Forgiveness and repentance is a turning away from darkness and guilt and confusion toward light and fellowship and joy. Your days should be growing lighter, your fellowship should be growing tighter, and your joy should be filling up not draining out. If that is not happening, then you are walking in darkness and that is because you are not really confessing your sins, including the sin of not believing the promise of forgiveness. Confessing sin is how we wage war with the world, the flesh, and the devil. When people cease to confess their sins, they are refusing to fight. Being nice to sin is to already admit defeat.

The Fellowship of Repentance
The end of confession is fellowship. But fellowship doesn’t make all differences evaporate. Some differences can be worked out rather quickly (days or weeks), others can take longer (years, resurrection), and still others are not necessarily bad. In fact the body of Christ is full of glorious differences. But without fellowship, differences will collide and clash. But when our differences are woven together in love, they create a harmony instead of a dissonance.

Our great temptation in a sermon like this is to hope that someone else is listening carefully. But Jesus calls that hypocrisy. You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye (Mt. 7:3-5). The principle is that if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. But the flesh loves to blame shift and try to insist that the other guy walk in the light first. Confessing our own sins first, removing the log from our own eye first means taking responsibility, bearing the shame, claiming the fault. This shouldn’t be a fake show of piety, but Christ-like love and compassion, gladly suffering for the sake of others.

Taking responsibility for our own sins and weakness teaches us humility and compassion for the weaknesses and sins of others. When you know how unlovely your own heart is, you can love the unlovely around you, even those closest to you in all of their weakness and shame. This is what the body of Christ is supposed to do more broadly anyway (1 Cor. 12:23). This means helping one another obey, supporting one another where we are weak. Individualism teaches us to hold back and let our brothers crash and burn, but love teaches us to reach out and gently bring our brothers in for a safe landing. Because we have an Advocate, we can be advocates (1 Jn. 2:1); He is the propitiation for our sins and the sins of the whole world (1 Jn. 2:2).

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Second Sunday in Christmas: 1 Jn. 4:1-21

Introduction
Christmas is all about the love of God for His people, for the world, and if we understand this, our response must be love for God and for His people and for the world.

The Text:
John says that false prophets have gone out into the world, filled with the spirit of antichrist, who deny that Christ has come in the flesh (1 Jn. 4:1-3). But He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world (4:4). And we can tell who people belong to by the voices they listen to (4:5-6). John exhorts the Church to love one another because this is the mark of the life of God: God is love (4:7-8). Christmas and Easter are the great manifestations of the love of God (4:9-10), and when people get that, they love one another (4:11). This is because even though no one has ever seen God, God lives on earth in people who have been engulfed in the love of the Father and Son through the Spirit (4:12-14). We may not have seen God, but we have seen and testify that the Father sent the Son (4:12, 14-15). And this is why as we love Him and one another, God lives in us, so that “as He is, so are we in this world” (4:16-17). The opposite of love is fear, and fear is obsessed with punishment (4:18, cf. Mt. 25:46). We do not love Him out of fear but because He loves us (4:19), and our love of God is proven by our love for the people right in front of us (4:20-21). The proof of Christmas is in our love for God in Christ as He is present in those around us. This is why John is so worked up about the spirit of antichrist who denies Christ came in the flesh. In the incarnation we have seen God by the power of the Spirit, but John knows that this incarnating Spirit did not finish when Jesus ascended into heaven. Rather, that same incarnating, Christmas Spirit was poured out on all flesh at Pentecost. While Jesus is in heaven in His flesh, the Spirit is making Him present here in this world in and through the flesh of the saints.

Discipleship Love
Being a Christian means being a disciple; it means we have left everything for Jesus our Master. But our temptation in the Reformed tradition is to overemphasize the intellectual side of love, to the detriment of the rest of human experience. But the greatest commandment is to love God with all that we are, not just our minds (Dt. 6:5, Mt. 22:37), and Jesus insists that loving Him is central to following Him (Jn. 21:15-19). Paul connects knowledge, love, and the presence of God as well (Eph. 3:17-19). And notice all the plurals.

Obsessive Love
Paul picks up this theme in 2 Corinthians 5 as well where he is simultaneously defending his own credentials and assuring the Corinthians of the truth of the gospel. And the thing that connects these two is the Spirit of God who is their guarantee (cf. 1 Jn. 4:12-13). And this Spirit is the love of Christ compelling them and making them seem crazy (2 Cor. 5:13-14). This same Spirit pours out many different gifts, but it is the same obsessive love of the Trinity at work in all (1 Cor. 12-13). Therefore, Christmas means knowing the love of God in Christ and loving one another (1 Jn. 4:9-11).

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Proverbs 30:13-15

Prov. 30:13 There is a generation -- oh, how lofty are their eyes! And their eyelids are lifted up.

This proverb links to the previous one with the word “eyes.” “These generation” cannot see themselves, and therefore they cannot see others around them either. They cannot see the fact that they are covered in their own excrement, and this is because they are proud and greedy.

Here, the pride is underlined. As we have noted many times, eyes are the organs of judgment, and when people only do what is right in their own eyes, they set themselves up as the standard and the judge and are sure to quickly fall into folly. The reason people cannot see their own sins is frequently not because of pure ignorance but because of vigorous systems of self-justification, lowering the bar and reformulating the standards to make ourselves fit. We frequently do this through comparisons: well, I’m not as bad as so and so. But the standard is always Christ. The law is the law of love.

Jesus warns against “evil eyes” and “bad eyes” (Mt. 6:22-23, Mk. 7:22, Lk. 11:34) which according to the law is refusing to be generous to the poor (Dt. 15:9) and the flip side of this is greed (Prov. 28:22). The parable of the laborers in the vineyard uses this expression in the same way (Mt. 20:15). But the difference between good eyes and bad eyes is the difference between wisdom and folly (Eccl. 2:14).

Eyes can be lifted up to the Lord in faithfulness (Ps. 121:1, 123:1, Is. 40:26, etc.). But lifted up eyes are also idolatrous and this is connected with injustice and oppression of the poor (Ez. 18:6, 12, 15, 23:27, 33:25). This contrast suggests some sense of dependence, hope, refuge sought in wherever the eyes are lifted toward. And anything other than God and His provision is clearly arrogant and proud.

But this also adds another dimension to the healing of blind eyes. To open eyes and restore sight is to restore the ability to see our own sin and poverty and the ability to see the needs around us. To open the eyes of the blind is to transform graspers into givers (Is. 42:7). When our eyes are lifted to the God of heaven, we see His provision and inheritance which is far more than we need and this makes us generous (Acts 28:16). But John says that greed and pride has a spiral effect: hating a brother is itself darkness and a blinding of the eyes (1 Jn. 2:11). And hatred is not merely active assault. Hatred is the lack of active love and mercy in actions and deeds and in truth (1 Jn. 2:16-18).

Prov. 30: 14 There is a generation whose teeth are like swords, and whose fangs are like knives, To devour the poor from off the earth, And the needy from among men.

And just in case we did not catch what Agur meant by “lifted up eyes,” it becomes more explicit in this next proverb where the oppression of the poor is central.

This proverb hinges on the main verb “devour/eat” which makes the swords and butcher knives more graphic. This generation feasts on the poor and the needy, and this generation chews them with their teeth and fangs. The language of cutting and chopping with fangs and teeth is beastly and savage. Literally, they consume the needy from Adam which underlines the image of God in these human beings. This generation devours the poor like beasts, but they are like predators of human beings. They are like beasts hunting and devouring people. In other words, the poor are more human than the rich and powerful (cf. Dt. 32:24).

We noted in back in 30:12 the sacrificial/ceremonial connotations of this generation considering themselves “pure.” They are covered in shit, but they think they are ceremonially clean and appropriate for worship. They justify themselves and lift up their eyes in prayer and worship, and here they are ironically offering sacrifice as well.

Throughout the sacrificial system, worship of Yahweh with sacrifice included meals, eating before God, and even the fire of the offering “consumes” the pieces of the animal symbolizing God’s own “consumption” of His people. But here, this arrogant generation is feasting on the poor and the needy. They are dismembering the poor and the needy and eating them up.

This is why David prays that God would break the teeth of the wicked (Ps. 3:7, 58:6), and this is why God broke Israel’s teeth in the exile, making her harmless to the poor and needy that she was devouring (Lam. 3:16). Micah suggests that when people are chewing up the poor, they do not do it with diabolical laughter, but they are frequently talking about peace and listening to the preachers and prophets (Mic. 3:5).

These generation’s greed and selfishness is aptly summarized by the following verse:

Prov. 30:15: The leech has two daughters – Give and Give!

The leech is a bloodsucker that is never satisfied. This is what “this generation” is like, and it flows out of the “three things that are never satisfied, four that never say ‘enough!’” Waltke says that this is probably a reference to the “horse leech” which has two sucking organs, one to attach itself to its host and the other to suck blood with. The leech is a parasite; it lives off the life of others. And this is exactly the opposite of love. This is hatred of neighbors, living without care or concern for how our actions may affect others.

This underlines the greed of the “this generation” again. And it may be more helpful to think of “this generation” as a culture, a culture that trusts the provision of Yahweh, or a culture that demands to be its own god, its own provider. Think of Israel in the wilderness. The beastly empires that Daniel seas in his vision have “huge iron teeth” to devour everything in their way (Dan. 7:5, 7, 19, cf. Joel 1:6). Thus, "generation" is not merely people born in particular century or decade, but in this context "generation" is a way of life, a culture, an empire.

This kind of arrogant greed starts with dishonoring parents because parents are one of God’s first provisions of us. Long before we "woke up" in this world, God was generously providing for all of our needs through our parents, but rejection of parents’ provision and wisdom occurs because of pride and selfishness, and this necessarily results in the oppression of the poor and defenseless.

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God is not a Scrooge

As we consider the story of the Exodus and the highly ambiguous record of the Israelites in Egypt and even after coming out of Egypt, and God’s great acts of deliverance throughout the story, we can only conclude that we serve a God of overwhelming grace and mercy. We serve a God who loves to forgive, who loves to cleanse, who loves to heal, who loves to set free. If God is anything, He is the indulgent Grandfather, the dismissive Judge, the generous Fool. God is merciful and gracious and longsuffering and keeps mercy and forgives sins for thousands of generations; and He only remembers sins for 3 or 4 generations. He remembers mercy, He remembers forgiveness, He remembers grace, and God loves to forget about sin. He can only remember back a few minutes and everything else is love and grace and mercy. In 1 Jn. 1:9, the apostle famously reminds us that if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And I don’t think we usually hear carefully what John is saying that God does. John is not saying that as we confess our sins one by one, God will then forgive us our sins one by one, as though He has a ledger in heaven with all your sins listed and a box next to each one in which He checks off whenever you remember to confess one. God is not a Scrooge. God is not counting yours sins. God has no ledger. The promise from the apostle is that when we confess our sins, whatever ones we can remember, whatever ones the Spirit shows us, when we confess those, God washes us completely clean. He promises to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. When we confess our one or two or three sins, whether they are big or small or medium, God forgives us those and everything else. It’s like asking for three dollars off a billion dollar debt and having the whole thing cancelled. It’s as though we come to God having played out in a big mud puddle covered head to toe in filth and grime, and we ask God if He could please wash our hands, we think they might have gotten a little dirty, and God in His mercy, smiles and joyfully washes everything clean. But it’s even better than that. If anyone sins, the apostle says, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous. Not only does He wash us clean, but God the Son is our constant representative in heaven. And that means that when God looks at your record, He only sees Jesus. He only sees the Righteous One, He only sees His Beloved Son crucified for sin. God only hears Jesus saying, he’s with me, she’s with me. They’re with me. And this means that we serve a God of overwhelming grace and mercy. We serve a God who loves to forgive, who looks for excuses to show mercy and grace. And this means that we must be this way with one another, with our children, and with our enemies.

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Blood and Water and Exodus

I noted in the previous post that Jesus comes as the eternally begotten One to be begotten again from the dead. The Eternal Exodus comes in history, in flesh, to perform that Great Exodus, delivering this world from Satan, sin, and death in His death and resurrection, through the blood and the water.

John notes this twice: When Jesus is pierced with a spear, blood and water come out (Jn. 19:34). And again in his first letter: "This is He who came by water and blood -- Jesus Christ; not only by water, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who bears witness, because the Spirit is truth... And there are three that bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree as one." (1 Jn. 5:6, 8)

All of this of course is birthing imagery, but it is more specifically Exodus-birthing imagery. Israel passed through (under) the blood of the lambs and then through (between) the waters of the sea. John is insisting that Jesus' death is His Exodus, His rebirth. And this is why the apostle will talk this way in His epistle: "Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves Him who begot also loves him who is begotten of Him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep His commandments... For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world -- our faith. Who is he who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? This is He who came by water and the blood..." (1 Jn. 5:1-2, 4-6)

If Passover is the birth of Israel, then all of this birthing imagery in John's letter is actually passover and exodus imagery. As I noted in my sermon on Ex. 12:6, this is the first time that Israel is called a "congregation." Prior to this it has always been a prophecy. When the lambs are slaughtered and the blood is poured out, Israel is born as a congregation. The tribes, the families, the clans, the free and the slave, male and female, old and young are all born into the congregation of Israel in the blood of the passover lamb.

And John is saying the same thing: To be "born of God" is to join the Exodus of Jesus and that means loving all the other people who have been begotten in this same Exodus. And this is why he immediately thinks of keeping the commandments. If you have come out of Egypt, if you have been born of God, then you have come to the mountain with this new Israel and therefore you will love this new Israel and keep the commandments of this new Moses.

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Eternal Exodus

Micah foretells the Christ: "But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to me, the One to be Ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting." (5:1)

This is one place the Church has looked to for evidence of the eternal generation of the Son. The Ruler who is to be born in Bethlehem is the One who is eternally begotten of the Father, whose "goings forth" are from everlasting.

In the Septuagint, His "goings forth" are literally "exoduses." God is eternally the God of the Exodus. The Son has always "gone forth" from the Father, always coming up out of the Father through the power and love of the Spirit. It is therefore no surprise that God brings Israel, His son, out of bondage from Egypt and her gods (Ex. 4:22-23).

For Pharaoh to kidnap Israel, the son of God, is a Trinitarian heresy. God must deliver His people because He is Father, Son, and Spirit. If Israel is God's son, then the Spirit will come and beget the son. And thus at Passover, the son is born and comes out of the womb of Egypt, through the blood and the water.

And the Christ did come, the eternal Son, the Son who is eternally begotten, the Son eternally in exodus from and to the Father through the working of the Spirit. But now in history, in the flesh of man, He comes forth from the Father through blood and water and back to the Father. There are thee that bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water and the blood, and these three agree as one (1 Jn. 5:8, cf. Jn. 19:34).

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Anointing and Antichrists

In 1 Jn. 2, the apostle addresses "antichrists" and his reasoning sounds a little strange when he turns and says, "but you have an anointing from the holy one and you know all things" (2:20). He goes on to describe the lie of believing that Jesus is not the Christ, and that those who deny the Father and the Son are "antichrists" (2:22-23).

While clearly part of John's point is the content of what these people believe, (i.e. that Jesus is not the Christ and therefore not the Son of the Father, etc.), it seems that he may also have other things in mind, particularly since he addresses the "anointing" of his readers.

"Christ" of course means "Anointed One", Christos is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Messiah. To be an anointed one is to be a priest, a king, a prophet, to be marked with a symbol of the Holy Spirit for authority, to carry on a mission of God in the world. Of course all of that comes to fulfillment in Christ upon whom the Spirit comes to rest and remain upon Him. But it doesn't stop there. The Spirit is poured out on the Church at Pentecost, and all of God's people are anointed. As Jesus was anointed in his baptism, so too the promise of the Holy Spirit is promised to those who repent and are baptized (Acts 2).

And all of this means that Christians are mini-Christs, miniature messiahs. We are all anointed with the same Spirit. But this also means that to deny the Messiahship of Jesus is to deny our own messiahship. To deny that Jesus was the Anointed One is to forfeit that same anointing for ourselves.

Thus to be 'antichrist' is not merely an active denunciation of Jesus; it is also a self-malediction. If Jesus is not the Christ, then neither are you a christ. If Jesus was not anointed with the Spirit, then neither are you. To be an "antichrist" takes on a sort of literal fulfillment in the bodies of those who were once marked as "with us," those who had been anointed and yet went out from us (2:19). To go out from the church, to walk around denying that Jesus is the Messiah, is to become a walking object lesson. His anointed has become an un-anointing, an anti-anointing.

It's interesting then that this verse is sometimes used by those who want to downplay the objective, covenant realities of the Church. "They were not really of us" is taken to mean that there was no connection really even though they may have pretended for a time. But it would seem that there's much more than that going on. These christs have not merely left revealing that they were not really christs. Rather, they have left and turned their anointing into an anti-anointing. They have turned their baptisms into anti-baptisms. They do not leave as though nothing has happened. They leave, revealing their true loyalties, but their allegiance to the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (2:16) is their profession of faith as "antichrists." Their denial of Jesus as Christ and as Son, is their own forfeiture of their own status as christs and sons.

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