` Lent 5 - 2001

Lent 5 - 2001



Todd A. Peperkorn, STM
Messiah Lutheran Church
Kenosha, Wisconsin
Lent 5 – Judica (April 1, 2001)
John 8:42-59
TITLE: “The Truth vs. the Lie”

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.  Our text for this morning is from the Gospel lesson just read from John chapter 8, as well as the sacrifice of Isaac from Genesis 22.  We focus particularly on Jesus’ words, Most assuredly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My word he shall never see death. 

Abraham and Isaac.  It is one of the greatest, most touching stories in the Old Testament.  God had given Abraham and Sarah a son, Isaac, when Abraham was a hundred years old and Sarah was over ninety.  This was a miracle by anyone’s reckoning.  God had promised Isaac to Abraham many, many years before.  Abraham had spent almost his whole life trying to second-guess God, and trying to figure out how to keep this promise that God had given to him.  By God’s mercy, though, Abraham finally had the faith to see that God is the one who would keep him, and that God was the one that would hold Him fast to the promise.  You see, God had promised that through Abraham’s seed, through His family all the world would be blessed.  In other words, the Messiah would come from Abraham’s son.  When you are hearing about Abraham, you are hearing about Jesus.

Isaac is born.  Miracle of miracles!  He grows up to be a young man.  Then God did the impossible.  God told Abraham to go to Mount Moriah and sacrifice his son, his only son, whom he loved, and to kill him on an altar on the top of the mountain.  Abraham could hardly believe it.  Didn’t God know what he was doing?  The Messiah would come from Isaac.  If Isaac died, then the whole world would be lost in sin.  And it was his son!  He had waited a hundred years to have a son.  How could God ask this of him?  It was inconceivable.

But true it was.  So Abraham, the man of faith, the “friend of God, went to the mountain, and was prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac.  It was a hard journey, as you can imagine.  Isaac, who is no infant but a young man by this time, asked his father, “Look, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”   And Abraham said, “My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.”  So the two of them went together.  Do you hear that faith?  Father and son went to the mountain together, one to lose his only son, and the other to die to keep the will of his father.  

They came to the mountain.  Abraham bound his son, put him on the altar, and was prepared to do the unthinkable.  How could he do it?  How could he make sense of this all?  What was his hope?  His hope was that the God who made the heavens and the earth could and would raise his son from the dead.  Abraham knew that if God said that all the world would be blessed through his seed, through his line, then that was the truth.  If that meant God had to raise Isaac from the dead, then God would do it.  So Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son.

 In the end, Abraham didn’t have to sacrifice his son, yet at the same time he did.  He had to give up his belief that it was all about him.  He had to sacrifice the idea that he could manipulate and control the world around him to fit what he thought was right.  Abraham had to sacrifice the false idea that he could make sense out of everything in God.  God gave Abraham the faith to see eternity in the face of the death of his own son.  As Abraham said to Isaac, God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.

This, my friends, is not about a ram caught in a thicket 3500 years ago.  This is about Jesus Christ, the son of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  God Himself will provide the lamb.  God would not finally ask his servant, Abraham, to sacrifice his own son.  But God would sacrifice his own son.  He would send his son to die the cruel death of a criminal, so that Isaac and you and I and all the sons of Abraham might live.

This is what the Jews could not bear.  They could not bear the thought that God would sacrifice His own Son.  So when Jesus said, Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad.  It was too much.  The truth of God’s plan for salvation was too much.

Satan’s tool for this heinous act of murder was one we are all to familiar with: the Lie.  Satan wanted Abraham to believe that he could understand all of God’s ways, or that he had to break God’s commandments in order to keep God’s promise.  This is perhaps the oldest weapon of choice in a war.  Hiram Johnson [TAP1] once said during World War I: “The first causality when war comes is the truth.”  If you can convince your enemies that they have lost, or that your friend is actually your enemy, then you have won.  In the Cold War it was called propaganda.  Today it’s called spin doctoring.  It simply means taking the truth and spinning it or turning it so that it suits your purposes.

This is what is going on in our text.  Jesus had gone throughout Judea and Galilee, doing good and preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of God.  He was the Son of God, the very image of the Father.  But they wouldn’t accept it.  They could not bear to hear the truth, and so they convinced themselves of the lie.  So in order to hold up the lie, Jesus had to die.

Jesus in our text tells the Pharisees and the Sadducees what is what.  He says that they are of the devil, because they do not hear and believe God’s word.  They rejected God’s Word concerning the coming of the Messiah.  They believed that because they were the physical sons of Abraham, that they somehow deserved God’s grace and mercy.  They were better than anyone else.  They were the righteous, or so they thought.  They believed the lie about themselves, and so could not stand to hear of the True one who came from God.  They didn’t understand that the great thing about Abraham was the faith God gave him, not his bloodline.

Jesus knows their lies.  He knows their schemes for salvation by works.  He knows their plans to control and manipulate the people for their own benefit.  But he will not let them hold onto their lies.  So He tells them that they are of the devil, because those who hear the truth hold onto Him.

You can imagine their response.  They respond by claiming that Jesus has a demon and that He is a Samaritan.  Now they were half right: Jesus is the Good Samaritan, who comes to save us when we are lying half-dead in the ditch.  But Jesus does not have a demon.  He is the true Son of God, who comes to bring salvation and redemption to a lost and condemned world.

I think it’s hard for us to imagine that the Lie is Satan’s greatest weapon.  Think about our Lord’s Passion and death.  Lies, it was all about lies.  They lied at his trials.  The Chief Priests lied about what laws He had broken.  The people lied when they released Barabbas instead of the Son of God.  They knew Jesus was God in the flesh, but they convinced themselves that He had to die.

It doesn’t make sense, does it?  It’s inconceivable, to kill the son of God.  How could God sacrifice His son to save a world that hates Him?  It’s the truth, but everything in our nature just can’t hear it.  Why would God’s son have to die?  We hold onto the lie ourselves, just like the Jews in Jesus’ day.  I’m not so bad.  I mean, sure, I guess I’m a sinner, but I’m basically a good person.  I haven’t killed anyone; I haven’t stolen anything really big or done anything all that bad.  Yeah, I guess I’m okay.

Do you lie?  Do you lie at work or at home?  How easy is it to gloss over something with your wife or husband?  I mean, a lie is so much easier than facing up to the truth sometimes.  What about at school?  Ever cheated on a test or lied to a teacher or friend?  Have you ever lied to your parents?  I’ll get the trash out; I’ll do the dishes; I’ll get my jobs done.  But you know you won’t.  You conveniently forgot to do it this time.  Lying is like a drug: you become addicted, so that you can’t even say the truth when you know it.

Every time you lie, be it big or little, you are rejecting God and putting yourself in league with Satan.  Does that sound harsh?  It is.  But not half as harsh as the lie.  Saint John said, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.  When you lie, be it big or little, you are calling God a liar and you lie to yourself. Now God knows who you are.  He knows what you have done and your sinfulness.  Do you’re not fooling him.  You may be able to get away with the lie for a time here on earth, but not for long.  God knows your sinfulness, just as Jesus knew that the Pharisees were of the devil.

So what is the solution?  What is the answer to this dilemma of the lie?  Left to yourself, there is no answer, no solution.  You are stuck without a way out.  But you are not left to yourself.  That is the miracle of the Gospel.  The title for this Sunday is Judica, which is from the introit and means judge or vindicate.  We pray with the Psalmist, Vindicate me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation.  This is the prayer of Lent.  We pray that God will vindicate us, that He will judge us, not according to our works, but according to the work of His Son, Jesus Christ.

That is why Jesus said, Most assuredly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My word he shall never see death.  When you keep, when you hold fast to Jesus’ Word, you are kept from the lie.  But more than that, you will never see death.  Now this is a truth that matters, but it is not one that we can grasp or understand by ourselves.

You can’t do this yourself.  Only God can do it.  Like Abraham, this faith, to see Jesus as the true Son of God who comes to save the world, that faith can only come as a gift.  But come it does.  Jesus gives Himself to you even now in His Word and meal.  This Sunday we begin in earnest our reflection on Jesus’ Passion and death.  So come to the Table, prepare yourself for our Lord’s journey to the cross and death, and feast on salvation that comes from the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  That is no lie, but the truth that lasts for an eternity. Amen.

The peace of God, which passes all human understanding, keep your hearts and minds in true faith, unto life everlasting.  Amen.

 [TAP1]in the US Senate

Copyright © 2001 by Todd A. Peperkorn.  This sermon may be reproduced freely, as long as the author is properly cited for any reproduction in print.
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