In the Garden of Eden the serpent said to Eve, “You will
not surely die.” The devil’s lie was in direct contradiction to God’s Word.
God had said that if Adam and Eve should sin, then they would most certainly
die. And yet the serpent says, “You won’t die.” God had made a law, but the
devil said, “There is no such law.” It was the power of lawlessness that led
Eve and then Adam to eat what God had forbidden with his law. They hoped that
the law did not exist. They hoped that it wouldn’t be enforced. But, of course,
the law did exist. It would be enforced. They were living in a fantasy land.
They were living in a lie.
As we well know, God was gracious to Adam and Eve. Contrary
to their will he showed them that the law was real and that it would be enforced.
This was contrary to Adam and Eve’s will because they would have liked to have
continued on in their false hopes rather than being terrified by the sound of
God coming after them in the Garden. But it was a good thing that their false
hopes were demolished, because then they could build on a new foundation. They
could build upon God’s own promise that he would send his Son to redeem them
from their slavery to sin and the devil. Through this promised seed of the
woman, there was reconciliation between God and Man. That’s because there would
now be a righteousness that was not based upon the Law, upon what we have done
or left undone, but upon the free gift that is given to us in Christ Jesus our
Lord.
But the fall into sin has done its work. We are born blind
to the truth. The lawlessness by which we ate in the Garden is the lie that
comes much more naturally to us than the truth. Nobody has to teach us lawlessness.
It is of the essence of our sinful flesh. Everybody wants to do whatever they
want to do and not be punished for it. That is why Adam and Eve ate. That is
why children disobey their parents. That is why we have done things that we
know to be wrong. We do not think that things will go badly for us. We think
things will turn out fine. The forbidden fruit looked good to Eve. That’s why
she ate it. So also those things that are forbidden for us look good, otherwise
we wouldn’t even be tempted to do it. The false hope that there is no Law or
that it won’t be enforced is the only sensible reason why anybody would ever
break the Law.
Unfortunately, most people live their entire life
entertaining this false hope, this lie. They hope that they will not be judged
and will not be punished for their sins. There are very powerful forces that
cooperate in the endeavor to keep people convinced of this. The devil is the
author of this lie, and he knows well how to further it along. All the unbelievers
that make up the world take lawlessness for granted. People are sinners. That’s
just the way they are. So this is just what is considered normal. The only
advice that the world has to offer in this situation is to make use of second
chances and to try harder. This is very familiar advice to us. Try harder and
never give up. Do this your whole life and then people will say nice things
about you when you die. But who cares what people think? Who cares if the whole world thinks you are just swell?
It is not to the devil or to our fellow sinners that we must give account. They
very well might give us a free pass with a winky, winky at all our misdeeds. It
is to God our Creator and Judge that we must give answer. What shall we say? …
I tried? Can he possibly be convinced by such lies?
And so if we want to help ourselves as well as our neighbor,
then our first task must be to dispel this false hope, this lie, that God’s Law
does not exist or that it won’t be enforced. The world believes that we
Christians live in a fantasyland. It is actually the other way around.
Christians know God’s Law and that he is deadly earnest about it. The whole
Bible is testament to the existence of the Law and how God punishes those who
break it. It is the world who is believing in lawless dreams of bliss both now
and eternally. But what will happen when they die or when Judgment Day comes?
The devil will have caught his prey with his awful tricks and lures just as he one
time suckered Adam and Eve. Always remember that the truth is not on the
devil’s side. The truth is on our side, because God send his Son who redeemed
the whole world. It is only by the devil’s lies, which nurture our unbelief,
that he can succeed.
Telling the truth to ourselves and other people about the
Law’s condemnation of our sin is helpful, even if it makes the heart race.
Thank God that he did the good deed for Adam and Eve, confronting them in their
sin, so that they should repent and believe in the promised Messiah. God saved
them from the lie, the pseudo-gospel, that says, “Don’t worry about it.
Everything is going to be okay.” Indeed Adam and Eve were going to be okay, but not because anybody said, “Oh, just
forget about it. It’s no big deal. You won’t surely die. You won’t burn in
hell.” No, they and whoever else might be saved is rescued only through the
holy, precious blood, and innocent suffering and death of Adam and Eve’s Son
and God’s Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Lawlessness does not actually exist. There
are only two possibilities. Either the Law cries out for our punishment, or it
is fulfilled. Either you are a sinner who is under God’s wrath or you are
righteous by God’s gift of Jesus, who fulfilled the Law, whom you receive by
faith.
Understanding that there is no such thing as lawlessness can
help us understand what St. Paul is talking about in our Epistle reading today.
St. Paul is dealing with another one of the devil’s lies by which he wishes to
trick people into unbelief and damnation. The lie goes something like this:
“I’m a sinner. God forgives sinners. Therefore sinning does not matter anymore.
I can sin all that I want.” This is a very powerful lie, because it has a lot
of truth to it. It’s true that you are a sinner. It is also true that God
forgives sinners. These are two outstanding, incredibly important truths. It is
only the conclusion that is false. The conclusion is geared towards unbelief
and lawlessness, instead of faithfulness and devotion.
Here would be a more proper argument: “I’m a sinner. God
forgives sinners. Therefore (instead of saying sinning doesn’t matter and I can
sin all I want), the more proper conclusion is that I shall thank and praise my
God who has done this great thing for me. He even sent his dearest treasure to
suffer and fulfill the Law in my place. That is a conclusion to this argument
that is right.
And yet our Old Adam, who is so good at looking out for
himself, brings his reason to bear and says, “If we are saved by grace, then it
doesn’t matter what we do. We shall be saved regardless of how we live. Since
we like to sin, let us sin all the more. God has to forgive us. It’s part of
the rules.” But this is just that old lawlessness that has been around ever
since the fall into sin, and remember that lawlessness does not actually exist.
It’s a big fat fairytale. You can pretend that the Law does not exist. You can
pretend that for your whole life. But eventually everyone has to wake up from
that dream. The Law will come crashing down upon those who have not received
the fulfillment of the Law in the Messiah, and the devil will gladly take them with
him down into hell. If you present yourself as a slave to sin, obeying sin’s
commands for how you should live, then you belong to sin. If you belong to sin,
then the Law is going to condemn you to hell. “The wages of sin is death.”
The Christian who musters up his reason and thereby says
that we can sin without fear because we are covered by God’s grace is believing
a very subtle lie of the devil. The devil is urging that poor creature on, saying,
“Eat, eat, it won’t hurt you. You won’t surely die. It’s all right there in the
rules. God has to forgive you.” But this is playing Russian roulette, counting
on God’s grace like a person might count on the chamber of the gun being empty.
You might not lose your faith forever by hardening your heart after this sin,
and another sin, and another sin, and another sin. But it just might be that
after one of those sins, God does not call you back to repentance and faith.
Perhaps he will leave you as a slave to sin, because that is what you have told
him over and over again you would like to do. Do not put the Lord your God to
the test. Otherwise you might end up like King Saul or Judas or many others who
had tasted the goodness of the Lord, but ended up making shipwreck with their
faith.
Now all of this can sound rather complicated. I’m sorry
about that. It shouldn’t be that way. God’s message to us in the Gospel is so
simple and easy to grasp that even an infant can and does grasp it. It is the
simple message that Jesus is the Savior. He is the Good Shepherd, we are the
sheep, let us listen to his voice and follow him. But the subtlety of the
devil’s lies forces us to get into complicated things. That’s what lies do.
They make it very hard to tell what is the truth. And so we have to try to sort
these things out like St. Paul is trying to sort them out in our Epistle
reading.
So let’s try to sum up things, making things simple. It
might not seem like it, but what we are dealing with here is a very practical
matter—there isn’t a single one of us who has not had to deal with it. Here is
the situation: You are confronted with the temptation to sin. What do you do
about it? What St. Paul is warning against in Romans chapter 6 is how we might
say to ourselves, “Oh, it’s fine. Go ahead and do it. We won’t be harmed by
it,” and then we pile up some nice theology to make it kosher. That false
theology is the great danger that St. Paul is warning against, because that is
where the lies are, and lies have no power to save. It is precisely by these
lies that we lose our faith and are taken as the devil’s prey.
So what should we do in that situation when we are confronted
with temptation? St. Paul tells us. We should consider ourselves dead to sin
and alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. We should present the members of our
body as slaves to righteousness. We should say to God, “Here I am. You know
what evil dwells in me. Make me your instrument for holiness. Lead me not into
temptation, but deliver me from evil.” We turn ourselves over to our God who
own us, who has purchased us back from the devil with the ransom blood of
Jesus.
The devil cannot prevail against this. He has to retreat so
long as we stick with these divine weapons. Blessed are you if you take up this
armor of God and stand against the devil. This is a great gift and I want this
gift to be given to you and that you should learn and grow in using it.
I wouldn’t mind stopping right there, but I also do not want
to give a false impression that this is the way it has to go unfailingly.
Whenever we hear about how we are supposed to do something, then we
automatically assume that we are always going to be able to do it. In this
case, then, we might believe that we are able to get better and better, holier
and holier, and go from one triumph to another. That, however, is not how this
works. And this is not me saying it, but St. Paul says this. In the next chapter
after our reading, Romans chapter 7, he speaks about the way that this battle
against the devil, the world, and our flesh goes. That is where he says, “The
good that I want to do, I don’t do, whereas that which I don’t want to do, that
is the very thing that I end up doing. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver
me from this body of death? Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through
our Lord Jesus Christ.”
We are a work in progress with terrible ups and downs throughout
our whole lives as Christians. This is frustrating. It would be nice if we
could learn how to battle Satan, the world, and our own flesh, and kill them
once and for all. But of course this is not something that we are capable of
doing. Only One Person has been capable of doing that, and that is Jesus.
Although it is frustrating to fight, and especially to fight and to lose, it
does serve a good purpose in the end. It teaches us over and over again that we
are not capable and competent. If we are going to be saved, then it is the Lord
Jesus Christ and him alone who is going to have to do it. It helps us fight
against the lies of the devil and hold to the only truth that saves. Jesus has
fulfilled the Law for us. He gives this to us as a gift. Therefore, this,
always and forever, remains true:
Jesus, thy blood and righteousness
my beauty are, my glorious
dress;
'midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
with joy shall I lift up my
head.
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