{"id":10376,"date":"2024-11-30T07:00:12","date_gmt":"2024-11-30T14:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/?p=10376"},"modified":"2024-11-30T07:00:14","modified_gmt":"2024-11-30T14:00:14","slug":"he-is-doing-this-from-eternity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/?p=10376","title":{"rendered":"He is doing this from eternity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Click here for a pdf version.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ephesians 1:10; Galatians 4:4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our situation as we begin a new church year is like starting a road trip toward a distant mountain range. When you begin to see the foothills and they seem to be not so far away although they are several hundred miles away, you have the sense: \u201cWe\u2019re almost there!\u201d But the closer you get, the more you see those foothills are pretty big, then come the mountains, only then the peaks. This is where we are in the church year, driving toward the foothills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We now look forward to what the Lord is doing from eternity to eternity. His plan is in telescoped fashion for us in Advent, and we can unpack it. Today we begin with God\u2019s plan as described in the Old and New Testaments, as it seems from the outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you look at it from the outside, when he started out, he created everything good, the garden with Adam and Eve, but then first came sin, then the first murder. Things went downhill fast after that. In Genesis 4 comes Lamech, who says that if Cain took vengeance seven times, he, Lamech, will take revenge seventy-seven times (Genesis 4:24). Everything went wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the Lord started over again with Noah, eight people, and that didn\u2019t work because it ended up with the Tower of Babel. He started over again in Genesis 12 with Abraham. Abraham, as it says in Genesis 22, almost killed his son. And then came Jacob who was a real rascal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then they go into Egypt as a family because of famine and disappear. They become slaves. And there, of all things, the Lord picks the Jews, as a way of starting again. There\u2019s a famous quip you may know (by an English journalist): \u201cHow odd of God to choose the Jews.\u201d He starts out with these unknown people, stiff-necked, and with the difficulties through forty years in the wilderness. It was a bad time because they kept on going astray, and finally they reached the promised land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there are fourteen judges (and two prophets, Elijah and Elisha, who could be called judges). The Book of Judges has this constant refrain: They have a judge who helps them against the enemy. The judge dies, and they fall into idol worship again. Then an enemy comes and takes them over again, and they repent, and the Lord sends another judge. Finally, the famous last line of the book: \u201cEverybody did what is right in his own eyes\u201d (Judges 21:25).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then the people said they didn\u2019t want judges anymore; they wanted kings. So first came King Saul, who was a disaster. He had all these wives and was really tied up with other nations and idolatry. Then came David, who fell into adultery, so there was no way he could build a temple, and so the nation split.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The four hundred years of kings does not go well. The people go into exile. And then some of them say: \u201cLord, we repent,\u201d and after time, seventy years or so, a small group is brought back, and but they\u2019re really a vassal state. They are caught by paying taxes and belonging to someone else, except for four years under the Maccabees (167-164 B.C.). Then comes Erza, and he says: \u201cWe really have to keep the law,\u201d but it isn\u2019t much of a success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, the Lord sends his own Son, who is killed, and all of this is virtually unknown in history, except for four words by a Roman historian named Suetonius. Hardly anyone knew about Jesus or his crucifixion and resurrection, or anything about all that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you look at this history from the outside, it is a series of failures. God tries and it fails; God tries and it fails, and it\u2019s a mess. Dealing with these people is like herding cats. It just doesn\u2019t work well. You end up having to say: Either God isn\u2019t all wise because you could see what was going to happen, and you could do something beforehand instead of these series of failures. Or he is not all powerful so he couldn\u2019t manage it. It\u2019s out of control, and he keeps trying one thing after another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The people end up then with saying several things about this, that is, as one looks at this history from the outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One is to say: It\u2019s all meaningless anyway. It\u2019s all just chance, just happens. At most it\u2019s a kind of charade. It\u2019s as if the Lord is sitting under a tree and for a few minutes he has this amusing thing called the whole creation and what happens on earth and all of that. It was just an interesting thing for him to do, a stage where he amuses himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or some say, it\u2019s a little more serious than that, but the Lord is not really bothered when people disobey him and sin. He just pats them on the head and says: \u201cThat\u2019s all right.\u201d It doesn\u2019t hurt me; I\u2019m the Lord of the universe. Just try to be better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or some do, as John Milton does in his epic poem \u201cParadise Lost,\u201d which is great poetry but bad theology. Milton says in the first lines that he is going to justify the ways of God to man. What you see if you read what he says, apart from the great poetry, is that the great hero (or anti-hero) is Satan. It\u2019s a kind of speculation about how God didn\u2019t quite do it right. In the first place, God ought to convince us. Or he has to give us free will, and then he has to seek in some way to convince us, or make us obey, and that\u2019s the whole story of Satan in Milton\u2019s \u201cParadise Lost.\u201d Well, why should I? Most people aren\u2019t convinced and aren\u2019t obedient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or some say it\u2019s like the poem \u201cThe Hound of Heaven\u201d (1890), by Francis Thompson. The Lord chases us until finally, when we\u2019re worn out from running away, we\u2019re convinced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or, another way of going after this is to say: This is the way God should have done it and it is with our help, our planning, our work, and what we need to deal all these troubles, which are theologically called sin, but philosophically called evil, is more planning and more education. We\u2019re baffled by the fact that all of our planning, all of our education, doesn\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something always goes wrong. Empires fall. The ancient Greeks called it nemesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we look back at all this, again from the outside, it may seem that either it\u2019s all foolishness or that God doesn\u2019t do very well. He doesn\u2019t understand. It\u2019s a mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we\u2019re given to see in Scripture is that we\u2019re looking forward to Christmas and looking through Christmas to Good Friday and Easter. Christmas is the first foothill on the way to the mountain peak beyond. It\u2019s important to have the incarnation, but the most important thing is what lies ahead, the cross and resurrection, Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s counter to the way we speculate, and it\u2019s counter to the way Satan in \u201cParadise Lost\u201d speculates. From eternity the Lord planned to make it all right again. As it says in Ephesians 1:10 (paraphrase): \u201cFrom eternity he planned to make it all right again.\u201d It\u2019s poorly translated \u201cto unite all things.\u201d It really means \u201cto put a new head on,\u201d a new Adam on the human race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Paul writes in Galatians 4:4: \u201cWhen the time had fully come (in the fullness of time), God sent forth his Son . . . to redeem those . . . under the law, that we might receive adoption as sons and daughters.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we then speculate that God isn\u2019t doing it right, that we have to understand what it\u2019s about, and why isn\u2019t it working right with evil, and what is this thing theologians call \u201csin,\u201d we remember first of all, that we\u2019re caught in space and time and God isn\u2019t. Or we might claim he is caught in infinity, but he\u2019s not even caught by infinity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the scandal of the fact that this One, who has created everything, became a human being and died and rose again, and that this One, the Holy One took on sin, so that all of the speculation we have is really a temptation to get away from what God is really doing, which is that the answer to the problem of evil, is in the cross.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s totally scandalous, totally against our way of reckoning things, our way of speculating about God. We have to remember that we get caught by the evil one, who is the father of lies (John 8:44), when we say: This is the way God will do it; this is the way it has to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, God looked at this from all eternity and saw there was a terrible problem, and then he solved it his way. We could not have imagined that he would have solved it through the cross and certified it by the resurrection. And he did it by himself, not with us, not with our help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So finally, there is no way we can solve this. There is no \u201cwhy.\u201d There is the \u201cthat\u201d of it, but because we\u2019re caught in sin and death, there is no way we can get out of that, and see outside of it and be outside of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But our Christian hope and the promise is based on that he has done this, he is doing this from eternity, and we look then, on this first Sunday of the church year, to the foothills, to Christmas and then to the peaks beyond, to Good Friday and Easter. Amen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ephesians 1:10; Galatians 4:4<\/p>\n

A Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent<\/p>\n

Our situation as we begin a new church year is like starting a road trip toward a distant mountain range. When you begin to see the foothills and they seem to be not so far away although they are several hundred miles away, you have the sense: \u201cWe\u2019re almost there!\u201d But the closer you get, the more you see those foothills are pretty big, then come the mountains, only then the peaks. This is where we are in the church year, driving toward the foothills.<\/p>\n

Select here<\/a> to read more or Click here for a pdf version.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10376"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10380,"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10376\/revisions\/10380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}