St. Paul is doing something important with the Bible in our
Epistle reading that we should learn from. He is taking the history that was
recorded by Moses in the first five books of the Bible and he is applying it to
the Corinthians even though they live in a different time, different place, and
are even of a different people—for most of the Corinthians were Gentiles, that
is, not descendants of Abraham. After recounting what happened with the
Israelites, St. Paul says, “Now these things that are recorded in the
Scriptures took place as types or as examples, so that we do not desire evil
the way that they did.” And then a few verses later: “All these things
that were happening to them had meaning as examples or as types. They were
written down to warn us, to whom the end of the ages has come.” What St.
Paul is saying here is that the history of Israel continues to be relevant and
useful for the present day, because it reveals the way that God typically acts.
It is quite common for people to neglect history and think
that it is some kind of dessert that only nerds like to consume. And this might
be true, depending on what you mean by the word “history.” History is often
thought of as memorizing a bunch of facts—names, dates, and events. Here’s an
example of such history: “The Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon in the
Battle of Waterloo in 1815.” That is history, and even somewhat important history,
but you could live a long and satisfying life without knowing such a fact as
well as the countless others that are like it.
Something similar can happen with the Bible and its history.
The useful knowledge of the Bible does not consist in the bare accumulation of
names, dates, and events. This is often referred to as trivia, and that’s a
good name for it, because such knowledge, on its own, is trivial. The knowledge
of these facts might make a person competent for the Jeopardy game show or for
quizzes on facebook, but this will not do them much spiritual good. The
knowledge of history that is relevant and useful and is even indispensable for
the health of God’s people is different than just the bare facts. It is
understanding the way that God has dealt with people over the centuries, how he
has blessed them and cursed them, and then applying this also to ourselves.
This is exactly the kind of thing that St. Paul is doing in
this letter to the Corinthians. He is pointing to the people of Israel who were
so freshly delivered out of Egypt. In the verses prior to our reading he goes
through the blessings that God blessed them with. They were under the cloud of
God’s glory, they passed through the Red Sea, they all ate the same spiritual
food and drank the same spiritual drink. They drank from the spiritual Rock
that followed them and that Rock was Christ. They were all richly blessed by
God. But they ended up being cursed by God because of their sins as well. That
is what you heard in our reading today. The wilderness was covered with the
dead bodies of those who rebelled against God in many and various ways.
“Now,” St. Paul says, “apply this to yourselves.” What God
did to them, God has also done to us. God has blessed us by baptizing us into
Christ instead of being baptized into Moses. He has fed us with spiritual food
and spiritual drink. Instead of manna, quail, and water from the rock, our
spiritual food and drink are the very body and true blood of our Lord Jesus
Christ. This is how God has blessed us—even above and beyond what he did
through Moses. But just as God brought catastrophe upon the disobedient
Israelites, so also he will bring it upon us if we live in rebellion against
him like the Israelites lived in rebellion. God dealt with his people of old the
way that as we read about in the Scriptures. God will deal with us along those
same lines, for he is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Understanding that the history of the Bible is relevant and
useful to us today because we can learn from it how God will bless us and curse
us, gives us a particular way of looking at our life that is sometimes called a
worldview. Everybody has a worldview, because everybody has beliefs about how
life is going to go or how it should go. When a person wakes up in the morning
he has an idea of what is going to happen during that day because he believes
that things typically take a certain course. Let’s look at a small example of
such thinking. A man gets up in the morning. If he goes to work like he is
supposed to, then things will go like they normally do. If he doesn’t show up,
then he’s going to get in trouble. But if he calls into work and says that he
is sick, then things will be fine. But if he is spotted going around town when
he is supposed to be sick, then he might have to deal with that when he comes
back into work. This shows a few of the assumptions that we have for how we
think life will go. There are countless others.
Now think about the Israelites. These people were not so
different from us. They had assumptions about how things were supposed to go.
So let’s put ourselves in their shoes. Let’s say that we have a vast sea on one
side of us, and a huge military that is armed to the teeth on the other who are
looking forward to slaughtering us. If we see the world with the way we think that
things normally go, then we foresee that we are dead. We can’t go into the sea
or we will drown. We can’t run away. The Egyptian army is well equipped with
chariots to overtake anybody running on foot. The worldview that does not
include God’s influence is going to say that they have made a horrible mistake.
They should have remained as slaves under Pharaoh. You know how that turns out
though. God unzips the Red Sea, dries out the ground, and makes it into a
highway. Even with all our technology we couldn’t do that.
But that’s not the end of the story. Very soon after they’ve
been baptized in the Red Sea the Israelites start to find that their canteens
are empty. If you are in the middle of the desert, where are you going to find
water? And not just a little water, but enough to quench the thirst of hundreds
of thousands of people plus all their livestock? The worldview that only thinks
of the way that things normally go without any reference to God is going to say
that they are doomed. They won’t survive a week. They’ve made a horrible
mistake. They should have remained as slaves under Pharaoh. Again, you know how
this goes. God made water come out of a rock. I could do the same thing with
all the other difficulties that the Israelites encountered in that wild,
deserted place, but I think you’ve got the idea.
But it was not just with the necessities of life—those times
when the Israelites needed a miracle—that the Israelites failed to consider God
as having anything to do with how their day might go. They also did this when
they were tempted and fell into sin. It is astounding that the Israelites
constructed a golden calf to worship only a few weeks after God had commanded
them not to make any idols. Maybe they did that because everybody else did that
when they worshipped their God, and they get along fine, so why couldn’t they? Or
when they started to hang out with their new friends, the Moabite people, and
they had some titillating practices that were oh-so-enjoyable, they thought
they might join in on the fun. What could happen to them, after all? But what
happened is that 23,000 of them got sick and died in one day.
You can see that the Israelites were unbelieving altogether.
They were unbelieving as far as God’s blessings were concerned. They were also
unbelieving as far as God’s punishments were concerned. They didn’t think God
would help them when they needed help. They didn’t believe that God would
punish them when they broke his commandments. Their hearts were hard. They were
worse than animals. When I start to walk out towards the barn in the morning my
cattle and pigs do not have to be prodded and beaten to come into the barn.
They book it, as fast as their legs can carry them. They know that I’m going to
feed them. Or when my dog barks, and he knows that I don’t like him barking,
and I give him just a look, he hushes up.
But the Israelites had to be led with bit and bridle the
whole way along. They would not trust in God’s help, but were always rebelling
against God and against Moses. Over and over again they are ready to stone
Moses and head back to Pharaoh, their old lord, whom God had redeemed them
from. And before they would quit breaking God’s commandments they had to be
punished brutally. They wouldn’t stop until they were terrified by disease or
by serpents or some other dreadful thing. David says in his psalm, “The fool
has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” That is what the Israelites were
saying in their hearts, even though, if they were asked, they most certainly
would have said with their mouths that God exists.
So it is also with us, for this godlessness is built right
into our natural selves. Every time that you wake up in the morning and plunge
into your day without giving a thought to God, calling upon his name, you are
doing the very same thing that the Israelites were doing. Every time you
believe that your day and your life has to go a certain way, because that’s
just the way that things typically go, you are being godless. Every time you
break God’s commandments you are inevitably saying that God does not exist or
that he doesn’t care or that he won’t punish me. I can just go on doing what
I’m doing.
But it’s even worse than all this. Even having the thoughts
that I’ve mentioned is a giant step in the right direction. The most natural
state for fallen man is to live in rebellion against God and to never even have
the thought of that rebellion come to mind. That is when the devil really has
us in his iron grip. If we are waking up, going about our business, going home,
watching TV, going to bed, and then doing it all over again the next day—all
the while not even giving a thought to God, his blessings, or his curses—that
is when we are totally spiritually dead.
But being spiritually dead does have this one nice side
effect, so far as our life in this world is concerned. It means that we do not
have to be afraid of God. Sinning without
fear is oh-so-much-better than sinning with
the fear of God’s punishment. The devil knows this. He’s no dummy. Just like I
can trick my cattle and hogs with feed to go onto the trailer that will haul
them to the butcher, so also the devil knows how to lure us with our stupidity
to our doom, and we will be smiling the whole way. Ignorance of God is blissful
for the old Adam. But it also means slavery to sin and the devil.
The work of God is to set us free and make us human beings
again. We were not meant to be like cattle and hogs, or even worse than cattle
and hogs. We were created in the image of God. We have been made as spiritual
creatures who are able to know and communicate with the Creator. Andy boy has
our Creator really communicated to us! To us the end of the ages has come. God
has not kept us in the dark. He has fully revealed his heart to us by
sacrificing his dearest treasure, our Lord Jesus Christ, so that we could be
set free from our old master, the devil. The day is quickly approaching when
the children of God will receive their inheritance while those with hardened
hearts will be led into the slaughterhouse of hell. Faith in God is what makes
all the difference.
And so St. Paul’s application of history to the people of
Corinth has just as much relevance to us today as it did to them. To understand
our lives as being under God is unnatural for us when we are in bondage to sin.
Instead, we imagine that we are a law unto ourselves. It is only God’s Word
that can teach us anything different from our natural assumptions. That is why
we must study the way that God has acted in history and still acts today.
Accordingly, taking into account what St. Paul has taught us in our Epistle
reading today, we should not desire evil as the Israelites did. They are just
like us, and look what God did to them. Instead, let us fear, love, and trust
in God. He has made his promises for deliverance and blessing. Let us believe
them and be blessed through them.
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