Resurrection Lutheran Church, St Catharines

The Divine Physician Cuts Deep

The LORD sometimes departs

It is important for us to recognize that sometimes the LORD God has simply had enough. While He wishes to have mercy on all people and He has extended His promise of grace and forgiveness to all who turn from evil and look to Him for salvation, those who refuse to take Him seriously try His patience. Through the prophet Hosea, the LORD proclaimed that He had had enough of showing mercy to His people who were not serious about turning from their sins to His benevolent compassion.

Time after time He had forgiven them. They would call to Him and He would be there to rescue them. But then they would go back to worship at the golden calves, and fall back into the sinful practices of the heathen nations around them. The LORD would warn them through the prophets that they were not acting like His people and so they could not expect Him to act as the god they wished Him to be. Powerful nations would threaten to take their land, their animals, their produce and their people, and they would cry out again to the LORD to save them. They would say that they were seeking His love and mercy, but they really only wanted to get bailed out of trouble, so that they could resume living their lives of idolatry and self-indulgence again.

Perhaps it is because we see within ourselves the same kind of behaviour as God’s Old Testament people that we do not want to believe that God could reach the limits of His patience. There are times when He has had enough of our feigned repentance which we put on only in order that He might bail us out. We get into some kind of trouble and we cry out to Him to save us, to change our circumstances and our fate, promising that we will do better, put an end to our sinful ways, stop living like the people who do not believe in Him, and take His saving grace seriously in our lives. But so often we don’t really mean it, or only mean it for the moment that we are in need of rescue. Then we go back to the way we were before. We really had no intention of changing at all. That is our false repentance.

So the LORD spoke through the prophet Hosea, “I will return again to My place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face, and in their distress they will seek Me” (Hosea 5:15). I will leave them to their own devices until they see that they cannot get themselves out of trouble, they have no friends to help them, and they feel the onset of their destruction.

For the kingdom of Ephraim (that is the northern kingdom of Israel) and the southern kingdom of Judah (which was quick to follow in their footsteps), their repeated false repentance had caused the LORD to say, “That’s enough. You’re on your own. Egypt will not come to your aid. The Syrians are a false hope. And this time, I am not going to come to your rescue. The kingdom of Assyria is going to destroy you.” And the LORD meant it. He was not going to bail them out unless they turned to Him earnestly with a truly repentant heart, not just to get them out of trouble but to be for them a God who dwells with them, to whom they would look for salvation, for blessings, for wisdom, for life.

False repentance expects treatment without change of heart.

The LORD is expected to forgive, like we expect doctors to provide treatment for our healing. So the people said to themselves, “Come, let us return to the LORD, for He has torn that He may heal us; He has stricken and He will bind us up” (Hosea 6:1). “God has torn at our life like an animal attacks its prey, but just so that He can bandage our wounds. So let’s let Him heal us and then we can poke the bear again.”

It must be difficult for doctors who treat patients that only continue to put themselves at risk. I am sure that they wonder, “Why am I doing this? Why am I spending my time, my energy, medical resources, and emotional investment in these patients who are not going to make the necessary lifestyle changes that would prevent another recurrence of the same illness?”

Jesus likened Himself to a Physician in today’s Gospel reading. When the Pharisees asked His disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners” (Matthew 9:11), they were perplexed over why a religious teacher would waste his time on people who were likely always to go back to their sinful lifestyle. And Jesus replied, “Those who are well have no need of a Physician, but those who are sick” (v. 12).

It is not that they don’t need a physician, but that they need more than a bit of surface bandaging. When Jesus called Matthew the tax collector to follow Him, the other tax collectors and prostitutes and other sinners saw the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was an offer to share His life of holiness, mercy, and compassion with people who needed a whole lot of spiritual healing: forgiveness for their sins, adoption into God’s family, Christ’s own holiness to take away their guilt and banish their shame. That was their desire for healing, and Christ was the right Physician to come to them to heal them.

The Pharisees also needed more than surface bandaging, although they did not want to acknowledge it. They didn’t think they needed anything that they could not provide for themselves. They believed they could be their own physicians, healing some impure thoughts with some stricter religious practices. But contrary to their self-diagnosis, it was not just a surface lesion that afflicted them. It was the poison of sin, a cancer of the heart. They could not perceive the depths of their disease.

Jesus’ response to them, “Those who are well have no need of a Physician, but those who are sick” (v. 12), was not in agreement with them that the tax collectors and prostitutes were the truly sick ones, and that the Pharisees had no need of a physician. Rather, Jesus’ reply was to point out that all people are sick with sin and in need of the Divine Physician to heal them by His forgiving mercy and compassion, whether they know it or not. He had come to provide healing of the soul and the sin-ravaged body for all, even for those whom the Pharisees assumed would simply return to their lives of sin and depravity.

The Pharisees were no different than other sinners. If they ever acknowledged their need for God’s divine healing and recognized that it was present in Jesus of Nazareth, they were even more likely to return to their sinful ways of self-justification, arrogant pride, and spiritual blindness. We all do that, against the warning and example of Old Testament Israel, which shows us that sometimes God has had enough of it.

Do we acknowledge our need for God’s forgiveness, for His healing to soul and body, for His salvation from sin, death, and eternal damnation? Like the kingdoms of Ephraim and Judah, like the tax collectors and sinners, and even like the Pharisees, we need more than a little bandaging to cover the surface sins. We need surgical intervention that cuts deep to the heart. We need to be killed and brought back to a new life.

We need resurrection.

The prophet Hosea put this desire for resurrection into the words of feigned repentance of the people of the kingdoms of Ephraim and Judah. “After two days He will revive us; on the third day He will raise us up, that we may live before Him” (Hosea 6:2). Faith in God’s power to heal, to save, and even to raise us up in the resurrection, does not mean that our repentance is true. If you are honest with yourself you know that full well. You believe that Jesus died for all of your sins, that He rose again from the dead, that He will come again to call all people forth from their graves and sit in judgment to grant eternal life or eternal suffering. You believe all of that concerning Christ, yet you also know of yourself that you will want to return to those sins from which you hope He will rescue you.

He will raise us up on the third day with Christ. He will look upon our sins and see His Son on the cross rendering full payment for them through His suffering and death. He will see us in the resurrection of His Son as those baptized into His death and life. On the third day He raised Christ from the dead and us with Him. We do have a new life to live in repentance and faith. Will we live it?

We know that we cannot count on our repentance, but we can count on the LORD. He comes to forgive and to save as sure as the sun rises in the morning. He is ever faithful to His Word and promises. He can be depended upon to forgive. Our repentance, on the other hand, so quickly returns to a desire to sin those same old sins from which we hope for rescue.

The northern kingdom of Israel, or Ephraim, with its golden calves never truly repented. Since the nation had split after the reign of Solomon, the northern kingdom separated itself from the temple, the priesthood, and the true worship of God. They thought they could worship Him where their golden calves were stationed, and this devolved into adopting the abominable practices of the surrounding heathen nations who also used idols as their objects of worship. This northern kingdom was conquered by Assyria and was destroyed. It fell out of existence.

The southern kingdom of Judah had the temple and the priesthood, and despite their struggle with sin and rebellion they continued to look for the Christ proclaimed by the prophets and reflected in the worship practices that the LORD had instituted for them. The Assyrians who destroyed the northern kingdom were repelled from the kingdom of Judah. The struggle for a faithful and true repentance continued. They were taken into exile in Babylon, but returned. The promise of the Saviour arising out of the kingdom of Judah was preserved until its fulfillment in the birth of Jesus Christ.

Through the prophet Hosea, the LORD asks, “What shall I do with you?” What shall the Divine Physician do with those who call to Him for healing, but time and again return to the harmful ways of life that brought disease and death upon them in the first place? The LORD deals with hypocrites by His cutting Word. With surgical precision His Law reveals our sins and what they deserve—what we deserve—nothing better than the destruction and end of the northern kingdom at the unrelenting violence of the Assyrians.

Like them, your repentance evaporates like morning mist and dew. It may be truly present at the dawning of the realization of what you deserve from God because of your sins, but it quickly evaporates as the day gets underway and the same dry and dusty life of sin appears again. So the LORD performs His surgery. He cuts by the prophets. He cuts deep. He kills by the words of His mouth, which condemn not only our sin, but our feigned repentance and short-lived reformation of life.

He performs such drastic surgery because He wants us to know Him truly. He is not just a God who exists to bail us out of trouble. He desires that we truly know Him to be a God who wants to raise us out of the death of our life of repeated sin, so that we might live in holiness and righteousness, that we might receive His love and share it with others, that we might feast with Him like tax collectors and sinners who know that they could not have earned the right to sit at table with the Lord, but are recipients of His undeserved grace and mercy. The Divine Physician has come to heal the sick and to give us His life.