“The Things of God”
Mark 8:27-38
3/8/09 Sermon
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“Because you have made the LORD your dwelling
place - the Most High, who is my refuge - no evil shall be allowed to
befall you, no plague shall come near your tent” (Ps. 91:9,
10). “I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not
seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread”
(Ps. 37:25). “No ill befalls the righteous, but the wicked
are filled with trouble” (Prov. 12:21). “Disaster
pursues sinners, but the righteous are rewarded with good” (Prov.
13:21). These verses and others like them in the Scriptures have
led many to believe that God promises His people that they will never
suffer, that they will always have food to eat, that they will never be
sick, and that they will be protected from all evil. But then in
today’s Gospel text we have Jesus, who not only talks about the
suffering and death He’s about to face, but also the suffering
and death that His disciples should expect to experience, if they
intend to follow Him. He even classifies all of this suffering as
“the things of God.” Well, aren’t those other
passages from Scripture the things of God, too? We like those
things of God, where God is our refuge and delivers us from evil,
plagues, and disasters. We don’t like the things of God
that Jesus is talking about, where God actually seems to give us evil,
plagues, and disasters as He tells us that it’s even necessary
that His people deny themselves, pick up their crosses, and follow
Him. These so-called things of God don’t seem to fit our
ideas and expectations about who God is and what He’s there to do
for us. He’s not supposed to give us the cross, but deliver
us from the cross.
And this is exactly what was going through
Peter’s mind, as Jesus started talking about the suffering and
death He was shortly to experience. Surely, Jesus had come to do
what God had promised in those O.T. passages and deliver the righteous
from the wicked. Surely, He had come to put an end to all hunger,
suffering, death, and evil, not to sanctify them for use in the lives
of His people, and certainly not to undergo them Himself. No
wonder Peter rebuked Him.
And we’re just like Peter. The things of
God that Jesus was talking about just don’t make sense to
us. It doesn’t make sense that God seems to promise life,
prosperity, and protection from all evil on the one hand, but then
seems to promise death, poverty, and suffering at the hands of the
wicked on the other. Is God speaking out of both sides of His
mouth? Is He contradicting Himself? Or could both things be
true?
In the beginning the things of God that He wanted
for us were fellowship with Him and lives lived according to the image
of God in which He had created us. It was an image of holiness,
righteousness, and blamelessness before Him. It was a life in
which there was no suffering or death, a life in which the LORD was
man’s dwelling place as he walked with God face to face in
paradise. But then, not satisfied with the things of God, we
introduced our own things into this world - sin, rebellion, and
disobedience against God’s Word. God then had to introduce
things like suffering, death, and separation from Him, which was the
punishment that He had threatened for rejecting His things. And
to this day we suffer these things, because we still reject God’s
things and insist on our own. While non-Christians want to blame
God for all the suffering and death that goes on in this world, we
Christians confess that we are subject to these things, because we have
sinned against God in our thoughts, words, and deeds, both by what
we’ve done and by what we’ve left undone, as we’ve
failed to love God and our neighbors as we ought to, so that we justly
deserve both God’s temporal and eternal punishment. We
deserve to suffer many things, to be rejected and killed, not only at
the hands of our fellow men, but above all by God Himself, because we
have despised His things.
But notice here that Jesus says that He must suffer,
be rejected, and be killed. Why must He be subjected to these
things? He’s no sinner. He didn’t rebel against
God’s Word and disobey His Father’s commandments. He
didn’t insist that His will be done, but that His Father’s
will be done instead. Jesus’ whole life was lived in His
Father’s things. He did nothing but go around doing good
and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, as the Apostle Peter
proclaimed. Mark writes that Jesus preached in their synagogues,
healed many who were sick, and cast out demons. And yet here He
was saying that He must suffer many things and be rejected by the
elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed, and after
three days rise again. A lot of churches like to talk about
Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, but they often avoid talking
about His suffering and death. Some don’t even have crosses
in their churches anymore, and if they do, they definitely don’t
have one with a body on it. A crucifix is repulsive to these
people, because to them it signifies that we are celebrating a dead
Christ, and Jesus is not on the cross anymore; He’s risen.
Even Good Friday is more or less of a footnote in their holy week
observances. The really big holiday is Easter. And you can
tell by the amount of people who come on that day just which of the two
days is the more important one to them.
But Jesus spends a lot of time talking about His
cross, more time in fact than He does about His resurrection. In
His discussions His resurrection is more or less of a footnote to His
suffering and death. But both are part of what He calls the
things of God. Jesus had to do both: He had to be rejected,
suffer, and die, and He had to rise again from the dead. He had
to do the former, in order to be our substitute. He Himself was
not a sinner, but He died as a sinner in our place, taking your sin and
my sin upon Himself, so that He might suffer the things of God that we
deserve for insisting on our own things. But Jesus also had to do
the latter thing and rise again from the dead on the third day, because
He had to overcome death for us. To have a dead Jesus would be to
have no Savior at all. The evangelicals would be right in
rejecting crucifixes, if they meant we celebrated a dead Savior.
But our Savior is not dead; He remains forever, though, both the
crucified and risen one, as He Himself says, “I am the first and
the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive
forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.” And
the Apostle John writes of his vision of Jesus in heaven, “I saw
a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain.”
For Jesus, the things of God included both being
crucified and being raised from the dead. God sent His Son to do
these things for you and for me, because though one of the things of
God is for Him to punish sin, the greater thing of God is for Him to
show mercy and forgive sin. But which is God to do? He must
punish sins, but He must also be merciful, because that’s who He
is. If He were to punish you and me, we would have to suffer
under that punishment forever; we’d be destroyed by it. But
if He punished His Son in our place as our substitute, Jesus could
drink the cup of God’s wrath down to the dregs without it
destroying Him. Death could not hold Him. He rose again
just as He said He would on the third day. Now, because of
Jesus’ sacrifice for you, you are at peace with God. His
wrath has been spent on His Son, and there’s nothing left for you
but His mercy.
But now the question arises, then why must we bear
the cross ourselves? If Jesus has borne the cross for us, why
does He then start talking about how we must deny ourselves, pick up
our crosses, and follow Him? If God is merciful for
Christ’s sake and forgives our sins, why does He still allow us
to suffer and die? Where are His promises that no evil will
befall us and that no plague will come near our home?
The reason is that we still have a nature that
insists on having our own things rather than simply being on the
receiving end of God’s things. This nature, then, must be
crucified; it must be drowned in the waters of our Baptism daily and
put to death with the crosses that God graciously sends our way, so
that nothing might disqualify us from inheriting the promises of the
life to come. Right now, in this life, we don’t seem to
experience protection from all evil. Plagues hit us all the
time. Many Christians suffer lack of food and clothing in this
present evil age. We are constantly being pursued and oppressed
by the devil. The wicked flourish while the righteous suffer all
sorts of ills. These are the crosses that we must bear in this
life. The Lord grants us these things, so that we might deny
ourselves and follow Jesus, keeping our eyes on Him and the prize He
promises to those who endure until the end. God doesn’t
speak out of both sides of His mouth. The glories He promises to
us are coming. They are ours even now by faith. But they
will be seen only after we have born the cross for a little while in
this life. Then, just like Jesus we, too, will be raised from the
dead and live and reign with Him in His heavenly kingdom forever.
Though it may seem like we lose our lives in this life, we have eternal
life in Jesus and lose nothing. Instead, we gain everything; we
gain God’s things.
And today we have the down-payment of those things -
the Holy Spirit, who is the deposit and guarantee of the good things to
come. Through things like the Word of God, Baptism, and the Holy
Supper He continues to deliver the things of forgiveness, life, and
salvation, so that you might be able to deny yourself, take up your
cross, and follow Jesus until the day He comes in the glory of His
Father with His holy angels to rescue you from all evil and take you to
your eternal home with Him in the new creation. So, don’t
be ashamed of Jesus and His cross: it means eternal life for
you. And don’t be ashamed of your own cross:
God’s working through it for your good. Keep your mind on
the things of God, and know that through them He is always leading you
to Jesus, crucified and risen from the dead for your salvation.
Amen.