181007 Sermon on Ephesians 4:17-32, October 7, 2018 (Trinity 19)

181007 Sermon on Ephesians 4:17-32, October 7, 2018 (Trinity 19)

There are two groups in the world: those who are God’s people and those who are not.  All of history has this theme and the Bible testifies to it.  What is particularly important for understanding the Bible is the way that God chose Abraham and his descendants to be his people, and that he would be their God.  Abraham believed this promise from God and it was credited to him as righteousness.  Abraham’s descendants, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob’s twelve sons, believed this promise they too were justified by faith.  And so it went generation after generation.

The Bible records the dealings that God had with these people and whether they believed in him or not.  Because of the powerful enemies against faith, namely, the devil, the world, and our sinful flesh, the faith of God’s people is never as stable and strong as we might like it to be, and this is attested to in the Bible.  And so there are some of God’s people who defect from God and his promises.  They are deceived and tempted and misled.  They end up putting their trust in things besides the one true God for the blessing and happiness.  And in God’s wisdom, which is unsearchable, he does not restore them to the true faith.  They are cut off and lost.  They once were believers, but they are no more.  They once were God’s own, distinct from all other people, but that is no more.

There are a couple exceptional examples of this fall from faith that are recorded for us in the Bible.  The first is the fall of the northern kingdom called Israel.  They continually put God to the test with their disobedience and idolatry.  God was long suffering towards them and sent them many prophets to turn them to the right way, but they would not be turned.  They loved their dishonest, proud, and lustful practices too much.  They did not repent.  Finally God quit sending prophets to them and sent the Assyrian army instead.  Then the people of the northern kingdom were scattered hither and yon and they simply melted into the mentality and beliefs of the people around them.

The other great example of God cutting of his people is what happened with the Jews in their rejection of Christ.  From the very beginning God promised to send his beloved Son as the Messiah who would redeem his creatures who had become sinners.  In the fullness of time he sent this Son, born of the woman, the Virgin Mary, who redeemed all the people of the world.  But with the exception of a very few the Jews did not recognize the true Christ and believe in him.  In fact, it was the Jews—descendants of Abraham and God’s own beloved people whom he cherished above all other people—who rejected Christ and would not rest until he was put to death on the cross. 

Even though they tortured and murdered his Son, God was still long-suffering towards them.  He sent Christ’s disciples to testify to them.  He announced the forgiveness of sins, purchased with Jesus’s blood, that was for them and for their children.  Again, a few were converted by this promise of God’s favor, but most were not.  Instead they mocked and gossiped and lied about those who believed in Christ.  They drove them out of their jobs and out of their towns and tried to extinguish all knowledge of Christ and his redemption.  They killed ordinary Christians, but they especially targeted those gifts of God whom God had given who were able to testify publicly.  They killed the public preachers and the apostles.

There are no worse sins than these sins—when God’s Word is derailed and silenced so that people’s faith is overturned—and so God’s wrath was provoked.  He quit sending his messengers to the Jews and sent the Roman army instead.  The people who would receive God’s promises now would be those who previously were not his people: the Gentiles. 

The Gentiles are all those people who are not descendants of Abraham, who are not Jews.  Because God had not made himself known to them, they couldn’t believe in him.  They believed in themselves and in other things instead.  But because the proper people of God—the Jews—rejected God’s invitation, God went out into the highways and byways and beat the bushes.  He took in the lame, the crippled, and the blind instead of the Jews who are really the princes and princesses of the human race.  The Jews became darkened in their understanding, as they are to this very day, while a great light dawned upon the Gentiles, so that they learned of the only true God: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

Instead of living for pleasure or glory or human progress, as they previously lived, the converted Gentiles now lived with the hope of heaven opening upon them and being visited by angels as Jacob was in our Old Testament.  They learned of the great and awesome destiny of the human race, that we should be brought into the presence of Almighty God and have fellowship with him—something that is totally impossible except through the holy precious blood, and the innocent suffering and death of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Coming into God’s presence apart from Christ is to come before him with our defiling sins and it means wrath and hell.  But in Christ we are acceptable and holy and righteous, only because Jesus is these things and he has given us this, his standing before God, through his Word and Sacraments. 

No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the imagination of the heart of Man the greatness and splendor of being before almighty God.  The most awesome forces of nature such as tornados and tsunamis and but a puff of wind and a splash of water compared to the unlimited power and glory everybody will experience when they come before God, but those who had lived and believed in Christ will not be afraid.  Those who have worshipped themselves and idols and demons and the devil, on the other hand, will wish that the mountains would fall upon them.  They would prefer that to seeing God’s glory and suddenly realizing that they foolishly lived in rebellion against him.  It is no minor thing to have the Gospel, to know the true destiny of our human existence, to escape the wrath that is about to be revealed, and to be safe in God instead.  Salvation moving from the Jews to the Gentiles is one of the most dramatic moments in the history of the world.

St. Paul is very aware of how monumental this change has been.  God’s rejection of the descendants of Abraham so that they are lost in their futile, sinful thoughts, is very raw and painful to him.  In one place he says that if it were possible he wished that he could be condemned if only his fellow Jews would repent and believe in Jesus.  By their unbelief the Jews have become Gentiles even though they are descendants of Abraham by blood, while the Gentiles, who are not descendants of Abraham by blood, have become his true sons and daughters, because they, like Abraham, believe in God and his promises and are justified by faith.  God is not a respecter of persons or of skin color or of nationalities.

Therefore, we, who are Gentiles by blood, must be aware that we can be rejected just as the Jews and Israelites were rejected before us.  They did not have some kind of monopoly on God and his promises, and neither do we.  If we cease to love God and his glory bringing Gospel, then it isn’t going to stay around. 

Therefore, the messages of the prophets to the wayward people of God are provoking his wrath are especially applicable to us because we are in a very similar situation.  The message of these prophets is very consistent: “Repent.  Turn aside from the ways of the unbelievers around you.  Take to heart what God says both with his threats of punishment and his promises of restoration after the punishment.  Do not persecute those who speak for the truth and support the truth, like the unbelieving world.  Support them and be friends with them, even though what they say and believe is unpopular and it might mean that your family, friends, and neighbors might look at you funny or say mean things about you.  Otherwise you and your children will relapse into the idolatry that is so natural for us.”

St. Paul, in our Epistle reading, is speaking along these lines.  He is addressing people who were formerly Gentile unbelievers.  They used to not know the triune God, his will, and his promises.  Instead they lived for this world only.  They only cared about themselves and their own happiness.  They did not take seriously the final judgment of the living and the dead and the life of the world to come.  St. Paul knows how easy it would be for such people to relapse into their former worldview and way of living.

And so he says, “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.  They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.  They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.”

What you see in St. Paul’s characterization of the Gentiles is that they are oriented to this world instead of being otherworldly.  Unbelievers do not want to miss out on any pleasure and so they will do whatever is necessary to get ahead in life.  This frenzied fight for possessions is futile, though, as St. Paul says.  They are ignorant that all things that we acquire and accomplish in this life must be left behind and will be destroyed and that we will each be judged before God.  All is vanity and a chasing after the wind. 

Instead of being on earth, our treasures are to be in heaven, where rust and moth do not destroy and thieves cannot break in and steal.  Our acts of righteousness and kindness and forgiveness are these treasures.  Jesus says that even if we should give a cup of water to a child in Jesus’s name, as his disciple, that we shall not lose our reward.  The true incorruptible treasures are the gifts of the Holy Spirit through which we can remain faithful and love our neighbor selflessly.  The gifts the Holy Spirit gives in the lives of his Christians are precious to God and glorify Christ.  These deeds will remain, even though everything else is futile and will melt as it burns.

And so in our reading St. Paul is turning these Christians away from the corrupt riches of this world to the incorruptible riches of the life of the world to come.  We won’t talk about everything that St. Paul says in detail, but we’ll just look at a few things that give us the big picture.  Instead of the deceitfulness and scheming and lying of the old, unbelieving life, we are to be plain and honest.  You know very well the way that we hide things or distort or manipulate in order to get what we want.  Christians are not to be that way, even if being plain spoken and open might seem to mean that we are going to miss out financially or we might lose the friendship of those who are rebuked for their wickedness.

St. Paul says that we should do honest work.  And why?  So that we can become filthy stinking rich, retire, and let everybody else serve us?  No, but so that we might have something to give to the one who is in need.  You do not need to be rich in this life.  It is better to use your money to help others.  There will be no money or possessions that we can take with us into eternal life, but Jesus does seem to indicate that our deeds will be remembered on Judgement Day and that they will either vindicate us or condemn us.  The sheep are accepted and the goats are rejected based on what they did to the least of Jesus’s brothers.  What good is it to have all the money in the world when you will without doubt lose it all in the end?

St. Paul also says, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all meanness.”  Bitterness, anger, and the seeking after revenge is being this-worldly instead of otherworldly.  Being this-worldly makes people eager to punish those who might mistreat us, as though there will not be a final judgment or that God doesn’t punish and avenge.  Unless God has given you the job of punishing evil by making you a parent or a judge or a policeman, you must turn all things over to God.  God is a much better judge than we are, and the only thing that all our anger and bitterness is able to accomplish is to give place for the devil to eat away at us like a cancer.

In summary, we can see from St. Paul’s words is that there is a big difference between the people of God and the Gentiles.  We must not think that Christians are just like everybody else, except that they happen to also believe that Jesus exists and that what the Bible records about him is true.  Believing that Jesus is exists and that he has redeemed all people through his death on the cross and justified all people by his resurrection from the dead, is certainly what makes a person a Christian, but that is not the end of the story.  There is a new life in Christ that is different than the old life that we have inherited from the first Adam.  Being a Christian is putting off these old things more and more and being clothed in Christ more and more.  Living that way is an anticipation of the end when all the old and corrupt things will be in hell and only the new and incorruptable will remain.  Be wise, therefore, and embrace the future that God has revealed to you, lest you lose it and revert back to being a Gentile.