Christ Church (Moscow, ID)

One of the great things I learned from my father is that “God takes you from where you are, and not from where you should have been.” All of us are sinners, and so none of us are where we should have been. The glory of forgiveness is that God can bring glory out of a shapeless ruin, and in the gospel, this is precisely what He has done. He provides the glory. We contribute the shapeless ruin.

We come now to a particular gospel “turn” that is extremely troublesome to the carnal mind. The square peg of “alien righteousness” goes not go into the round hole of any “righteousness of my own.” Consequently, a great deal of ingenuity has been expended on trying to make it fit. We might even go so far as to say that this problem, this tension, is the driving engine of almost all new developments in theology. And that is not a good thing. The challenge always comes down to the unvarnished gospel versus the “cold clatter of morality.”

In the short space of this letter, John gives us a vital tutorial in the contrast between friends & enemies of the Gospel. Many modern Christians have no category for what Jesus meant when He commanded us to love our enemies. Broadly speaking, we have no clue we have enemies, we fail to recognize those enemies, and we have no clue that loving them requires us to confront their errors (Cf. Eph. 5:11, 2 Jn. 11).

THE TEXT: Isaiah 3:13-26

Everyone here has an inner life and an external life. If there had been no fall, no rebellion, there would have been a true unity between the two. But the entry of sin into the world made it possible for us to dissemble and to play the hypocrite. When this happens, a person takes advantage of the separation—he can now present one appearance to the world, a holy appearance, and he can keep a lozenge of diseased unholiness under his tongue.

This brief letter from John shouldn’t be perceived as a loose page of Apostolic records which got stapled into the back of the Bible. It is no afterthought. Rather, the sense which this book of the Bible gives is that of a well loved uncle slipping silver dollars to his nieces & nephews. It is both personal and pastoral in its tone, while its content is simple, succinct, and robust.

The Text: Psalm 32

The Text: Judges 2

What is truth? There is no other moment in history that could possibly trump this display of irony. Pontius Pilate, looks truth dead in the eyes. Truth incarnate stands before him, bruised and beaten from the previous night. He asks, “What is truth?”, like a sculptor staring at his finished work and wondering, “What is clay?” I do not fault the man the question; it is a good question. But the contrast of the scene is striking. Both men have authority, but only one recognizes where it comes from. One man exhibits courage, facing an imminent death. The other, conflicted about the situation, finds no fault in Jesus, but chooses appeasement and succumbs to political pressure instead of doing the right thing. One man is meek, knowing full well that he could invoke twelve legions of angels at a moment’s notice to rescue him from the Jews. But purpose, justice, and the fulfillment of all righteousness is what motivated his restraint. Pilate is motivated by a desire to be rid of the upheaval. He says, “Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.” In other words, “Why are you involving me? I don’t care what you do with him.” And then in exasperation, he looks at Jesus and says, “What is truth?” Jesus could have responded, “You’re looking at him.” A few chapters earlier Jesus says, “I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.” We certainly could explore Jesus as The Way. And there is also much to say about Jesus as The Life. But this morning we will focus on Jesus as the embodiment of truth.

If you want to know how much trouble we can get into for disbelieving very good news from the LORD, then look no farther than Zacharias, John the Baptist’s father. The angel Gabriel told him that his barren wife, Elizabeth, would have a child even in her old age. His son would be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from the womb, and turn the hearts of the fathers to the children. Zacharias, surely overwhelmed at such a prospect, responded with something like, “Are you sure? Because my wife is very old.” For his unbelief, he was not able to speak until after John’s birth.We shouldn’t think, “Oh, that naughty Zacharias, we wouldn’t do that.” He was a priest. He was called a righteous man. And he was burning incense in the temple, much like we are now when this whole affair took place. The tidings from Gabriel weren’t just medium-grade glad. They were cosmic glad. So are ours today from Isaiah’s prophecy.