Resurrection Lutheran Church, St Catharines

Our Old Testament reading for today is taken from Moses’ address to the children of Israel after they have done their 40 year trek across the wilderness from Egypt and are about to enter into the Promised Land. The LORD God provided for them an inspiring message for the challenge that still lay ahead (entering into a land filled with pagan peoples who worshipped demons and practiced all manner of sinful lifestyles). There are two primary thoughts in the short summary that we have as our reading today. The first is that God has made you to be a holy people. And the second is that your God is the faithful God who accomplishes what He says to you.

 

This is also a fitting a reminder for us, as we today are again delivered from our captivity to sin through the gracious forgiveness of God spoken by His appointed messenger; hearers of His gracious Word proclaimed in our midst; recipients of the bread of heaven given to us in the Lord’s Supper; and thus made to be a holy people to the LORD about to go out from this place into a land filled with pagan peoples who worship demons and practice all manner of sinful lifestyles.

 

You are a holy people to the LORD your God

The first thing that the LORD your God wants you to know is that to Him, you are a holy people. That is, a people purified from sin and defilement, cleansed and free from guilt, worthy to be in His presence, to appeal to Him for any need or blessing, and to share in His glory and love.

 

That all sounds rather good and perhaps maybe too good to be true. Is it at all believable while you are aware of the sinful things that you have done in your life, and the sinful thoughts that are even now lingering in your head and in your heart? Can it be that you are indeed holy and will remain so as you leave the gathering of the Church and go to your homes and your jobs and your leisure? Will you be holy in the midst of people surrounding you who reject your God and care not a whit about what He thinks of how they live their life? Can you be holy living in a nation that flaunts its rejection of His Word on marriage and life and care for the needy? Maybe your holiness is too good to be true.

 

The children of Israel were surely having the same question in their minds as they stood on the edge of their divine inheritance. Were they any better than the people of the nations that they would dispossess? Could they maintain their holiness in the midst of such a people?

 

The LORD God’s response to their questions and to your doubts is to direct the consideration of your holiness away from yourself and away from the people around you, to focus on the God who has made you holy. If your holiness rested on your own shoulders or was defined by a measure of the morality of the people around you, then you would have reason to doubt it. But the LORD makes the definitive and unmistakably clear statement that your holiness depends on Him and not on you or those who are around you.

 

He decided for you to be His people. It wasn’t your decision. It was His. This is why we reject what is called “Decision Theology,” which says that you become a Christian when you decide to be one. This false theology then has to reject the gifts of God such as Baptism being a new birth by the Holy Spirit. Instead, they have to make Baptism to be your decision to submit to a ceremony that God put in the Bible for people who are really serious about making themselves holy. They also then have to reject the gift of Jesus’ body and blood in the Lord’s Supper because they believe that the Holy Supper can only be your decision to show appreciation for Jesus as your Saviour.

 

This is a problem because it then leads to the very doubts and questions which we pointed out earlier. Can you truly be a holy people if it rests on your shoulders? Can you handle your sin and stand against the pagan culture that surrounds you? The LORD God does not want His people to live in such doubt that gives way to despair when we are at our weakest and most in need of His salvation.

 

It was not you who decided that you would be one of God’s people. He decided that. He chose or elected you to be His child even before you were born. In the mystery of God’s grace and love He chose you from before He founded the earth. Clearly this is beyond our understanding or comprehension, but His Word makes it very clear that He has chosen us and He decided that we should be His and there is great comfort in that.

 

He has chosen you to be a treasured possession of His, something that He paid dearly to have for His own and which He will keep close to His heart forever. Like He chose the descendants of Abraham over and above all the peoples of the earth to be the physical origin of the incarnation of His eternal Son, so He has chosen you long before your birth to be a descendant of Abraham by faith and an heir of eternal life through Jesus Christ.

 

As Jesus spoke in the parables which we heard as our Gospel Reading today, you are to God like a treasure in a field. He paid all He had in order to buy that field so that He could have you as His treasure (Matthew 13:44). And you are to Him like a pearl of unsurpassed value. He was willing to pay the price in order to have you as His holy child (13:45).

 

The price that He paid was the suffering and death of His incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. The only, eternal, beloved Son of the heavenly Father became man, suffered for our sins, died to save us from their penalty of death and hell, and rose from the dead to share with us His glorious victory and eternal life with the loving and true God, who has adopted us to be His holy children.

 

Note how a decision theology flips the parables of Jesus around. It tries to make Jesus the treasure and we the ones who must pay the price in order to have Him. How could we possibly pay a price that would purchase for us the eternal and holy Son of God? The parable makes no sense going in that direction and yet our sinful nature would like to claim it as so. It would like us to be the ones who were willing to give all we have in order to get Jesus. But that just isn’t true, and in the depths of our conscience we know that all too well. And such a false theology will never be able to conquer the guilt and shame that we feel when we have soiled and desecrated ourselves with sins.

 

But God’s grace and mercy are deeper than our desire to decide for Him. And the price that He paid to have us as His own is more than we could hope to offer in order to have Jesus. But God did not decide to have us as His children because of our net worth or of any worth that we might have. He chose to pay the price in order to redeem sinners. We were dead in our trespasses and sins, unable to do anything of merit, not even able to make a decision to be His people.

 

But as He told the children of Israel that it was not because they came in greater numbers than any other nation, but only out of His love that He chose them to be His holy people, so it is with you. It wasn’t because of any potential that you showed that He acquired you to be His own. The children of Israel only numbered one person when He called Abraham to go out from His land and His people to a land that the LORD would reveal to Him. And Abraham was too old for children, as good as dead. Yet, by the promise of the LORD God He made Abraham the father not just of the Old Testament nation of Israel, but of many nations, all peoples who have been adopted by God’s grace into the family of faith.

 

As with the children of Israel, He set His love on you and chose you. Why? Because the LORD loves you. And out of His great love for you He keeps the promise that He gave to Abraham when he was but one elderly man. He keeps the promise that He made to David that there would be a people and a kingdom forever. He keeps the promise that He made to the apostles that there would be disciples of all nations made through Baptism in His name.

 

As He brought the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt with His almighty wonders and judgments and redeemed them from the hand of Pharaoh, so the LORD God has brought you out of slavery to sin by the mighty hand of Jesus Christ, nailed to the cross in order to pay the redemption price to rescue you from the devil and to have you as His holy children. Christ, the Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for you. You have passed through the sea of Holy Baptism and eaten the Bread from heaven. And now you are about to go out again into the land filled with pagans and sin.

 

Will you stand firm by your own strength and the resolve of your decisions, or will you need to rely on something else, someone mightier, more committed, who has invested a lot more into your salvation, whose love for you never wavers, who has conquered your enemies before you?

 

Know therefore that the LORD your God is God

So, as Moses was instructed to remind the children of Israel before they entered the promised land with all of the pagan peoples dwelling therein, now the LORD God wants you to be reminded that He is not only the one true God, but He is the faithful God. You can rely on Him rather than on yourself. You can depend on His strength rather than your own. You can be sure of His own holiness as the unending source that provides you with holiness for life now in this fallen world and with Him for eternity.

 

He keeps His promises—those He made to Abraham, Israel, and David and those He has made to you. He has paid the price to have you as His own. The suffering and death of His own eternal Son has redeemed you and purchased you to be adopted into His family, chosen in His eternal love and secured through His own Son, Jesus Christ, your Saviour.

 

The promises that He has made concerning your holiness are true and certain because they come from this loving and faithful God who has decided to have you as His own holy people, His special treasure purchased at inestimable cost. He has forgiven you all of your sins. He has washed you in the waters of Holy Baptism. He has given you His solemn oaths in His Word. He has purified you with the blood of His Son.

 

In Him you can live in holiness and righteousness even among the evils of the world and the people in it. You can stand before them and before the LORD free from guilt and shame. You can live in strength and confidence knowing that your holiness depends upon the LORD and His love bestowed upon you. And here today, you have received it once again. It is yours purchased for you, given to you, effective in you.