|
Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church
|
||
|
First Sunday of Advent |
||
|
Isaiah
28:14-22 A
Covenant with Death? If
you could make a covenant with death, what would it be?
To live forever, right? To
never die, right? You would
want to be young and healthy and happy and live forever.
We naturally want to avoid death, not just because we want to live
forever, but because we want to be delivered from the greatest fear death
holds, the fear of hell. If
death is part of the punishment for sin, as the Bible teaches, then a
covenant with death would also be a way to escape punishment.
And if you would never die, and never stand before God to give an
account of your life, then you would be eternally free of the fear of
hell. In such a situation
would you continue to live your quiet, godly, moral life?
Or would you, possibly, over the course of several millennia, give
in to the realization that you can do whatever you want and never have to
pay for it? Wouldn’t
knowing you are free to commit sin without ever having to answer for it to
God eventually lead you into temptation and sin? That is exactly the idea Isaiah tells us about in today’s
reading from his book. Many
of the Jews of his day were of the opinion that they were beyond the reach
of God. Somehow, God did not
see their sins. Or God did
not care about their sins. Or
God was too busy to concern Himself about their sins.
Either way, they were free to do anything without fear of God.
They could sin, Sin, SIN with complete impunity.
They could do as Eve wanted; sin but not die. And
God’s message to those people, whether they live in Isaiah’s time, or
our time, or the far distant future, is this; it won’t work. Your covenant with death will not stand.
It will not stand because it is based on lies.
It is based on the ideas I enumerated a few moments ago; that God
does not see or does not care, or is too busy to be concerned about sin..
“We have made lies our
refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves.”
God does see, and He does punish the wicked.
To paraphrase the prophet, the storm of God will sweep away the
refuge of lies. The scourge
of war shall come and trample down those who thought it would never reach
them. War shall take them to
the grave. Originally
this referred to those in Judah and Jerusalem. Though deep in sin, they ignored the warnings of God, saying,
“The Assyrians will never take Jerusalem.
The Babylonians will never take our land. The empires and the battles and the ravages of war will never
come to this land wherein are the Temple of God, the sacrifices, and the
Law. God will never allow
such a thing to happen. We
are forever safe, even though we sin.”
But God says He will not only allow the invading hordes into Judah,
He will actually bring them. He will actually empower them.
He will raise them up specifically for that purpose.
Judah’s covenant with death shall not stand.
But this passage is as relevant today as it was when penned by the
prophet. There are still many
who believe God will not act in judgment; that He will never condemn,
never punish; that He doesn’t care what we do, or that somehow we have
gone out of His reach and beyond His ability to chastise the guilty.
I see this often in people who refuse to admit their sins are sins.
“Sin is what criminals do. Sin
is what oppressive governments do. But
what I do doesn’t hurt anyone, and it feels right to me, so it can’t
be sin.” I tell you with
tears and trembling, such logic is a covenant with death, and it shall not
stand. God said through
Isaiah He would bring devastation to Judah, and if He spared not His
chosen people can we expect Him to spare us?
I think not. “The
soul that sins, it shall die.” Yet,
as always, God’s promise of wrath is coupled with a promise of
deliverance. He will chastise
Jerusalem for its sin. But He
will not leave it in desolation. He
will raise it up again. He
will forgive it and work with it, and His purpose to bring salvation into
the world through it will be accomplished infallibly.
He will lay a foundation, a cornerstone in Zion, and upon it He
will build a renewed City of God, by which He means a renewed people of
Judah. Again, this originally referred to the day God would bring
the remnant of the Jews home from Babylon to Jerusalem. It would be a glorious time; a homecoming.
But, more than that, it would be a time of grace and forgiveness.
God would bring Judah back to Himself in that day.
That would be the real homecoming.
“Thou hast been our
dwelling place in all generations.”
Judah will dwell in God again. Yet,
like so much of Isaiah’s book, the release from Babylon does not exhaust
the meaning of this passage. God
is going to lay the Foundation for a new people, a new nation, a new
culture, a new City of God that will include people of all nations, all
races, all tongues. It will
be a spiritual nation. We
often call it the Kingdom of God, but more frequently we call it simply,
the Church. God laid the
foundation of this new culture in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago in a baby who
was actually God with us. Many
say God could not be in Heaven and on earth too.
I say, if He can’t He isn’t God.
And something you need to know is that God is not sitting on a
literal throne in a literal Heaven. That,
like all religious language is symbolic language.
God is not “in Heaven.” Heaven
is in God. All things are
“in God.” And God invaded
the sin and darkness that held mankind captive, and He conquered it in
Christ. And in Christ He laid the Foundation Stone upon which to
build a new culture by building new people, one soul at a time. Christ
is the Foundation because on Him our sins are forgiven and our darkness is
removed. Put more simply,
Christ conquered death. Remember
that the Jews had thought they were beyond the scope of God’s wrath,
therefore, they would never die. Again,
this is symbolic language. It
means they thought God would not punish them for their sin.
In Christ that covenant with death is annulled, not because we have
made ourselves untouchable by the wrath of God, but because Christ has
borne that wrath for us, and has delivered us from death and hell and all
the punishment for sin. On
Him the new culture, the new City of God is being built. But
the new one is actually a renewal and expansion of the old one.
It is not that the Jews have been cast out, but that the Gentiles
have been invited in with the Jews, and that in Christ we are all made one
body, one family, one people. How
significant it is that man attempts to make it possible to sin with
impunity, so he never has to suffer the penalty of “death,” yet God
removes the penalty altogether for those of us who know Christ as Lord and
Savior. They are dead already. We
will live forever. In
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. R. Dennis Campbell, Vicar, Holy Trinity Anglican Church,
|
||
Copyright © 2006 Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church. All rights reserved For website information contact: E-mail Webmaster |
||
http://www.holytrinityanglicanorthodoxchurch.org/HolyTrinityHello.htm