The history of the Old Testament
believers and the history of Christ are the same history. As the New Testament Church, their history is
ours. They found their life in
Christ who would in due time give his life for them. We also find our life in Christ who fulfilled his promise and has given his life
for the world. His death and
resurrection, his session at the right hand of his Father and the sending of
the Holy Spirit mark the end of the ages.
We are currently living in the last chapter of the chronicles of time,
written and directed by God himself to make us wise for salvation.
St. Paul does not want us to be
ignorant, because God does not want us to be ignorant. He wants us to know. He wants us to rejoice in the knowledge
compared to which all things in life are worth nothing. It is a great honor to be taught what God
wants you to know. Notice that St. Paul
calls the Corinthians brethren. He calls
us brothers (and sisters) too. He then
refers to the children of Israel as our fathers.
He is speaking to a bunch of Gentile
Greeks whose biological fathers had been wallowing in idolatrous darkness for
2000 years. And yet he refers to
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all their children, chosen by God to live by
faith, as their fathers. When we believe the same gospel by which God’s
people were saved in times past, we become their spiritual heirs, because we
become heirs of Christ himself. Their
history becomes our own. We learn from
our past when we learn the stories of the Bible. The temptations and trials that befell them
are no different from ours. They are
common to all men. We are all children
of God who, as children of Adam, must contend with our sinful flesh in a world
deceived by the devil. We contend and
overcome by hearing God’s word in simple faith.
As far as God’s children are concerned, nothing has changed in the last
2000, 4000, 6000 years.
The children of Israel followed
Christ. When they ate manna, their
bellies were fed; when they drank water on two occasions from solid rock, their
thirst was quenched. But they lived by
faith in Christ. And so their food and
drink were to their spiritual benefit, because it was for Christ’s sake that
God provided for them. This is what
Moses taught them. By being led by a
cloud of smoke through the Red Sea out of Egyptian slavery, they were baptized
into Moses. This means that they
followed him as their teacher who did more than provide physical security. He taught them about their salvation in
Christ. We are not baptized into
Moses. We were not there. But God was.
He is the same God who baptized us into Christ. Having put on Christ, and being clothed in
his righteousness, we follow Christ through the desert of this life into
eternal life. On the way, we eat
spiritual food. We partake of the Lord's
Supper, the true body and blood of Christ himself for the forgiveness of our
sins. But even more immediately, this
spiritual food is the word of God that we listen to and believe. This is what identifies God’s children
today.
In the Old Testament, the salvation
event that distinguished God’s people was the exodus from Egypt through the Sea. But what distinguishes us as God’s people
today is the fact that God has called us from the ends of the earth to be led through
water and the word out of spiritual ignorance and slavery to sin. Our conversion as Gentiles and our inclusion
in the heritage of Israel is the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy, chapter
23:
“Therefore, behold,
the days are coming,” says the Lord, “that they shall no longer say, ‘As the
Lord lives who brought up the children of Israel from the land of Egypt,’ but,
‘As the Lord lives who brought up and led the descendants of the house of
Israel from the north country and from all the countries where I had driven
them.’ And they shall dwell in their own land.”
God was not well pleased with most of
those whom he saved from Egypt, but only with those who heard and believed the
spiritual promises that Moses taught. So
also, it is only by listening to what Jesus teaches us today that we learn to
enjoy God’s favor. Crossing the Red Sea
and wandering in the wilderness was not enough for the Israelites. They needed to embrace God’s word. And God was displeased with most of them
because they didn’t embrace his word.
So also, coming to church and going
through the motions is not enough. We
need to learn what God says. God is not
pleased with those who attach themselves outwardly to the church. He is pleased with those who identify
themselves as Christians by embracing the mercy of Christ.
We are children of God. Our true ancestors are the children of God
whom he has long since brought home to heaven.
We honor our fathers by learning from their mistakes and by trusting the
same forgiveness that gave them eternal life.
We are their children. And so we
learn as their children by learning as the children of the most high God. As children of God, we possess a childlike
faith. But let me speak about childlike
faith a little bit, since most people don’t really know what it is.
Oh, people know that this kind of faith
is best. Simple, honest trust in
God. That’s the kind of faith we want to
have. That’s the kind of faith Jesus
tells us to have. He says, “Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not
receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it”
(Luke 18:17). And so we see also that
this childlike faith is the only faith that even saves at all.
But what do little children know? Little to nothing. The bare necessities, really. So is that the kind of faith that Jesus
praises? Does Jesus praise a faith that
is content to be mostly ignorant of what He teaches? — I’ve been lead out of Egypt; that’s good enough for me – I’ve been
saved from hell; that’s good enough for me.
Or does Jesus praise the faith that holds onto His word in confidence
that every syllable is true and beneficial?
Obviously the latter. And
certainly not the former!
Folks like to justify their disinterest
in theology (that is, in learning what God’s word says) by appealing to their
“childlike” faith. “I know and believe what I need to, and
that’s all I am concerned about.” But
Jesus compares us to children not as it relates to the ignorance of
babies, but as it relates to their eagerness to be filled with more and
more and more of the same. This means
for us that to have a childlike faith is to desire more knowledge. Consider what St. Peter says:
“Therefore,
laying aside all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all evil speaking, as
newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby, if
indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious.” (1 Peter 2:1-3)
That
you may grow thereby. That’s why God has
instilled in babies the natural desire to suckle – that they may grow! And then when they have tasted that it is
good and beneficial, they want more.
This is an important and essential desire for their health and
survival. God our Creator is wise.
And so it is with the Spirit-wrought
faith that saves guilty souls from sin and death: God graciously implants in us
not only a firm trust in His word, but also the spiritual desire to increase in
knowledge. We have tasted that it is
good knowledge – saving
knowledge! The same Spirit who works
faith and gives good fruit to abound in His Christians also works the desire to
keep tasting and learning.
Children hang onto the words of their
parents. Parents ought to know that they
are their children’s teachers whether they want to be or not. Children listen. Children repeat. Parents have to be careful. For sinful parents this might be an
aggravating feature of kids. But to God who
always speaks what is good and true, this characteristic of His children to
listen and absorb with open ears and trusting hearts is exactly what Jesus
encourages and even requires.
When children get older, it is really
only then that they develop that loathsome, lazy, self-assured attitude toward
further instruction, as though they have nothing more to learn from you. If left unchecked, this immaturity can last
for the rest of their lives. And so we
discipline our children when they begin to talk back or roll their eyes or
ignore us. We teach them that it is
wrong and harmful to behave in such a way.
They still have much to learn from their father and mother even if they
think that mom and dad are out of touch.
It is this characteristic of children
that Jesus condemns – that is, when adults take this childish attitude toward
Christian doctrine as though it were irrelevant to their lives. It is this sinful attitude that God punished
in the wilderness, as St. Paul mentions in our text. God disciplined his children in the Sinai
desert because he loved them and wanted them to remain in his word. So also he disciplines us for the same
reason. A few chapters later, Paul
writes:
“Brethren, do not be
children in understanding; however, in malice be babes, but in understanding be
mature.”
(1 Corinthians 14:20)
The older you get, the more discerning
you ought to become. A baby is weaned
from milk and introduced to different foods until he develops a taste for this
and a distaste for that. So parents have
to be careful what they feed their children.
And we need to be careful how we feed our faith. We ought to identify what hurts faith and
remain pure. We should have an attitude
toward malice and other works of the flesh akin to the attitude a newborn has
toward hard liquor. Be innocent. Flee temptation. Remove yourself from lust. Hate what is impure. Despise what hurts you. Be children.
Mature Christians should mark and avoid false doctrine the way that
children mark and avoid poison.
But how can we have such an
attitude? How can we revert to our
childlike days of innocence? —
especially since our lives have been lived less innocently and piously and more
like those whose bodies were scattered in the wilderness. We have become lazy. We have ignored God’s instruction. We have developed bad habits that keep us
from doing and thinking as God demands of us in the 10 Commandments. How do we resist what we have regretfully
developed a taste for? There is only one
way. We cling to the word of God,
because it alone is pure milk. It alone
teaches us who our gracious God is. It
alone gives us the purity that we need, because only God’s word teaches us that
we have a gracious Father in heaven.
Everything that God teaches us he teaches us so that we might trust more
firmly in Christ who covers our every sin with his holy life which he lived in
our place.
As a child becomes stronger and more
active, all the more he needs to graduate from milk to solid food. It’s essentially the same thing. Milk has everything he needed. But now he needs to receive his nutrients in
a more adult fashion. As temptations in
life become stronger the further removed from infancy we are, the more we need
to progress beyond the basic principles and learn to digest the deeper things
of Holy Scripture as well (Hebrews 5:12-14).
This requires that we be mature in understanding. It means that we take an active interest in
what God teaches us in the Bible.
When we by God’s grace come to faith in
the Gospel, when we experience the joy and peace of sins forgiven on account of
our Savior’s death and resurrection, not only do we gain a new attitude toward
God who loves and receives us. But
naturally we gain a new attitude toward His written word. We do not squeeze the essential tidbits from
the Bible in order to be saved and then ignore the rest of it – no more than we
could remain on a diet of milk and then ignore the banquet set before us. Impossible!
No, we see in Scripture a treasure
trove. We see a feast with more than our
stomachs can hold. We see such a wealth
of knowledge that we will never master or fully understand. But what a joy to begin. In heaven, the mysteries of Scripture will be
opened to us. We will know God even as
we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12).
Scripture is able to make us wise for
salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
Every word God speaks is profitable.
That means it’s useful. It
benefits you. Christian doctrine is
relevant and interesting. It is through
the hearing and reading and studying of God’s sacred word that we are completed
by God as His workmanship (2 Timothy 3:14-17).
We are his workmanship. Not our
own. God is faithful to complete what he
has begun. Whatever temptation we face,
whatever temptation we have fallen into – no matter how often – is overcome by
Christ who leads us and teaches us. He
is the way of escape. He rescues us from
ignorance by giving us the knowledge of his holy life and atoning death, which
he offered to redeem us. He rescues us
from sin by giving us all that he has earned.
He gives us his righteousness.
God does not count our sin against us, because he counted it all against
Christ in our place. When we learn about
the life of God’s people, we learn about the life that God gives them. We learn about the life that God gives
us. As children of God and brothers and
sisters in Christ, we mature in faith and love by making use of our
heritage. We learn God’s word, and God
never fails to feed us what is good and teach us who we are: his beloved
children whose eternal salvation is secure and certain in Christ who leads us
all the way.
Amen.
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