Trinity 10

Luke 19:41-48 - Trinity Ten - August 9, 2015
 A Meditation on Divine Wrath

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The book of Lamentations, which is the 25^th book of the Bible, was written by the prophet Jeremiah who also wrote our Old Testament lesson this morning.  Jeremiah was a faithful prophet, who, like every faithful prophet or preacher, had the very unfortunate task of preaching about the impending wrath of God upon the impenitent.  It’s no fun to preach wrath and the threat of hell.  What pastor wants to preach about how God is angry with sin?  To sinners?  Especially when he himself is a sinner?  It’s a burden of the calling, I suppose.  But sin does make God mad.  So it must be preached.  God does send those who don’t repent to eternal hell.  So it must be preached.  God really does threaten to punish, to the third and fourth generation, those who hate him.  So Jeremiah preached it.  And unlike most preachers, Jeremiah lived to see the day when God’s threats were realized – when everyone was forced to acknowledge that he was right the whole time.  This brought no joy or sense of I-told-you-so to the prophet, only sorrow.  Jerusalem was sacked with him in it; and God permitted his people to be carried away by heathen enemies into captivity.  Reflecting on what he witnessed, Jeremiah writes,

The Lord was like an enemy.
He has swallowed up Israel,
He has swallowed up all her palaces;
He has destroyed her strongholds,
And has increased mourning and lamentation
In the daughter of Judah. (Lamentations 2:5)

God himself stands as an enemy to those who oppose him.  He uses the wicked to punish the wicked.  He uses sin to punish sin.  But God himself takes credit for the ravaging and pillaging and burning of the holy places, because it is God’s wrath that was being executed upon an unfaithful nation.  It is this wrath that consumed Jerusalem once.  It is the same wrath that Jesus warned about in our Gospel lesson this morning that destroyed Jerusalem again some 40 years later.  That is why Jeremiah’s description from 600 years earlier has such striking similarity.  The same God did both.  We do well to remember that the divine wrath with which he destroyed his own holy city twice is the same divine wrath with which he will destroy the wicked world in which we live today. 

The entire book of Lamentations is written from the perspective of one who must endure the same wrath that he himself had warned of.  Jeremiah was a sad man.  He is known as the weeping prophet because of the stirring words of this book.  He writes,

For these things I weep;
My eye, my eye overflows with water;
Because the comforter, who should restore my life,
Is far from me.
My children are desolate
Because the enemy prevailed. (Lamentations 1:16)

The wrath of God is very real.  It moves men to tears and sorrow – if not when it is warned about, surely when it is experienced.  And if it weighs heavy on the hearts of God’s faithful messengers to report such warnings, it weighs much heavier on the heart of him who must endure the same punishment with those who impudently ignored his warnings.  Jeremiah saw Jerusalem surrounded.  He saw the wall torn down.  He saw wailing in the streets, starvation, murder, cannibalism, and unrepeatable atrocities committed by his own people against each other in the desperate attempt to survive like rats.  And so he wept.  He wept over the destruction of Jerusalem. 

But in the midst of his weeping, God taught Jeremiah to weep for himself as well.  The sin he saw God punish in others was also the same sin that he found in his own heart.  Through suffering, God taught even this godly prophet to humble himself in repentance:

Let us search out and examine our ways, [he writes,]
And turn back to the Lord;
Let us lift our hearts and hands
To God in heaven.
We have transgressed and rebelled. (Lamentations 3:40-42a)

In the midst of his lamentations, therefore, Jeremiah not only urges repentance – even though it seems like it is too late.  He also urges faith.  Even though they are getting the temporal punishment that their sins deserved, he urges God’s people to wait on the Lord for redemption.  He writes,

Through the Lord’s mercies, we are not consumed,
Because His compassions fail not.
They are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“Therefore I hope in Him!”

The Lord is good to those who wait for Him,
To the soul who seeks Him.
It is good that one should hope and wait quietly
For the salvation of the Lord.  (Lamentations 3:22-26)

For the Lord will not cast off forever.
Though He causes grief,
Yet He will show compassion
According to the multitude of His mercies. (Lamentations 3:31-32)

Jeremiah was right.  God had mercy.  He had mercy on those who were swept away into Babylonian captivity.  Most of them would die without ever seeing the promised land again.  True.  But – those who repented of their sins and waited on the Lord inherited the true Promised Land in heaven – along with Isaiah, Elijah, David, Joshua, Moses, Abraham and all their fathers before them who found comfort in the gospel of Christ.  And yet, in his mercy, God not only brought to heaven those who believed the promise of mercy.  He also brought his people back to Jerusalem; he rebuilt the Temple, and again blessed his nation just as Jeremiah had foretold.  Why?  If their true homeland was in heaven anyway, why bother with reestablishing an earthly city? 

Simple.  Because of Jesus.  God had not yet sent down his Son to become true man.  God had not yet fulfilled his ancient promise to take on human flesh and dwell among us.  This was the hope of all those I just mentioned.  And so in order that the fullness of time might come to pass, the almighty Lord God freed his people so that they could return; he rebuilt the walls of his favored city and blessed them in order that he might send them Christ and bless the whole world.  The purpose of the physical nation of Israel was for the sake of God keeping his promise.  The purpose of the physical temple was for the sake of God assuming physical form himself in the person of Jesus Christ.  He is the true Temple of the most high, not made with hands.  So God preserved a remnant who would continue on in the land he had promised until Jesus came.  

As we fast forward several hundred years, we see that, as man is wont to do, God’s people again slipped into the same sin as before.  Just as Jeremiah wept over Jerusalem that was and was soon not to be, so Jesus did the same.  And as I said before, if it fills a man with grief to report such calamity, it grieves a man that much more when he knows that he must endure it with them – especially when he does not deserve to. 

Jesus wept over Jerusalem because he saw what was in store for it.  And he reports exactly what happened as witnessed by unbiased reports in the year 70 A.D.  But it was not the horrors alone that made Jesus weep – nor Jeremiah.  It was the fact that it was all totally avoidable. 

Jeremiah preached Christ.  He preached repentance and forgiveness.  He preached the promised visitation of God who would redeem mankind and cover their sins.  But people who don’t want to confess their sins, people who think that it’s a bit dour and depressing to get down on their knees and beg God for mercy – these people are not so interested in being covered in the blood of Christ.  But unless they begin to take a keen interest in pleading as we do here for the Lord to have mercy, for Christ to have mercy, for God to give peace for the sake of Jesus’ atoning work on the cross – unless they humble themselves, they will most certainly perish in worse calamity than what might happen to any earthly city.  Jesus tells us not to fear man who is able to destroy the body, but to fear God who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.  Jesus tells us to repent lest we likewise perish. 

Jesus wept because he saw that his merciful work on behalf of his own people would be rejected.  Yet this did not keep Jesus from suffering this rejection in their place.   He bore the fullness of God’s wrath even as he saw with tears how his offering would be dismissed.  What Jesus endured on the cross when all man’s sin was reckoned to him as our substitutionary sacrifice is only dimly reflected in the terrors of Jerusalem’s besiegement.  It is only dimly reflected in the terrible things that the news reports today.  If a bit of hell came to earth when Jerusalem fell, then all hell broke loose on Jesus as he paid for all sins on the cross. 

All God’s anger at man’s arrogance, licentiousness, greed, lust, and lies, he took out on his own Son in our place.  He alone was innocent.  He alone could rightly stand aloof at the world’s suffering.  And yet he alone, the righteous One, the merciful One, did not stand aloof.  He became the spotless Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  This makes for our peace.  Our peace is earned and established there where God most clearly demonstrates how seriously he takes human sin. 

We know how serious our sin is.  It is evident where we see how serious God is in taking it away and sparing us from wrath.  And yet the world looks on in impenitent disinterest.  This made Jesus weep. 

Dear Christians, do we not see the same thing today.  We see our culture abandon any heritage it had as a Christian nation.  We see every vestige of virtue and compassion attacked in the name of choice, freedom, and equality.  We see Christian doctrine compromised here and utterly denied there so that the name of our Lord is blasphemed among the heathen who taunt and mock our Lord for his merciful pity on the creatures he loves.  Does it not bring us to tears as Jeremiah and Jesus were brought to tears?  And if this does not grieve us enough to see folks spurn the free gift of salvation, we today, and especially you who are young like me or even younger, will soon feel the sting of God’s wrath as he punishes the United States of America and the rest of the so-called civilized world for its pompous rejection of what our God has done and said.  He did not spare his chosen nation.  Neither will he spare any nation today.  And like Jeremiah, God will permit us to suffer the decline and ruin right along with it. 

Look at the signs.  Temptation increases.  The world lures us to love what it loves and to forsake what God has commanded.  We see material wealth and sensual promises tug us away from hearing God’s word.  We feel and know in our flesh that the very sin that will be the ruin of our nation is the sin that we contend against in our own hearts.  So will not the punishment that God has in store for the world also be the punishment that God has in store for us as well?  The clouds of judgment gather.  Should it not make us tremble? 

But do not let the looming destruction of the world lead you to forget the day of your visitation.  Let us not refuse to suffer and weep with Jeremiah and even our compassionate Lord as punishment and vengeance surrounds us.  God is not punishing us.  We know this, because we have been visited by him who spares us.  We have been visited by him whom his Father did not spare. 

What punishment do you deserve?  What sin that the world taught you to embrace, and which your flesh delighted in for a while grieves you and makes you think that God’s wrath is against you too?  Do you see God’s justice being done on fornicators and thieves, and on those who neglect the poor and oppressed, and on those who ignore the word of God when it is spoken?  Do you know in your heart that you deserve the same fate?  Dear sinners like me, see here in Christ the Lord God of hosts who visited humanity, not to condemn, but to save.  See him who makes a zealous distinction between those who enter his temple to make money, and those who enter in hopes of finding peace with God.  See him who visits you still with that which does make for your peace with God.  He who loves you so much as to die for you still provides for you his body and blood of the second Person of the Trinity, which is no less real on the altar than when it was embraced by Simeon as a little baby.  Dear Christians, ponder the significance of what you pray in the Nunc Dimittis, which words you learned from Simeon: “Lord, now you let your servant depart in peace, according to you word.”  Jesus makes for your peace.  He gives you peace.  He forgives you.  Your sin cannot condemn you when you have Jesus.  And so God will not condemn you. 

Our culture, our nation, may just be beyond hope as the wrath of God is set against it.  We should recognize this.  Scripture demonstrates that God will not long endure rejection.  But although a nation or city might be doomed, no sinner is beyond hope.  No individual is beyond the mercy of God.  Jesus came not to save some, but all.  His tears demonstrate his desire to save each one of us and everyone else.  As Simeon also said of him, “A Light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.”  Jesus visited the temple.  Simeon rejoiced.  So do we.  He came to cleanse it of all false worship and pretense.  He still comes to do that for us.  He teaches us what makes for our peace.  He makes his house a house of prayer by making all our prayers acceptable to God.  And if our prayers, so also we ourselves – even as the Spirit makes intercession for us while also teaching our hearts to locate the mercy we need in the cross of Jesus. 

Amen.